Toxic Effects of Inferiority Complex in Pakistan (III)

Read part I and part II.

In South Africa there are two million whites against almost thirteen million native people, and it has never occurred to a single black to consider himself superior to a member of the white minority.

– Frantz Fanon

The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior.

– Frantz Fanon

(First quote of Fanon really shook our spines to the core. This thought has never occurred to us! We must confess. Ask yourself. The second one is a ‘proven’ psychological fact.)

There’s an undeniable existence of self-hatred, self-pity and total disregard for our Way (cultural and above all religious) present in many of us, especially those dazzled by all things ‘western’. Another term for this disease is Occidentosis. Speaking of which Jalal Al-i Ahmed writes in his famous Occidentosis: A Plague from West:

“Under [occidentosis] we are like strangers to ourselves, in our food and dress, our homes, our manners, our publications, and, most dangerous, our culture. We try to educate ourselves in the European style and strive to solve every problem as the Europeans would.”

Jalal has comprehensively summarized negative effects of westernization in various aspects of our individual and collectives lives which we’ll attempt to examine as following.

Read full article here.

Historical Roots of Inferiority Complex in Indo-Pak

Blowing brains and spirits out

Colonial Invasion & State Structures. Loss of self-confidence in Muslims is justifiably related to defeats on the battlegrounds at the hands of west. But a military defeat is not enough to enslave hearts and minds, as it can be an impetus for revenge. Today Muslims are envious of West’s power, which proves the fact that the real challenge of west is not of materialism, but of intellectuality (which modernity certainly lacks in the true sense of the world).

However, what happened after the first phase of colonial invasion? How did colonials succeed in subduing large populations in vast areas? We’ve partial answers.

Realizing the danger that native “monkeys” might overrun them by sheer numbers, colonizers had to play the games of perceptions and mind control. They had to look big and strong. Few in numbers, they developed railway and laid communication systems to travel fast over the huge mass of land to subdue any possible mutiny, which did take place and successfully crushed. But the physical assets won’t do the job if the natives were enthusiastic and confident of their victory. Hence, that spirit of rebellion was decimated, and fear and inferiority complex were placed like time bombs beneath our (un)conscious. Self-confidence was shattered when Muslims’d see Tipu Sultan’s majestic dress being worn by peons of whites. Healthy, buildup, young officers constantly replaced older ones to give the illusion that all whites are brave and strong and can’t be messed with. These are just few of countless examples of this social-engineering.

We’ve to contextualize heroic things we attribute our colonial masters. Colonialism was about dispossession. In a paper on this very topic, Cole Harris summarizes colonists’ grand strategy of dispossession as following: 

“The initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the supporting infrastructure of the state; the momentum to dispossess derived from the interest of capital in profit and of settlers in forging new livelihoods; the legitimation of and moral justification for dispossession lay in a cultural discourse that located civilization and savagery and identified the land uses associated with each; and the management of dispossession rested with a set of disciplinary technologies of which maps, numbers, law, and the geography of resettlement itself were the most important…” (‘How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), abstract)

Hence, administrative and other infrastructures, and all the technologies were means to loot and pillage, although in a more civilized or face-saving way.

Education: Colonists’ Most Favorite Vehicle (MFV)

While military and political subjugation of colonists broke the spirits of many, colonial education convinced many that modern West’s ventures in barbarism were for our own benefit. When defeat induced fears of a mightier foe, the education changed the victim’s heart. As Akbar Abadi said: ‘An easterner would cut off the head of the foe; a westerner would change his heart’. British justified their rule to their own people on the pretext of ‘civilizing’ natives. This was different from what was happening to Blacks in Africa. This comparison will make things more clear.

Blacks were made colonizers on the basis of their color. They were led to believe that their skin color reflects that of sin, ugliness. Black lies are unforgivable, white lies are ignored. They don't have any right to exist. Be white or disappear was the attitude of their colonizers. Blacks even had dreams of being white. They craved for white color at any cost.

Our minds were made slaves. Our color is not such a problem to them. Our culture, religion, and thought endangered their existence. They worked to snatch our inheritance, our ilm from us. That is why they used education. They changed minds.

Economic-historian Atiyab Sultan writes that in the beginning of 19th century, colonization became more ‘pedagogic’ in India. Previously, Britishers were consolidating militarily and administratively. It was time to tend to education, which was primarily used to create a special kind of class of natives, loyal to them.

Liberals and utilitarians advocated ‘civilizing’ natives in the “universal image” of modern western man. There were 3 distinct groups in British parliament who lobbied for their own educational programs (with unmistakable similarities): Evangelicals, utilitarians, and uiberals. Evangelicals like Charles Grant believed Indians to be 'race of men lamentably degenerate and base'; liberals like Macaulay fancied, “A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”; and utilitarians like JS Mills considered Indian stock of knowledge to be ‘obscure and worthless’ (perhaps he did so without digesting a page of Indian literature). On the contrary, Dr Asad Zaman argues, “A single chapter on sacrifice in a book like Fazail e Amaal that teaches man to go against his nafs, is worth the whole literature of modern West.” Only Orietnatlists, Atiyab mentions, argued that colonial educational system in India should be according to indigenous sources and be taught according to indigenous views.

In a way summing up the educational policy, which was fiercely debated in English parliament, Atiyab further writes:

“Education was also a chief instrument in the creation of a colonial subject that would be a loyal and willing consumer of British knowledge and produce. Macaulay voiced this concern thus: ‘Indians should not be too ignorant or too poor to value and buy English manufactures’ (Basu 58.) In a larger sense, the loyal subjects were needed for the calm preservation of empire, echoing the imperial policy of cultivating supportive local elites …”

It becomes clear that their educational institutions served colonists needs, not ours. This reminds of what Iqbal called the “un-Muslim character” colonial education produced. Also, that system was unfair to the masses as it sent few to higher service, leaving the rest impoverished. We should also add that this created an anti-native character in Indians at large, to which Hindus responded very well, boycotting foreign goods.

Triumph of Materialism. Hamza Yusuf (HY) notes that the colonists saw the global and historical link Muslims maintained due to their religious Tradition. Muslims had many global learning centers which played vital role in this regard and maintained some kind of visible unity (although the underlying unity of ummah is still undeniable and, in fact, crucial to the venture of Islam). In order to destroy that unity among Muslims, colonists sought to destroy this ‘historical link’. And as per HY, they did so by injecting inferiority complex in Muslims regarding their lack of material progress. “It’s all documented how they did this,” he emphasizes. For instance, they’d compare paper to pre-modern tablet, which Muslims used for instruction. “Using a tablet is backward. Now we’ve paper!” This notion of backwardness is still on the lips of 75-80% (if not 100%) of Muslims, especially the educated class.

Eurocentrism. The roots of civilizational inferiority complex may also lie in the venom called eurocentrism, especially for uncritical bookish minds. These are more less two central tenets of this mythological, racist & historicist thesis: All civilizations must develop along the lines of West to achieve the idols of indefinite economic progress, civility and “enlightenment”; and that Europe is at the center of world stage, and that all other civilizations are mere supporting pillars, resource fields to it. But western civilization not the end of civilizations, argues Rene Guenon:

"So long as western people imagine that there only exists a single type of humanity, that there is only one 'civilization', at different stages of development, no mutual understanding will be possible. The truth is that there are many civilizations, developing along very different lines, and that, among these, that of the modern West is strangely exceptional, as some of its characteristics show."

Further Guenon scrutinizes the true nature of this highly over-rated civilization, which dominates the world materially so far (we would concede to the objection that even its material dominance is soon to be surpassed):

"The civilization of the modern West appears in history a veritable anomaly: among all those which are known to us more or less completely, this civilization is the only one which has developed along purely material lines and this monstrous development, whose beginning coincides with the so-called Renaissance, has been accompanied, as indeed it was fated to be, with a corresponding intellectual regress; we say corresponding and not equivalent, because here are two orders of things between which there can be no common measure. This regress has reached such a point that the Westerners of today no longer know what pure intellect is; in fact they do not even suspect that anything of the kind can exist…"

Post-Pakistan: British Legacy goes on. Leadership produced by the British took over the country after the partition. They molded state policies and institutions in the image of their departed masters, more or less. Discussion of continuation of such structures is not relevant here. What’s important is that the inferiority complex of native Brown Sahibs’ turned into superiority complex that caused much harm.

After 1947 we witnessed exploitation of our Bengali brothers, which was at once racial and materialistic. It wasn’t religious extremism that separated two brothers, but the absence of spiritual training of the governing “elites”, in bureaucracy, politicians and army. We’ve accounts of how West Pakistani elites treated Bengalis as lower level race. Our false-elite was certainly a clone of their masters.

Co-authored with Noor.

Colonists Bluffed Us, the Mozlems! Still Do!

That's a euraka! post that i want to share. I would rather allow Gai Eaton to shed a new light on the Muslim perception of West and ensuing self-pity and reactionism that harms Muslims alone:

The Muslims´ lack of self-confidence may be attributed in part to the experience of colonialism, but it still endures chiefly, I think, because the West has bluffed the Muslims into accepting it at its own valuation and has succeeded in hiding its weaknesses, its vulnerability. It seems to me that this was exemplified in the early 1970s, during the so called "oil crisis." The oil producers — the Saudis in particular — had what amounted to a stranglehold on the Western world; they had very great power, which might have been put to use to their own advantage and to the advantage of the Ummah. What they lacked was the self-confidence which would have enabled them to use that power wisely and effectively. They lacked also that spirit of daring which encourages the powerful to make full use of their power. The opportunity was missed and may not come again... When I talk with my fellow Muslims about the nature of Western dominance, one of my principal aims is to persuade them that this power rests upon very shaky foundations.

These shaky foundations and bogus pshyco-propaganda has to be exposed with so much academic sources available at our disposal. All these academic sources provide logical foundations to the truths already to be found in Islam. Dr Asad Zaman is doing a seminal job by persuading his research graduate students through lectures in this regard by making us realize that we've been bluffed by self-deception (freely available online here). His analyses draw from variety of sources: Islamic reasoning, "subaltern" history, empirical evidences, economics, philosophy, etc. One such introduction to his lectures asserts:

Mostly people believed that history is objective, factual but in fact history is always biased. West claim that they feel the white man burden that’s why they attack other nations to make them civilized but its not true, in this lecture we have tried to show the true picture of why west attack other nations.

Its the game of confidence which Muslims lack at individual level and societal level vis a vis West. The point is: Muslims/easterners are not inferior in any sense to Western men; guess is that they are more advanced. The latter guess has to be induced in the minds to arrive at the former truth, because the confidence level is abysmally low.

The "Civilized" Ones

This video was shot in Lahore in front of the famous Awan e Iqbal, where the Iqbal Academy is located as well. It shows the duality between what is said and what is done by the so-called Euro-centric civilized ones. (Coincidentally, the video was made by yours truly.)



The person reporting is Mr. Farjad Adnan, ex-president of a student organization in Pakistan called ESEF. He is currently studying at NUST.

Colonialism Is Pathetic

I find the following points about colonialism (pre-World War 2) as quite accurate salient summary features of this term, more or less; all of which forces me to abhor it from the very core of my inner being, just for its being manifesting a true downfall of human intellect. And as the worst form of human monstrosity and beastliness. Here they are:

1) Colonialism imposed alien and authoritarian regimes on subordinate societies. These regimes tended to train a few of their subjects in bureaucratic management [according to Altaf Ghuar they're called intermediaries] and requires passive acquiescence from the remainder.

2) Although for long periods passive acquiescence was indeed largely attained, as colonialism advanced it also stimulated nationalist agitation and organization and came to be more and more passionately detested, particularly by those among the colonial people who came into closest contact with the European superiors.

3) Some features of the "colonial situation" are: domination of an alien minority, asserting racial and cultural superiority, over a materially inferior native majority; contact between a machine-oriented civilization with Christian origins, a powerful economy, and a rapid rhythm of life and a non-Christian civilization that lacks machines and is marked by a backward economy and a slow rhythm of life; and the imposition of the first civilization upon the second (Balandier 1951, p. 75). ["Political Colonialism: Colonialism", International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol 3 & 4]

Number 3 point is but a sign of the total reign of quantity which is being advanced by the concepts of democracy and gender equality, driving the whole world, as if it was not already passing through the darkest periods of human history, "Kali-Yuga" according to Hindu traditional data, towards utter doom. Moreover, I often lament on the mentality of anti-colonial forces, who "have derived their inspirations and ideas primarily from the teachings of the colonial powers, have for the most part adopted Western forms of organization and action..." [Same source as quoted already.]