Thoughts on peace: ‘Thoughts are free...censorship and burning books cannot change that’

Conference speakers stress the need for promoting the sufi message.

LAHORE: “Sufism can play a pivotal role in bringing peace to our region...We need to promote sufi teachings and writings,” Syed Siraj Naqvi, a journalist from India, said at the second day of the International Conference on Peace on Sunday.

Naqvi said India and Pakistan had similar cultural backgrounds and traditions. Both countries had experienced hardships during partition and struggle for freedom. “Our challenges are the same and we need to tackle them together,” he said.

He said the literature and poetry the sufis had created was quite relevant in the age. Naqvi further said the Sufis had played a role in bringing together people of different religions, colour, caste and creed and had promoted love and peace.

Gino Leineweber, a German writer and president of the international board of writers and translators, said, “There is no education without books.” He discussed the importance of books and lamented burning of books. “Books stimulate creativity and expand possibilities of representing the self,” he said. “Poets and writers have the ability to change, secure and enrich our ways of thinking about the world we live in.”

Leineweber said books were essential to developing a free thinking nation. “Books expand one’s horizons and help them connect personal points of view with what we call the collective truth,” he said.

In the past, writers had had to suffer periods of harsh censorship and to destroy their works for fear of being banned, he said. Censorship not only curbed the freedom for writers, but also entailed lack of freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government. “Freedom of writing includes freedom to disagree, disobey and build ways leading to the truth through independent effort,” he said.

He said a book had a life of its own. The purpose of burning books was not only to prevent thoughts and ideas from reaching the public, but also to eliminate them. “People who support book burnings believe books would also destroy the ideas they carry,” said Leineweber.

“Unfortunately, there are many ways to destroy literature and not all of them need governmental action,” he said. This year, Germany celebrated its 80th anniversary of Hitler’s project to burn books. The act [of burning books] was framed around the motto “action against the non-German spirit,” and carried out willingly by many German professors and students, he said. “They removed books from libraries that [they believed] were at odds with Nazism...and enthusiastically threw them into the fire.” The truth, however, is that thoughts are free and censorship or burning books cannot change that, he said.

Dr Dmytro Drozdovskyi, a scholar from Ukraine, presented his paper titled Emotional Authenticity of the Post-Post Modernism- Rethinking an Abyss of loneliness and creating a world of peace.

Drozdovskyi said, “I am of the opinion that the age of post-modernism has passed and post-post modernism has changed the world politically, socially and culturally.” The post-postmodernism period has true human emotional feelings based on deep empathy and the concept of peace.

He said contemporary world thinkers believed that the post-modern era encompassed the philosophy of emptiness... people wanted to escape from their fears and stress and wanted to find a firm ground and reliable values.  The post-modern era ended in 2001, he said.

Post-postmodernism has led to cultural and political transformations, he said. “The heart of post-postmodernism is humanity with true feelings...not the sociopathic virtual identity [post-modernism] that ended along with its cognitive, political, social problems.”

Madeeha Gauhar, a theatre director, said, “There cannot be creativity without some spirituality. It has become increasingly difficult to express oneself especially though the performing arts.”

She said “Talibanisation” was increasing by the day and one could see it manifest in the army, teachers, students and even writers, “creating the need to promote the sufi message”.

The second day of the conference concluded with a poetry session.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 23^rd, 2013.