EXTRACTION
AND REFINEMENT OF CULTURAL RESOURCES
"Man and Islam"
by: Dr.Ali Shariati
. As a nation and a society possesses economic resources, rich in
energy, but worthles when raw, it also possesses vast cultural and spiritual
resources that have accumulated throughout history. An inept and incompetant
nation will sit upon such rich treasures which are capable of making people
comfortable, nevertheless its people will remain ignorant, stagnant and
deprived. At the present time we know of large nations in Asia and Africa that
own vast and rich cultural resources, but they are being stereotyped as
backward, ignorant and spiritually and morally bankrupt. There is a
correspondance
between the cultural and economic resources of a nation. In
short, a generation looking for a way to solve its economic and
cultural-spiritual problems and to transform its society into a progressive and
creative one, must posses a historical and cultural awareness aw well as
technical-scientific know-how. This does not mean it should merely emulate
another progressive society. Rather, it must posses an independant experiance,
and original principles and virtues, with a new mission in moving towards its
goals.
In recent years the enlightened generations of Asia and Africa have come
into direct contact with the philosophical, cultural and spiritual schools of
Europe. In the past (eg. in the 19th century), when an educated Asian returned
from Europe, he would merely recount his memories, and whatever he said people
would accept. This was the only type of connection between Asians and
Europeans. Today however, Asian and African free-thinkers are well acquanted
with Europe due to today's educated class, mutual relations, heightening of
cultural awareness, and familiarity with various aspects of European culture.
These handful of Eastern free-thinkers are self-conscious of themselves as well
as their cultural and spiritual values.
They have realised despite the fact that they posses great and rich
cultures brimming with spirituality, philosophy, and knowledge of life, they
are so 'culturally' poverty stricken (due to alienation from their roots) that
they have their mouths open for any European cultural morsels. These peoples'
only pride is to learn the collaquialisms,ideas, expressions of the European
thinkers and take them home as souveneirs. We notice that the contents have
nothing to do with our miseries, pains and fate. The fact is that the Easterner
suffers from hunger while the Westerner suffers from a full stomach. Therefore
what the latter says does not make any sense to the former, though in their
western atmosphere they are proper and make sense. However once these ideas are
transferred to a different atmosphere they become useless except to those who
like to show off.
I have sutied existentialsim and am a bit familiar with it. I see
existentialism in it's philosophical and spiritual form, and as an art, the
most splendid human consciousness in industrial Europe and the materialistic
West. But unfortunately I often notice that our Asian and African
free-thinkers, who know nothing about their own native historical and spiritual
treasures and know only one western language,have learned existentialism in
Europe or America and imported it to their homeland- often passing it off as a
new phenomenon. When we examine the "souveneirs" we notice that what
was the existentialist revolution of the 19th century in Kierkegaard's era to
the 20th century, in Sartre's and Jasper's period consists of a sort of
spiritual and human consciousness against the materialistic order and vile and
fossilizsing of consumption which has been ruling the West.
Up to this point,fine, but as compared to the Eastern spiritual
experiances, these are very elementary and crude lessons. Anxiety, which has
been the most basic spirit of existentialism in the past 100 years (man's
estrangement with the material world, the anxiety due to responsibility and
inability to find direction and the right way), make up the bulk of the most
fundamental problems of existentialism. We see that such problems are as easy
as "learning the alphabet" in Eastern theosophy . They have existed
in Laotse,Buddhism and Islamic theosophy long ago, we have had rich experiances
in such areas.Unfortunately for example, we notice that an Iranian free-thinker
goes to Europe without knowing anything about Islam and his own history other
than those things he learned from "Mama" and "Granny" and
his high school books. He studies literature, philosophy and art, and when he
returns home, he offers us elementary concepts that are taught in our high
schools and religious seminars.
For instance, this free-thinker goes to Europe and learns that Sartre
talks about "Choisir" (verb in French,to choose,and Choix,a noun),
which is our determinism and free-will in persian. Determination and free-will
have always been in circulation and usage in our culture, especially in the
philosophical,spiritual,and theosophical writings of the Islamic culture.
However, since this free thinker was unaware of their existence before going to
Europe , he thinks he is offering something new!
We notice that there is an exact correspondance between the economic
and the spiritual fate of the East. As I mention before a nation which is
incapable of utilizing it's own material resources remains hungary, no matter
how rich it is. By the same token if a nation cannot know it's own cultural and
spiritual resources and is incapable of extracting,refining, and turning them
into energy, it will remain ignorant and backward while sitting in piles of
spiritual and cultural resources. The same type of correspondance exists
between the role of cultural and material resources in the fate of a society.
That is, those who are incapable of utilizing their resources have to extend
their hands for rations from foreigners.
We see that the conscious Europe, which knows us better than we know
ourselves, utilizes our cultural and spiritual resources and builds new schools
of thought and ideas. Since we are not worthy of a conscious utilization of our
spiritual resources, our free-thinkers have to beg them, and it never dawns
these free-thinkers that what they are recieving is their own raw materials.
Since they were not able to utilize their own resources, they are being accused
of savagery,ignorance,spiritual,moral, and material poverty.
Therefore,as the East is trying to know it's own raw material
resources- - learning to extract them,showing their worth in refining and
converting them to energy - in order to save itself from poverty, it should
also do the same in cultural realms. By extracting and refining it's cultural
resources it must attain a spiritual comfort, as well as a spiritual movement
and creativity. As the East is trying to become self-sufficient and independant
in the economic realm in order not to consume European consumer goods, by
utilizing the same consciousness, it must try and become independant of Western
spiritual products and ultimately achieve moral and spiritual independence.
It is impossible to achieve economic independance, without having
achieved spiritual independance and vice versa. These two are interdependant as
well as complimentary conditions. In order to have an independant character in
the material,social, and economic sphere, we must develop an independant
consciousness before the West, and vice versa. What should we do, and in what
way?
It is quite obvious. We must know that the best teacher for regaining
and wresting one's independance and national character is the enemy (or
enemies) who robbed us from our independance and national character. Therefore
we must develop consciousness of how the West has deprived us of our cultural
and spiritual resources and consequently trained a generation of Easterners who
have lost the capability of utilizing their rich treasures of thought,ethics,spirit,
and culture. In reality we have become estranged from these resources. We must
search for the steps that the West has taken, as well as the mathod, and the
sratagems it has used to succeed and reach it's goals in the East, to such an extent
that she has accused the grand East, the origin,cradle, and the foundation of
Western man's civilization and culture, of savagery, backwardness and
corruption. Once we study and find the tracks through which the West has enterd
our lands, we can then retrace them and return to the origin.
Instead of knowing the great African and Asian thinkers of the present
century who have found solutions with their own national and universal
consciousness, with greed and indescribable enthusiasm, we spend our energies
and efforts to know people such as Brecht, Beckett, and so forth who have
nothing to do with our own condition. If I were a German I would worship
Brecht, but since I am an Iranian, I cannot understand him and I do not know
what he can do for me. The fact is that Brecht's prescription is not good for
my pain; he has a neurological problem, but I have a stomach ache. Further, he
has gone through two world wars and three centuries of machinism, but I know
neither what a world war is nor machinism and bourgeoisie. Therefore his
philosophy is of no use to me. My anxiety is over fuel for winter, my future
job, and the training of my child, while his anxiety is existential. He is
asking himself, "what is my role in the world?". He has reached a point
where is secure in all aspects and now he has come to grips with his own
existence. We are still without clothing and charcoal, but he is thinking about
"himself". Therefore his malaise is different than mine.
In searching for a writer and thinker , we must look to those
individuals whose pains,history, condition, and fate are identical to ours. I
wish we knew Kateb Yassin instead of Brecht, Omar Mawloud, Omar Ozgan,Frantz
Fanon, and Aime Cesaire instead of Jean Paul Sartre and Camus. Unless we know
ourselves to the extent that we are familiar with the Western free-thinkers, we
will to the same extent become alienated from ourselves.
Those who sincerely and honestly contaminate the Eastern free-thinkers'
minds with existential,cultural,philosophical, and social problems of the post
W.W.II Western man and create in them extreme subjectivity for the European
problems and the progressive schools of the West, will not only distract the
Eastern peoples and their free-thinkers from their subjective mission and the
existing reality which they are confronted with, but they will also change
themselves into corrupting and deceitful elements.
What has the West done to the East , that the latter has become
alienated and become unworthy of her own material resources? It is quite
obvious. Omar Mawloud (one of the grearest African thinkers) says, "In
order to turn a man into a subservient, obediant, and trusting creature, we
must strip his personality away Because as long as he has character he cannot
be a servant. And in order to get a good ride from a nation, human feelings
must be taken away from them, or at least weakened. As long as the Easterner
feels he is independant, noble, and worthy, he will never fawn and wag his tail
for a Western morsel to be thrown to him.
Sordell is one of the great African thinkers,writers and free-thinkers.
He is one of the individuals we should seek to know rather than Jean Paul
Sartre. He says, "In the relationship between two human beings as well as
two societies, and in the relationship between the East and West, there is a
contradiction, a dialectic. How? Look at the dialectic between a mother and the
child. The mother despises the kid, beats him up, negates him and rejects him.
And the child in order to be immune from all these harrasments resorts to the
mother herself. He resorts to the mothers lap and the mother accepts him. Why?
Because he is no more nuisance, he is hanging onto the mother, he is part of
the mother, and he has resorted to her. The child by doing this negates his
original character, the one that exasperated the mother, 'I will not listen to
you, and I don't care what you say'. But since the child wanted to be immune
from all these hassles he resorted to the mother."
As we notice in the dialectic relationship, the child was despised by
the mother but in the meantime in order to respond to being despised he resorts
to the mother herself. This resembles the relationship between two human
beings, and two societies, the East and the West. This is Sordellian dialect;
superior vs inferior, Western vs Eastern and white vs black. The fact is that
the west with her philosophy from Nietzsche,Hegel, to Freud and Sigfried, all
have designed the issue of superior race inferior race, Western-Eastern race,
and black-white
Ernest Renan, one of the greatest spiritual and moral anthropologists
of the world, also spurts out such nonsenses as:"Man's spiritual race is
the Northern and Western race".
Yes, I have seen it with my own eyes in universities such as Sorbonne
in Paris. In the 20th century an M.D. writes his dissertation on the subject of
the cells of the blacks vs whites. And a group of world famous professors offer
him his degree since he has proven that brain cells of the black man's cortex
are inferior to white's or that the curvature of the tail in a black's cell is
less than that of the white's. I told him then that he was mistaking the cell's
tail and his own tail!
Hegel who purported to be a great genius, says, "God was a
'subconscious' that entered nature. He developed and entered plants; he
developed further and entered animals.....into man.......into Eastern
man......into Western man....into Germans, and he evolved further and entered
into the German government, and finally it entered the kingdom which rules us
now." Wow! Look how far Hegel's whole reasoning and arguments have gone!
Today in schools the war between the Greeks and the Persians is called
the war between the Greeks and the barbarians (though Persians had the greater
civilisation). These people still do not know that the Greeks were not defeated
by barbarians but by a great civilisation. From the second and third grades on,
children are indoctrinated with the myth that Westerners are superior to
Easterners. Even university professors and thinkers in all areas of the universities
cherish the feeling of racial superiority. For instance the contemperory
professor Sigfried states that, "God has created two kinds of races in
natire: the boss who must direct, and the laborer who must obey. Which one is
needed more? Obviously the laborer. Every thousand laborers calls for two to
three bosses. So, God has created a European race who is the boss, and an
Eastern race, who is the laborer. This is why the birth rateof the East is
3%-5% annually, while for West is 1%."
Mr.Sigfried is a sociologist and a member of the French academy today.
He is an international figure and has not been accused of racism. He says,
"What you see and tend to ignore on the sidewalk is a French gentleman, an
average worker with blond hair and blue eyes, who can easily direct huge
organisations and offices of the East. While, if you go to the East, you will
find great thinkers and personalities who are incapable of directing a six man
organisation. Why? Because the Western brain creates civilisation and organisation
while the Eastern brain is sentimental, poetical, and theosophical.
Furthermore, a European is capable of working with a machinefor forty years,
but an easterner wrecks it within the first six months and then continues to
work with it for the next twenty years." ( L'ame des peuples (Spirit of
Nations), translated into Persian by Mr.Ahmad Aram, Tehran).
I want to tell Mr.Sigfried that what he says is true but it has nothing
to do with being ae Easterner. It is due to unfamiliarity with the machine, and
because the Easterner has become corrupt. There was a time when the Persian
mind organized and administered a huge empire extending from India to the
Meditrranean. The direction of this empire was in the hands of one man - Khaje
Nezam al - Molk - at a time when going from one end of the empire to the other
required one to pass through twenty races, religions , and nationalities. This
used to be the Eastern mind. If the Easterner is incapable of ti now it is
because he has been corrupted by Westerners, but the Easterner is not aware of
this.
The people of India who are being accused of being useful only for
theosophy, morals and mortification of flesh, discovered the first numerals for
man. The laws of light refraction discovered by Ibn Heitham, and the Algebra by
Omar Khayyam are still valid. These are some of the discoveries of the East.
Why are we told the East is only good for theosophy, ethics and meditation,
rather than intellect, logic and economics? The reason for designing
philosophical, scientific, sociological, and historical problems in this manner
is, because the Europeans, while trying to buy themselves security and assure
themselves of superiority and originality, want to make Easterners feel
racially inferior, weak and faithless. Why? Because, according to Sordellian
dialectic, on the one hand the Easterner is made to feel inferior (having a
corrupt past, religion, and history), while on the other hand, in order to get
rid of his complexes, the Easterner tries to be like the Westerner,the superior
race. Once the Easterner follows the superior race he will be, he will be
immune from attacks which label him black,Eastern, theosophic,religious,
corrupt and brainless. Why? Because he is no longer being accused and he is no
longer in his native suit. Just like a child who is attacked by his mother but
resorts to the lap of the mother himself. When I use the 'mother-child'
instance to depict the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed,
from a cultural point of view, it is not an exanmple - it is a reality.
The mothers for Asia and Africa are England,France and Belgium, and
Holland. When these countries accuse us of a base culture,people and race we
tend to believe them. How does a country interested in freeing herself from
such accusations go about it? By pretending to fulfill those descriptions. Once
this is done, the "mother country" is satisfied, and consequently
one's country is secure and everything is alright.
When an individual thinks, consumes, socializes, creates, and wears a
suit like "himself", he is independant. But now such an independance
is being attacked, all the talks are a means to severe the East from
"it-self", and make her a consumer like the West.
Ever since the 18th and 19th century when European machines began to overproduce,
the surplus had to be sold to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Australia, but
the merchandise such as beauty aids, were made for European tastes.How could an
African woman use it? As an African woman makes her own beauty aids from her
farm, the same is true of her clothing.
What should one do to attract the villagers to buy expensive coats?
Their mode of consumption must be changed. But consumption cannot be easily
changed since it is related to one's religion,history, social standing, culture
and ethics. All these must be destroyed in order to change a villager into a
mannequin that can be manipulated the way we wish. That is we must force things
down his/her throat (regardless of how the individual feels).
What is culture? It is the spiritual,mental,moral,and historical
accumulations of a nation,similar to natural resources.How were natural
resources formed? Throughout centuries animals and plants were pressurizes
within layers in the depth of the earth. Due to the interplay of myriads of variables
they were transformed into vital economic substances. Throughout history,
culture, due to the appearance and demise of successive generations, also
becomes accumulated and forms the spiritual assets of a nation. No matter how
we interpret originality,it belomgs to history since man's character is not
suddenly formed from nothing in a single period.
Therefore, the personality of a generation depends upon the constant
flow of past accumulations of spiritual,mental,ethical,artistic,and theosophic
nurturing, to the extent that a generation can digest his past savings,he can
receive nourishment from the makings of it's own century. Which tree can
utilize the sun,air,and nitrogen best? It is quite obvious that it will be the
one that has grown roots deeper in the soil.
An individual who feeds on his own history possesses a personality that
is capable of choosing and shaping his tomorrow. It is absolutely impossible
for an individual who has no past to have a future. Whoever has no past begins
from zero, and whoever is not familiar with his own culture is a primitive man.
The exploitiative sociology of Europe has realised that in order to be
able to rob the East, to ride on her back, and to easily decieve her, it is
imperative to strip her from her personality.Once this is accomplished she will
proudly follow the West and with unspeakable lunacy and thirst she will consume
Western goods. Because whoever is deficient in personality will relate himself
to someone who has it. And one of the manifestations that help an individual
resemble someone else is through consumption., by which the person can imitate.
This is very true, since those who want, for instance, to look like a celebrity
(scientific,artistic, and cinematic) often imitate his consumption, and drive
his type of car.
The exploiter wishes to see his machines work all of the time.
Furthermore, he wants to see all originality,religion,tastes, and various
talents destroyed, so that all races can be changed to become consumers of his
products. In order to achieve this purpose, the exploiter searches for ways to
deprive a nation of it's personality, which is defined as the unique aspects of
a culture that differentiates it from another.Therefore, a generation, like a
tree, must be severed from it's roots so that it can be used and manipulated
any way the exploiter wishes.
Depriving a nation of it's history and cutting it off from it's culture
with subsequent alienation of the present generation from it's cultural
resources, have reached a point that the cultures which possessed the proudest
religions,most progressive philosophical thinking, the most delicate arts,
created the grandest civilisation and contributed the most experiance to human
history, today have become so alienated with their past possessions that they
have been transformed, into a sort of human being that has to re-learn how to
dress,eat,read,and write! Why are these societies living in poverty and
ignorance while the West and it's thinkers, by looting such cultures, are
trying to enrich their own cultures?
In the Crusades, the Islamization of Christianity created
Protestantism. Christianity,which throughout centuries was the cause of
retardation, was transformed into a builder and energizer of Europe. Unlike
what we are told it was not the negation of religion which created modern
Western civilisation but the transformation of a corrupt and ascetic religion
into a critical,protesting and mundane Christianity. That is, Protestantism was
the creator of modern Western civilisation, rather than materialism or
anti-religious sentiments which did not exist in the Renaissance.
The transformation of Catholic to Protestant meant changing a corrupt
religious spirit to a social religious spirit, one which built today's grand
civilisation upon centuries of Western retardation and inertia. What I am about
to mention happens to be the biggest Renaissance experiance; no cultural assets
(including religion) were negated in the Renaissance, It was Hitler who
asserted that he was in the process of building history. If you start buliding
history now you will have just what you made! What did Hitler do than destroy
past accumulations?
What was Renaissance? It was a revival of the Greek cultural elemants
which were unknown in the Middle Ages. Therefore today's great Western
civilisation is the product of 15th,16th, and 17th century thinkers who decided
to extract the Greek and Roman cultural resources (along with their own vast
reservoir of faith and feeling) in order to consciously "know"
Christianity, so that they could convert this opiate to energy and
awareness-generating force. And they succesfully did it. Why are we not told
the truh?
We are told these thinkers threw religion and past away, marched
forward and suddenly embraced a new civilisation! But how could they march
forward empty-handed? With an empty hand you must start from zero and a
primitive condition. Rather, they returned to the past consciously from the
right direction, and instead of knowing Plato and Aristotle through the Arabs,
they decided to do it their own way.
Today, we notice that Asian and African progressive thinkers and
leaders who have advanced European education attend international circles in
their own native costumes and attires.Why?Because they are aware that for the
past 200 years"exploitation" has tried to tell them that, "You
had know native clothes of your own and "I" put it into you. You had
no language, I taught it to you.You had no past and I provided the present for
you. You were not familiar with civilization,i civilized you." All in all,
the exploiters had trained the black Africans in such a way that they could
feel that they were only good for servitude and dancing. The black leader who
puts his native clothes on wants to create a faith in himself. He has been a good
human being, a good thinker in the past, a partner in human civilisation, and
he contributed to helping the human condition.
At the present time the Tanzanian intellectuals speak English since
they have learned it from childhood. But their president (Julius K.Nyerere)
says that they should return to Swahili, the language which is used by the
country's natives. Their president is a sociologist, and a well known thinker
on the international level today. He is not a "fuddy-duddy"
reactionary. Why? Because as long as the Tanzanian black man does not realise
that talking is possible without using a foreign tongue, he will continue to
feel like a dumb semi-savage who was civilised by having attached himself to
Europeans. In order to create a faith,character,spirituality, and originality
in themselves, Swahili must be learned and English thrown away. And this
experiance is possible only when they can get rid of European culture and
return to themselves and depend upon their own history and culture.
We Easterners have been civilisation builders and humanity's teachers
throughout man's history, so much so that we now own a collection of vast and
deep cultural,mental,and social experiances of humanity.Why can't we, by
depending on ourselves,extract and refine all these spiritual resources (which
have been sitting unknown and idle), rejuvenate, and convert them to
consciousness raising and protesting forces? Yes, we have these vast resources
which are like mines and rich sea under our feet, but they were severed to such
an extent that in order to regain our personality we have to resort to
others.What should we do?
We must mend and fill up this gap in order to be able to think
independantly and know ourselves. We must find the strength to choose and turn
into a creative force the past historical, religious, theosophical, and
literary factors which have changed to superstition, and opiate matters and
have caused inertia and corruption in our societies.
The Westerners, unlike what they did to Africans, did not negate our
past,they metamorphosized it. And when we look at our own new portrait we hated
it. Consequently we began to run towards our "metamorphosized" past
and religion, as well as towards European schools and culture.
We have had no choice but to shatter such images of ourselves and
inculcate the portrait of reality in the minds of our masses in the East,and
extract and refine our cultural resources, not the way the West has done it for
us, but with a method and conscious responsibility, relative to our people and
society. Further, as in economics, where we convert raw materials to energy and
consequently start a great industry and production, we have to use the same
spirit in building up our personality and cultural independance in
thinking,spirituallity, and human movement.
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