| Arab Leadership Quagmire – What are They Fighting For
Mahboob A Khawaja, PhD. The contemporary Arab world is fraught with animosities. Common sense stops at various levels to reflect on the real problems. Revitalization of historic ignorance, authoritarian greed of power, sectarian hatred and missing sense of moral and intellectual visionary leadership to deal with the contemporary problems of political transformation. American-led warfare has ruptured the Arab world’s integrity and unity on several fronts. Most recently, President Trump has challenged the global consciousness on the status of Jerusalem. Jerusalem belongs to the humanity – to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike and is not the capital of Israel. One finds irrationality and trade-in of human rights, justice and freedom in Trump’s declaration to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Americans are not born with a national cause, the political elite invents the cause to maintain control over the masses. All nations want to be seen as relevant and influential- nothing wrong there. But to pick on Jerusalem and make it a deliberate historic blunder mocks the human nature and facts of history. The Arab leaders knew for long, it was coming-up for change. Yet they were sitting motionless and did nothing to challenge the absurdity of the current US administration. Do the Arab societies have intelligent leaders and enlightened scholars to speak out on this vital issue? Why do the Arab leaders buy several billions worth of armaments from the US? Are the Arab leaders stupid and ignorant of the facts of prevalent global affairs? |
| Attachments | ||||
| untitled-[1.1].plain | ||||
Nowadays there is not a single wise or pragmatic Arab leader in the whole Middle East. They have neither power nor intellect to deal with the problems of their own country or to deal with the Zionist threat to Palestine and other Arab countries.
After 13th century, Intellectualism is hard to find in the World of Islam. Muslim rulers, such as the Ottoman Sultans, the Mughal Monarchs and the Persian Sufvis, promoted Spirituality and Sufism, the ideology which suppressed rationalism and free thought. Another big blow was inflicted by Wahhabism that blocked the road to enlightenment and free thinking, declaring “death of intellectualism.”
Unfortunately, today, throughout the world, the Age of Genius, which started in the West in the 17th century giving birth to enlightenment and modern mind, has also come to its end. The advent of 21st century has marked the beginning of the age of IT and Artificial Intelligence, an age in which we are living in a world without mind. Every day we are silently experiencing a revolution in terms of who controls our knowledge and information. With a smart phone in our hand we are shopping online with Amazon, socializing on Facebook, turning to Apple for entertainment, and relying and trusting on Google for information. We do not think and question ourselves. We are blindly trusting all online stories, views, and fabricated-truth as nothing but the whole truth, which are shaping a culture of mechanized-autonomous thought, propaganda-information, or digitized-solitary self-analysis? We are living in a world without mind! In the present situation when we are being guided by silicon brain, how can we expect a digital mind to guide humanity towards true intellectualism? MIRZA ASHRAF
The western efforts of omission of muslim contributions to arts and science were compounded by the equally deliberate efforts by the muslim leadership over the last three centuries to limit their learning to Koranic and historic recitations and not open up to the exchange of ideas on learning and scientific inquiry. The deficit in the learning skills of the various muslim countries is notable today and is a challenge few of these nations are prepared to face.
Nasik Elahi
In addition to an erudite commentary by Mirza Ashraf, we are also being conditioned and indoctrinated to a new phenomenon “fake news” in America.
Brin Barnard described in his book “The Genius of Islam” the deliberate attempt by European scholars to forget its Islamic heritage. Aristotle is considered the founder of Western thought and Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle and made his difficult ideas understandable to a wide audience. In 1345, the Tuscon poet and scholar Petrach demanded the expulsion of all Muslim names from European education and claimed Arab inventions as their own. They systematically replaced Arab star names with Latin ones and eventually the Muslim contributions to the West were barely a memory to all but scholars of the obscure. No one noticed this as the printing press was not allowed in the Muslim world, until 18th century as Turks read nothing but the Qur’an which could only be copied at that time by hand.
Today, everyone is conditioned, exposed and indoctrinated to a new idea “fake news” in America or “tabloid journalism” in U.K. The impact of the fake news will be enormous in the age of IT. Any politician can put a label of fake news on any fact past or present. Indian children, expert in IT, are being taught that 360 years old iconic monument Taj Mahal – currently undergoing restoration and facelift, being washed and cleaned – was originally a Hindu temple converted to a mausoleum by the ruling Muslim king Shah Jahan whose son Aurangzeb, was an enemy of Hindus. Fortunately, the Govt. of India and Indian Courts have rejected at least the fake news about Taj Mahal but Aurangzeb remains the most maligned king in Indian history books.
Azeem Farooki