The Republic and My Rule B+F=Nf From the Forbidden Book to the Rule... From the City to Humanity... From Introducing Women to the Army to a Woman Dialoguing with His Book

I grew up in a sect that protected certainty just as a coward protects his treasure. Its slogan was unwritten but circulated in every circle: Whoever adopts logic has become a heretic. A saying attributed to Ibn al-Salah, and later circulated by subsequent scholars. The prohibition was not merely a fatwa; it was a complete existential system: Do not ask, do not question references, do not dialogue, just transmit as water is transmitted from one vessel to another. I was required to be a pure functional processor: a human machine that transmits the text without touching it, repeating the saying without understanding it. My library was filled with the books of my sheikhs, my sect's religious texts, and their interpreters, and I left other books behind. All these sayings, which I thought were religion, I later discovered were alienated functional processing disguised as religion. But something inside me rejected it all, and my question was always: Why shouldn't I ask? When I opened Plato's Republic that book which I was forbidden to read I did not find the destruction they warned me about. Instead, I found that my sect was applying exactly the stance that Socrates refutes. They used to tell me: Justice is what the ruler says, and injustice is to disobey him. Perhaps they feared I would become a heretic and leave their sect and their rule, but that is exactly what happened. They were applying Thrasymachus's stance (Justice is the advantage of the stronger) while thinking they were protecting religion... sorry, I mean their sect. Here the breaking point occurred. Here heresy was born. They told me: Whoever philosophizes has become a heretic. So I said: Then, I am committing heresy.