In Al-Aisar’s Mailbox Agenda-Making: Between the Truthfulness of Judgments and the Preservation of Neighborliness Captain Mohamed Hassan Al-Taher

 

Date: November 8, 2026

First: Why Do We Ask About the Agenda?

The answer lies in the fact that no one makes a decision in a vacuum. Every decision issued by a leader, an institution, or a nation passes through:

What is deemed worthy of consideration

What is treated as marginal

What is advanced and what is postponed

What is named a problem and what is passed over in silence

This hidden ordering of priorities is the agenda. It:

Precedes the decision as the scale precedes the weight

Whoever controls the ordering of questions controls a great share of the answers before they are ever spoken.

Let us begin by examining a single question from several angles:

How is an agenda made?

What is its connection to truth and falsehood in judgments?

What does it do to neighborly relations?

And what guidance does the Qur’anic text offer in all of this?

Second: On the Definition of the Term

The word “agenda” is a loanword in Arabic. Its origin is the Latin agenda, the plural of agendum, meaning “things that ought to be done.” In its original coinage, then, it is a form of obligation, not a description of reality. This matters, because the agenda carries in its very structure:

The meaning of “what ought to be” before it carries the meaning of “what is”

It then moved from the appointment book to the agenda of meetings, and then to the broader political and intellectual sense: the ordering of priorities that directs collective action.

Arabic has terms of similar meaning:

“the plan” (al-khuṭṭa), “the intention” (al-niyya), “the purpose” (al-maqṣid), and “the goal” (al-gháya).

In the terminology of Islamic law, the equivalent is maqāṣid (“objectives”):

The closest thing to a publicly declared moral agenda.

In everyday speech, the word “agenda” has acquired a negative shade, so people say “he has an agenda” to mean “he has a hidden motive.” This semantic drift reveals a psychological truth that oscillates between the concealed and the manifest:

People understand that declared priorities are not always the actual priorities.

The agenda is the child of place and time together, for we find that:

Geography imposes priorities that no one can ignore.

For a nation on a great river, water is the first item on its agenda.

For a nation on a trade route, roads, markets, and alliances are its first concern.

For a nation in the open desert, the caravan, the oasis, and tribal solidarity (ʿaṣabiyya) are the first things it reckons with.

Ibn Khaldun recognized the influence of environment on the character and institutions of nations when he linked Bedouin and urban civilization with the solidarity, politics, and morals that follow each.

Drawing on the wise text, we find that the Qur’an takes note of this geographic-commercial meaning in Surat Quraysh:

﴿For the accustomed security of Quraysh. Their accustomed security [in] the caravan of winter and summer.﴾

Quraysh’s agenda was drawn by place:

Two journeys between Yemen and the Levant,

The safety of the road and the sanctity of the House.

Hence, neighborly relations for them were a condition of survival before they were a virtue. They are reinforced by history, which adds memory:

The accumulated wounds,

The preserved victories,

The inherited grievances.

And the agenda that nations make

is, in large part, a reaction to their history:

A nation carrying the memory of invasion makes security its first priority.

A nation carrying the memory of disintegration puts unity first.

A nation carrying the memory of enslavement puts dignity first.

Danger appears when history turns from a lesson into a weapon: the facts that serve the agenda of the present are selected, and the rest is passed over in silence.

The Qur’an rejects this selective use of the past, saying of bygone nations:

﴿That was a nation which has passed on. For it is what it earned, and for you is what you have earned. And you will not be asked about what they used to do.﴾

In this is a release from captivity: the past is to be learned from, not to have its vendettas inherited.

Here is a distinction I consider key, between two kinds of agenda:

The imprinted agenda is what has been stamped on the community without its awareness: habits of thought, the self-evident truths of the culture, and the unquestioned assumptions that are no longer noticed. It is the product of upbringing, history, and environment, and it works in silence. Among its examples is the Qur’an’s report of the peoples who objected to their messengers:

﴿Rather, they said, “Indeed, we found our fathers upon a religion, and we are, in their footsteps, guided.”﴾

This is an imprinted agenda in its purest form: its holders do not see that they chose anything; they see only that they were found this way.

The manufactured agenda is what is deliberately crafted:

A media discourse, a political campaign, or a narrative built to direct attention and shape opinion.

It does not work in a vacuum. The most successful manufactured agendas are those that ride on an imprinted agenda, exploiting:

An ancient fear,

A suppressed dream,

Or a wound that has not healed.

The Qur’an recounts a stark example in Pharaoh, who builds an agenda of intimidation:

﴿Pharaoh said, “I do not show you except what I see, and I do not guide you except to the path of right conduct.”﴾

Here lies the essence of domination:

When the definition of “what matters” is monopolized,

the owner of the agenda narrows the circle of the possible, then presents what remains inside it as “the only sound choice.” He need not forbid debate; it is enough for him to define its subject. And here the next question arises:

How Does the Agenda Control the Making of Decisions?

The agenda has successive mechanisms, among them:

Selection:

What enters the sphere of attention and what leaves it.

Framing:

How the issue is named. Naming is half the judgment.

Ordering:

What is addressed first and what is deferred, and what is deferred often dies.

Exclusion:

The alternatives that are never put forward at all.

Thus the decision is a late result of work that preceded it, according to mechanisms derived from:

Game theory

Rational choice theory

From here we logically conclude that the leader who thinks he is “choosing” often chooses from a list that was made for him by the agenda, and also according to the psychology of leaders.

Leaders have souls like other human beings, but position magnifies what is in them. Leaders do not decide with a pure abstract mind, but with a mixture of calculations, anxieties, memories, and self-images. The most important thing that shapes a leader’s psychology is the founding narrative of their community:

The story of origins,

The founding hero,

The primary enemy,

The great catastrophe,

The awaited promise.

The leader raised within:

A narrative of “siege” will read every opening as a threat.

A narrative of “chosenness and mission” will read every opposition as hostility to truth.

A narrative of “historical injustice” will see in every decision an opportunity for revenge or compensation.

Thus the narrative seeps from books and anthems into the decision room.

A narrative is not merely a tale; it is a structure of meaning:

It organizes events into a plot with a beginning, a climax, and a direction.

It is built from four gateways: philosophical, scientific, religious, and artistic.

Philosophically, the narrative is built by grounding it in grand concepts:

Nature, reason, progress, justice, the state.

It takes the form of a system that answers the questions of existence and purpose. Philosophy works through definition and argument, and so produces narratives that claim universality, such as:

The Enlightenment, which promised to liberate humanity through reason,

Or dialectics, which saw history as an inevitable movement.

The danger here is that a tightly constructed system may tempt its owner to ignore facts that do not fit within it.

Scientifically, the narrative is built when research results are cast into a larger story:

The origin of the universe,

The evolution of species,

The laws of civilization (sunan al-ʿumrān).

Science in itself is a cautious method that says “according to current evidence,” but the narratives built upon it often lose this reserve. Thus:

The model becomes a final truth,

And correlation becomes causation.

The language of science was used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to justify racial hierarchy, policies of exclusion, and so on. Science itself is innocent, but its symbolic authority tempts people to exploit it.

Religion, by contrast, is the most powerful factory of narratives, because it combines:

Origin and destiny,

Duty and hope.

The religious narrative is built upon:

A sacred text,

A prophetic memory,

A repeated ritual,

so that identity, morality, and belonging become one thing, whose:

Strength lies in giving meaning to suffering and setting a direction for life.

Danger lies in this: when it is used as a tool of mobilization, it turns from guidance into polarization,

and the text is conscripted to serve the agenda, when it was revealed to judge it.

Finally, artistically, art delivers narratives to the heart because it goes beyond argument to image and rhythm. The poem, the anthem, the epic, the film, and the TV series plant biases in a person that they adopt before they become aware of them. Poetry has a well-known authority among the Arabs; it was the tongue and the media of the tribe. For this reason the Qur’an distinguished between poetry that follows desire and the word that guides:

﴿And the poets – [only] the deviators follow them. Do you not see that they wander in every valley?﴾

Then it made an exception for those who believed, did righteous deeds, and were truthful. The judgment here is on the function, not on the instrument. From here we conclude with questions to the future-makers among the wise people of Sudan:

Who is making our agenda now?

Who controls the hearts and minds of the people of Sudan?

Where are we now, and where are we heading?

And what is our vision for shaping the future of Sudan’s generations with global mindsets (in the age of artificial intelligence and quantum theory), by regulating the founding narratives to safeguard the integrity of the heart and conscience, through upbringing that helps produce a Sudanese generation that is globally qualified and emotionally sound, which can be described by the English saying:

He dresses local but thinks global