Thanks to ID, I found this beautiful translation of a verse by Kabir. The idea is profound and is truly representative of Kabir’s philosophy shaped by the yogis, Sufis and mystical traditions of the Indian subcontinent.

“I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.

I laugh when I hear that men go on pilgrimage to find God.”

~Kabir

My earlier post on Kabir - click here, which resulted into a full fledged paper published by Jamia Millia’s journal

Book Review

Name of the Book: Sacred Kerala—A Spiritual Journey

Author: Dominique-Sila Khan

Publisher: Penguin, New Delhi, 2009

Reviewed by: Yoginder Sikand

The southern Indian state of Kerala has a unique population mix. A little less than half of Kerala’s inhabitants are Hindus, who belong to various castes. The rest are Muslims and Christians, in roughly equal number, and a miniscule number of Jews, who form India’s oldest Jewish community. In contrast to much of north India, inter-community relations in Kerala have always been fairly harmonious, although the situation is beginning to change today. At the popular level, economic and social ties and inter-dependence between Kerala’s different religious communities have given birth to a strong sense of Malayali identity that transcends religious boundaries. This has been facilitated by the use of the Malayalam language by all of the state’s communities as well as a long-standing tradition of religious overlapping or shared religious identities, which is what this fascinating book is all about. (more…)

My piece that appeared in The Friday Times (May 29-4 June, 2009 issue). I have argued that the silence of Pakistani writers on terrorism and extremism is finally breaking  

	‘Fallen Indus’, a painting by the author
	‘Ignorance Is Bliss’, a miniature by Saira Wasim

Since the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and the global hysteria about ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’, Pakistan has faced the greatest of existential challenges after its dismemberment in 1971. As a frontline ally of the US in the war on terror, Pakistani society and polity have been engulfed by growing militancy and acts of violence. Whilst there is no single definition of ‘terrorism’, the mainstream media and policymakers – in the service of imperial rhetoric aimed to justify and perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq – have established terrorism as the major threat to domestic and regional peace in South Asia. Acts of premeditated and organised violence in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have thus assumed a central place in discourse on regional cooperation or its converse: the rivalries between the constructed nation states and their irresponsible power-elites.

 In this milieu, South Asian citizens have been the victims of violence, uncertainty and acrimony that have only led to the exacerbation of poverty, inequality, ascendancy of militarism and the war-mantra. All of this is taking place when globalization is relentlessly seeping into domestic economies, cultures and social systems. Where does this leave the writers and poets of the (more…)

I am sharing a message from Suhayl Saadi here: The website associated with my forthcoming novel, Joseph’s Box has been launched. There are stories – fables, one might say – tangential to, and drawing from, the main narrative of the book as well as other information. The site will develop over time. If you pre-order the books now from the site, you will get them early. Happy reading!

About the novel: Recently bereaved Zuleikha Chashm Framareza MacBeth wades into the Clyde one morning and recovers a large box, with which she becomes obsessed. The discovery brings her together with Alex, a lute-playing clerk, and they manage to open the box – only to find six more boxes inside, each of which can be opened only by following a cryptic clue. The clues lead Zulie and Alex on a physical and emotional journey, modulated through music, across Glasgow, Argyllshire, Lincolnshire, Sicily, Lahore, and finally the frozen peaks of the ‘Roof of the World’. Meanwhile Zulie, a troubled doctor, has been sucked into the vortex of the terminally ill Archie MacPherson, an ambivalent, visionary Second World War airman and Glasgow shipyard worker. In the manner of a lord of misrule, Archie’s dying consciousness begins to shape and ultimately define Zuleikha and Alex’s quest as they progress through the seven Sufi stations of sacrifice, truth, power, obedience, life, memory and beauty. Drawing on a wide framework of cultural and spiritual reference, uniquely blending contemporary Western literature and traditional Arabo-Persian storytelling, this is an extraordinary and ambitious novel with a visceral sensuality and subtle touches of magical realism, in the vein of Okri, Murakami and Pamuk.

ISBN 9781906120443; trade pbk 216x138mm (with coloured endpapers); 688 pages.Joseph’s Box will be available on publication date as an e-book via this website and the publishers’ website only.

My piece published in The Friday Times (October 24 issue)

Who is entitled to keep the child – one who is a better, nurturing mother, or the one who may be the natural mother but could not care for the child? The larger question then haunts the audience: who is entitled to ownership – the one who has the deed or the one who tills the land?

Ajoka Theatre has revived a production that was first staged twenty three years ago. A deft adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, its vernacular version, Chaak Chakkar, is a timeless comment on the viciousness of Pakistan’s exploitative culture of power politics. Perhaps the duo, Shahid Nadeem the playwright, and Madeeha Gauhar the director, would have tried to capture bits of social reality in the mid 1980s when General Zia was still the Lord Master of Pakistan. Why did Ajoka choose to stage this after a gap of two decades?

As Madeeha Gauhar explained: “In 2008 one marvels at how Brecht had foreseen the chaos, the anarchy, the shameless switching of loyalties of recent years, especially since the return of the popular leadership exile.” The seat of total power, “symbolized as Lal Mahal, is uncannily similar to Lal Masjid and Lal Haveli of our times,” she added. (more…)

Rumi on knowing ourselves

Suppose you know the definitions of all substances
and their derivatives,
what good is this to you?
Know the true definition of yourself.
That is indispensable.
Then, when you know your own definition, flee from it,
that you may attain to the One who cannot be defined,
O sifter of the dust.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ (more…)

Courtesy AHRC

I come from there

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland…..

*****************

Identity Card

Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the nineth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry? (more…)

by Farid al-Din ‘Attar (1142-1220)

1
We are the Magians of old,
Islam is not the faith we hold;
In irreligion is our fame,
And we have made our creed a shame.

2
Now to the tavern we repair
To gamble all our substance there,
Now in the monastery cell
We worship with the infidel.

3
When Satan chances us to see
He doffs his cap respectfully,
For we have lessons to impart
To Satan in the tempter’s art.

4
We were not in such nature made
Of any man to be afraid;
Head and foot in naked pride
Like sultans o’er the earth we ride.

5
But we, alas, aweary are
And the road is very far;
We know not by what way to come
Unto the place that is our home.

6
And therefore we are in despair
How to order our affair
Because, wherever we have sought,
Our minds were utterly distraught.

7
When shall it come to pass, ah when,
That suddenly, beyond our ken,
We shall succeed to rend this veil
That hath our whole affair conceal?

8
What veil so ever after this
Apparent to our vision is,
With the flame of knowledge true
We shall consume it through and through.

9
Where at the first in that far place
We come to the world of space,
Our soul by travail in the end
To that perfection shall ascend.

10
And so shall ‘Attar Shattered be
And, rapt in sudden ecstasy,
Soar to godly vision, even
Beyond the veils of earth and heaven.

Translated by A. J. Arberry

Raza Rumi

Fahmida Riaz is Pakistan’s premier female poet. She became a sensation in the early 1970s when her bold, feminist poetry created a stir in the convention ridden world of Urdu poetry. Riaz was expressive, sometimes explicit, and politically charged. She created a completely new genre in Urdu poetry with a post-modern sensibility. Later, she remained prominent with her defiance of General Zia’s martial law, her exile to India and the continuous evolution of her fiction and poetry.

Since the late 1990s, Fahmida Riaz has discovered Jalaluddin Rumi, the 12th century Turkish poet and jurist, and now an international celebrity. Her recent publication – Yeh Khana-e aab-o-gil – is a unique translation of Rumi’s ghazals in the same rhyme and meter. Since her navigation of the Rumi universe, she has explored another dimension of her individual and cultural consciousness, where the influence of Islamic scholars and Sufis is paramount.

Last winter, she read a letter by Hazrat Ali bin Abi Talib (AS), the fourth Caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), while browsing a translation of Nahaj ul Balagha (a collection of sermons, letters and sayings of the Caliph). Later, in an email, she related to her friends across the globe how angry she felt for not knowing about this letter all her life, and how the real jewels of Muslim history were concealed “generation after generation.” (more…)

I am growing fond of Tabish Khair’s poetry. Just read this remarkable poem:

Cartoon Wars

Let’s spell out this world.

Generally speaking, we are civilised.
Evil is something others do, mostly.
Not that we are perfect. No, that’s not what I mean.
Occasionally we make mistakes.
Criticism of it should bear that in mind.
It happens: a bomb gone bad, some brutal soldiers.
Doesn’t mean our intentions were not good.
Evil is something others do, mostly.

Germans, or at least Nazis, and communists, Muslims:
Evil is something they do, mostly.
Now the difference between us and them is this:
On every occasion we were willing to meet them, but they
Could not imagine a world with us, with people like us
In it. No, they can’t. That’s the problem. They
Don’t mean what they say, say what they mean. Damn.
Evil is something they do, always.

Came across this excellent article by Farooq Suleria that rather candidly talks about the dearth of creativity in Muslims of today. I love the poem by the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani at the end. First an excerpt from this piece and then the poem:

…the solution to all our problems is always simple: return to an imagined past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century, never existed. Every time, a scientist in the West is ready with an invention, our readymade answer is: we knew about it 1,400 years ago what the West has found only now. We kill Theo van Gogh when confronted with a film. We burn down our own cities in response to a blasphemous and racist caricature. Still, we refuse to understand that our answer to every “provocation” is either a fatwa or mindless violence – perhaps because creativity is anathema to us. Not because we lack fertile minds, but because we lack liberation and freedom — liberation from self-imposed mental, moral, and cultural censors. And freedom to think and express. Time to heed the great Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, who said:

Five thousand years

Growing beards

In our caves.

Our currency is unknown,

Our eyes are a haven for flies.

Friends,

Smash the doors,

Wash your brains,

Wash your clothes.

Friends,

Read a book,

Write a book,

Grow words, pomegranates and grapes,

Sail to the country of fog and snow.

Nobody knows you exist in caves.

People take you for a breed of mongrels.

Christian Spurrier on the tragedy of Gramsci’s prison years as revealed in letters to his wife and sons (Guardian)

When I see the actions and hear the words of men who have been in prison for five, eight or 10 years, when I observe the spiritual deformations they have undergone, it gives me a cold shiver and I begin to doubt my own power to watch over myself.” So wrote Antonio Gramsci to his Russian wife Julka, two years into the prison sentence that ended with his death in 1937. Gramsci’s subsequent fame rests on his prison notebooks – political essays on fascism and capitalism written while in Mussolini’s jails. But his letters, of which there were more than 500, tell the story behind that work. And they are a remarkable account of imprisonment.

Arrested on November 8, 1926, aged 35, Gramsci was a Sardinian-born journalist and agitator who had fought his way to the leadership of the Italian communist party. He was famous for his campaigning articles and had worked closely with Mussolini in the days when Il Duce was still a socialist and editor of the worker’s paper L’Avanti. Perhaps because of this, from the moment Mussolini seized power in 1922, Gramsci knew his position was precarious. Aged 35, he was arrested on November 8, 1926 despite parliamentary immunity and sent to the prison island of Ustica, where he expected to spend five years.

His letters from Ustica are combative, optimistic and full of fascination at the strange new world into which he had been flung. He recounts seeing a pig arrested and treated as a felon and being instructed in the rivalries of the Sicilian and Calabrian mafias. He told his mother: “I felt I was living in a fantastic novel.” To Julka, he wrote: “We two are still young enough to look forward to seeing our children grow up together.” (more…)

An Interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Islam’s Spiritual Science in the Modern Age

By WAJAHAT ALI

Rumi, the best selling poet in America today, was a practicing Muslim and a Sufi master who lived nearly eight hundred years ago. His poetry and lyrical verses exalting his desire for the Divine, as well as describing his ecstatic pain and yearning for his “beloved” continue to inspire lovers to this day. Due to mass commercialization and weak translations of Rumi’s poetry, Sufism has unfortunately become synonymous with a saccharine, Hallmark card, Deepak Chopra’d simplification of Islam’s most profound spiritual science. Even within the global Muslim community, significant controversies and acrimonious debates have arisen around the validity of Sufism within the theological framework of the religion. Many, such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of the most prolific and well known Muslim American scholars, argue that Sufism represents the spiritual engine and heart of Islam, which is rooted within the core of its scholastic traditions, and is capable of revitalizing modern day Islam rooted in literalism and political extremism. In discussing his latest work, “The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition,” we talked about Rumi’s spiritual influence on the modern world, the role of Sufism in Islamic history and tradition, and the critique of Sufism as an antiquated model of esotericism.

ALI: Let’s talk about Rumi. I’m sure you know Coleman Barks [“Translator” of countless Rumi poetry books], correct?

NASR: Yes.

ALI: Even though Coleman Barks and others try to divorce Rumi from his God consciousness, it nonetheless emanates in his poetry. Rumi is the best selling poet in America today. What is it about his work, which is thoroughly rooted in Islam and Islamic sciences, that appeals to mainstream audiences? (more…)

Amrita Pritam never woke up on the afternoon of October 31, 2005 and the world is emptier without her musings. She embodied the fullness of poetic expression, creativity and the intensity of a woman in the perpetual state of love. Amrita’s voice was rooted in the South Asian idiom with all its contradictions, diversity and a faint recognition of fate. Her remarkable affinity with the depths of the Punjabi language adds to her iconoclastic status in India, Pakistan and wherever Punjabi is spoken and appreciated. Yet her audience has been global as well: her work was translated into dozens of world languages.

One of her poems makes the following confession:

Today I have erased the number of my house
And removed the stain of identity on my street’s forehead
And I have wiped the direction on each road
But if you really want to meet me
Then knock at the doors of every country
Every city, every street
And wherever a glimpse of a free spirit exists
That will be my home
(translation by author)

Through the course of her life, this free spirit generated controversy but she never concerned herself with the mundane. Outspoken, prolific and deeply spiritual, Amrita existed within self-defined, non-conformist parameters. She lived with her partner for 41 years, shunned religious and sectarian identities and rejected the political divide of the left and right:

No absolutes for something as relative as a human life
No rules for something so tender as a heart..

Amrita was born in 1919 in the Gujranwala district and educated in Lahore. Her first collection of poetry, Amrit Lehran (Ripples of Nectar) was published in 1936 when she was hardly 17. By the early 1940s, five collections of her poetry had been published. However, it was in the tragic turn of events during Partition that Amrita’s poetic genius found the real groundswell of expression. Her meteoric fame is often ascribed to the masterpiece poem “Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” when a neo-Heer emerged on the literary landscape of the Punjab during the 1947 trauma. This poem, addressed to Waris Shah  the author of the Punjabi epic of immortal love, Heer Ranjha summed up the anguish of millions, particularly women in the Punjab who suffered a disproportionate share of the tragedy.

I say to Waris Shah today, speak from your grave
And add a new page to your book of love
Once one daughter of Punjab wept, and you wrote your long saga;
Today thousands weep, calling to you Waris Shah:
Arise, o friend of the afflicted; arise and see the state of Punjab,
Corpses strewn on fields, and the Chenaab flowing with much blood.
Someone filled the five rivers with poison,
And this same water now irrigates our soil.
Where was lost the flute, where the songs of love sounded?
And all Ranjha’s brothers forgot to play the flute.
Blood has rained on the soil, graves are oozing with blood,
The princesses of love cry their hearts out in the graveyards.
Today all the Quaidos have become the thieves of love and beauty,
Where can we find another one like Waris Shah?
Waris Shah! I say to you, speak from your grave
And add a new page to your book of love.
(Translation by Darshan Singh Maini) (more…)

“Doors in Metal” by Rumi

Tell me, O Love,
Who is more elegant,
You or this vast garden of yours?

Shine, O moon,
You are an inspiration
to all who look upon the night sky.

Sour will turn to sweet,
Blasphemy will turn to truth,
Thorn bushes will turn to jonquil,
A hundred bodies will spring to life
with one breath of yours.

You place doors in the sky.
You place wings on the human heart.
You enchant every mind
and bewilder both worlds. (more…)