BETWEEN PAST GLORY AND PRESENT REALITY
In Riyadh’s Arabic monthly Al-Faisal (Dhul-Qa‘dah 1413 AH/May 1993), an article titled Al-Atfal Qalbi was published. In it, a remark by Israel’s former Minister of War, Moshe Dayan (1915–1981), about his Arab opponents is quoted. The remark appears in Arabic as follows:
“The Arabs tend to deceive themselves and others, and they do so without deliberate intent. They are always inclined to speak of the glories of their forefathers—of Salah al-Din, of the battles of Hattin and Yarmouk. While they do this, we smile, for they see themselves in the mirror of past glory, while we see them in the mirror of the present. If only they would ask themselves why they always speak of the great ones of their past, yet find no great ones in their present to speak of.” (p.3)
This condition is not limited to the Arabs; it is the same with Muslims everywhere. Today, Muslims in every land live by recalling the greatness of their predecessors. Yet to live on the memory of bygone heroes is an opiate for oneself and a cause of ridicule for others.
The sound and useful course is self-accountability: to recognize one’s own weaknesses and shortcomings and to strive to remove them. To take pride in the fame of past greats only traps a person in false pride. It wastes time rather than making use of it.
Moshe Dayan’s statement is deeply meaningful—that Muslims see themselves in light of their past, while we see them in light of their present. A Western observer expressed the same idea differently: that the case of Muslims today has become a case of paranoia.
A paranoid character is one who begins to live by the psychology of “My father was a king.” Such people are always absorbed in self-pride. But others experience the opposite, for they see them according to their present condition and deal with them accordingly. Thus such people fall prey to hatred and frustration, feeling that others do not acknowledge them according to the status they imagine for themselves.
Living in the greatness of bygone people, in its outcome, is nothing but destruction. It gives rise to two major disadvantages.
First, those who fall into this psychology lose the capacity for independent thought and action. Their minds move only within the circles of their predecessors’ thinking. They take exaggerated praise of past achievements as a substitute for real work. Such people can never become people of action themselves.
Second, they form entirely false opinions about the people around them. Since others see them according to their present, they do not give them great importance. This attitude, though fully based on truth, is taken as belittlement by those living in the tales of their forefathers. As a result, they wrongly come to believe that everyone else is their enemy.
Such people either do nothing at all, or, if they act, their planning is always based on the assumption that all others are unjust and prejudiced against them. Such planning is not based on facts, and planning that is not grounded in reality can never, in God’s well-ordered world, succeed.
