Protocols of elders of Muslims?

Being well-led matters and when it comes down to the nation-states being well-led matters more because this has a significant impact on the people’s lives. History tells us that great leaders have drawn the willing obedience of the people to lead them with great pride, immense dignity, endless admiration, and unflinching authority. Could the rise to power of Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Temujin the Genghis Khan, or Saladin Ayubi be halted? Regardless of the type and notion of their leadership, without people in millions ready to work for them these leaders would never have achieved their dreams.

Last week I read a statement from Subrahmanyam Jaishankar India’s Minister for External Affairs, and it immediately struck a chord. He said that streets shape policies and their role cannot be undermined and understated. He was speaking in the context of how the foreign policy goals of both India and Russia may be taking them in different directions. But what sounded great (if I have interpreted it correctly) was what the external affairs minister of the largest democracy in the world was saying — policy is shaped by the aspirations of the people, of what the people want out on the streets. A great leader will always be able to understand people’s motivation and convert it into a political idea that would eventually become part of the national purpose. So great nations should always have both — people that are enthusiastic and leaders that are purposeful.

Our problem is that we are stuck with a kind of leadership that is not willing to listen to what the roads and streets of Pakistan are saying. The best way to listen to the streets is not for politicians to put on headphones but to go to the elections and find out what the people want. Fritz Wiedemann was Corporal Hitler’s Adjutant in the List Battalion in World War 1. When Hitler became Fuhrer, he became his personal Adjutant and served him from 1934 to 1939. During Nuremberg Trials in 1948, he famously stated that ‘Hitler didn’t have what it takes to become a superior officer.’ Yet people in Germany were eager, passionate, and enthusiastic about him being their leader and he created a sense of purpose — a higher sense of purpose to lead them.

It is no secret that Hitler hated Jews for what he thought they had done to his country. Considered ‘Jewfied’ during his stay in Austria from 1908 to 1912 where he witnessed almost all Jews taking up the jobs of a clerk and about whom he wrote in Mein Kampf his autobiography that Jews take up the jobs of clerks to benefit from war and hide from war and to stop them from doing this he had become a politician. He was a mad man that destroyed his country and where did his persecution of Jews leave them? They are 0.2 % of the world’s population but out of almost 900 recipients of the Nobel Prizes in the world 20% have been Jews. So, what is the moral of the story — the national enthusiasm was poorly utilised by a popular leader who chose a faulty higher sense of purpose.

My job these days is to tell all the students and everyone that I come across and who debate politics is — stop following any leader and start following the political idea(s). There are two reasons for that — one, ideas are immortal leaders are not. Two, all our famous leaders are baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and they are not looking up, to many years to live and survive. So, get out of the charisma and cult they create and get into the political ideas they not only produce but uphold.

Had the Germans not fallen for Hitler’s charisma and cult and focused more on the appropriateness of his political ideas like lebensraum (eastwards expansionism) and racist ideas like Germany only for Germans they might still have understood the wrong path their nation was travelling on and maybe avoided their fate.

These days, I also have this great desire that we as people — as people of one great Muslim world should also dominate the economic and the technological world. It is said that the Jewish elders got together in 1897 in Switzerland and authored the ‘Protocols of Elders of Zions’ wherein their masters documented the strategies of establishing global Jewish dominance. Why can’t we have the Mahathir Mohamad, Tayyip Erdogan, Sheikh Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani, King Salman Bin Abdul Aziz, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, King Abdullah, and others of the Muslim world get together and author ‘The Protocols of Elders of Muslims’. That would be a great favour to the younger generations of Muslims — the Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996). The essentiality of doing this is because one generation of Muslims has failed and if the elderly leadership can be honest to admit why we failed maybe the next generation would learn from the mistakes they committed and not commit the same mistakes themselves and allow another generation to fail.

So, if such protocols are eventually written what would people want these elderly Muslim masters to write? Maybe to start with, advise us on how we may survive? How can the re-birth of the Muslim world take place vis-à-vis the rest of the world? How merit is rewarded and criminals held accountable for their just fates? Should the young generation keep looking up to getting educated in Madrassa’s and yet dream of winning Nobel Prizes and global awards in science and technology? How people’s rights can be restored in the Muslim world and the usurpers punished? How diplomatic engagement can become a distinct aspect of our geopolitics and not violence, intimidation, and extremism? The list can go on but fundamentally unless there is a realisation that the Muslim world also needs to have its ‘Deng Xiaoping moment’ our next generation will also fail like the way we the baby boomers failed.

For leadership to climb the personal military and civil ladders of success and glory means nothing to the people. They look up to a man like Deng Xiaoping to pull them out of the clutches of poverty that have taken away not only the remotest of happiness that was left in their lives but their very will to survive.

Pakistan — please hold general elections. Let people bring in a government of their choice.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 31^st, 2022.

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