Dear Feroz Karmally: 

You have told us that by the time you were in your twenties, you had “rejected just about everything” about the Muslim religion into which you were born. That, I must say, is a fine example of personal democracy, to be able to choose between sense and nonsense, and then, years or decades later, to return to the land of religion again through one’s enhanced conscious choice between sense and nonsense, which you call a rediscovery “based on reason.” Good for you.  

I have no qualms about how you choose to believe, or what political system you espouse. One should be free to follow one’s voice of reason, for only then can one begin to see that sense and nonsense are two viewpoints of the same thing, truth and falsehood, night and day, good and evil, and so on. The appearance of duality is really an illusion, and the cause of so much confusion everywhere, from the best democracies to the worst religious kingdoms.  

All along, individuals like you and I either get caught in between, or get swayed this way and that way—not so much by the freedom to choose but quite often by the bondage to conform. There’s a force of convenience, compulsion, and influence everywhere. Just as Muslim countries are not free to choose democracy, so democracies are not free to accept the religion of Muslims as part of their software to run the machinery of state.    

You have also told us, “We have to start looking seriously sometimes, and we have to stop looking when we really think we have found what we were looking for. Otherwise we go right past the truth, and what else is there past the truth except falsehood.”  

The words “when we really think we have found what we were looking for” and “otherwise we go right past the truth” contain two erroneous elements. First, “think[ing] we have found” and, second, “go[ing] right past the truth.” You may have noticed that I am mostly attacking the thinking that creates the illusion that “we have found.” Thinking, I maintain, does not have the capacity to liberate human thought, steeped as it is in either religion or politics. 

Because our thinking faculty is terribly deficient about abstractions such as truth, god, reality, and so on, I further maintain that we can never “go past the truth.” I say this because our thinking faculty wouldn’t know how to recognize the ultimate unknowable truth even when it stares us in the face because our thinking can only recognize what it knows. And what it knows is the Known, never the Unknown.  

That is why there’s very little commonality between you, me, Javed and Ahsan, as you have yourself indicated. I don’t know about Ahsan or Javed, and I can’t speak for you, but I can tell you I am different only because I am pointing out the error in our thinking, and that is what I’ve tried to demonstrate in all my remarks so far concerning democracy and the Muslim mindset.

Rashid Mughal  

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