By: Dr. Adnan Bozan

In societies exhausted by ignorance, where a culture of submission has taken root in people’s minds, freedom becomes an accusation, democracy a crime, difference a deviation, and independent thought an assault on the sacred. There, where traditions put reason on trial and the collective monopolizes the definition of virtue, human beings are not regarded as free individuals possessing their own will and conscience, but as social property that must remain subject to the commands of family, tribe, sect, national identity, and the authority of the majority. The tragedy is not that these societies do not know freedom, but that some of them fear it so deeply that they redefine it as corruption, turn tyranny into a virtue, submission into a moral principle, and servitude into social respectability.

In our East, burdened by contradictions, particularly in environments dominated by patriarchal structures and closed interpretations of religion, individuals are still expected to apologize constantly for their freedom, as though their independent existence were a crime requiring justification. If they think, they are accused of blasphemy; if they object, they are accused of treason; if they choose their own path, they are accused of moral depravity; and if they demand their right to self-determination, they become enemies of the collective. Meanwhile, those who confiscate their freedom wrap themselves in the mantle of morality, sit upon the throne of virtue, and speak of order, values, and honor as though contempt for human beings could become a virtue simply by being cloaked in moral or religious rhetoric. This is the power of hypocrisy: it grants itself the authority to dictate what others should be while exempting itself from every question and every form of accountability.

Democracy, in the mindset of social authoritarianism, is acceptable as long as it grants the majority the right to attain power, but unacceptable when it grants individuals the right to differ from that majority. The problem, therefore, is not elections, but a mindset that treats numerical superiority as the source of absolute truth and grants the collective ownership of its members’ consciences. Thus, the majority becomes a political and social idol, its will a law standing above human rights, and democracy is reduced to majority rule rather than the protection of freedom, equality, and pluralism. It is the democracy of those who seek to possess power in the name of the people, then possess the people in the name of morality, and finally possess morality in the name of the sacred. What is the value of a ballot box if the mindset behind it refuses to acknowledge the right of those who differ to live as they wish, think as they wish, and choose what they believe to be their right?

Honor, meanwhile, has been subjected to some of the most grotesque forms of semantic distortion within this system. It has been stripped from the realm of integrity, honesty, and justice and deposited in the body of a woman, as though the history, dignity, and future of an entire family could be reduced to the distance between a female’s thighs. A woman’s body has become the symbolic property of her family, her personal decisions a public concern, and her freedom a social scandal, while men are granted a broad margin of tolerance for their contradictions and sins. What kind of mind is incapable of recognizing dishonor in lying, corruption, betrayal, and injustice, yet perceives a threat to honor in a woman’s choice of clothing or way of life? And what kind of morality mobilizes all its forces to police bodies, only to retreat when confronted with the plundering of public wealth, the exploitation of the poor, and the degradation of human dignity?

Honor that requires imprisoning a woman to preserve itself is not honor; it is social fear wearing the mask of virtue. Dignity granted to men and stripped from women is not human dignity, but a masculine privilege deriving its legitimacy from an imbalance of power. When womanhood becomes a permanent object of suspicion, society becomes more preoccupied with managing women’s bodies than with confronting its own corruption, more concerned with policing sexual conduct than with scrutinizing political and economic behavior, and more eager to punish personal differences than actual crimes. At that point, the body becomes a dense curtain concealing the scandals of reason, power, and conscience.

Religion, which is supposed to be a matter of belief and spiritual responsibility, is transformed in the hands of merchants of the sacred into a marketplace of influence, a source of social legitimacy, and an instrument for dividing human beings into believers and sinners, the pious and the deviant, those who possess the truth and those who oppose it. Faith ceases to be a matter of the human conscience and becomes a membership card in a group that monitors, classifies, and punishes. Religious discourse becomes political capital available for investment, used to purchase obedience, protect vested interests, and grant certain individuals a moral immunity that their actions do not deserve.

The most dangerous forms of commercializing religion do not lie in denying the sacred, but in exploiting it. An ordinary merchant demands payment for a conventional commodity; a merchant of the sacred demands not only payment, but also the buyer’s conscience, reason, and freedom, then convinces the buyer that surrendering all of them is the price of salvation. Thus, objecting to a religious figure becomes an objection to religion itself; criticizing an institution becomes an assault on faith; and questioning religious discourse becomes a crime against the sacred. The boundaries between human belief and human interpretation disappear, opinions are elevated to the status of absolute truth, and personal interests are granted heavenly immunity. Once this happens, religion, in social and political practice, becomes a means of subjugating human beings rather than remaining a belief they freely choose according to their consciences.

Within this intellectual structure, ignorance does not need to defend itself as long as it can intimidate knowledge. It is enough to label a philosopher a heretic, a researcher a conspirator, an intellectual a deviant, and anyone who differs an enemy. In this way, ignorance saves itself the trouble of thinking. When ignorance loses confidence in itself, it may humbly defer to knowledge; but when it allies itself with power and the sacred, it becomes an aggressive certainty that sees every question as a threat, every reconsideration as a conspiracy, and every new idea as an attempt to destroy society. Here, the organic relationship between ignorance and fanaticism takes shape: ignorance is incapable of understanding the world, while fanaticism seeks to force the world into the narrow limits of that incapacity.

Terrorism, meanwhile, is not merely an eruption of violence at an exceptional moment. It may be the ultimate consequence of a mindset accustomed to dividing human beings into those who deserve to live and those who do not. It begins by denying the legitimacy of difference, proceeds by stripping those who differ of their right to express themselves, and then portrays them as a danger to the collective, until attacking them becomes justifiable in the eyes of those whose consciousness has been imprisoned within a system of exclusion. When this mentality joins forces with authority and weapons, fanaticism is transformed from a social attitude into a project of domination, and from rhetoric that despises the other into a practice seeking to subjugate or erase them. Not every form of ignorance is terrorism, and not every tradition is violence; yet a mind that denies the humanity of those who differ lays the moral foundations upon which violence can build its justification.

At the bottom of this scene stands money, the god that needs no temples because markets serve as its sanctuaries, no priests because vested interests perform their function, and no sacred scriptures because numbers can issue their commands in silence. In the presence of money, many slogans are exposed and some barriers long presented as inviolable red lines collapse. Someone who once cursed another in the name of nationalism may shake that person’s hand in the name of a business deal. Someone who once prohibited dealings with another on sectarian grounds may become a partner when interests converge. And someone who once made grand declarations about honor may bargain away their position when offered the right price.

Where do beliefs go when they conflict with profits? Where does honor disappear when betrayal becomes profitable? Where does morality stand when integrity demands material sacrifice? And what meaning remains in values when the judgment of an action changes according to the amount of money it generates?

Money does not corrupt every human being, but it exposes with remarkable clarity the fragility of values that have never progressed beyond the stage of pretence. Some people make money a means to live; others make life a means to acquire money. Some possess wealth, while others allow wealth to purchase their positions, loyalties, and social image. In the latter case, values cease to be principles governing behavior and become expressions that can be reinterpreted according to the scale of personal benefit. One sells a political position and then renames the act political wisdom; sells principles and then describes the act as realism; sells silence and then presents it as prudence; sells betrayal and then wraps it in the language of the higher interest. Thus, an opportunist does not need to abandon the language of morality. They need only retain it to conceal the truth about what they do.

Even more blatant is the way nationalism, religion, sect, and denomination can become boundaries that open and close according to the demands of the marketplace. Identity is invoked when profitable and neglected when burdensome. Hostility is elevated to an existential struggle when it serves mobilization, then evaporates when a commercial or political opportunity appears. It then becomes clear that some enmities presented to the masses as principled conflicts may, behind closed doors, be managed as struggles over influence and wealth. What appears to ordinary people to be a wall of faith may be nothing more, in the eyes of those pursuing vested interests, than a curtain that can be drawn aside.

In this East, where minarets stand alongside palaces, moral sermons alongside marketplaces of influence, and banners of identity alongside deals driven by self-interest, the contradiction does not lie in the absence of values from public discourse, but in their overwhelming declared presence alongside their practical fragility. Everyone speaks of honor, almost everyone demands respect for the sacred, and everyone raises the banner of homeland, nationalism, or religion when it serves their purposes. Yet this language does not necessarily prevent corruption, discrimination, or the exploitation of the vulnerable from flourishing. A society that consumes morality in words more than it translates it into justice can produce an enormous moral discourse above a reality that fails to respect even its most basic requirements.

The crisis is neither inherently Arab nor inherently Kurdish; it is not an inherited destiny. Rather, it is a crisis of social and political structures nourished by authoritarianism, patriarchy, indoctrination, and the monopolization of truth. When these structures emerge in Arab society, they take forms shaped by its history and institutions. When they emerge in Kurdish society, they take other forms connected to its political and social circumstances. Neither, however, is thereby granted immunity from criticism. One of the great ironies is that a society that has suffered oppression can reproduce it within its own home, party, family, and institutions; demand freedom from the authority that subjugates it, yet deny that same freedom to those over whom it exercises a smaller measure of power. Here is revealed the tragedy of a human being who refuses to be a slave but does not hesitate to demand slaves of others.

A mind that rejects a ruler’s tyranny yet practices tyranny against women; condemns the oppression of the majority when it is the victim, yet endorses it when it benefits; and denounces corruption only to justify it when personal interests are served does not suffer from a shortage of slogans. It suffers from a separation between what it publicly proclaims and what it actually believes. Within this separation, a dual social personality takes shape: a person with one language for public display and another for private dealings, one set of moral standards for others and exceptions for oneself, sacred principles defended in words and interests defended through actions.

True bankruptcy does not consist in a society losing its wealth or power, but in losing its ability to distinguish virtue from self-interest, faith from its exploitation, honor from control, democracy from the tyranny of the majority, and freedom from the chaos invented by those who fear it. When money becomes the measure of value, affiliation the measure of truth, and submission the measure of morality, the human being ceases to be an end in themselves and becomes an instrument serving the collective, authority, or market. At that point, an individual’s worth is measured by what they own rather than what they think; by the benefit they provide rather than the dignity they embody; and by their capacity to conform rather than their capacity to exist as an independent human being.

Are there minds more degraded and filthy than those that criminalize freedom, anathematize difference, sell dignity, and then claim to be guardians of morality?

The harshest question is not about peoples, but about the mind capable of selling everything and then standing before others as a preacher in the name of virtue: the mind that turns freedom into a disgrace when it threatens its authority, religion into a business when it brings influence, honor into a restraint when it seeks to control women, democracy into a crime when it does not guarantee victory, and money into a god when principles conflict with personal interests. This is a mind that does not need to abandon its proclaimed morality to practice its opposite. It simply redefines morality whenever its interests change, redefines truth whenever it loses its position, and redefines betrayal whenever it becomes the betrayer.

Thus, ugliness becomes more than an individual behavior; it becomes a system of justification, a culture of contradiction, and an environment in which opportunism is given noble names, independent thinkers are treated as threats, and people of principle are regarded as naïve because they have not learned the art of selling their consciences. It is the moment when society no longer needs to conceal its contradictions, but merely gives them acceptable names: self-interest becomes wisdom, submission becomes respect, surveillance becomes protective concern, fanaticism becomes devotion to the faith, discrimination becomes the preservation of identity, silence becomes prudence, corruption becomes a necessity, and opportunism becomes politics.

At the end of this dissection, the question is no longer how many peoples have reached this degree of contradiction, but how many masks the human mind can wear before losing the ability to recognize its true face. When everything becomes saleable, the sacred is no longer sacred, honor is no longer honor, democracy is no longer democracy, and morality is no longer morality. Words become nothing more than linguistic currencies exchanged in the service of vested interests, and the human being becomes a commodity in a marketplace that recognizes nothing but the logic of power and utility.

One of the ugliest forms of human bankruptcy is to worship money in private, worship the majority in public, trade in religion when necessary, police a woman’s body in the name of honor, and then raise one’s head to speak of morality, virtue, and dignity. This is not a passing contradiction between words and deeds; it is an inverted world in which vice becomes adept at dressing itself in the garments of virtue, hypocrisy becomes more capable of surviving than truth, and ignorance, when armed with power, self-interest, and the sacred, becomes capable of putting the very reason that exposed it on trial.