By Fadhil Ahmad Fauzan
Fadhil Ahmad Fauzan, a 21-year old youth from Depok, a small urban town famous for star fruits in West Java, Indonesia, always finds himself in a dilemma about foretelling. He is realistic towards what happened in the present rather than in the future, yet he does not rule out the possibilities.
People easily recognise him by his retro style of dressing and his taste of retro music, which is undoubtedly rare for a Gen Z these days. But that is his signature of the way he is and how he looks.
He is of average Asian height, 5.5 feet or 168 cm, with thick black hair directing backwards like in the The Godfather movie series, and has a fair skin.
He admitted that academically in his school days, he was not a good student. Studying curriculum subjects was never his passion until he was in high school which forced him to be good in all the subjects.
For some time, he felt aimless and depressed, but gratified after finishing high school. He first wanted to enrol in Biotechnology when he applied to join IIUM based on his science background. However, as he failed to fulfil the minimum grade required for the course, he chose Communication instead.
Fadhil’s father is almost reaching his retirement as a human resource manager with a German company, Bauer. His mother is a housewife and a businesswoman, and he has two younger sisters, one of them is chasing her dream to be an animator in a vocational high school.
As an individual, Fadhil has an ADHD (Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder) mental disability. However, that does not back him down from continuing with his life. In fact, he considers this setback being his powerful trait which had shaped him as a friendly, creative, and a visionary person with critical mind.
He loves being in different environment with different culture where he learned to respect others. Among his peers, he is known to be passionate in learning other languages which he finds interesting. One of them is a Dutch language which he thinks has an amazing similarity with English and German. On the top of that, he studies the languages all by himself.
Fadhil is a person full of imagination. Things out of this world would come up to his mind, altering reality through his eyes and be with it. This is one of the effects of his mental disability and he wishes to use his imagination to write a novel. A lot of these skills that he acquired are derived from the movies he watched and the video games he played.
Fadhil has his own tastes of reading. He loves fantasy fictions that narrate something irregular in this world, such as “The Witcher” series, written by Adrezej Sapkowski, about a sole monster hunter making his way to earn gold by the contracts people put bounty on.
Then, there is the recent book Fadhil was reading, a horror-themed book called “Shadowland” by Peter Straub, where two boys are spending their holiday together in a place called Shadowland, and one of them performs a magic trick and everything turns sour and sinister.
Observing western political news and doing critical analysis is Fadhil’s next charm, especially regarding liberal ideologies that centred around free speech like the LGBT community and its roots. He deemed these ideas to be deviations of true human nature and against the teachings of Islam.
He has been very serious against the LGBT community fearing that this might indoctrinate society with the idea to live together in peace with these particular individuals, but this is a subterfuge to invite people to their community.
“I honestly get the idea about freedom of speech that everyone can be or think of whatever they want to do. But look, there is no limit to human behaviour when people fall to their lust and don’t know what the consequences are. Yes, it’s not only homosexuality that spreads HIV, but most of the things are from them,” Fadhil noted.
His sources of news, especially regarding political developments came mainly from CNN, BBC and Vox. He thinks the news anchors of these channels are most likely to touch on liberal ideologies.
Given his ability to speak Dutch, he is able to read newspapers like Volkskrant and watch news on NOS (Dutch Broadcasting Network).
He is steadfast about his morality, without closing his mind to discover what the world has to offer. The indoctrination of western concept of freedom of speech, has spread across the United States through education as Fadhil has read about it in CNN articles, backed by Muslims making commentary on YouTube. He felt that this has crippled the young minds of today’s generation.
He noted an article on CNN that says, “This is what happens when gender roles are forced on kids.” Children are now taught that gender is a social construct, which means that it depends on the way a person acts or behaves.
Studying Communication, especially journalism, has given Fadhil a lot of lessons on how news media work, like the fundamental functions of the media, the different types of content, and its target audience. From this experience, he hopes to use the media to deflect the western liberal ideology which he is opposed to. He is willing to dedicate himself to defend the traditional values of humanity and the teachings of Islam.
Another reason he plans to choose journalism as a career is that he wants to reveal the truth to the public. Fadhil is steadfast about his stance, he will never allow anything to stand in his way. He is assured that the truth is where people realised they have been played out in a game they would suffer the losses.
He noted that an example of the truth that has never been revealed was an essay written by George C. Harring about the “My Lai Massacre” that took place in Vietnam on March 16, 1968, where the US soldiers killed 400 innocent civilians, and raped and murdered the women. It was the US that often turned the storyline and influenced the world that they are the real heroes. “But, behind all of that is something else,” Fadhil claimed.
For his future, Fadhil expressed the hope to be a more revealing journalist. Today, he is still honing his sword of choice which he feels is perfect to fight what he is against.***
(This article is written as part of individual assignment series for Feature Writing class)