Questions of identity are some of the oldest questions of all Mankind. Questions of identity spur the essentials of all philosophy. Questions about oneself, one’s environment, one’s likes and dislikes and one’s relationship with others were more fundamental than most questions that came afterwards. Ruminating on these aspects of identity and finding reasons for these fundamental questions are part of Man’s unending quests. Smaller questions are easier to answer, and smaller questions are usually within the framework of a well developed set of postulates that are the result of a deductive thought process. Not all systems of understanding the world through questioning depend on deductive thought processes – some are partially dependent on them, while the basic framework is “revealed”. Not all questions are small questions, because some questions transcend the nature of trivialities and the apparent reality, and take on different manifestations and representations as we gather evidence to answer these questions. The curiosity about the human condition really ends with most of these basic questions. The rest of the ruminations that are within the context of the answers we find to the basic questions are perhaps best left uncompared between different sets of people who give these answers from different viewpoints.
Before science had its way, religion had run its course. Religion stemmed from philosophical thought, from a quest to answer fundamental questions, from a fascination with one’s existence and from specific realizations about the world derived from a very personal, phenomenological viewpoint. Inspirations answered the questions that Man did not have the deductive apparatus for (except for perhaps Greece and India). It is inconceivable that the prophets of world religions as well as the saints and poets of old were steeped in a sense as specific as their sycophantic followers. They surely encouraged a state of mind that questioned the nature of reality and the human condition and wondered on the answers to the big questions of existence.
It is difficult to imagine that this spirit of questing for subjective truths before the advent of the scientific method has been twisted by sycophantic followers of these prophets to become what religious fundamentalism is today. Literal interpretations of subjective experiences have led to a world filled with religious fundamentalists. Questions asked in an exalted mental state by those early intellectual pioneers who broadened their imagination by delving into the basic questions of human existence, thereby providing purpose and ideas to many groups of people, have become bones of contention for different sets of people whose ancestors’ imaginations were triggered by different things, and in most cases, whose religion is hardly associated with their own culture’s intellectual development.
One wonders how the fundamentalist can juxtapose the old and the new, science and the knowledge of the books of old, the prescribed and the proscribed and the reality of things, the relevant and the irrelevant, his own good and another’s good, his duty and his conscience. One wonders how a fundamentalist can live with intellectual dichotomies, with half-truths, with prescribed hatred and suppressed freedom, feigned acceptance of the absurd, of that which he has not experienced first-hand, of a revelation that was significant in a forgotten age. One wonders how the fundamentalist can juxtapose creation and destruction, crime and killing for the sake of his ideology and the unselfishness of the old fundamental questions, how he can juxtapose the curiosity of coming to know of something, and the anguish of destroying it before understanding it.
One wonders how he can juxtapose those questions of identity and willful suicide for the purpose of killing others.
The mind of the fundamentalist is, when examined, altogether tragic, irksome, burdening, and tiring. I could never live fully with too many half-truths, and wish that I can eliminate more of them as I go along. Having said this, I wonder how steep the climb is for the men who trust the books and not the felicity of their minds, who know the answers but forget to ask the questions, who can kill their enemies but never understand them.
7 Comments
December 3, 2008 at 2:00 am
Troubling and yet thoughtful Phily. Where is the answer to this question? In the madness pouring out of some men’s minds and hearts?
December 3, 2008 at 10:22 am
I wonder, maami. I wonder if this cancer of fundamentalism is all we have left as the future of religions that once benevolently united people. Having said that, change will probably be slow. I see a trend in the majority of the Muslim population to denounce and disown the terrorists who have caused havoc, but I don’t see how this disowning can also not be twisted by politicians to execute their agendas by disowning them, concealing their locations and identities and making their funding mechanisms discreet. Unless change happens from inside, and unless people don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t see any bloodless solution.
December 4, 2008 at 2:40 am
It is sad… don’t know what to say
December 5, 2008 at 4:52 am
Hmmm….. my friend had asked a similar qusetion while we were discussing about the blasts,”How can people who are educated and rational(the glasgow bombers), who had enough intelligence and thinking to execute such a plan(the mumbai blasts), not know that their intention(the creation of an islamic state etc..) will never fructify?”…..
I think it all goes back to your blog post “Rajaji Speaks” , people get to know only what they want to know, the jihadists only know about the atrocities perpetrated on muslims and use their intelligence and education to mount reprisal attacks…………. the same being the case with the hindu terrorists and by extension with any group fanatically linked to an ideology, need not neccesserily be a religion.
December 5, 2008 at 9:19 am
Madhu, the venom that really gets you, is not even the violence sometimes, which can be defended against. The point of worry here, as you say, seems to be that they want the world to follow Islam, and what’s worse, their specific brand of Islam. I was surprised by Francois Gautier’s argument, when he said that the presence of Sonia Gandhi in the nerve centre of Indian politics emasculated the RAW and resulted in them cracking down on the so-called “Hindu fundamentalists” (such groups do exist, as shameful as it is to the Sanatana Dharma) rather than on Islamic fundamentalist activity. I wonder how this translates to a “better” state. On the other hand, by taking down Islamic fundamentalism now, we have a chance to redeem what we can rightfully call the Indian secular temperament, however pseudo-secular that may be. Indeed, if we can achieve the goal of secularism by influencing change, by repeating what is now nearly a myth – secularism – several times, so be it.