Truth, and the freedom industry

By Iftekhar Sayeed
Jul. 29, 2007

How long can the truth be perverted by the freedom industry -- the nexus of NGOs, intellectuals, western donors and political parties? How long can they continue to call murder and mayhem, freedom and dignity? How long can money sustain falsehood? Above all, how long can our native Muslim culture, civilisation and history be suppressed by lies and cash? These are the questions of the day.

Truth has a price. Purveyors of falsehood, such as the Americans, can always find in the great bazaar of our nation enough ‘educated’ people to utter -- repeatedly, and in glossy magazines and learned papers -- the most flagrant of falsehoods. I know an intellectual who has sent his child to London for secondary and tertiary education. Where does an intellectual get that kind of money? We know that our intellectuals send their children mostly to study abroad. Where does the cash come from? How much does a university professor earn?

A clever gimmick has been devised by some thinkers to tar others with the brush of corruption, thereby deflecting attention away from themselves. I refer to Transparency International’s ranking of corruption where we have scored first for five consecutive years. The corruption is in every sector -- if the report is to be believed -- but not among the intelligentsia.

For 16 years, Soviet-style propaganda has been undertaken by the interested parties above mentioned -- the stakeholders minus the people -- to the effect that democracy is a wonderful system; it is not the best, proponents slyly remark, but it is better than anything else. Which, of course, makes it the best. But notice the masterly skullduggery: the avowal and disavowal of democracy as the best form of government at the same time! Canny! Cunning!

People, of course, have had enough: but they are the voiceless. They want a stop to this nightmare emanating from Washington. They have been systematically misled as to the true nature of democracy. They have been deceived about Palestine, Iran and Iraq. Benevolent democracies have inflicted misery on our Muslim brothers and sisters, and the freedom industry still maintained that democracy was the best form of government. The Afghan and Iraq wars have been eye-openers: a brutal democracy has been exposed. Of course, our thinkers are wily enough to trot out a few processions against the ‘Iraq war.’ That’s because the issue is global: America and Britain attacked Iraq ‘illegally.’ That they murdered nearly 2 million Iraqi children legally through sanctions has never been voiced. And, of course, the plight of Iran -- squeezed mercilessly by sanctions -- and the plight of Palestinians -- rendered refugees in their own country for generations -- get no coverage in our glossy newspapers, so beloved of NGOs and diplomats.

The attempt to suborn a culture, to change its course, to graft an alien culture on it, must fail. Why? Culture, as a product of history, is as independent of present circumstances as that history. No amount of cash can wipe away the past, leave a blank slate on which to write a new history of the people. The experience of the Muslim people is written in the indelible ink of time. Since money cannot make us disavow our past, it can do the next best thing: it can make us forget the past. And this has been achieved. We know more about what Locke or Mill said than about what al-Ghazzali and Ibn Khaldun said. Our education system has been Westernised by our thinkers.

Yet history may be forgotten, but never undone. It is constantly there, casting its long, benign shadow on the Muslim world, protecting it from the glare of corruption. We do not see the shadow, it is all around us. Pockets of resistance to democracy are springing up everywhere. They have sprung up in Palestine, Iran and Iraq. They are springing up here, as well.

Thus history is as solid as this table I’m writing at. Our intellectuals have engineered amnesia, but not the dissolution of history. How long will it be before our culture, founded on this history, breaks through like an eruption from a hitherto unsuspected volcano? I used to despair for our nation, but I despair no more.

I hope to see soon a resurgence -- I deliberately avoid the word ‘renaissance’ -- of our identity. What can the intellectuals do to prevent such a resurgence? Precious little. For there will be one problem with the resurgence: it will be cashless. Our thinkers thrive on cash. The resurgence will occur immaterially -- not in the body, but in the spirit. It will not be a product of greed and envy, but of purity and light. Sheikh Sa’di once said: “When ants unite, they rend the skin of a ferocious lion.” But first the ants must unite. And before that, they must realize their common ancestry. Here the freedom industry will try to throw us off-course; they will try to channel and dissipate our energies into futile rivulets of search. For the search is close at hand: open any book on Muslim history, and try to find the words ‘democracy’ or ‘civilian ruler;’ then open any book on Western European history, and you’ll find plenty of both.

For truth does not depend on what we want, but on what is the case. The truth regarding our culture must be a truth radically different from the falsehood being preached. There is something impersonal about the truth. Truth is no respecter of persons or cash or military hardware. To say that the freedom industry will always triumph is to say that falsehood will always reign. Can a man who believes that the sun rises in the West go on believing that indefinitely? Only if he takes leave of his senses, as we have done in Bangladesh. Our 16-year diet of lies has been like a long period of lunacy. We have not all gone mad -- in fact none of us has. The freedom industry knows fully well what is going on; the rest are beginning to wake up.

We have been taught that Western culture is our culture. We quote Churchill and Jefferson -- these people are alien to us. We are not one of them. What al-Mawardi said is germane to what is happening here -- he was one of us. When this feeling of ‘us’ and ‘them’ will begin to reach the intellect, our emancipation will be complete. The tyranny of lies will no longer find dominion.

People are heading for the West because life is uncertain here -- and yet they could just as easily head for the Muslim countries which are far safer than the West. Muslim women are the safest in the world. This is not my opinion. The disability-adjusted-life-years of a Muslim woman are given in the World Bank report on health published in 1993. We have been kept ignorant (the facts occur in only one table, in minute print, among several dozen tables, at the back of the book!).

For ours is a culture of peace; the West’s is a culture of conflict.

Iftekhar Sayeed was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he currently resides. He teaches English as well as economics. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in Postcolonial Text (on-line); Altar Magazine, Online Journal, Left Curve (2004,2005) and The Whirligig in the United States; in Britain: Mouseion, Erbacce, The Journal, Poetry Monthly, Envoi, Orbis, Acumen and Panurge; and in Asiaweek in Hong Kong; Chandrabhaga and the Journal OF Indian Writing in English in India; and Himal in Nepal. He is also a freelance journalist. He and his wife love to tour Bangladesh.