138] The West must cure itself

West must demand cure for itself
Azly Rahman
May 25, 06 4:03pm


British reporter: “What do you think of Western civilisation, Mr Gandhi?”
MK Gandhi: “That would be a good idea”.

I refer to the careless analyses in this forum that do not understand the potential of Islam as a powerful force for social renewal as it collaborates with the system of ‘ethics of authenticity’ of other religious/cross-cultural doctrines such as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Sikhism.

Of late, there has been here a series of writings openly undermining the Islamic faith, written by those with one-eyed view of the philosophy of human liberation. They have been composed by those intoxicated by their little understanding of the philosophical foundation of this great religion.

Is Islam under fire, or are we all blinded by the smog of immorality called ‘liberal Western secular democracy’ that continues to eclipse our consciousness?

In Malaysia, products of such a ‘materialism-based Times-Square-New York-hypism’ type of philosophy of human liberation is transmitted arrogantly by forces of ideological confusion such as communication departments in our public universities, liberal-Bangsar type salon writers, advocacy groups with twisted arguments on equal rights, incongruent interpreters of the Holy Quran and Hadiths, Da Vinci-Code copycat Malaysian pulp-fiction and moving-images storytellers, street and low-budget film-makers that express a rude interpretation of Islam and half-baked filmcritics that supports ‘anything-goes-as-long-as-they’re cheaply-sensational’ type of movies, and of course strangely-brewed Malaysian cultist music inspired perhaps by the ideology that informed the work of wayward Danish cartoonists.

Malaysians, welcome to the postmodern world. We are all cloned by the excesses of hyper-modernity and globalised ignorance at the speed of how Iraq and its people is destroyed.

There is a difference between ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal democracy’, between ‘demo-kratos’ and ‘demon-kratos’ as I conceive the issue of freedom we are so obsessed with in the West. While the former means ‘rule of the people’, the latter means ‘ruled by the Devil’. The West continues to be a problematic construct/concept as we try to understand its demands.

The average Western citizen will need to evolve into a more-than-average world citizen if we are to carry out successfully a civilisational dialogue on the issues plaguing humanity. These issues, amongst the major ones are militarism, racism, capitalistic fanaticism and psychological imperialism. The influence of these are brought and facilitated by high-speed communications system that send messages say, from Dubai to Durian Tunggal or Danok in nano-seconds.

The flow of hedonistic cultural ideologies such as radical and no-clear-sense feminism, rock and roll-ism, black metal-ism, Zouk-discoism, stock-marketism, free-Market-ism, anti-Hadithism, and corporate-crony-crypto capitalism are happily engineered by the cultural-imperialistic ideology of the West.

The local elites in the East are merely embracing this form of hedonism to make good profits out of the blood, sweat, tears, and fears of the natives. In the end, society gets destroyed irreversibly until perhaps, a new power comes in to re-engineer culture and re-ethicise society.

The West brought a disease to the non-Western world – the disease of colonialism that plagued elites in despotic regimes of the East. There is currently no cure to this neo-colonialist plague.

What else must the West demand but a cure for itself? The cure might best be sought in the ulama, the Catholic priest, the Jewish Rabbi, the Buddhist monk, the Hindu priest, and the leaders of transcultural philosophies who understand how ‘republics of virtue’ work.

Emulate not the sick cognitively-dissonant of secularism.