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A political fiction novel, “1984”, authored by George Orwell (published in 1949) dramatically tells about the terrifying world of the future . That world is inhabited by humans who are slaves to one of the three superpower states, each is headed by an authoritarian single-party, that are at war with each other. Each state has its own system to fool its subjects through the manipulated media. The minds are controlled, behaviours are observed, purely for the sake of justifying the actions of the tyrants who are only concerned with power than with their people. This is the Orwellian world (from the name of the author).

The NIC (National Intelligence Council) in 2004 listed the Orwellian world as one of the future scenarios, besides three other scenarios: The Rise of China-India, Pax Americana (America continues to be the ruler of the world) and The Khilafah of Islam. However, as if we've got a picture of the near-certainty that the Orwellian world is no other than the Pax Americana itself. The United States of America is the empire that claims to bring democracy but supporting the dictatorial regimes. So they are then fooling the people of the world through the global system that seem friendly: the World Bank, UN, WHO, IMF, UNICEF. The duping is then performed through the mass media to justify their arrogance.

Noam Chomsky in his book, "Pot Calling the Kettle: America the Terrorist? " introduced a term to facilitate us in naming the duping system, i.e. “newspeak”. The newspeak is a system of 'term reversal'. Every term can be emptied of its original meaning to be given a new meaning, next it would be propagandized through the mass media, books, a series of seminars, conference and intellectual works. When the term reaches our ears or eyes, our minds will automatically interpret it with a new meaning, because when we insist with the old (original) meaning, suddenly our minds would feel weird, awkward, secluded and criminalized.

For example, imagine the word “terrorism” in your mind, what do you see? Why Muslims, why Imam Samudera, Osama, Al-Qaeda? Don't you think about the Khmer Rouge? Or the military that carried out a coup d'etat against the (democratically) elected president of Chile, Savador Allende on 11th September 1973? Input the name of “Abu Bakar Ba’asyir” into your mind . What comes to your mind? What file appears? Yes, he was the leader the Jama'ah Islamiyah, a leader of the Indonesian branch of Al-Qaeda who commanded the bombing actions from behind bars. Enter the word “Islamic Shari'ah” or “Khilafah”, then comes the world of the conservative, cruel Wahhabi and repression of women and so on. Newspeak also applies to other terms such as militant, freedom, mutual-respect, radicalism, etc. Why don't we think of other meanings? Perhaps we think of other meanings, but soon we feel alienated, strange and rebellious.

Such is how America control the mind of the people of the world so that they are in the same flow with their ideology. Chomsky called it “the American Ideological System”. The mind is the first thing that must be controlled by America in order to be successful in a war against a new enemy. That is why, it was said, early in the morning after the 11th September 2001 attack, George W. Bush had already called on for the ban of the book “Kitab Tawheed” written by Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, similar to the former vice president of Indonesia in the previous period who called for the banning of all books by Sayid Quthb. Books are the shapers of the mind, which must also be controlled (by America). Then the mind is controlled through the electronic media, from the CNN to the TVOne, notice how the above terms enter into our minds with new meanings, shaping our mind so as to be in line with their ideology.

When the human mind is fed with old terms with new meanings, and then the humans got befooled by it, perhaps this is what's called jahiliyah (ignorance), similar to the jahiliyah of the pre-Islam Makkah. It's not that jahiliyah cannot be purge and retaught (from basic), unless it is the ignorance from true sense of the word. Thus, Prophet Muhammad SAW, soon after being appointed to be a Prophet, endeavoured to redefine the terms, starting from the interpretation of the term “god” (rabb, ilah). (It is also on this basis that Syed Naquib al-Attas, an Indonesian born Malaysian intellectual, developed the “Islamisasi Ilmu Pengetahuan” of the Islamization of knowledge. He did the reinterpretation (Islamization) of the terminologies which had been Westernised. Starting from the term “ilmu” or knowledge).

The ignorance of the world population like this becomes the main support of the American empire. This ignorance gives strength to America to wage the Afghan and Iraq wars, because many people of the world “unknowingly” justify the rationalization of the actions. This ignorance gives strength to America to intervene the madrassa to remove the jihad materials from the curriculum, because the people of the world agrees that the word jihad in the Newspeak Dictionary means terrorism. The ignorance of the people of the world makes the audience give applause during Obama's speech in Cairo which was frothing with “mutual respect” between the West and Islam, while at the same time, his men were dropping bombs in Pakistan!

Nearly three decades ago, that novel of Orwell was as if presenting a satire to that of America's behaviour when mentioning the slogan of the Ing-Soc Party in the Orwellian state of Oceania: "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH".

Yes, our ignorance is the strength of the empire. Where the limit of our ignorance lies, it is also as far as there where the zone of the Empirical strength extends. To fight the strength of the empire is the same as fighting our own ignorance. Ignorance towards our religion, ignorance toward the plots of the enemies of Islam. “1984” features a resistance leader named “Emmanuel Goldstein” who is against the tide of the newspeak with his common sense, even though he has to be eliminated by the Ing-Soc regime and then becomes the victim of the “newspeak”: a criminal who should be despised, reviled and scorned. Exactly the same as the strangers (ghuraba) today, to fight the ignorance (jahiliyah) we must necessarily be a victim of the newspeak: stigmatized as radical-fundamentalist, the enemies of the whole world. Rasulullah SAW said,

Islam becomes estranged when resisting the tide of the ideology of newspeak. However, that's precisely our job. At the time when the world, as far as the mind, is controlled by the Empirical power, the first step in the fight is in the mind itself, the revolution of thought. From the minds we are fighting against the ignorance, into our real world we fighting against the strength.

Original author:
Reza Ageung S.
A Student of Hidayatullah High School of Shari'ah Science,
Balikpapan, Indonesia.

Translated and submitted by a Mujahid

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