BY SHAJAHAN MADAMPAT

SIR Salman Rushdie, that beloved symbol of freedom of expression, has now turned Khomeini, so to speak, exposing, in an ironic twist of tale, the hypocrisy and double standards that marked the entire liberal case for unqualified and unrestrained freedom of representation.

The man, in whose defence the world’s intelligentsia mounted an intellectual blitzkrieg against the alleged medievalism of the Muslim masses, has threatened to sue the publishers of a book about him by a former police officer, Ron Evans. In his forthcoming book, On Her Majesty’s Service: My Incredible Life in the World’s Most Dangerous Close Protection Squad, Evans dares to paint a rather unflattering portrait of the writer, whose unflattering ways stirred up controversies ever since he began to write. Rushdie alleges that the book “destroys his character” and “presents wholly made up incidents as facts.” (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

Guardian has compiled an interesting list of writers and their rooms here. Here’s a detailed account of Kureishi’s room:

“The garden gnome with his bottom showing on the desk was given to me by my son. I’ve got three sons – 13-year-old twins and an eight year old – and almost all the objects you see on the shelves are to do with them: they are of no intrinsic value but they remind me in some way of my boys.

The photographs are also mainly of my kids. And above the desk there’s a very sexy picture of Kate Moss. I think every writer needs a picture of Kate Moss in their room as an inspiration. Kate is from South London like me, and, indeed, like my girlfriend, also a Croydon girl.

I’ve got thousands of CDs because I always listen to music when I’m writing. I’ve done it since I was a teenager, when I first started writing in my bedroom in Bromley. Silence makes me feel rather uncomfortable, nervous. (more…)

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…)

The Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, winner of the intellectuals poll undertaken by Prospect, has been hailed as “the modern face of the Sufi Ottoman tradition.” The magazine further states that he is “at home with globalisation and PR, and fascinated by science”, Gulen also influences Turkish politics through his association with the ruling AK party in Turkey.

The results of the Prospect/FP 2008 global intellectuals poll can be found here

Is it possible to be a true religious believer and at the same time enjoy good relations with people of other faiths or none? Moreover, can you remain open to new ideas and new ways of thinking?
(more…)

Saw this story here a while ago

Christie’s South Asian modern and contemporary art sale here March 20 will feature works of leading 20th and 21st century artists from various countries in the region, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The sale will focus on prime examples of many different movements, styles and highlights and will include works from modern masters M.F. Husain, Francis Newton Souza, Tyeb Mehta, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Syed Haider Raza and Ram Kumar as well as works from leading contemporary artists including Atul Dodiya, Bharti Kher and Jitish Kallat.

A 1981 untitled painting by Mehta, the lauded master of Indian Modernism, is one of the sale highlights and is estimated at $600,000-800,000. The painting depicts two female figures intermingled, demonstrating Mehta’s formal and psychological considerations, and the two forms suggest the tangled figures of his later “Mahisasura” series. (more…)

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…)

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…)

Found a great excerpt from Mohammed Hani’s novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes where he recounts on his time at the Pakistani military academy during General Zia’s regime.

ONCE UPON a time, when I was 18, I found myself locked up in Pakistan’s military academy’s cell along with my friend and partner-in-crime, Khalid. We had thought we were doing charity work but the Academy officers obviously didn’t share our ideals. We had been caught trying to help out another classmate pass his chemistry exam, something he had failed to do twice already and this was his last chance to save himself from being expelled. The logistics of our rescue effort involved a wireless set improvised in the Sunday Hobbies Club, a microphone concealed in a crepe bandage around the left elbow of our academically challenged friend, and a Sanyo FM radio receiver. We were running our operation from the rooftop of a building next to the examination hall. We were caught red-handed, whispering a reversible chemical equation into the transistor. We were in breach of every single standard operating procedure in the Academy rule book, and faced certain expulsion. We had just started our glorious careers and now we faced the prospect of being sent home and having to explain to our parents how, instead of training to become gentlemen-officers, we were running an exam-cheatingmafia from the rooftop of the most well-disciplined training institute in the country.

For two days, while we waited in that cell to find out about our fate, we planned our future. Khalid, always the worldly-wise one in this outfit, immediately decided that he was going to join the merchant navy and travel the world. I tried hard to think what I would do. I came from a farming family where even the most adventurous members of our clan had only managed to branch out into planting sugarcane instead of potatoes. Education, jobs, careers were absolutely alien concepts. The Academy was supposed to be my escape from a lifetime that revolved around wildly fluctuating potato crop cycles. And here I was, already a prisoner of sorts, facing a journey back to a life I thought I”d left behind. Maybe I’ll become a teacher, I said vaguely. The farmers in my village used to show some vague respect to teachers in the primary school I attended.Or a mechanic. I was a member of the car-maintenance club in the Hobbies Club, after all. It was considered an elite club since there was no car to maintain. It was basically a Hobbies Club for people who hated hobbies.I can’t even change a bloody tyre, Khalid reminded me. We managed to stave off the impending expulsion through a combination of confession and denial: we lied (we were listening to cricket commentary on the transistor radio), we grovelled (we were ashamed, ashamed, ashamed of our un-officer like behaviour) and we pleaded our undying passion for defending the borders of our motherland. They looked at our relatively clean records, our sterling academic achievements, let us off the hook and awarded us a (more…)

Fred Halliday begins his argument in the captioned article published by Open Democracy with these lines:

In many European countries in particular (the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Germany, as well as Britain) “Islam”-related issues connected to the veil, medical hygiene, or religious imagery become the trigger for entrenching opinion, drawing battle-lines and fomenting indignation. If the pattern is to be broken and a more constructive form of public discourse conducted, it can only be done by informed reason, including historical and linguistic clarification.

And makes some pertinent points especially for the :

A common confusion is made between sharia and fiqh (Islamic juridsprudence) – the corpus of law which has arisen over centuries and which forms the basis for law in many Muslim countries, and is obliged like any modern legal system to pronounce on all matters, from the personal to the commercial. This is not divinely sanctioned. Indeed the only parts of Islam that have such sanction are classified as deen (religion).

Fiqh, therefore, is a system of conventional law, without divine sanction, and allowing of many interpretations. Beyond the fact that the Sunni world has four main schools of fiqh – Maleki, Shafei, Hanbali, Hanafi – each reflecting developments in medieval Islamic society and politics, the Shi’a have their own, distinct, system. Where the confusion has arisen – and where both Islamic fundamentalists and well-meaning but ill-informed western observers like the Canterbury archbishop have contributed to the problem – is in pretending that there is one single legal text (sharia) and that this supposedly univocal code carries divine authority. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Full article can be accessed here

The Message of the Quran
Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (Formerly Leopold Weiss)

When studying the Quran, one frequently encounters what may be described as “key­- phrases” – that is to say, statements which provide a clear, concise indication of the idea underlying a particular passage or passages: for instance, the many references to the creation of man “out of dust” and “out of a drop of sperm”, pointing to the lowly biological origin of the human species; or the statement in the ninety-ninth surah (Az-Zalzalah) that on Resurrection Day “he who shall have done an atom’s weight of good, shall behold it; and he who shall have done an atom’s weight of evil, shall behold it” – indicating the ineluctable afterlife consequences of, and the responsibility for, all that man consciously does in this world; or the divine declaration (in 38:27), “We have not created heaven and earth and all that is between them without meaning and purpose (baatilan), as is the surmise of those who are bent on denying the truth.”

Instances of such Quranic key-phrases can be quoted almost ad infinitum, and in many varying formulations. But there is one fundamental statement in the Quran which occurs only once, and which may be qualified as “the key-phrase of all its key-phrases”: the statement in verse 3:7 to the effect that the Quran “contains messages that are clear in and by themselves (ayat-e-muhkamaat) as well as others that are allegorical (mutashabihaat)”. It is this verse which represents, in an absolute sense, a key to the understanding of the Qur’anic message and makes the whole of it accessible to “people who think” (li-qawmin yatafakkarUn). (more…)

A Poem by K.G. Sankarapillai

Dear Che

Dear Che,
you came to our university campus
in mid sixties
with a comrade and a modernist friend
with visuals of jungles past and present
with a vision of a new battle for justice.

Like a fresh wind of October
you joined us
moved us
renewed us
and smoothened our entry into history
with love, dreams and plans.

You told us about the sleeping rebel powers
of mountains and forests of the new minds;
quite often you talked of the day when
the Andes would become
the Sierra Maestra of America.

Our modernist friend said:
you are the red star over the world
tarnished by America;
you are the future of the world
crippled by America;
you are the Jesus of the modern age
crucified by America.

Although you remained evergreen in us
showed us the exit to the oceans
from the lyrical ponds of our
post Independent Indian youth;
the exit to the storm from the water lily breeze
of our weeping romantic poems;
dear doctor, you redefined us
living with us
living for us
living in us
passing the confidence of torrents into our deserts
weaving sunlit paths into our prodigal nights.

You brought world into our words
and future into our past.
You opened blast-furnaces for our ore. (more…)

Herat Hami

A poem by Wimalaratne Kumaragame (a translation)

Herat Hami who lived in Aliya Watunu Wawe*1
Even someone like me was more important than him
Though Harat Hami cut dead bodies*2
He was twenty, thirty times more decent than me
In the hospital of Aliya Watunu Wawe
He spent his time removing night soil
Though he lived happily with a monthly salary
Whenever I saw him I was moved with sadness

A hard, wiry body, handsome and thin
Not much of age, fresh and young
No wife as yet
I was perplexed by the job he did

Making someone like me sad
Each day he carried my excrement
If someone dies suddenly
Doctor comes
He cut the dead bodies in front of us

None from the farmer, worker or elite caste
Ever did such a job
No known disease of mind he had
He did no harm to any dwellers of the forest

He spread a docile smile
Every word of his spread ahimsa
Every evening he drank burning water
His heart overflowed with kindness

His sister was stabbed
Recalling her my eyes get wet
He did not cry the day his sister died
When she had a fever he wailed with tears in his eyes

When his younger sister died he went with a doctor
Her dead body was cut by Herat Hami
Though the villagers blamed him in harsh words for this
He did not care much about the world’s violent flesh
As he was not born in a rich mansion
He went to the temple at every Poya
He was a member of the newly built stupa
Even more than that he respected Iyyenayaka*3

Translation by Basil Fernando (more…)

Amir Khusrau

I am a pagan (worshiper) of love: the creed (of Muslims) I do not need;
Every vein of mine has become (taut like a) wire; the (pagan) girdle I do not need.
Leave from my bedside, you ignorant physician!
The only cure for the patient of love is the sight of his beloved
other than this no medicine does he need.
If there be no pilot on our ship, let there be none:
We have God in our midst: the pilot we do not need.
The people of the world say that Khusrau worships idols.
So I do, so I do; the people I do not need,
the world I do not need.

Last year, I came across a Charles Homer Haskins lecture that Dr Annemarie Schimmel delivered in 1993. Aside from the amazing events and milestones of her life, what struck me was her immersion in an infinite ‘learning’ cycle. I am reproducing some lines from the lecture and a dazzling poem of hers below. Dr Schimmel left this world in 2003 for another voyage. As an extra-ordinary scholar (over 150 publications to her credit), a Rumi disciple and an odd Sufi herself, the world is not the same place without her.

However, her erudite and passionate writings will continue to warm our hearts. Sang-i-Meel Publishers (http://www.sang-e-meel.com/) in Pakistan have done a huge favour by re-printing selected titles for the Pakistani audience. (more…)