The Face of Truth | Dr. Ibrahim Shaqlawi Sudan… How Do We Lose Our Minds?
While travelling on one of my journeys, I came across a small book by Ali Shariati. I had chosen it from a street vendor, thinking it would make a suitable companion for the road. For roads do not merely shorten distances; sometimes, they open other paths to the mind. The book was elegantly written, as though it had chosen its reader before he chose it, as our professor Atef Al-Iraqi would say. It was titled Al-Nabaha wa Al-Istihmar (Awareness and the Stupefaction of the Mind). Yet its pages went beyond the boundaries of a book, placing our country before a realistic mirror, one that was not without its harshness.
Shariati presents his reader with a striking duality: awareness and the stupefaction of the mind. By awareness, he does not simply mean intelligence, extensive knowledge, or academic achievement. Rather, he means a person’s ability to understand themselves and their position in society, comprehend the issues surrounding them, and distinguish between what deserves their attention and what they are being made to focus on. As for the stupefaction of the mind, it is the disabling of this ability and directing people away from their genuine interests, until they become preoccupied with matters that do not change their reality, or defenders of conditions whose contradictions they fail to recognise.
The book is a collection of lectures delivered by Shariati in one of the Husayniyyas, which were later compiled into a volume and published after his death. Its significance lies in the fact that it does not treat ignorance merely as an absence of information. Instead, it ventures into a more complex territory: How can a person possess knowledge, academic qualifications, and social standing, yet remain incapable of reading their reality and recognising their responsibility towards it?
The deepest idea presented by the book is that controlling people does not always require preventing them from thinking. It can instead be achieved by drowning them in issues that consume their attention and dragging them into secondary battles that obscure what is happening around them. Here, the stupefaction of the mind becomes a form of managing and controlling consciousness, whereby a person becomes occupied with everything except what affects their life and future.
In this context, Shariati offers a striking example of a fire. When a house catches fire in a neighbourhood, asking its occupants to concern themselves with any other activity, however sacred it may appear, before putting out the fire, means diverting attention away from the real priority. Not every issue raised deserves attention, and not every battle is worth fighting.
When we bring this idea into the Sudanese context, we find ourselves facing a question that goes beyond cultural reflection to the very heart of the political crisis. Since the outbreak of the war, the crisis has no longer been confined to military confrontation and economic collapse. It has extended into the public sphere, where information overlaps with rumours, positions with alignments, and national issues become entangled with partisan and personal disputes.
Amid all this, the elites expend their energy on battles to assert positions and exchange accusations, while questions concerning the state and its institutions, rebuilding the economy, reforming education, restoring services, and establishing an inclusive national project recede into the background.
The paradox is that Sudan does not lack knowledge of its crises as much as it lacks the ability to transform that knowledge into national will. We know the scale of the devastation, understand the cost of war, and witness the decline in performance, yet we often fail to turn this awareness into consensus on priorities. Here, the question arises: Is our problem the absence of information, or our inability to organise it and translate it into decisions?
More dangerously, a person may deceive themselves without realising it, believing what conforms to their convictions and rejecting everything that contradicts them, not in pursuit of the truth, but in defence of their position. In this way, they become part of the very misinformation and narrative of failure they believe themselves to be victims of.
War makes this condition even more complicated. It destroys, but it also reshapes consciousness. Fear, anger, and the desire for revenge drive societies to reduce complex issues to binary judgments, making calm reflection appear a luxury, reconsideration a sign of weakness, and admitting mistakes a retreat from one’s position. This cost may persist even after the guns fall silent if we fail to regain the ability to think beyond the logic of war.
In this environment, the elites do not stand outside the crisis. Some political, cultural, and media forces are not merely incapable of producing awareness; they also contribute to entrenching division, treating the public as an audience to be mobilised rather than partners in shaping the future. The battle for attention has also moved to digital platforms, where rumours and provocative rhetoric compete for people’s minds. The speed of circulation becomes more important than the credibility of information, and engagement replaces understanding. Here, the responsibility of the media emerges: to illuminate the public sphere, not to multiply its chaos.
Shariati was one of the most prominent Iranian thinkers who brought together sociology, religious thought, and political criticism. He left a significant mark on the intellectual climate that preceded the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He was known for his criticism of the political exploitation of religious doctrine and his call to overcome divisions that drain societies and distance them from the causes of liberation and justice. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with him, the value of his book remains in the question it leaves open: Do we think about the issues that shape our future, or do we merely react to the issues imposed upon our daily lives?
In Sudan, it is not enough to emerge from the war; we must also free ourselves from patterns of thinking that reproduce our crises. Recovering awareness begins with placing the interests of the nation above partisan calculations, the interests of the state above personal conflicts, and the future above battles of attrition. From the perspective of #TheFaceOfTruth, Sudan does not lose its mind when it is ignorant, but when it knows without understanding, sees danger without recognising its priorities, and becomes preoccupied with what divides it rather than what unites it. The greatest danger we face is not the absence of knowledge, but the absence of awareness of what we ought to do with it.
Wishing you continued well-being.
Monday, 9 November 2026
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