Minhaj Qidwai :
With Turkey playing a key role in the first world war, the Western leaders realized that without breaking the Ottoman empire their goals of establishing a new world order will not be achieved. The fall of Ottoman Empire will also break the back of the Muslims-as Turkey was the centre of Islam. The leaders plotted not only the re-structuring of the Muslim world, but also the restructuring of Muslim identity.
The West was not new to social engineering and had experimented both on slaves and other colonized people. They realized that by breaking slaves’ link to their pasts and distorting their self image, they were able to create a pacified, compliant people. Black leaders like Malcolm X and others have illustrated how vital this deliberate distortion was in the continued subjugation of their people.
Following the demise of Ottoman Empire, the Western leaders carved out the pieces to support their interests. While doing so, Canadian author Naomi Klein, in her excellent book The Shock Doctrine, explains when Western Governments wanted to change the way people thought, it was best to do so after a significant trauma. For in that moment, people would lose their sense of orientation in the world; how they understood themselves and in this confused state-a new narrative could be implanted.
The book argues that the free market policies have risen to prominence in some countries because of a deliberate strategy of certain leaders to exploit crises by pushing through controversial, exploitative policies while citizens were too busy emotionally and physically reeling from disasters or upheavals to create an effective resistance. It is implied that some man-made crises, such as the Iraq war, may have been created with the intention of pushing through these unpopular reforms in their wake. Klein introduces two of her main themes:
1. That practitioners of the shock doctrine tend to seek a blank slate on which to create their ideal free market economies, which usually require a violent destruction of the existing economic order, since the existing order features policies, laws, and practices that interfere with laissez-faire capitalism.
2. The similarities between economic shock doctrine and CIA-funded shock therapy studies in which electric shocks far exceeding normal therapeutic levels were applied to patients in mental hospitals in an effort to destroy psychological resistance and create a tabula rasa personality, upon which doctors could imprint whatever they wanted.
While documenting practical examples, the author outlines the Psychiatric shock therapy and the covert experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in collusion with the CIA. Its partial success in distorting and regressing patients’ original personality, but ineffectual in developing a “better” personality to replace it. Parallels with economic shock therapy are made, including a digression on how government agencies harnessed some of the lessons learned to create more effective torture techniques. Torture, according to Klein, has often been an essential tool for authorities who have implemented aggressive free market reforms. In the Capitalist setup corporate soar. In the “Disaster Capitalism Complex”, model, the author describes how companies have learnt to profit from disasters. She talks about how the same personnel move easily from security-related posts in government agencies to lucrative positions in corporations. Winners and losers of Economic shock therapy, shows how small groups will often do very well by moving into luxurious gated communities while large sections of the population are left with decaying public infrastructure, declining incomes and increased unemployment.
Occupation of Iraq, Klein describes as the most comprehensive and full-scale implementation of the shock doctrine ever attempted. Iraq was bombed through a “Shock and Awe” campaign to demoralize the Iraqis. At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law was unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed-Physical shock therapy: the electrode or physical torture in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets. The book vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin recently. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.
With the advent of internet, a new dimension came in the social engineering towards mind set. Social media have been extensively used in bringing a revolution; a recent example can be cited for Egypt.
So, with the Shock and traumatization inflicted on the Muslims after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, led to their state of tabula rasa. As the colonizers brutalized those they now occupied, the shocked populaces were given a new narrative, deliberately intended to break their spirit. The social engineering was interwoven into the very apparatus of the newly created ‘Muslim States’. Prior to the restructuring, the Muslim world saw them as Muslim. In the new world the Muslims saw themselves in a myriad of ways-as Arabs, Kurds, Turks etc, who were further fragmented into the newly manufactured identities of Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese or Jordanians etc.
The Muslim identity would now simply be a spiritual identity with no political consciousness-much like Hindus or Buddhists see themselves today. Islam itself would not be eradicated-simply changed-by muting its political voice.
Those who accepted their new identities would still be allowed to follow the rituals of Islam as long as they did not speak of the ethical demands of their Prophet’s message. This original understanding of Islam-to uphold justice on Earth-was the priority, with the ritual simply upholding this mission. Now this has been reversed.
The colonizers promoted a passive, apolitical version of the original revolutionary message of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the same way Christianity’s ethical message was undermined by the Roman power of the time, by inserting the Biblical words “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and give unto God what is God’s.” In short pray to God-but leave the world to us. Same as we see in case of the Americans preferring separation of religion and the Church.
The newly conquered Muslims, in a state of shock, accepted the colonial and ritualized version of Islam that they were allowed to practice by their new masters. Muslim scholars prioritized what they were allowed to practice and ignored what would get them in trouble. Over time this understanding of Islam became what Muslims practiced across the globe: an apolitical, ritualized version of Islam; a far cry from the original 7th Century message that urged its believers to act to free the world from tyranny.
Equally, if the colonial masters could convince Muslims that they were spiritually Muslims but politically Saudis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis-and so on-then their national vision would always be limited to the needs of that individual nation. There could be no global Muslim cause. No united Muslim freedom struggle, only a localized nationalistic one. The people could never rise in unity, if they no longer saw themselves as a single unified oppressed people. This was the social engineering implemented to change the identity of those being ruled.
The Western powers’ grand plan had changed the self-identity of millions of people, a gigantic feat of social re-engineering, and as a result the powers were able to dominate those they sought to exploit.
While this benefited Western powers, it has destroyed the Muslim world. As a result, violence, chaos and senseless death have become the order of the day in the Muslim world. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) long ago predicted the continuing chaos near the end of time saying, “My Ummah will be divided into 72 groups”; and there we see the Muslims divided into groups, sects, sub-sects-everything except as united Muslims. His prediction has proven correct.
Over the following century the Muslim world would go through continuous trauma. Extreme ideologies would take root due to internal and external players. The West continued its plan of backing secularist dictators and at the same time supporting their puppets-countries and their mouth piece clergy. Both would ruthlessly do whatever it took to keep power. The desperate oppression the populations now lived under was the incubator for a violent and extreme reaction.
A relatively safe and stable Muslim world had previously produced liberal-minded philosophers; poets and men of science; and brought enlightenment to Europe through Muslim Spain. Now that same Muslim world produced broken, angry men, who had lost all hope in a world of poverty, repression and endless brutal wars. Men who had no direction. Lost people.
For this reason the Muslim world has become an increasingly intolerant place. Religious groups too became increasingly intolerant, especially of other religious groups. Without an Islam that gave them an ethical purpose for the world, their minor ritual and theological differences became bitter differences. They looked for internal enemies in theology to fight and ignored the giant global war the external enemies were waging.
Despite this a new phenomenon was occurring, one that was a real threat to the neo-colonial order. Pragmatic Muslim political thinkers like Allama Iqbal started to emerge. And it was these thinkers who started to decode their place in the world. They started to rediscover their history and, through it, the slow process of unraveling what their colonial masters and nationalist dictators had long sought to erase from their consciousness-a free, pre-colonial identity.
