Daily Times

We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent Muslim intellectuals and leaders bear responsibility for not selflessly taking on the savage Israel assault on a largely helpless population in Gaza, another atrocity that Muslims all over the world still see as a “blood stained chapter of world history”. But as for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past few weeks, on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions. Reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them from intellectuals and people has particular significance and poignancy. I have a few scattered questions in protest about the responsibility of intellectuals and how, in practice, they go about meeting this responsibility. With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyse actions according to their causes, motives and often hidden intentions. In the western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. Suppressive third world democracies do not provide the courage and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, through which the events of current history may be presented to people. Yet the responsibilities of intellectuals remain much deeper than the responsibility of people, given the set of privileges that intellectuals still enjoy.
It is of no particular interest that Israel is quite happy to lie on behalf of a cause that it knows to be unjust but it is significant that such events provoked such little response in Arab leaders, for example none has said that there is something strange in Israel’s stance that it feels no duty to persuade the world that US-backed violence on Gaza is nothing of the sort. What of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of the UN and its spokespersons concerning matters such as negotiations with Hamas? The facts are known to all who care to know. The press, foreign and domestic, has presented documentation to refute each falsehood as it appears. But the power of the west’s propaganda apparatus is such that an individual who does not undertake a research project on the subject can hardly hope to confront Israel’s pronouncements with fact. There is much more that can be said about this topic but, without going on too long, I would simply like to emphasise that, as is no doubt obvious, the cult of experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent. In the case of Palestine, if those who feel themselves to be experts have access to principles or information that could justify what the Israeli government is doing in that unfortunate country, they have been singularly ineffective in making this fact known. To anyone who has any familiarity with human rights and social sciences, the claim that there are certain considerations and principles too deep for the outsider to comprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of comment.
Pakistan is once again at the mercy of another poor form of revolution. Once again, sentiments will be abused, words will be exchanged, die hard loyalist workers will chant slogans, promises will be made, deals will be brokered, the economy will be plundered, security will be compromised, a few will die, television channels and newspapers will not need any advertisements and nothing will happen except that another episode of shameful personal political vendetta will be criminally played out on the streets in the name of rigged elections and poor governance. Simply because leaders suffer from grandiosity, people want change, the media sells sensationalism, intellectuals are hiding and history is helpless to repeat itself. Tahirul Qadri and his dubious religious-political convictions dictate a certain disdain for the ruling class. The inqilab (tsunami) march on August 14 added yet another element of instability and unrest in the offing. All this is nonsense but nonsense that differs from Imran’s azaadi (freedom) march only in the respect that Dr Tahirul Qadri’s argument is of slightly greater duplicity than anything to be discovered in Imran’s work. What is remarkable is that people actually pay attention to these absurdities, no doubt because of their fragile faith and cultish beliefs.
Returning to the quite appropriate question of whether countries can grow by building democratic institutions or only by totalitarian means, I think that honesty requires us to recognise that this question must be directed more towards intellectuals than to revolutionary ideologues. Backward countries have incredible, perhaps insurmountable problems and few available options where we have neither the intellectual nor moral resources to confront some of these problems. And while it may not be easy for intellectuals to deliver homilies on the virtues of religion and politics, if they are really concerned about, say, totalitarianism or the burdens imposed on the people in sham democracies, they should face a task that is infinitely more important and challenging. In short, we are prepared to live peaceably in our — to be sure, rather extensive — habitations. And, quite naturally, we are offended by undignified noises from the servants’ quarters. If, let us say, an Islamic clerical-based revolutionary movement along with a politicians’ call for a long march tries to achieve independence from the ruling powers and the domestic structures that support them by threatening to incite violence, blood and death at the clarion call of injustice, religion and faith, I think we must respond to this belligerence and contradiction with appropriate constraint and controlled force. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however, for the modern intellectual for whom it is not at all obvious.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com