By Mehreen Omer
The trouble with today’s modern man is his inability to break the clutches of his mind and think freely and independent from other sources. He feeds on the information being fed to him through the hands of others and doesn’t questions what he is being fed. He has incontrovertibly become dependant upon the views and information being presented to him by “others” and so sees the world as “others” want him to see. So in effect, he finds it either inconvenient or too strenuous to work out some information about any thing himself and would readily accept any information presented to him by “others”. Unfortunately, the “others” that he either trusts too much or considers “experts” are the very same people who are not credible at all and deliberately supply false information i.e. in other words propaganda.
So has man become too tired to think critically and put everything under careful scrutiny or has man indulged himself in an inferiority complex seeing the world through the eyes of those that he considers superior. This is the perception of orientalism which basically promotes the notion that the West has better and much superior values and the eastern world has remained backward as a whole. An important personality who needs be discussed whenever orientalism is discussed is Edward Said.
Edward Said (1935-2003) was a Palestinian American writer and educator. In his writings and lectures, Said was highly critical of Western portrayals of Arabs and of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. For much of his life he was a passionate advocate of the cause of Palestinians displaced by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. His outspoken views gained him both admirers and fierce critics. Said is best-known for his book Orientalism (1978), which discusses the attitude of Western intellectuals toward the East, and in particular toward the Middle East. Said argued that Westerners have a limited, oversimplified concept of the Middle East and its history. This view, he said, goes hand in hand with political imperialism.[i]
In Culture and Imperialism (1993) Said drew similar perceptions from works of Western literature—perceptions of the East as the “other,” of peoples barbaric and limited, of Oriental despots, and of cultures both exotic and degenerate. Said argued that these perceptions remain influential today and have an impact on politics, particularly on policies toward the Middle East and on views of Arabs. [ii]
An excellent analogy that can be cited is that a man who is reluctant to think independently is like a policy-maker who has been told by his enemy how to set his foreign policy. Most people are aware what propaganda is, but still apply little effort to counter it. Even if barely a person becomes aware that a television anchor has lied about things or events in the past, he still doesn’t gives him the certificate of a liar and presupposes that the television anchor can lie about something trivial but not something that is so open. These are the kind of people who are unaware of disinformation. Disinformation does not merely means false information but false information which is presented after lots of true information, so that the person thinks that if that much true information has been given to him, the remaining must also be the truth. That’s why most Hollywood movies would portray governmental corruption and domestic terrorism but don’t go further than that. They would give the facts that make the public hate the puppets (because they already hate them) and not the real people behind them. How many movies are made about a government sex scandal but not about how the government has actually been proved to be behind a terrorism case that they for long blamed on others?
And when such narrow-minded people are told that a certain person is lying; that man pops up angrily and argues baselessly that are they the experts are you the experts. Such a person has undeniably been deluded into believing that just because a person got his so-called Ph.D. in a particular field, he got to be saying the the truth! Even as a layman, one must do his own research and study under experienced teachers and then form his own conclusion. Man always tries to avoid the hassle and find the shortcut which in turn hurts him big time in the long run.
The debate between the east and west seems to be old and outdated yet this is not only about western domination and eastern incompetency but unwillingness will to think critically and independently. No argument regarding this entire notion is well-supported without the mention of the thousand years of golden age of Muslims. It was a time when Muslims literally ruled the world and set the stage for advancements in medicine, astronomy, technology, social sciences, political science, law, history and many other sciences. They led the way; and this being at a time when the European (or more precisely the Western world) was engrossed in their dark ages. Today Muslims have become gripped in their pessimism and have become reliant upon the western world to lead the way. One thing that needs to be reminded here is that the western world considered here is the western values in general and not the western people in particular; since there are western Muslims as well!
Another thing that needs to be considered is that mankind has indeed become inept and entertainment saturated. And this is not by chance, as many would like to believe. Man is also affected by his societal milieu and resultantly adopts the values that the majority agrees to be ethical not what really should be ethical. And this is the problem. What will happen if the majority errs?
So conclusively, man needs to change his mentality and free himself from the clutches of modern-day imperialism. He needs to develop his self-esteem and stop being a puppet being stringed by the elite. Most people today accept and agree that 9/11 was an inside job, but they don’t consider the implications of this. If they lied about such an enormous event, why can’t they lie about other events, be they trivial or momentous? So beware. A Muslim needs to cautioned here that Prophet Muhammad SAW reminded us of these times when great lies will be spoken, so beware!
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