Unthought thoughts by Aziz Ali Dad

The following article  “Unthought thoughts”  by Aziz Ali Dad, source “The News, April 3, 2011”.

 

Killing on personal whims reveals the violent mentality that lurks beneath the calm veneer of silent majority in the Pakistani society.

The elevation of Salmaan Taseer’s assassin to the status of a hero and justification of the murder by a vast section of society show a mindset that is totally out of sync with modern times. When a society relapses into primitive state of nature, it paves the way for its own demise. Moreover, it clearly shows the descent of our society into an anarchic state where the only rule is the law of jungle.

In the state of nature, individual will remains dominant and the collective will does not emerge. In such a state, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “man is a wolf on a fellow man, a state of war of everyone against everyone.” To end the uncertainty and insecurity of life in the state of nature, humankind entered into a social contract, in which the individual surrendered its will to form a collective will. The collective will played a pivotal role in the emergence of society, culture, state, religion, law, industry and vocations of different kinds.

With the advent of modernity, nature of the state underwent drastic changes. Through rationalisation of institutions and other spheres of life, the state was able to hold the monopoly on violence by empowering only one organisation to commit violent acts legitimately.

This idea is basically a manifestation of the collective will that enables people to progress and make life secure from the dangers of allowing the individual will and devolution of violence to its citizenry.

A study of the Pakistani society clearly shows the signs of withering away of rationality and disintegration of society. It is a society where the individual will dominates the collective will and the state fails to hold its monopoly on violence.

Salmaan Taseer’s murder is symptomatic of an obscurantist mind that is bent on removing the last vestiges of modernity to create more space for a golden past that never existed. Taseer’s assassination has clearly opened the deeper fissures within our society. Also, it has revealed the violent mentality that lurks beneath the calm veneer of silent majority.

Qadri’s elevation to the status of a hero clearly manifests a clash between tradition and modernity, because it is against the basic principles of modernity to decide about the fate of a person on a personal whim. Only institutions of the state are entitled to decide about the crime of a person and award punishment. If everyone is given a license to kill, the civil war in Pakistan is well nigh.

Those who are celebrating Qadri as a hero are not only eroding the fabric of society by turning it into a state akin to the life of nature. It is impossible to keep the edifice of state, religion, culture and values intact when the very foundation of the society is destroyed.

The clergy in Pakistan failed to understand the dialectics of modernity. Instead of tackling modernity on its own turf, the priest, in a bad faith, tries to cast our minds in medieval mould. This has created a cognitive dissonance or gap, for we are trying to make sense of the modern order of things with a paradigm that was evolved in response to centuries old issues.

Late professor Mohammed Arkoun of Sorbonne University termed this gap ‘unthought’ in Islamic thought. According to Arkoun the unthought in Islamic thought has been accumulating since the 16th century. He finds the causes of contemporary semantic disorder of thought in Islamic societies and its failure ‘to contribute to the great open debate on a world scale’ in the lacuna created by unthoughts.

This intellectual lacuna can be filled only by acquainting ourselves with modern discourses of social sciences and humanities. It will enable us to avoid anachronism in our worldview and objective realities on the one hand, and help us to deal with some of the intractable issues of our society with relevant sociological imagination.

Modernity demands rationalisation of different spheres of life and progressive vision of religion, but our priestly class has organised itself around issues that are always divisive and mostly violent. Their myopic version of religion reduces the status of God into hangman. The managers of the sacred have turned sacred institutions into an instrument of their political agenda. The priests are misfit to assume the charge of defining an entity like God.

On the other hand, religious discourse has remained ‘unthought’ for liberal/secular intelligentsia. As modernity is ‘unthought’ to religious class, religious discourse has remained unthought for seculars.

For more details: http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/apr2011-weekly/nos-03-04-2011/dia.htm#4