The Secret of Reform
All forms of evil are related to thinking. The transformation of human consciousness or thinking is the secret of reform. Without this, no reform is at all possible.
Many people mistakenly think that the root of all problems are those individuals who happen to control the levers of power in their times, and that, therefore, if they are removed from power, all evils will come to an end. This sort of thinking has repeatedly been shown through experience to be completely wrong.
Consider the following case: Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, believed that the government of King Farooq (d.1965) was the root of all evils facing Egypt and that if somehow this government could be toppled, everything in the country would be set aright. In line with this thinking, they joined with some Egyptian army officers, overthrew King Farooq, and forced him out of the country. But after this, all that occurred was that the conditions in the country became even worse than before.
Similar was the case with another Islamist group, the Jamaat-e Islami of Pakistan, which repeated the same blunder, with greater intensity. In the era of President Ayub Khan, they assumed that the root of all the problems of Pakistan was the military government of President Ayub. They unleashed a tumultuous movement against this government, so much so that the government fell. But despite this, there was no improvement in Pakistan’s conditions. Later, too, Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami once again made the same mistake. It assumed that the government of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was the root of all evil. And with the help of other so-called ‘pro-Islamic’ elements, they launched movements directed to overthrow Mr. Bhutto, so much so that with the help of General Zia ul-Haq, in 1979, they succeeded in getting Mr. Bhutto hanged. However, the conditions of Pakistan continued to worsen.
This experience with regard to the fallacious ‘root of all evils’ theory has been frequently repeated in present times. And every time, this theory has completely failed.
The fact is that all forms of evil are related to thinking. The secret of reform is the transformation of human consciousness or thinking. Without this, no reform is at all possible.
