The Pharaoh: a consortium

Metin Karabaţođlu (Translated by Muhammed Ţeviker)

THE PARABLE OF MOSES, AND, consequently of Pharaoh’s is the most reiterated and detailed parable among the Qur’anic tales. It is the most repeated parable in respect to the number of chapters in which it is mentioned. So much so that, even the parable of Adam and Devil ranks the second after it.

There a lot of wisdoms of this. And, perhaps one of the most important wisdoms is that the parable of Moses shows best how the struggle between Adam’s descendants and those of Devil manifests itself in the realm of people who shape in flesh and bones.

In this parable which manifests itself again and again when proceeding along with chapters of Qur’an, Pharaoh does not present himself as a single entity. We can observe that the pharaoh didn’t make himself a pharaoh. Because, actually, pharaoh is a human being like us. He is not a superhuman. All of the needs which befall to everyone else apply to him too. He dies if he gets hungry. He does not sustain his life without water. He can’t live without breathing. He perishes without sleeping. He has height and weight like everyone else; he has limited strength and thought.

What makes him a pharaoh is not he per se, but it is consortium that he belongs to and stands in the centre of it. Actually, the pharaoh is consisted of a consortium. Yet, because of the elements except for him, the pharaoh was able to be a pharaoh.

Thus, the Qur’an narrates this villainous guy who declared himself as a “the most high lord” together with his collaborators in this process.

First and foremost together with his community…

When the Pharaoh brought his community together and asked “am I your the most high lord?” even a one person in his huge community didn’t challenge this guy who has as the same limitations, the same helplessness and needs as them. Even one man could not say “get outta here!?”

Rather, they said all together, “yes, you are our most high lord”. Thus, in the narration of the verse, “the Pharaoh befooled and misled his people, and they obeyed him.” the thing they should have said is “Neither you are lord, nor we are your servants. All of us are servants of the Lord of the Worlds. All of us are equal servants of Allah, in being created and being far away from creativeness.

Qur’an shows us the community Pharaoh who, sometimes because of hope, in others out of fear of death, by all manner of means, with an ontological blindness serve someone slavishly lost their human dignity to extent that they agreed to serve the servants in this consortium as well as other names.

For instance his aide Haman is, in one respect, the symbol of bureaucracy, in the other is the symbol of ‘academia’.

For instance, Korah is the symbol and mouthpiece of this consortium’s economy branch. (Who, even though he was one of from the children of Israel whom the pharaoh enslaved, instead of challenging the Pharaoh like Moses and saying him “set free the children of Israel, restore their liberties, be servant to the Lord of Worlds”, he chose being the economical supporter of this ‘consortium’ and, in this way, to increase his wealth.)

Moreover, there are others those, also from the children of Israel, like Korah, who abandoned his intellect and heart to the consortium. In this consortium there were, such as Bal`am bin Ba`ura who, although his reason know the truth, for the sake of worldly profits his tongue becomes a mouthpiece of evilness and wrongdoing.

Even, except for a too few people, the Children of Israel were in this consortium. Because, before the tyranny of the pharaoh they virtually internalized slavery; they sought and saw their future in the order of Pharaoh. Having been rescued from the tyranny of Pharaoh, particularly by means of a miracle, they avoided the holy struggle against the city’s people whom considered as strong, and said “O Moses! Go you and your Lord and fight you two, we are sitting right here." They also, taking advantage of the days in which Moses left for Mount Sinai, immediately, began to worship golden calf constructed by a man who was among them called Samiri. These are two great signs of intellectual, heartily, emotional, actual, operational and credential defects.

The pharaoh reality that the Qur’an shows us in parallel with Moses parable, lays bare before us a consortium in which all the elements meet.

It shows also the reason from which pharaohs stemmed from and sustained their entities.

Let’s look at the world’s recent centuries at the light of these clues.

What do we observe?

Or, let’s look what has been going on for last sixty day, particularly in the Islamic world.

What can we see?

What we see is a consortium in which there are masses who come to agree disbelief and oppression; and those who build up the future constructs by means of internalizing slavery, having seen the edifice of disbelief and tyranny as an unchangeable constant; and those who mastermind; those who develop practices accordingly, and those who finance them…

Hamans, Korahs, Bal`ams, Samiris and others….

If I asked “what have you seen in the world in the last sixty day” my answer would be “I have seen the Pharaoh consortium so much clear at the first time.”

But, I have always kept my hope that this consortium is going to collapse inevitably…

Because, if they have a consortium, the truth has a stick, which wherever is it hit, extracts a life water, and resolves and swallow wherever it sees a pharaohial magic.

It is true that every pharaoh confronts with a Moses…

But, its opposite is also true: the Lord of the Worlds sends a Moses in order to undermine a pharaoh.

And, even today, this struggle goes on.

  31.07.2013

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