There exists a force more corrosive than evil, more contagious than vice, and more stubborn than ignorance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it stupidity, and in the mirror of scripture, it reflects something older still: the _nafsul–ammārah_, the commanding self that incites to evil. Between these two notions lies a chilling alliance, one secular, the other spiritual, and yet both diagnosing the same enemy. A human soul in rebellion against its own ability to think, to reflect, and to stand upright in truth.
This is not the stupidity of failing an exam or making a clumsy mistake. No, this is the darker, more structural kind. A willful disengagement from moral thought. It does not think. It parrots. It does not discern. It reacts. Orwell, if resurrected to address our current climate, would have called it thought of crime in reverse. Not the sin of speaking the truth, but the virtue of avoiding it.
Bonhoeffer, imprisoned for defying the Nazis, came to see that the true threat was not the gun-toting fascist but the neighbour who nodded along. “Against stupidity,” he wrote, “we are defenceless.” And he meant this in the most literal, damning way: you can not educate it, reason with it, or shame it into submission. It is not a failure of logic. It is a rejection of logic. A philosophical suicide.
Islamic thought had already charted this terrain. The _nafsul-ammārah_, as described in Surah Yusuf, is the inner voice that commands evil unless restrained. It does not need justification; it thrives on impulse. The fool under its command becomes convinced that his petty passions are sacred. He repeats slogans like scripture, wages vendettas in the name of virtue, and walks proudly into error because it feels good to do so. It is not lack of intelligence; it is lack of inner discipline.
George Orwell knew this pattern well. In his satirical prophecy 1984, he submits that the people are not conquered by force but by consent. They are too busy hating the wrong “enemy” to notice the boot on their own necks. The slogans change, but the structure is the same: stupidity sanctified by classical conditioning.
What unites Bonhoeffer and the Qur’anic psychology of the soul is a terrifying principle: stupidity is not simply a problem of education but that of morality. The man driven by _nafsul-ammārah_ has intellect but no moral compass. He may be an Emeritus and still be enslaved. He may quote Rumi and still be cruel. Bonhoeffer saw scholars defending tyranny. Orwell saw journalists peddling falsehoods with “sincere” smiles. And we, today, see influencers and manipulators conditioning millions on how not to think.
This spiritual stupor thrives on the death of introspection. In a culture where every noise is external, the inner voice is muted. The moment one begins to think, truly, he is labelled a cynic or worse. The world is curated to reward loud convictions and punish silent reflection. The nafs clap; Bonhoeffer’s stupid man cheers. Truth dies.
Here is the crux: evil knows it is evil and can therefore be opposed. But stupidity is unaware of its complicity. The Nazis, according to Bonhoeffer, did not rely only on sadists but on bureaucrats, teachers, and shopkeepers who “just followed orders.” Similarly, the _nafsul-ammārah_ never raises a sword; it whispers “just this once,” and the soul obeys. Again. And again.
Orwell would remind us that the Ministry of Truth was not designed to deceive the enemy, but to make citizens drown into mis… and disinformation. Bonhoeffer would say stupidity is immune to the truth. The Qur’an says, ‘They have hearts with which they do not understand, eyes with which they do not see, and ears with which they do not hear.” Stupidity is not the absence of senses but the refusal to use them.
This refusal has consequences. It is the soil in which manipulators plant manipulations. It is what turns people from poets to propagandists. Bonhoeffer watched Germany surrender its soul. Orwell imagined Britain might do the same. And the Qur’an warned that even believers, if heedless, could fall prey to this inner rot.
Ali Shariati, in his fiery homage *Once Again, Abuzar*, invokes the memory of Abuzar al-Ghifari, not as a relic of asceticism, but as a paragon of intellectual rebellion against stupidity adorned as religiosity. Shariati’s Abuzar is the man who dares to call out the Umayyads when the Qur’an was used to legitimise tyranny and silence the poor. He is the antidote to the collective _nafs_: one who not only thinks but dares to think differently. Stupidity, in Shariati’s lens, is what allows the betrayal of justice to hide beneath piety, which makes a mosque complicit in some unprintables. Like Bonhoeffer’s silent Germans, the people around Abuzar are not malicious. They are comfortable, cowardly, and complicit. Shariati shows that this inertia, this reluctance to rattle the order, is the ultimate triumph of the _nafs al-ammārah._
We must be honest. Stupidity is seductive. It offers a life without doubt, without the burden of moral responsibility. You need only to conform. You need only to outsource your conscience or, worst, still mortgage it. And yet, this is the very act that kills the soul. The _nafsul ammārah_ grows fat on comfort zones. It does not just rebel against morality. It hates it with reckless abandon, simply because thinking is exhausting.
Bonhoeffer concluded that stupidity grows strongest in groups. The mob dulls thought, flattens difference, and cheers its own decay. The same is true of the _nafs_ left unchallenged. It fears solitude because solitude invites self-awareness. It hides in crowds. It chants louder when confronted. It would rather burn the world and lead the ashes than admit a mistake.
In Orwell’s world, the greatest crime is to think for yourself. In Bonhoeffer’s, it is to stop thinking entirely. In the Qur’anic cosmos, the ultimate downfall is when the _nafsul-ammārah_ leads a soul into destruction, and it says on the Day of Judgment: “I only invited him; he chose to follow. I did not force him.”
The remedy? Painfully simple and excruciatingly rare. It begins with self-reckoning. Socrates called it the examined life. The Qur’an calls it _muhāsaba_ (self-reckoning). Bonhoeffer called it conscience. Orwell called it rebellion. Shariati called it the revolution of the self. They are all describing the same act: *thinking clearly, morally, and alone with the Alone.*
This is not easy. It demands stillness in an age of noise, integrity in a culture of branding, and courage in a time of applause. But if we fail, the result is certain: stupidity will become a king in the jungle. The _nafsul-ammārah_ will become a culture and a tradition. The human being will become a hollow slogan wrapped in human flesh and bones.
Let us not flatter ourselves. The greatest evils in history did not rise alone. They were hoisted on the shoulders of good men who failed to think. Who failed to resist their inner commanding self. Who failed to see that in the struggle between evil and stupidity, stupidity always smiles first.
And perhaps that is the final warning: when your soul stops probing, and the slogans start sounding holy, you are already halfway gone. _Qulil lah, thumma zarhum fiy khaudihim yalàbūn!_
