Liberals vs Islamists - ongoing useless debaters?
Opinion |
Azly Rahman
Published: |
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We live in a time of ideological, philological, and semantic confusion, I feel, because we have trapped ourselves in words; because we use elusive concepts to define words we employ, to argue, to clarify, to elaborate, to extrapolate, to state our point of view, to deduce, to induce, and to conclude and to lock ourselves in this prison-house of language and we swallow the keys.
I am still trying to grasp the meaning of the ongoing, futile debate between, especially the ‘liberals’ and the ‘Islamists’ of Malaysia and to discern not the dichotomies and the seemingly irreconcilable worldviews that seem to clash with each other a la that Samuel Huntington thesis produced some time ago.
There is now a ‘liberal’ camp and an ‘Islamist’ camp. We must look into the mind of these campers, some happy and some unhappy, and see what the neural network of complexities look like, what concepts gets linked from one another as the sub-concepts of the definitions try to find way to connect to what is meaningful as if they are creepers in my Walden II, some sweet smelling, some not.
Al Rushd, or Averroes as the Greeks Hellenized him, sits by the steps watching the liberals and the Islamist in New York City debating the nature of reality, the structure of truth and whether 9/11 was an inside job. The Islamist speaker in the Malaysian forum, holding a Japanese-LIBERAL-made microphone, occasionally checking time on his Swiss-LIBERAL-made Omega SA watch he got from his wife who works in that Big-Four neo-LIBERAL accounting firm, wearing a new retro Travolta-styled haircut he got the week before from a UNISEX hair saloon housed in that LIBERAL-Kuala Lumpur mall build by ultra-neo-LIBERALS schooled in post-post Friedmanian economics while his head contemplates the perfect Islamic society ruled by the Khalifah whose early appearance is in the form of an Imam Al Baghdadi, the leader of IS...
Connections in the brain are made; none of the speakers debating which is better and more moral - Islam or Liberalism - while thinking about what is for lunch.
We must go into each other’s minds and speak of this prison-house of language. We could find a way to resolve contradictions, if we believe that ‘philosophy can clip the wings of angels’ and see, as the German poet Rilke once said, how “angels can be terrifying”.
Evolutionary period of paradigmatic changes
As Al Rushd, or again, Averroes, in the great Renaissance master-painter Raphael’s work, ‘The School of Athens’, glanced upwards waiting for Plato and Aristotle to come down the steps of the Academy, hoping that the philosophers par excellence of the Hellenistic period would say “Hi” to him and thank him for doing those Arabic translated work to add to the corpus of the body of knowledge of the ars liberalis, or the arts of the free Man that will eventually become building blocks to the Enlightenment period first, Renaissance next, Age of Discovery and Exploration, Age of Science, to Age of the Application of Scientific Principles, and next Age of Industrialisation to Age of Machines, to Age of Thinking Machines to Spiritual Machines to Machines installed in Gardens of Eden, to Age of Neural Networks to Computing to High-Speed Computing, to the Age of post-Humanism-Cyberneticism and Bio-chip Implantation - this evolutionary period of paradigmatic changes in human consciousness as technology, culture, and human genomics come into play, Al Rushd/Averros asked: what must people argue if these exist as oppositional nature of ideas as in this raging yet useless debate between ‘Islam’ and ‘liberalism’.
And thus, Averroes sat on the steps wandering, those great thinkers of the Age of Philosophy, that Axial Age of Spirituality, that Athens of the 5th century BC, now long gone passed the spot where he sat, like the great beggar Diogenes; Averroes still wonders till late that night. Where did Islam go wrong in thinking that 5,000 years of globalisation of ideas of Man had ended up in the impossibility of a marriage between the LIBERALS and the RELIGIONISTAS.
Shall I unleash more questions on the nature of Man, Matter, God and the Universe and all then, so that not only Descartes can benefit from my musings but the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria will not come into being in the early 21st Century? So that the idea of the Mutazillahs will reign supreme over pre-Wahhabi and Salafi notion of what must a human being be, and how must society look like, and what will be the nature of the State as it tries to define itself in the framework of the this idea of the Ummah?
And Averroes could not sleep that night. Under the stars, under the clear blue sky painted by the Italian master Raphael, he wondered: have we, from the fall of the Empire of Uthmaniyah right up till the 21st century taken the wrong semiotic turn?
Liberals and Islamists - what say you?
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