When Civilization Lost Its Soul

It was an ordinary evening. I was sitting at the dining table, having my dinner, while the television played the evening news. The aroma of freshly cooked food filled the room. Outside, the world seemed peaceful. But on the television screen, an entirely different world was unfolding. Missiles, military strikes, shattered buildings, frightened children, and families struggling to find safety.

The newsreader was reporting American military strikes against Iran. Then came a statement attributed to the President of the United States, Donald Trump, threatening to send Iran “back to the Stone Age.” The words struck me. Back to the Stone Age! For a moment, I stopped eating. I wondered whether I had heard correctly. Had a leader of one of the world's most technologically advanced nations really threatened to push another civilization thousands of years backward?

What an extraordinary contradiction! We live in an age when scientists are exploring distant planets, developing artificial intelligence, studying the human genome, and searching for cures to diseases that once seemed incurable. Humanity has learned to transplant organs, build extraordinary machines, and communicate across continents within seconds. Yet, amid these achievements, we still hear threats of reducing entire societies to ruins. Have we really progressed? Or have we merely perfected the instruments of destruction while leaving the human heart behind?

I finished my dinner, but the disturbing images remained with me. I switched off the television and walked toward my bookshelf. My eyes fell upon Rabindranath Tagore's Persia (Parashye), his account of his journey through the ancient land of Persian civilization. I took the book from the shelf and began reading.

Persia! The very name awakened images of magnificent gardens, delicate poetry, profound philosophy, and an extraordinary intellectual tradition. Modern Iran was once known internationally as Persia—a land whose cultural heritage had enriched humanity for centuries. It was the civilization of Hafez, Saadi, Omar Khayyam, and countless other poets, thinkers, artists, and scholars. Rumi, whose life and literary legacy were deeply connected with the wider Persian-speaking cultural world, had given humanity some of its most enduring reflections on love and spiritual unity.

As I turned the pages, I found myself thinking about Tagore's encounters with Persian culture and his admiration for the bonds that literature could create between distant peoples. How strange, I thought, that a civilization which had contributed so much to humanity's spiritual and intellectual inheritance should now be spoken of in the language of annihilation.