by Dr. Azly Rahman
(Below is Part 2 of the speech on “student idealism” delivered at the annual gathering of the Malaysian and Indonesian Muslim Students in Washington DC, USA, December 2007.)
Most respected Malaysian and Indonesian students of the Islamic faith, let us continue. I begin with two quotes:
“Everything is good in the hands of the author of Things, everything degenerates in the hands of Man,” said Jean Jacques Rousseau, the spiritual force of the French Revolution.
“Know thyself know thy enemies, one hundred battles one hundred victories,” said the legendary Chinese military leader Sun Tzi.
If there is a thesis statement or a guiding idea or an inquiry theme in my speech today, it is this: question authority, break new frontiers of thinking, but listen to the voice of the inner self in order to serve humanity.
We live in interesting times, as chairman Mao Zedong once said; interesting because the forces of globalisation is at perpetual war with humanity’s inner sense of beingness.
We are a republic onto itself. We are a kingdom we govern ourselves. In each and every one of us lies an inner world bigger than the world outside – a world if known, if and only if we know ourselves – is a world in which freedom reigns and one in which the self refuses to be caged and shackled by structures of oppression built by others.
The essence of being human is that of having the insatiable urge to question and to search for answers, and next, not satisfied with the answers, to continue to question. Some revolutionary [thinkers call this dialectics; the permanent revolution in our world of cognition. Becoming a human being is a process – we are as a French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would say, beings in the process of becoming and by doing so we define the world and able to “name” it. We have always lived a life in which our world is already pre-determined, our belief system prepackaged, and our knowledge of the political world prepared for us as propaganda produced and disseminated by those who owns the means of producing propaganda. We have live in what a British writer Eric Blair/George Orwell called a world of “doublespeak” wherein what it said has its form and appearance. Continue reading “Students, question authority!”