Ideals do not die; dreams do not fade...

What then must we do?
By Prof Khwaja Masud
The News, January 8, 2007

Iqbal, in his letter to Dr Ghulam Sayyidain, dated 21st June, 1936, wrote: “I suppose you are aware of the educational implications of Leibniz’s monadism. According to him, the monad (the mind of man) is a closed mind incapable of absorbing external forces. My view is that monad is essentially assimilative in its nature. Time is a great blessing. ‘Don’t blame time, time is God’, goes a saying of our Prophet (PBUH). While it kills and destroys, it also expands end brings out the hidden possibilities of things. The possibility of change is the greatest asset of man in his present surroundings.”

Iqbal has answered the question that we have raised, yet when we look around, we face the harsh and stark reality of the deep and bitter schism in our society. This schism is born of the crisis of confidence that haunts every nook and corner of our country.

The crisis of confidence cannot be resolved by wishful thinking, platitudinous statements and tearful prayers. The role of leadership is crucial. Only a leadership which is propelled by commitment and dedication can transform the agonies of our long-suffering country into personal responsibilities.

A sense of common desperation has driven the people to the imperatives of new politics. Gone are the days of Machiavellian politics, history demands new policy of openness and transparency, tolerance and goodwill, compassion and forgiveness.

Unfortunately leaders cling to the concepts and ideas of the era which has since passed away. As Einstein has so well put it, “After the explosion of the atom bomb, everything has changed except thinking of man.”

Here, in our country, our leadership has failed to respond to the challenge posed by history. Both the sense of estrangement and the sense of exclusion have been reinforced by the changes accumulating and intensifying in our society. The velocity of change has never been greater and the momentum of sociological change never faster. As Robert MacNamara writes in his book The Essence of Security: “No age had a thornier bond with relevancy than our own. More changes have been wrought in two decades than in the entire history of mankind.” He made a strong plea for leadership that can command the dynamics of the calculus of relevancy.

Andre Malraux endorsed him, saying: “We are confronted with the greatest revolution history has known. The face of the world and its problems have been transformed in a single generation.”

The velocity of history and the concomitant explosion of knowledge can be gauged from the fact that whereas a third century BC Athenian scholar, a fourth century Byzantine philosopher, a ninth century Baghdad scientist and a fourteenth century Italian scholar in Bologna could carry on a discourse and understand one another, nowadays it is different for a scholar to keep pace with exponentially increasing knowledge in his own subject, much less understand what is going on in other subjects.

The impact of historical acceleration has been most devastating on those countries whose leadership is neither resilient nor adaptive. Thus the fast velocity of history and soaring aspirations of the people come into direct clash with glacial institutions and lack-lustre leadership devoid of wisdom, vision and empathy.

Two historic forces are operating simultaneously in the world: the centripetal forces shrinking the world into a global village, where everything is transparent and interacting and the electronic highway is demolishing all geographical and ideological frontiers ruthlessly; and, the centrifugal forces which are splitting apart countries and societies, confirming the Yeatsian dictum: things fall apart, the centre does not hold.

We are caught in the whirlpool of these centrifugal and centripetal forces. The crisis of confidence has led to the crisis of identity and an all-pervading anomie i.e. the lack of moral standards.

Ill-gotten money through evasion of taxes, black-marketing, smuggling, heroin-production and ubiquitous corruption have corroded the moral fibre of all strata of society. These who been denied the benefit of the bonanza, suffer from an acute sense of frustration, cynicism, and anarchism. While the bonanza confirms the estranged groups in their estrangement, it holds out to the excluded groups tantalising images of affluence which is nothing more than a mirage. These marginalised groups are becoming ever more importunate, as they are crushed under the burden of the ever-rising spiral of inflation.

In this context, history is nothing if it is not prise de conscience (the torturing and tortuous process of self-awareness). We must learn from history, otherwise we are bound to repeat it.

We have still to disentangle ourselves from the straitjacket of medievalism, intolerance, fanaticism, dogmatism, traditionalism and conformism. The end of colonialism has not brought about the end of colonial attitudes and mores. The feudalists, the tribal chiefs, and the nouveau riche are ruling the roost. Their values of vulgar ostentatiousness, philistinism, opportunism and hypocrisy dominate social values.

The Muslim world has known but one revolution — the revolution for national liberation to throw off the yoke of imperialism. The logic of history demands that it must be accompanied by social emancipation to break the shackles of absolutism and feudalism. We must bring about a cultural renaissance by casting off feudal norms and traditions. The cultural renaissance must be accompanied by reformation to break the stranglehold of medieval priests.

We are living in a period of transition. Human life is reduced to real suffering when two ages overlap. As Shelley says in Prometheus Unbound, “To hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing that it contemplates.” Let us always remember: Ideals do not die. Dreams do not fade. Values are eternal.

The writer is a former principal of Gordon College, Rawalpindi. Email: khmasud22@yahoo.com