It was the final days of spring 2007, yet the autumnal wind of death still blew relentlessly, scattering the fresh flowers of life and the hopes of young men across the scorched and blazing plains of the south. One sorrowful morning, the duty officer at the brigade headquarters wrote the twenty-four-hour report on the units as follows: “According to the reports received from the units of the Second Brigade, all was well over the past twenty-four hours and no notable incident occurred. Only the First Battalion ran into an enemy ambush, in which 15 personnel were killed, 29 were wounded, and one company went missing. Accordingly, this report is hereby submitted for the information of the esteemed command.”
In astonishment, I said: “Commander, sir! Fifteen killed, twenty-nine wounded, and an entire company missing, and still they say all is well? Then when are things ever not well for you?”
He said: “Things are not well only when the entire brigade is destroyed!”
I said: “If there is no brigade, then to whom will you submit your reports?”
He said: “If there is no brigade, there will be no one left to report either!”
There is no doubt that the duty officer meant no harm. He was an official within a system in which everyone thought in set patterns and wrote in clichés. In that environment, no one dared to innovate or change established wording, because otherwise they would be reprimanded and accused of tampering with “national terminology.”
At the time, this episode had simply become material for bitter and sorrowful humor among us. Recently, however, as I recalled this memory, another dimension of the matter caught my attention: on the one hand, “the normalization and acceptance of catastrophe under the cover of clichéd vocabulary,” and on the other, “the destructive role of this vocabulary in reproducing catastrophe.”
In the structure of the National Army of Afghanistan (ANA) at that time, an infantry battalion had nearly six hundred personnel. For a military unit of that size, at a time when no open and organized war was under way, forty-some casualties in a single day and night is a shocking figure. This situation is merely not “well.” It is a full-blown catastrophe.
But because the report was built on the expression “all is well,” and the mention of the dead and wounded came after the word “only,” it unconsciously evoked in the minds of the commander and others the sense that the incident was minor and ordinary, as if a trivial event had taken place. For this very reason, perhaps everyone passed it by at ease, without reflecting on the depth of the catastrophe and without devising any remedy to prevent its recurrence.
Taking refuge in common expressions such as “God’s will,” “fate,” “destiny and divine decree,” “God is merciful,” “all is well,” “God is the provider,” and so on may seem soothing on the surface. However, excessive reliance on and belief in these phrases can lead to turning a blind eye to stark realities and the laws of nature, as well as to shirking responsibility, and as a result can help reproduce catastrophe and violence.
Social Incidents
Whenever someone’s hands become stained with another person’s blood, the general public says consolingly: “That was his fate!” With this short sentence, they both normalize the crime and absolve the killer in the shadow of destiny.
Or if someone sinks under heavy debts, instead of planning and striving to repay what he owes, he hides his passivity behind the phrase “God is great.” In the end, all his belongings are lost to the wind, and the catastrophe called poverty casts its shadow over his life forever.
Inexperienced or drug-addicted drivers, too, say “trust in God” and seat passengers on steeds of death, on substandard roads and with loads exceeding the permitted limit. As a result, thousands of passengers are sacrificed every year in the slaughterhouse of traffic accidents, and the general public, instead of examining the cause and identifying who is responsible, once again says: “Their time was up, and this was their fate!” The same pattern applies to polygamy, to having countless children, and to many other matters.
Natural Disasters
It is not hidden from any sensible person that floodwaters will flow in a riverbed, that avalanches are certain at the foot of the steep slopes of snow-laden mountains, and that people witness rockfalls with their own eyes every year on mountainsides. Even so, they still build homes in those same danger zones, with the same blind trust in God, and in the end great and irreparable disasters occur.
There is no doubt that human beings always stand just a few steps from various natural and human-made disasters, and the smallest ill-considered action or reaction can lead them into the whirlpool of peril. But since humans are endowed with the gem of reason, intelligence, and the power of decision-making, if they use wisdom and prudence at the right time and make a rational decision, they can in many cases overcome disasters.
Indeed, the number of victims of traffic and natural accidents in a developed country like France is today in no way comparable with that of a country like Afghanistan. It is a stark difference that clearly illustrates the line between “rational prudence” and “surrender to fate.”
To move beyond this situation, the first step is to reconsider the linguistic and intellectual structure of society. As long as we hide human and natural disasters behind consoling yet deceptive expressions, we keep our eyes shut to their real roots and causes.
Trust in God gains meaning only through making a rational decision, keeping in mind the unyielding laws of nature, and accepting undeniable realities. Otherwise, such trust is nothing but a blind justification for walking into peril and for individual and collective suicide.
You can read the Persian version of this article here:
