The rude awakening

Other Voices

OBy Ahmad Al-Sarraf

ur colleague Fahd Al-Ahmadi wrote an article in the Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh yesterday, under the title ‘The Time for Awakening’.

In the article he said in the history of every nation there is a bleak period, a period which lacks awareness and rational thinking to the extent the nation itself wonders why and how it surrendered to nonsense.

In America there was the McC-arthy period, where intellectuals and politicians were accused of Communism. In Germany, there was the call for Nazism which the Germans underestimated until the Nazis came to power and ignited the Second World War.

In Japan, the military period enslaved society and sought to occupy all of Asia, but the Atomic bomb brought them back to their senses. In Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge gangs killed onethird of the Cambodians in the name of cleansing from the bourgeoisie, capitalism and Western culture.

All periods where the peoples were lost, the mind retreated, dominated by a single intellectual pattern. They were dark gloomy periods created by extremist currents ignored by the society until they became strong and took power.

He said the Saudis witnessed a similar period, but fortunately for them this period did not reach its final stage. We in Kuwait have passed a similar period called ‘The Awakening Period’, as in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, where the government and people live.

In this period, we, the government and people, surrendered our minds to forces of backwardness, that is to say the Salafis and others in the belief they are the best in understanding the requirements of the current stage but they took us to decades back,

Al-Sarraf

divided the society, and sorted out its components.

These forces made us hate anything beautiful after imposing their own ideology and understanding of life, and a monolithic view of the relationship between us and others.

During our concern to follow their instructions and think about their words, and get involved in their battles and their recommendations, they surreptitiously and publicly accumulated huge wealth for themselves and for their parties, living in the best luxurious houses and driving the most expensive vehicles in addition to owning chalets.

Many of them became stars on TV channels of deceit and misled millions with their rubbish talk.

Ahmadi returns to say that we were and still are the most religious people, but the awakening has turned us into the most hardline and fanatic people.

There are those who have exploited the jihad to incite the nation and to support the brothers and restore the glory. There are those who kept us preoccupied by fabricating taboos and narrowing the permissible and describing those of moderate jurisprudential opinions as misbelievers.

Some of us are suffering from schizophrenia because of fiery sermons and precautionary fatwas and putting into us the fright of the fate of Pharaoh and Thamud.

These forces of backwardness caused death of thousands who were sent for jihad outside while they themselves remained in their homes. We never heard any of the (clergymen) sending their sons to the battlefield but incited the sons of others to fight jihad.

He concluded his article by saying the society has the right to hate the period of awakening, and regret it, because they were largely deceived because their minds did not work.

Afghanistan lost an innocent generation. Yes, it has the right now to be happy with the true awakening these days, and looks forward to real material achievements that go beyond the stage of theorizing and the industry of speech.

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