However, our intention as organizers was to entertain and enlighten. We hoped that the tour would be the platform for students to re-evaluate and re-conceptualize a term ingrained in our moral consciousness. We thought we would articulate our thoughts on 'Freedom' in this blog piece and expand on what we meant when we said 'Freeing Freedom.'
Can freedom be emancipated?
Very few words hold the weight that ‘freedom’
holds. In the 21st century,
its emancipatory power and its oppressive potential has liberated and destroyed
nation states. Today it’s been used to
describe largely economic freedoms, the freedom to choose to buy, sell and go
about our daily lives. It has
increasingly become the neoliberal’s choice phrase in the construction of what
constitutes ethics today.
When this very narrow, specific type of ethics is
considered something that needs to be universal, problems arise. There tends to be a focus on the literal
unveiling and liberating of communities when our collective veil of moral
legitimacy in the West remains firm. Whether
it’s the ‘civilizing’ of states in the Global South or the coerced liberalizing of economies, our way is the only way
and The Enlightenment is the ultimate
vindication of these values.
The very same elite setting the agendas and
discourses of today hold freedom prisoner.
Its emancipation requires a discussion on the concepts, norms and
realities we treasure as universal truths.
From the Kuffiyeh
to the Bindi, symbols which represent cultural, spiritual or religious
significance are stripped of all meaning and left commodities, reserved only as
decor. We are often left to occupy the
vacuum left by this rationalistic purge and told these remains consummate
modernity. Similarly, appropriation of
language has meant terms like freedom have been rebranded to fit the narrative
of the 21st century globalized world.
But this exchange of ideas is a one way street and
alternative ways of thinking often silenced.
In the face of this continued suppression, it is essential to reclaim
freedom.
Part of this reclamation is in understanding that the
struggle of the self is still
incomplete. If we subscribe to the
binary view of freedom being a battle between good and evil, right and wrong
and the oppressed and the oppressor we often forget the oppressor is the self.
The fear, anger or jealousy in the heart of a human being is often
reflected in the actions of his leader.
For these problems, the East’s spiritualism has many
answers to the rationalism of the West.
As Persian poet Sa’adi Shirazi’s beautifully articulates in The Rose
Garden;
In
deserts, amid shifting sand and drouth,
Nor
pearl nor shell is manna to the mouth.
Ah!
what avails, when food and strength are gone,
The
girdle with its pearls or pebbles strown?
In the enormous capacity of the dessert, the pearl
means nothing. Money cannot be consumed
yet its consuming capacity puts humanity on its knees.
These messages of sages, scholars and spiritualists
of the East have offer solutions to the global issues we face today. That wisdom and intellect are two separate
things altogether. That if freedom were
a caged bird, we must discover it and let it go rather than put a price on
it. That land is to be roamed rather
than sold.
The persistent habit to measure, weigh and count is
detrimental to freedom. These norms imprison
us. This collective search to measure the other up to our standards is
antithetical to the very beliefs the West espouses. Freedom should be independent of ideology,
agenda and even people. It transcends
these things.
In contrast to this Farid Ud Din Attar’s poetry
informs us of the necessity of introspection.
This introspection is echoed in the works of Jalal ud-Din Rumi and Rabia
Al Basri. In their poetry, there is a
clear link between the inner and the outward state of man, the ruled and the
ruler. That self reflection necessitates
greater control over the self and
ultimately that is all we have control over.
This process of realization is true liberation.
The tendency to quantify comes from the hubristic
inability to accept our limitations.
Figures like Persian poet Sa’adi Shirazi or Farid ud-Din Attar understood
freedom like they understood the universe.
They saw the universe as something that is forever expanding and evolving,
often beyond their own understanding.
In accepting this infinity, these men were better
in tune with it, only then did they exercise control
over the self. This is where freedom starts and ends,
evolving and expanding and where it defies all definition.
Hadi Abbas and Mohamed-Zain Dada.
