Perhaps this will be the beginning of recognition throughout the Middle East that terrorism and war are not the solution. Chris
Dear Sir,
Your conspicuous words inspired me to respond. My motto is, as in the words of Giordano Bruno, "Who so itcheth to Philosophy must set to work by putting all things to the doubt."
I did highlight the concept of ‘Dissimulation’ practiced by Shiites and clearly stated that President Ahmadinejad's delay action tactics on UN response are just part of a ‘taqiya.’ He is buying time. When a government is run by scriptures and prophecies, everything else, especially reason and rationalism, takes a back seat. The ideological moorings of Iran and many Islamic countries like Saudia are making them ready material for implosion. It may sound premature but I don’t ever underestimate human love for freedom and free enquiry. ‘Revolutions of mind’ is not a propriety trait of one race or of one nation. We are programmed genetically to demand it, sometimes mutations can delay the demands, but once a man sees another free man, he yearns for the same opportunities.
Take ‘reason’ out of a thinking being and we are no different from species of the animal kingdom; it is rationale and rationalism that has provided us with uniqueness of our self consciousness. We face a daunting task in our part of the world, to speak common sense is equivalent to carrying stigma of treason, but luckily we are now in possession of organs through which we can spread the word of peace.
This ‘interconnected’ world and the ability to exchange ideas poses the biggest challenge to the force of backwardness and obscurity. What distinguishes a human from any other living being is the ability that he is mindful and cognizant of his surroundings; he consciously needs to know the answers of how and why; on that front alone reactionaries and radicals are bound to lose ground.
We are seeing early offshoots of the ‘lost renaissance’ within the Islamic world. It is taking root, but the only problem is that, unlike the ‘renaissance of the west,’ we are covering the belated renaissance of Islam live. Imagine when we talk of censorship within the Islamic world, we overlook the fact that we in the west progressed with our "Index librorum prohibitorum." The Index of Prohibited Books, the Index was regularly updated until the 1948 edition. The 32nd edition contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, political incorrectness, and so on. Among the notable writers on the list were Desiderius Erasmus, Laurence Sterne, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, Nicolaus Copernicus, Honoré de Balzac, Jean-Paul Sartre. We need to understand Islamic backwardness and censorship in the context of Muslims’ inability to break the chains of the clergy. The separation of church and state never really happened, rather, a Muslim state within context of the interpretation of scriptures is an organ of the divinity. Where chains were broken far earlier like Magna Carta Libertatum ("Great Charter of Freedoms") issued in 1215 that required a king to accept that the will of the king could be bound by law, we until 1948 still observed the remnants of the ‘guardians of thought’ banning free thinking. Here in the Middle East, where no such freedoms were allowed to evolve, Kings are still not bound by the rule of law! That is the factual catastrophe and an explanation to the fact that external enemies like America and Israel are auspiciously demonised, which keeps the populace attending to the exterior enemies, instead of concentrating on the enemy within: that is, lack of free enquiry which is eating away at their societies like cancer.
My hero is ‘Giordano Bruno,’ the world's first martyr of free enquiry, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition. A "cerebral maverick," Bruno believed in and wrote about an infinite universe – something beyond Copernicus's heliocentric system. His real crime, at least in Rome's eyes, was his belief in "free inquiry." The report from the Fraternity of St. John the Beheaded is the only documentary account of Bruno’s martyrdom on 17 February 1600 to be considered authentic by the Catholic Church. It was published in 1889:
. . . But he insisted till the end always in his damned refractoriness and twisted brain and his mind with a thousand errors; yes, he didn’t give up his stubborness, not even when the court ushers took him away to the Campo de' Fiori. There his clothes were taken off, he was bound to a stake and burned alive [e quivi spogliato nudo e legato a un palo fu brusciato vivo]. In all this time he was accompanied by our fraternity, who sang constant litanies, while the comforters tried till the last moment to break his stubborn resistance, till he gave up a miserable and pitiable life…
Imagine the above event being covered live! It would have been an atrocity of the worst proportions. Imagine ourselves being burnt at the stake for our beliefs! It can happen but, luckily, is not happening. We lost 400 years of progress, now all of sudden, the Muslim world is waking up to a world that is progressing beyond its wildest dreams; the new hypothesis challenge the entrenched orthodoxy prevalent since centuries. Like on October 31, 1517, according to tradition, Luther posted 95 Theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg for a disputation on indulgences. Someone needs to nail the new theses of illumination and restraint on the door of Al-Azhar; the connected worlds will make it happen. The dissent with our tyrants is our little effort to nail the theses in our equivalent of the ‘Castle Church door in Wittenberg.’ In comparison to what happened to our heroes, we are grateful that we lesser beings in our relative safety try to do what little we can. No good man should keep silent; silence is the biggest crime, the inability to condemn wrong being the worst offence. It is our duty to keep the struggle going. Bring humanity together and our purpose is to highlight what Kant defined as Enlightenment, in the essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", as an age shaped by the motto, "Dare to know" (latin: Sapere aude). This involved thinking autonomously, free from the dictates of external authority.
The present state of affairs is ready for a change. The balkanization of the artificially drawn borders of the Middle East will happen but it will not be so bloody. I think humanity is going to win; the relative backwardness of one whole segment of humanity has to gather pace with times. These lands missed their renaissance, they are now catching up. People, after a lot of killing, do get fed up of blood, and that is the lesson of two great wars of this century. We will see Iraq like Bosnia and Kosovo settling down. It has taken time but the lid which controlled millions as slave for decades exploded in far greater proportions than one expected. Iraq is old Mesopotamia, it gave the world the Hammurabi code, it will reconcile with itself.
I, as a student of history, can see green offshoots everywhere. The problem is ‘instant gratification’ and short-termism practiced by some. They want changes that took thousand of years to happen overnight. The age of knowledge has dawned and we are at the cusp of new breakthroughs of enlightenment; these are birth pangs of a greater level of consciousness. For me, human connections like the one I have with you, without consideration of distance are signs of emergence of a greater consciousness. This matchless characteristic is an exceptional bequest, and mankind collectively does not have the capacity to grasp this new togetherness. This fusion has a lot of stumbling blocks, but man is born constructive and we shall overcome all this bedlam.
The century of light is upon us, it is with this mind I write whatever I write. I am grateful for your comprehension.
The following article will answer some of the other questions you have raised..
metransparent.com. |
