The Furnace of Thought: Why Intellectual Freedom Must Burn Bright
By Zainab Salimi
There’s a house I visit often. It exists only in my mind, but its rooms are real.
I sit alone in the library, the kind that smells of ink, dust, and memory. The fire crackles in the hearth and I stare into it, watching it breathe. This flame, to me, is freedom. Not the shallow, patriotic kind engraved on statues, but the raw, difficult kind that burns, sometimes too hot, sometimes too bright — but always necessary. Around me are books some have tried to ban, voices some have tried to silence, truths too unruly to be tamed. This Library may not be real, but the fire is. But lately I’ve felt the room grow colder — not because the fire is gone, but because more and more hands are reaching for the extinguisher.
It’s strange, isn’t it? We celebrate books as tools for understanding and knowledge, but only the right kind of books. The ones that don’t discuss race, gender, sexuality, or systemic injustice too openly. But the most scary thing is that censorship rarely arrives as a villain twirling its mustache. Instead it comes dressed as “concerned parents,” “curriculum standards,” “protecting the children.” Yet when entire reading lists vanish overnight, for example Trump's book ban list, what disappears are: black authors, queer authors, Indigenous voices all under the excuse of preserving “patriotic values.”. Because a well-read student might ask too many questions, notice contraindications in literature, and stop swallowing the world in black-and-white. The freedom to read isn’t about endorsing every idea—it’s about having the right to turn the page at all. When politicians and parents try to smother that fire, our bookshelves become the same sanitized story as if discomfort is more dangerous than ignorance. We cannot champion liberty in fragments. You cannot silence speech without eventually silencing rights. Censorship of narratives not only restricts expression but also actively reshapes reality by denying young people access to diverse ideas. Which only undermines their intellectual development rather than safeguarding them.
A library, no matter how grand, is hollow if its shelves are censored. It thrives not on silence, but on the clash of ideas— and voices . Without the freedom to speak up and disagree, we aren’t thinking. We’re just repeating what has been given to us. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her TED Talk, sums this up well: “Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”That is what censorship does. When speech is suppressed, not only are individuals silenced, but entire identities are flattened into caricatures. Political systems rely on them because a population that cannot speak its truth cannot resist the lie.
This is not a theoretical threat; it's a historical and ongoing one. Colonial regimes erased indigenous languages to erase indigenous resistance. Authoritarian governments throughout history have criminalized protest speech and banned critical journalism. Even in so-called democracies, speech is selectively valued. In many countries, governments now manipulate or shut down social media platforms. During political unrest, Myanmar and Sudan have cut off internet access entirely. Even in countries like the UK or Australia, algorithms often suppress or deprioritize dissenting views and When marginalized voices challenge the status quo, they’re dismissed as “radical,” and we remain in a culture so allergic to friction that it prefers silence over complexity.
I myself felt this when we had to write persuasive pieces about events in history. I wanted to write about the conflicts happening in the Middle East, the place where I was born and raised, and in Pakistan, where my blood and tongue resides. Not to be provocative, but because I was trying to make sense of what I saw: headlines full of suffering and countries reduced to statistics. My teacher hesitated and said, “Maybe choose something a little less political?”
Less political. As if the fear and grief I’d heard at dinner tables or seen on the news weren’t appropriate for a classroom. That moment felt like quiet erasure. Like someone gently pulling my voice away from the fire.
And so I return to the library, but I sit a little closer. Because this fire—this messy, magnificent fire is all we have. Intellectual freedom is not just the luxury of thought—it is the labor of resistance. It is our right to read what makes us uncomfortable, to speak out against power, and to exist without having to shrink ourselves to be heard.
So let them reach for the extinguisher. I will reach for the flame.
Author’s Note
I’m Zainab, a 14-year-old who lives in Dubai, a city that never really pauses—and neither do I. I love debate, painting when I need to breathe, and finding clarity somewhere between a netball court and swimming. Yet I always find myself returning to my notebook, that quiet place where I can make sense of things. It taught me that there’s power in putting your voice on paper, even when it shakes..
