If Everyone Jumps off a Cliff, will You?

This article is yet another addition to the hoard of articles already out there on the film about the Holy Prophet (SAW) and the reaction (often violent) to its premiere. No, I'm not going to talk about how terrible the filmmakers are, or condemn the equally terrible reaction to it. I will however, talk about us, the apparently 'educated' elite who very snootily brush aside the burnings, killing and all-round violence in retaliation to the film as something 'A minority does' and 'We would never do such a thing' and 'We're enlightened and much better than that' and 'Oh, be a dear and pass the Earl Grey dah'ling. I got Jeeves to gather some turnips from the estate. Do forgive me if they're a bit off-colour; bloody peasants are too lazy to put any effort into their well being'.

"Egad! What ruffian dares put me, Sir Harold of Bigsby on this ghastly whats-its-name blog?"

Taken from: http://www.straighterline.com/blog/post.cfm/what-do-rich-people-think-about-online-learning

I put forward the hypothesis that given the right (or wrong, depending on how you see the whole issue) settings and triggers, we, the people who like to think of ourselves as too refined, la di da and above such base acts can be just as shameless and animal-like as the people we so readily condemn as not 'one of us'.

So who exactly are these men (and women) painting the town red (in flames)? Are they all violent psychopaths who start their day with 'Fire, Water, Burn' ringing on their alarm clocks, eat babies for lunch and shoot adorable puppies 'because the Son of Sam tells us to'? Or are they Anarachists? Or highly trained foreign Agent Provocateurs? Or just thugs? No, they're normal people, possibly low-level members of a political party (sprinkled with a few of the above individuals), possibly from a slightly lower income strata, but not low enough to not have access to a working internet connection and hence, this blog. They are on the whole nice, slightly dyspepsic individuals who like Cricket, ice cream and Pakoras. They have hopes, dreams and ambitions like us. They're also very passionate about certain issues, like their Prophet (SAW), the state of the country etc. In fact, they're getting sick and tired of and frustrated with our country's and Ummah's situation and want change. All that frustration is building up in them and is near tipping point. But they're not murderers or arsonists. Then what causes them to go nuts? Do they all just simultaneously go absolutely bonkers and coincidentally meet up in the streets to throw a big tantrum? No, it's those sinister individuals and groups (Read: The Man) up there who charge them up via obscure logic and fiery speeches and direct their anger to a tangible object (like a US Consulate) and convince them that their violence will yield results or at the very least, let them have a good ol' fashioned smashing (pun intended) time adn let it all out. And suddenly, these normal, friendly neighbourhood citizens are transformed into raving lunatics. Why?

What I'm talking about isn't new, it's an extensively studied psychological phenomenon called Herd Mentality. Monkey see, monkey do. It's when we yield to peer pressure. We exhibit much milder forms of this extremism in our taste in clothes, food, vocabulary etc. Of course, since that doesn't affect the world and isn't brought into the limelight by the media, we miss the connection (Unless you're a hipster. Then that fact is paraded by the media and your very existence depends on the fact that you go with the flow of going against the flow, something like Shane McGowan constantly bickering with The Pogues. See what I pulled off there? ;) )

And I say that if everyone else in your group of friends is doing it, so will you. Even if its something as terrible as murder. Except when you do it (God Forbid), you'll be calling it heroic. Remember Abu Ghraib, lynching in the early 20th century in the US, the London Riots? Heck, when the Boston Bruins beat the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup finals (Ice Hockey), the city of Vancouver pulled a city of Karachi! And at least we riot for lack of electricity and other important stuff! We all like instant gratification. We don't have the patience to see change through to the end. We can't accept the fact that our efforts may not yield fruit in our lifetime, or even at all. We forget that we will get our reward in the afterlife, inshaAllah. And that is because of a lack of patience and faith in Allah SWT.
I'd like to talk about an incident that I witnessed a few years back. It was a football final between my school and another. Both are prestigious schools (despite the jokes we make about them) where we have top students of Karachi enrolled. Anyway, my school was losing and a storm was brewing in the spectators on our side. Things reached fever pitch when a couple of guys on our side filled a bottle with urine and threw it at the other school's spectators. Sure it was just 2 guys but it was really a culmination of our anger and shame. While we all condemned it then, when you hear many people recount that episode now, its with a hint of a smile and fondness and not with overt disgust. Point is, throwing a bottle of urine is something we'd never do or condone any day of the week. But it happened. We become irrational when things heat up.
There's an incident in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, where a mob gathers outside the town lawyer's office to lynch a black man. It's a small town so the people who make up the mob are well known to the lawyer, Mr. Atticus Finch. In fact, he's even helped some of them out (one of them being a Mr. Cunningham) and is well respected in the town. The mob is inadvertently diffused by the presence of Atticus' daughter. After the mob disperses, Atticus tells his daughter, 
“A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it?"
Phil Zimbardo, an eminent psychologist who has contributed a lot to our knowledge of herd mentality conducted an infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, where:
Twenty-four male students out of 75 were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. (Source: Wikipedia)
24 males were conditioned to become sadists. And they were university students, just like us. Who's to say that we can't fall into the same trap?
Here's an interesting TED talk (more pertinent to the male gender) by Zimbardo who says that one reason all this violence exists is because of our addiction to being high. And that may lead to 'the demise of guys', as the video is called.
http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html

I'd like to conclude with the following:
1. All that violence could also be you. Guard against letting your emotions override reason.
2. Every irrational decision you make, you're edging one step closer to this insanity. And we all are    irrational regularly.
3. If we get a charismatic leader who promises us quick results (Like the all new Ariel that also promises quick results), be wary (By results, I mean anything that makes us feel good, like the feeling that we're united, or that change has begun, not necessarily meeting the objectives we set out to achieve in the first place, in this case, a banning of the film). Germany made that mistake with Hitler.
4. Be strong. Don't let your friends change you for the worse. If you feel they will,  try to change your friends. If you feel you can't do that, change your friends. Trust me, you'll thank me later on.

Fraternising with the Enemy

A while back a friend, and again more recently, another friend emailed me a TED talk by Sam Richards on empathy. Here is the talk:


Quite powerful, eh? I love the way he takes you through the whole exercise. I'm quite sure anyone other than the most deeply-entrenched redneck would be able to see the light after watching it. However, in all fairness, empathising with the plight of our Arab brethren is in vogue these days. The 'Free the Arab World' rage sweeping the globe today, the anti-American sentiment and the Israel-bashing zeitgeist has predisposed us to 'easy empathy' with the Arabs. So I feel, the talk's power is slightly blunted that way.
I think the real test lies with empathising with the likes of Bush, the Taliban, rapists and the rest of the scum of the earth. Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Don't bring the mob on me. EMPATHISING is COMPLETELY different from CONDONING. I'm not asking you to justify rape. I'm not asking you to justify genocide. I'm not asking you to justify the invasion of Iraq. Stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, there's no two ways about it. What I AM asking you to do is to delve into the why's of the crime. This is important so that you realise that no crime, no matter how inhumane, how perverse, is committed by human beings. And no human being alive today is entirely good or entirely evil. Mediocrity is human, perfection divine.
I'd like to relate an incident from the caliphate of Hazrat Umer (RAA), when a boy who was caught stealing food was not given the usual Islamic punishment of cutting off the hand. Why? Empathy. There was a famine and the starving boy stole to survive. The justice system took that into account.
What of the Australian Muslim cleric who compared raped women to meat left out for the dogs to eat? Whereas his choice of words were completely out of place, have you tried to, to quote Atticus Finch, 'delete the adjectives' to get the facts? In a world where scantily-clad hot women traversing your screens, billboards and books can only be seen but not touched by men, is it smart to live in the lalaland where they will still control their testosterone levels, not look at women as sexual objects and never lose control and never commit rape?  Empathy allows you to suppress your emotions when the time comes to deal out cold, impartial justice. That way, we don't exaggerate or downplay the issue at hand. Yes, it pains and frightens me no end to say this (I'm still undergoing training to become Empathiser Extraordinaire), but I include the likes of Hitler, Milosevic, Ted Bundy, Albert Fish, Karla Homolka etc. Everyone deserves empathy. As I said in an earlier post, we have a tendency to go to the extreme. We classify everything in the world into two neat categories: good and bad, instead of recognising the world for what it is, in shades of grey. There is a hadith:
“If a friend among your friends errs, make seventy excuses for them. If your hearts are unable to do this, then know that the shortcoming is in your own selves.” [Imam Bayhaqi, Shu`ab al-Iman, 7.522]
Sure, sitting in the safety of our homes, far from the madding crowd, it's easy to say that yes, we do understand where these criminals 'come from', attributing why such people turn out the way they do to a plethora of socio-economic reasons (e.g. troubled childhood, bad friends, born in Compton/Queens/Gaza, having me as a neighbour etc). But if we ever were, say, the victims of said scum, would we be as charitable? I'm referring of course, to the cliche 'Walk a mile in someones shoes before passing judgement on them'.
Let's apply empathy to our workplaces and institutions of learning (WAIL). As such places are centres of most of the human interaction one has during the day, needless to say, they are a large part of ones social life. We have our versions of the Nerds, Jocks, Goths, Cheerleaders, albeit not as neatly compartmentalised as these Hollywood-versions of social hierarchy. And it would be naive to say that these various social circles never have their altercations, just like their Hollywood counterparts (though we alhamdulillah don't usually descend to burning the homecoming queen's hair the day before the prom!). Every WAIL has some people who are universally despised, usually because they're 'different' in a not-very-nice sort of way. And we do gossip, pass judgement on and badmouth such people as well as other cliques. We never apply the empathy rule to such social misfits. Why? Because we are directly affected by them. We aren't exposed to the pressures the government of the US faces from its people when it can't provide them with cheap fuel for their SUVs and iPads. So its easy for us to 'empathise' with the Arabs and ironically, do the opposite with the perpetrators. We forget that Hitler was a product of a Germany that was hurting from the cruel clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. Which doesn't make the gas chambers okay, but doesn't make Hitler the devil's advocate either.
I'm lucky my blog isn't as popular as the Cheerleaders, or I'm pretty sure the comments below would be inundated with flamers calling me a 'Jew-loving Nazi Fag' (Yes, trolls usually aren't the most coherent people out there). Good think I can moderate the comments section, eh?

Extremism in our Homes

I recently got my first cell phone (an old black and white screen Nokia phone with a torch). Yes, I know, I know. 18 years old and my first cell phone. Addicted though I already am to texting, I'd still ditch it for the good old days when I wasn't a slave to technology (think of my situation like that of a drug addict who really wants to quit). Anyway, Alhamdulillah a few weeks after my first cell, by a stroke of some good luck, I traded my cell for a Nokia E50 with my uncle (moving upstate aren't we? Somebody play the Fresh Prince theme!) Now, my older simpler cell's big keypad was in stark contrast to my current E50 with its greater emphasis on screen size over keypad size. Now, texting has become a pain, which is good, considering I save a lot of time (On the other hand, my replies to texts have become curt, almost rude). On my old cell, I would always reply to 'thank you's' with 'np's' etc. As in, I would pretty much always have the last text, so to speak. With my new cell, this avid replying became difficult. Now I faced a dilemma. Stop replying to thank yous and be considered rude but save a lot of time, or continue with it, and spend a lot more time than I already was on the cell. In the end, I decided to reply to those people whom I felt would get offended if I didn't always reply to thank yous, and hit the delete button immediately the people I thought wouldn't really give a crap if I replied or not.


This is basically what my article is about: The only 2 conceivable options in my mind were extreme and diametrically opposed-either reply to everyone, or reply to no one. Only after some thought did an alternate solution emerge-reply some and don't reply rest. This is a form of extremism that pervades our lives without us realizing it, whilst we continue to decry religious etc. extremism in our world. We think in terms of yes and no, black and white. We choose not to take the middle ground. While the above example is harmless enough, and just required a bit of lateral thinking, other larger problems are not simply solved by some creative thinking and have much more serious repercussions if not dealt with correctly. They require us to completely change our way of thinking and require a complete paradigm shift. Let me elucidate:

The other day, I was listening to the tafseer (explanation) of the Quran when I came across the following verse:

"Those who live on usury will not rise up before Allah except like those who are driven to madness by the touch of Shaitan. That is because they claim: "Trading is no different than usury, but Allah has made trading lawful and usury unlawful…" (2:275)

This ayat highlights the type of argument many of us use to try to justify our actions, not just to others, but to ourselves as well. Yes, we all lie to ourselves. We become like that group of Bani Israel (the Jews) mentioned in the Quran who were not allowed to work on the Sabbath. Allah (SWT) tested them by making the biggest fish swim in the nearby sea on this day. So the Jews cast nets and left them all day to net fish, while they observed Sabbath. So technically they weren't working, but they were breaking the commandment. But they were convinced themselves that they weren't. Similarly, we look for common elements between usury and simple business transactions, and then use these to convince ourselves that usury is legal in Islam.

A similar story is seen in Verse 49 of the 9th Chapter of the Quran, Surah Tauba, where a companion, Jad-bin-Qais wanted exemption from the battle of Tabuk at the Prophet (PBUH)'s time, because he did not want to expose himself to the beauty of Roman women, for fear he would yield to the temptation and fornicate with them. Allah (SWT) aptly replies in the same verse, "…Have they not fallen into temptation (of telling lies, double dealings and hypocrisy) already?..." Look, we're not saying jump into a strip club, but don't shirk on your other obligatory duties just to avoid being exposed to a sin. Have some self-control for God's sake. Which reminds me of something else I hear a lot from fellow Muslims: "Let's go to parties and expose ourselves to drugs, sex and rock & roll, just so we can get our curiosity about them out of our system, and then avoiding these will become much easier.' A) Avoiding these things is a test from Allah (SWT). B) We're not supposed to do them. Ever. Period. Doing things to avoid doing them? I'm confused. C) And what if you don't get it out of your system? What then? You've injected yourself with the flu virus to get immune to it. What if you don't? Why the heck did you risk it in the first place? If you ever encounter the flu virus for the first time, take it from there. Don't be an idiot and leap into the disease's outstretched arms (or encapsulated DNA material) instead.

I encounter extremist arguments frequently when I debate with people over various religious and moral issues. For example, Islam does not permit free mixing of members of the opposite sex. Therefore, I try to avoid parties where there is mingling of the sexes (a palindrome easter egg  ). Yet, I study in a co-educational school. People wonder aloud at this seeming hypocrisy. Yet again, this is a case of extremist thinking. Parties are social events. School is not. There's the difference. To treat them as one and the same would mean I would have to stay shut up in my house forever, as going outside would possibly expose me to contact with a member of the opposite sex (that really makes girls sound like they're a disease. Ah yes, cooties).

Another completely illogical spin-off of this type of thinking is the 'If you sin in this, you might as well sin in that' philosophy. I have come across this very frequently, when people say, yet again about the above example, 'Faysal, you don't mind chatting with girls; you might as well come to XYZ's party with us.' While I recognize that chatting freely with unrelated women is a no-no, and it will count as a sin in the eyes of Allah (SWT), this does not give me license to go to parties. Just because I smoke pot, does not mean I should go the 10 yards and do heroin. Taking this extremist thinking a step further: 'I borrowed my friend's pencil without asking; I therefore have permission to commit murder.' Ridiculous isn't it? Well, I've seen it a lot, and as a debater who has to use this tactic a lot in debates, I out of habit, unfortunately bring it into my 'real-world' arguments as well.

On a not completely unrelated note, this same habit of humans manifests itself in the field of science- 'Correlation does not necessarily imply causation', i.e. just because 2 things are correlated, that does not necessarily mean that one is the cause of the other. For example, at a certain point in time in a nation's history, crime rates may be going up. Simultaneously, poverty is also increasing. Human beings, in a rush to reach conclusions, tend to say that the cause of crime increase is due to poverty increase, ignoring the possibility that instead of poverty, the cause may actually be a decrease in the police budget. This is again a form of extremist thinking.

One final example: recently there was a hullaballoo raised in the US about something talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger said on air. I'm not going to narrate the whole event here because I'm too lazy to do so. Just Google it please. The point is, the caller was a Black woman and Dr. Laura used the word 'nigger' 11 times. She wasn't calling the woman 'nigger', but was using the word to put across her point more effectively (People are more receptive to expletives). Anyway, the political correctness Nazis were galvanized into action. Unfortunately, the world, and especially the US is grinding towards an excessive and unnecessary level of keeping everything Bowdlerized and sanitary. Sure, don't insult people by calling them names or hurting their feelings by drawing caricatures of their religious figures, but don't turn it into a 'Voldemort/He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named' farce either. Don't believe me? Google some interesting cases litigation and laws in the States and around the world.

I understand that perhaps humans tend to pick extreme sides because that makes life much easier. A world neatly sorted out into black and white components is a much simpler and easier to understand world than one filled with shades of grey. But that doesn't make it right, and the desire for simplicity should not be an excuse for not trying to see the world for what it is: a complex thing.