To
@xenon54 @KediKesenFare and other Turkish members. By now you will have observed a phenomenon here. A visceral
hatred of Isreal and
general antipathy toward the west. You guys will be rather bemused about this because the sources of this hatred have little or zero geographic contact with Israel and are rather distant from the West. Here I am thinking of Pakistanis and even more so Bangladeshis. The reason is simple.
These countries were enslaved by European powers and were
defeated cultures. Militarily, economically and politically they were castrated in the 1800s and had to face the humiliation of being political slaves of Western imperial rulers.
Take for example early 1900s. Every single group of peoples that you see today being so animated by their hatred of the West [hatred of Israel is a more concentrated version] were flat out slaves of the same West they despise today. Only Muslim peoples that faced the West in early 1900s when they
rest were all enslaved were the Turks and Persians.
Defeatist Credo
It's interesting that today Turks and Persians are most at ease with the West. I don;'t mean here the politics of the Turkish or Iranian state - but rather the average people. Turks and Iranians tend to be cool with the West from cultural point of view. The Iranians do show some ambivalence but that is because they did get humilitated by the West to a degree,
The result of the enslavement of the ancestors of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis etc carries a terrible toll today. The defeat and humiliation at the hands of Western imperial powers left a terrible
scar. A legacy of
defeatism. The burden of which we still carry today and it still resonates in our day to day thinking.
This scar of humiliation - don't forget for over a century British ruled our part of the world like masters and trampled on our people. This crushing humiliation led a to defeatist
credo which was pretty much composed of
hatred of everything European. This defeatist credo was
reflected in hatred of everything Western - culture, morals etc. Thus for example aversion to Latin script. It is not
the script that they are averse to so much as what the context of the script is - Western domination and enslavement because the Latin script used by their masters. The script is being crucified by association.
Vicarious Living
Besides the defeatist credo there is another thread playing out. During the enslavement of our people [1850s onward] they found
sanctuary from the terrible reality of being slaves of Western powers. To detach fom the terrible reality of being a
crushed people ruled by few Western soldiers they began dreaming. Dreaming of the past golden age of Islam or began to dream of the great Ottoman Empire that was still though much weakened was still standing up against the West - the same West that had defeated and enslaved them. So they found a denominator that offered a release from their terrible reality. Since they were not Arabs or Turks they could not gain any comfort from the Ottoman Empire or the Ummayad Empire stressing ethnic identity merely exposed their enslavement. However by stressing the "Muslim" identity it enabled them to
escape from their disgusting failure as a people. It amounted to stealing another peoples history.
Therefore they
constructed a Muslim identity that deluded itself by
living or
thinking or
acting as inheritors of the Ummayad or Ottoman Empires etc in the form of "Muslims". Thus people [Pakistanis, Banglas, Somalis, etc] who had nothing to do with those empire began living as vicarious khalifas - Ottoman, Ummayad, Rashidun etc. This offered a escape from the real reality of slavery and conquest by the West. Vicarious living provided a collective delusion out of humiliation.
Today we are victims of credo of defeatism which has been
synthesised as Islam in the form you see in Pakistan etc. The reasons most of our Turkish members have difficulty in relating their easy going pragmatic Islam to the crude reactive Islam in members from South Asia is because the latter is the Islam mixed with the credo of defeatism.
That is why they get aghast at the thought of Latin script or anything to do with the West. For example in Pakistan our ancestors were using Greek script [from which Latin is derived[ as far back as 2,300 years ago. So it is not like Latin is entirely strange from our land. But the problem is Latin has become poisoned by the credo of defeatism. The Islam that you see being spouted from South Asia is nothing but credo of defeat and hate dressed with some rituals to give it the contours of Islam.
Building up on this credo of hate. You will notice that some of the most virulently anti-West Pakistanis or Banglas are those who actually live in the West. They are amongst the biggest dreamers of Muslim khalifas and look on at Ottoman Empire as if their great-grandads were sat in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1900s. It is they who destest Ataturk for having gotten ride of "
their" khalifa. The reason is again credo of hate and reaction. These individuals brought up in poor tough inner city areas of UK - children of migrants from regions that were defeated and colonized have struggled against racism from the wider white society. They have struggled to integrated. Partly because of their own fault but pattly because of racism.
This has reinforced the historical credo of hate and humiliation. Now added to the historcal humiliation of their forefathers they nurse the anger of being marginalized and being subjected to raciism. This has caused even more hate of the West and even stronger deataching from reality by retiring into the fantasy worlds of khalifas and Islamic empire where they imagine themselves to be the direct descendants of this historical supremacy.
I needed to explain this because Turks who have never been enslaved probably can't understand this complex history. I guess to a lesser degree the Eastern Europeans display something similar because they also were humiliated by the Turks. However unlike us the have found Western Europe/Russia as their saviour.
Therefore next time you see something innocent - maybe pair of trousers, skirt, shaving blade, simple Roman script etc. You see it as a neutral quantity. Our people see these as "loaded". Thus the bizzare reactions. The reaction against Israel is party fueled by their own conquest of their lands by the West. Israel is reminder to them of Western colonialism.
The day we can ovecome this legacy of defeat dressed as our Islam is the day we can move forward. Until then we are trapped in yessterday. That is why the Ottoman well is looked on as Turkish by you guys, the Ummayad well as Arab by guys like
@Sharif al-Hijaz but our people insist on branding them as "Muslim" because that is the only way they can take a drink.
The only way Pakistanis can overcome from this colonial scar of being a vanquished people is by owning our own fantastic history going back to Harappa 7,000 BCE. That is why I have interest in history. The day our people fully own up our glorious history they won;t need to rely on milching other peoples history to overcome the shame of being subject peoples of the British Empire.
And the more our Turkish/Arab friends are blunt about this delusion of using "Muslim" tag to provide vicarious pride the faster our people will begin waking up from this delusion.
you left your culture not us.
