The pyramid that was never a pyramid

. The writer is a Lecturer of English Literature at DHA Suffa University, and a PhD scholar in decolonial literary studies One of the most taught pyramids in Pakistani higher education was never drawn by the man it's credited to. Yet walk into any psychology or business studies classroom, and there it is: the same triangle, five layers ascended firmly in order, with physiological needs at the base, self-actualisation - meaning, fulfillment, even a kind of spirituality - at the peak. Credited to Abraham Maslow, who never drew a pyramid, rather warned against the rigidity of his theory. The shape we now treat as a scripture, was built years after him, not by any psychologist, but by a management consultant selling a formula for motivating employees as economically as possible. In 1943, Maslow laid out his categories of needs in a paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, published in Psychological Review. In 1954, his book, Motivation and Personality, cautioned against it directly: "We have spoken so far as if this hierarchy was a fixed order but actually it is not nearly as rigid as we may have implied... there have been a number of exceptions" (p. 51). He documented seven exceptions, last and the most striking exception: people driven by high ideals or values, "give up everything for the sake of a particular value" (p. 53) his own word for this was martyrdom. If survival itself can be sacrificed for an ideal, ideals can't only matter once survival is secured. His method for categorising 'self-actualised' relied on biographical analysis rather than controlled study. Eighteen individuals were the core group he studied and drew 15 characteristics of self-actualised people. Historical figures assessed through biography, from Lincoln to Einstein, alongside personal acquaintances he chose himself. The sample tilted heavily toward educated, high-achieving white men, with only two women, and no one from outside Western prominence. From it, he estimated only two per cent of people ever reach self-actualisation - a figure with no population basis at all. If Maslow didn't draw the triangle, who did? In 2019, management historians Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, and John Ballard traced its origin in their paper, Who Built Maslow's Pyramid? A 1957 textbook by Keith Davis first illustrated the theory as a staircase leading to the top, where a besuited executive plants a flag, echoing the Iwo Jima photograph. In1960, Charles McDermid, a consulting psychologist in his article, How Money Motivates Men, took the same idea and redesigned it into a triangle we know today by arguing that the shape helps managers achieve "maximum motivation at the lowest cost". It was never a psychological finding rather a sales aid to help managers get more out of employees. The pyramid arrived in Pakistan the way most of our postcolonial curricula did, through inherited Western textbooks, taught as fact, tested by exam, never questioned. If the classroom won't question it, art and literature already have. Vincent van Gogh produced over 900 paintings and sold only one. Throughout his life he remained destitute and entirely unrecognised, yet his art drew its meaning from inside the deprivation, not after it was resolved. Siddhartha Gautama, the prince of Kapilavastu, known as Buddha, whose story is usually told as a clean epiphany - a prince renounces luxury and becomes the enlightened one. The sharper reading comes from Ashvaghosha's Life of the Buddha (Canto 3, Canto 5): the awakening began with his repeated encounters with old age, sickness and death, not once comfort was secured. Allama Iqbal's philosophy of Khudi is built on the same inversion: selfhood forged through struggle, not preserved by comfort. Albert Camus closed The Myth of Sisyphus by imagining a man condemned to push a boulder uphill for eternity, with no rest or resolution ever coming, insisting us to picture him satisfied and happy anyway. None of these are stories about needs met before self-actualisation arrives; they are stories about self-actualisation despite needs never being met. If Maslow puts self-actualisation at the summit, reached only once survival is secured, one older tradition put it at the very base. Centuries before Maslow, Muslim legal theorists developed their own framework of three levels of ma?la?ah (public interest): essentials (religion, life itself, the mind, family lineage and wealth), needs (things like trade or marriage, whose absence causes real hardship) and enhancements (refinements of custom and conduct that go beyond necessity), with each tier resting on the one beneath it, so that disruption at the essentials level collapses the other two, while disorder in needs or enhancements leaves the essentials intact. The 11th century jurist al-Juwayni first presented these three layers and named five essentials: religion, life itself, the mind, family lineage and wealth. Later his student, Imam al-Ghazali, kept this same five-part list, placed religion above the other four, not treated as one item among equals. Faith, in his framework, isn't something to attend to once survival is secured. The theory was later schematised by al-Shatibi, who grounded it directly in scripture and stated the consensus plainly: "The Muslim community...[agrees] that the Law was established to preserve the five essentials, namely, religion, human life, progeny, material wealth and the human faculty of reason" (Al-Raysuni, Imam al-Shatibi's Theory of the Higher Objectives, IIIT Books-in-Brief, 2013). In this framework of human essentials, faith is not a luxury attained after survival, but foundational to survival itself. Al-Ghazali's framework stood for nine hundred years. Maslow's pyramid is barely sixty - and yet no one in the room is allowed to question it. The ask isn't to tear Maslow down - it's more urgent than that: stop teaching a 1960 consultant's sales diagram as settled science. Teach Maslow's own caveats. Teach al-Juwayni, al-Ghazali and al-Shatibi alongside him. Not because one tradition should win, but because a classroom that hands down conclusions instead of teaching students to question them has already failed at its only job.