Skip to main content

Delusions of Truth


Shamsudheen Fareed, a Salafi preacher in Kerala, has decided that Onam, Christmas and other such celebrations are haram.  A lot more things are haram in his version of Islam.  Movies are haram.  Even trimming the beard is!

When a person convinces himself that he possesses the ultimate truths, he is destined to live in a bundle of delusions.  Simply because there are no ultimate truths.  Except in science and other rigid systems.  Even in those systems, truths are amenable to corrections.  An Einstein corrected a Newton.  Einstein’s theories are also not ultimate truths.  When it comes to human life and affairs, truths are never ultimate.  We keep learning and understanding them in our own way. 

Source
Joseph Conrad’s celebrated character, Kurtz (Heart of Darkness), is a good example of someone who deluded himself with his own ultimate truths.  He thought he possessed the ultimate truths and he wanted to civilize the native Africans by giving them those truths.  The result was torture and slavery.  He enslaved the people.  He terrorised them.  He became a god for them.  A monster, that was what he was in reality.  But for a terrorised people there is little difference between a god and a monster.

Kurtz isolates himself from society.  He places himself above the society because he has deluded himself into believing that he is superior to all the society.  He has certain truths.  The others don’t have them.  Hence the others are harami. 

What many religious organisations are doing today in the name of jihad and divine reign are no different from what Kurtz did.  They are placing themselves above human societies.  They are the judges of societies.  They become the moral arbiters of other people.  Yes, there is one difference.  Kurtz didn’t even fall back on his god; the terrorists make use of god.  But gods are elusive creatures.  They assume the shapes and colours given to them by their inventors or interpreters.  Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses illustrates the malady that underlies those inventors and interpreters.  It is quite impossible for any man to don the mantle of God and maintain sanity too.  Kurtz became a god to the savages.  He was mad, in fact, in the judgment of the other white people who knew him.

All the while he thinks of himself as the moral authority in the jungle, Kurtz is actually a criminal and a hypocrite.  He is a homicidal maniac who has decided that other people are harami.

The pursuit of absolute truths necessarily creates such delusions.  Many literary writers have pursued similar themes.  I took Kurtz as a prototype. 


Labels:

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJuly 18, 2016 at 7:38 PM

    Raskolnikov came to me as well while reading the description. Satanic verses showed a different personality to a business minded prophet and I salute the guts of the author to write a book on it in spite of knowing the obvious repercussions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2016 at 9:45 PM

      Raskolnikov also placed himself above society and morality. But he had goodness within and hence redeemed himself. Inner goodness makes the difference.

      Rushdie was questioning his religion (indirectly others too) genuinely. Unfortunately his voice was lost in the wilderness of gross ignorance and silly politics.

      Delete
  2. Roohi BhatnagarJuly 19, 2016 at 8:00 PM

    Delusional - the correct word you have used. Such people are the actual ignorant lot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 19, 2016 at 8:33 PM

      Very costly ignorance, Roohi. The world is paying a high price for it.

      Glad to have you back after a long while. Hope you and the little one are doing fantastico!

      Delete
  3. CifarJuly 20, 2016 at 4:15 PM

    thinking your truth as the ultimate truth is where the problem starts and you closes your mind to listen to somebody's else truth to take the right decision

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 20, 2016 at 7:11 PM

      Precisely. If only people realise that truths are very relative affairs, half of the problems would be solved.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more