Across time and cultures, the adage ‘silence is golden’ has come to embody the virtue of restraint in speech. It perhaps originated in the ninth-century Arabic saying: “If speech is silver, then silence is gold.” The sentiment it conveys echoes in religious traditions, too.
Prophet Muhammad, as reported in Sahih al-Bukhari, advised Muslims to either speak good or remain silent. The Epistle of James in the New Testament urged Christians to be “quick to listen and slow to speak”. And in its 17th chapter, the Bhagavad Gita describes silence (maunam) as an “austerity of the mind” (tapo maanasam).
Such pronouncements have strengthened the belief that silence is not the absence of speech, but the presence of meaning—deep, intentional, and spiritual. However, this perception often overlooks the fact that what the aphorisms endorsed was judicious restraint, not muteness born of indecision or avoidance. In other words, silence is noble only when it is chosen as a form of prudence in the face of great responsibility. When it accompanies oppression, it joins in the crime and becomes its voice.
Hence, Prophet Muhammad declared that the highest form of jihad is “a word of justice” (kalimatu adl) spoken against a tyrannical ruler (sultaanin jaa’ir). Jesus too inspired courage in his followers saying: “What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the rooftops.” And in the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna that there is nothing more honourable than fighting a righteous war (dharmyam sangramam) to uphold justice.
Indeed, no serious philosophy upholds silence as a virtue when injustice demands a response. Yet, betraying its original nuance, the phrase “silence is golden” has been used to shield selfishness or cowardice, thus transforming silence into quiet hypocrisy.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the political quiescence surrounding Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza— an onslaught that many experts now describe as genocide. It has already claimed over 60,000 lives, razed entire neighbourhoods, and now threatens to starve a million innocent people to death, including countless children.
Silence in the face of these atrocities can perhaps be excused in lands where denouncing Israel brings the threat of imprisonment or worse. But what explains the silence of those who, free to speak, choose not to?
Evolutionary psychology suggests that an intense fear of outsiders that prevailed among early humans persists even today because natural selection honed our protective instincts. In contrast, modern humans possess the cognitive sophistication necessary for negotiation or conflict resolution. Yet, they exhibit atavistic tendencies as if evolution had passed them by.
Scientifically speaking, behavioural modernity equipped Homo sapiens with remarkable cognitive powers such as abstract thought, complex language, social cooperation, cultural imagination, and technological innovation. These advances should have made us more empathetic and peaceable. Yet the paradox of our species is that we used the very intellect evolution granted us to refine violence. We expanded organised warfare, perfected weapons of mass destruction, and became more violent than Neanderthals ever were.
Among the non-violent majority, human fellowship failed in subtler ways— through social identitarianism, propaganda, and ignorance of history. If most people today confine their solidarity to those who share their nationality, religion, or class, it is because disinformation-driven mistrust paints the ‘other’ as a threat. As a result, even after being endowed with the capacity for unity, we chose division.
This moral failure often takes the form of silence, cloaked in specious justifications: that the victims are in a distant land; that speaking out brings us no gain, while staying quiet costs us nothing; that condemning genocide might endanger our interests; that a single voice cannot sway the oppressors; and that our solidarity will do little to alter the victims’ fate.
But these are lame excuses. They are shamelessly invoked to avoid confessing the uncomfortable truth: we are silent because we don’t care.
Needless to say, it cannot be denied that silence can, at times, be a powerful form of resistance. But this holds only for the oppressed who are stunned into wordlessness by trauma. For those who watch from safety, silence is no act of dignity or courage. It is an abdication of social responsibility by which they not just surrender their freedom of speech but lose their humanity.
This makes reclaiming our humanity the biggest requirement for most of us today. But it is not an easy task. Mirza Ghalib had warned: “Bas ke dushwaar hai har kaam ka aasaan hona / Aadmi ko bhi muyassar nahin insaan hona” (Because it is difficult for every task to be easy / Even man finds it hard to become human).
Indeed, to look human is easy; to be one is not. Humanity is about preserving the humanitarian traits that nature has given us. The highest among them in the present state of affairs is our courage to speak for the victims of genocidal violence. We may find temporary refuge in silence. But in the end, silence is a verdict. It does not shield us—it condemns us.
A Faizur Rahman | Secretary-General, Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought
(Views are personal)
(themoderates2020@gmail.com)