The path to becoming the Irresponsible Nation: Influence of language and religion.

These sentiments / theories arose from a discussion with Simon after commenting on his blog post on “The Irresponsible Nation.” Below, I am trying to focus my writing on how two very basic aspects of Maldivians, the Dhivehi language and the Islamic faith, has been used over the ages to make us irresponsible people!

Maldives has a strong history of people having good command of its language, Dhivehi. Many linguists and poets live in our history books. They are more known than some great rulers. (Some poets are great IT dudes; DosBe is one.)

Some of us know (now) who brought about a written constitution. This wasn’t and isn’t taught in history classes. While many know who wrote “Dhiyoge Raivaru.” This is taught in Dhivehi classes. Vast majority of Maldivians love their poetical history. I jokingly said to Simon that “Maldives is lost in bad poetry and cloned music.” Bad not from a poet’s view perhaps but from the influence it had on the people. The poets / linguist of all times, not only the infamous last-28 years but from a long time ago, have been able to twist their words to twist the arms of law and rule. Taking an example from the recent rule (not Maumoon’s rule,) the father of the current President, Mr Abdul Qayyoom (Seedhee) was a linguist. He was able to influence and even mock the then ruler ‘cos of his superior command of the language. Which in-turn had earned him respect and even greater political status/power. There are stories from even deeper history. Anyway, the point I am making here is that people who had good command of the language had power. Power to influence rulers and the people. This isn’t in itself a bad fad, but it had been misused.

Talking about Islam, we all know the story of how Maldives converted to Islam. It is not a secret debate as to how most Maldivians embraced Islam overnight, let alone the debate around the “Rannamaari” story! For me, it is an impression of obedience. King says “let’s be muslims” and the public goes “oh goodie lets all be muslims.” Islam like other faiths is a way of life. It is hard for me to believe that it can be adopted, and adapted to overnight! The point here is that during the time of Maldives’ conversion to Islam most Maldivians never took to Islam as a faith, but took it as something they were told to do by the king, almost blindly accepting the path.

Sadly or not, this hasn’t changed much. Our constitution says we have to be muslims to be Maldivians. We are born Muslims. Islam is hereditary to us! We inherit Islam from our parents. This is all good except that the new-born muslims are never taught to seek out and understand the truths and beliefs in Islam. Again, a case of blindly following a preset path.

All this “blindly following” leads to irresponsibility as well stated in Simon’s post. We have been fed with “nice words” and poetry and shown the “right path” to follow, which have misled Maldivians to thinking that responsibility is being born already while the reality in quite the contrary; we don’t understand that responsibility comes with burdens to bear and consequences to face.

Through ages we have been taught to hear and obey, not to listen and think. This has made us an Irresponsible Nation. So is anyone taking responsibility? No one! We are all passing the buck. We have been doing this for ages and decades and we have gotten so good at this that we don’t realise it any more. It has become our survival game.

So we remain irresponsible for eternity? I don’t think so. Some among us are trying to shift our minds into thinking; something we have forgotten how to. The actions of some of us are also triggering the “enstrangered” act of thinking in us. However, history is proof that such paradigm-shifts had always had to confront strong, if not unbearable, difficulty (to put it mildly). Once we learn to think and understand for ourselves that’s when we become conscious that we have to bear responsibility at different levels. I believe this is the key to taking up responsibility.

This has become longer than I myself would like to read in a blog post, hence I’ll end this here. I will follow up with another post on a theory as to how this mind-shifting break-away from the spoon-fed life could be brought about.