...Raqs-e-Bismil...

… Can simply be translated from Urdu (perhaps even Persian, too) as Dance of the Wounded (or Dying). It can be left at that. It can be left at the good humor of the reader to interpret this further. If that can be the case, there is nothing better, really, than that.


If not, the unassuming attempt below can be considered, to see one possible vignette of what this wound and what this dance can possibly mean.


The relationship between Love and Pain has been an important theme for thinkers of all times but too many words have been written about it, leaving one pondering excessively into these details at the cost of feeling them. One research I read once, suggested that even the neural and hormonal mappings of the sensation of pain and emotion of love are similar. In other words, our physiological response to Love and Pain is somehow related too. Instead of getting carried away into these details, it is just imperative to see that Nature deliberately associated these opposing feelings together.

The price of Love is Pain… and it’s a price we pay unconsciously, sometimes begrudgingly, sometimes passionately. The simplistic and holistic example would be childbirth and I see no point of going into detailed particulars of that event, we all know what Love and Pain have to do there.


Metaphors are Nature’s way of driving points home; metaphors are Allah’s favorite games of language in the Quran.

Raqs-e-Bismil is a metaphor.

I will accept I don’t know who juxtaposed this phrase… the meaning, however, has been a common premise (in want of a better word) for Sufis.

To Dance with (the Pain of) Wounds of Divine Love.

Inappropriate.
Inadequate, rather.
It requires much more.

I am not qualified to explain the more-s of it, no fake humility about it, I just know it’s beyond the scope of language and little minds, and minds ours… are little. Still…



Dance.

Literalistic usage of this word is looked down upon, in Islam. Sufis deliberately used Dance, and words like Wine and Chalice… words that would literally hold negative connotations with reference to Islamic theology, because they were critical of literalistic translations and emergence of ritual theology, as opposed to the spiritual content of Quran. Dance probably has no place in Islamic Shariah, but it has been used as a metaphor here to denote something… very powerful.

One of the faithful companions of Prophet SAW, with an arrow in his back, stood up to pray, asked a companion to draw the arrow out and felt no pain.

Is this Fiction?
Perhaps, yes, for the skeptic.

But not for the Lover.

The Lover knows Divine wound in the heart of that companion was so deep and open, that in his Dance of Praise, or Salat, the physical weakness of blood and skin melted away.

It may still be disturbing for some to see Salat being equated with Dance, but this is not the dance where one limb forgets the other limb. It is too transcendental to have anything to do with the physical.

Another Wounded Dancer, one of my favorites, is Salah-ud-Din Ayubi.

I refer to a biography written by a Crusader about this great man, who was a terror in the battlefield. But his terror was less Genghis Khan-like, it was too awe-inspiring to be malevolent. The biographer remained stunned to see this man of absolute grace and pride weep like a lost man on a prayer mat, as if faced with a power not known in the battlefield. Salah-ud-Din would never twist any muscle on the face if it was about a physical pain, but the mystery of Divine wounds… and the mystery of the those tears on the prayer mat.

The examples of these Dancers are tremendous, in spite of my limited knowledge.



Rumi’s poetry is his Dance, Ghazali’s philosophy is his.

Attar’s metaphor of Simurgh is his Dance, Hajwairi’s treatise is his.



And Rabiya Basri.

You have to silence thought when you think about her because her Dance cannot be pointed at, she whirls too much in spacelessness. It is said that someone went to the Holy House once and said they couldn’t see the spirit of Ka’aba inside the physical Ka’aba. And another remarked, the Ka’aba has gone to see the old woman of Basra.

That’s her Dance.

I know of some people who are my contemporaries and are also involved in this Dance. They will never make it to books and that is, perhaps, better for them and for the vignette of their Dance.


We are all dancers, too… and wounded.

But the tunes we dance to, are all earthly. Too earthly and base.
And hah, we are not even apologetic about it.

Little gods and demigods, ordering us what to wear, who to talk to, how to talk, and we dance to that tune. Sometimes when there is a deep emotional trauma, or even a physical wound, we seek something of the Divine attribute, and we make a little effort in His direction. Reminds one of Hallaj’s instruction for that moment,

Wander as though mad in Love,
Amongst those distracted by love.

Love requires madness, it requires absolute surrender and sincerity; deep wounds and perpetually felt pain; and not a hiccoughing distraction for a short span.


It annoys me, in a sad way, to see these words I have written about Divine Love and Pain and Wounds and Dance … when above everything, what is required is experience.


In the words of the poet of Abida Parveen’s Raqs-e-Bismil:

Aqal kay madrassay say uth,
Ishq kay mehkaday mai aa…



Ishq mai teray koh-e-ghum,
Sur pay liya, jo ho… so ho

(I cannot translate that, I am sorry. And something I just noticed, as I plan to sign-out. “Bismil” is really, just the beginning of “Bismillah”, even if they have different meanings in Persian and Arabic).

And Allah knows best.

...Of these Times...

We were wrong, weren’t we?


Five W’s in that line.


We associated the word passion only with hormones kicking at and around puberty. After that, we thought human beings succumb to social pressures and passions are monitored, dictated and exercised by the collective voice of one’s society.


We were wrong.


Any amount of words spoken for 8th October, 2005, will not suffice. Enough words have been spoken and written already about an event that will go down in our collective history and memory as a mark-point of eons, perhaps. Passion of the youth is ventilated in the forms of words, actions, tears, vows and physical presence at the site of disaster.


But one woman, who probably represents countless other women, remains uncaptured by any lens, human and electronic.



Ahmadi Begum.
Aged 87, perhaps even more.


Cannot walk properly anymore, her eye sight brings incorrect information sometimes… but she remains an Amazon at heart, with strength your prodigious sons would be shy of. She has been too much already, migrating to Pakistan in ’47, the wars of ’65 and ’71… and then, the successive deaths of her parents, husband, siblings, even younger siblings, children, and grandchildren, too. I have driven her to and fro the death sites of some of her dearest, closest people… deaths that brought tears to my eyes, even when if I had never exchanged anything but a greeting with the deceased.


But my Amazon grandmother never cried. I never saw tears in her eyes. In desperate failure to understand her disposition, I even went as far as assuming, may be she doesn’t care about anyone or anything.


Aftermath of 8th October, 2005.
Now, I see her cry.


I see her cry and then, I watch the fluctuations as the resource woman augments within her, asking me to bring yards upon yards of stretchable raw cloth, so she can stitch masks out of them for doctors and aide workers to wear. I have no heart to tell her that such an effort would be wasted, we can buy those masks right of the shelf at a pharmacy now, and send them across. She has braided raw strings into strings for those masks… as she weeps at the sight of mass-graves on the television.


Each day, on my return from work, she hands me a list of point persons to contact, numbers she has taken down with teary eyes and shaky hands, as dictated on the television. Each day she narrates her new ‘plan’ for the reconstruction of this destruction – how we can split our house into portions to accommodate families of wounded people who will travel south for medical assistance; or, how we should pool in all our earnings and reserve a good percentage for at least 2 years to support a specific number of families.



Ideas are endless.
We thought rationality should take over by her age, at least?



There are no strict boundaries between reason and idealism anymore, such is the nature of these Times. The distinct worlds of Plato and Aristotle breathe together under the same roof – at last – the rational and empirical worlds.



Is this what God had in mind?
Effective, very effective.

...The Denuding Pen...

I know the garbage is in these genes, my genes.

Garbage? That’s euphemism, still.

As I write this, the counterarguments of moralists drum in my ears, “How can you be so ungrateful to the Creator, for this, umm, umm… talent…?”

They call the paroxysm (or, should I say pathology) of the chaffing pen in hand a “talent”. I don’t blame them. If you can merge colors into shapes on a canvas, you are known as an artist and you live in your own world of idiosyncrasies with this talent of yours. Along the same scale, if you can string a few adjectives in an original way, coupled with an original idea here or there, your talent is writing. And there are myriads then, a writer, reporter, poet, and further branches up that tree...

I ask myself why I assume such an ambivalent tone, if not entirely a negative one, about writing? Why do I refer to this genetic component of mine as garbage, when I have contentedly accepted the more harmful elements of heredity as comfortably-my-own? Why is it not a compliment, anymore, to hear someone say, ‘Ah, but you were born with a silver pen in hand?’

They say alcohol is illegal not because of what its chemical content per se, but because it alters human consciousness.

And so, there is no wickedness in the pen itself, but its effect on one’s consciousness needs a little pondering. Pen of a scholar (and that’s a tricky term to define nowadays) will perpetually yield a different sort of serum from the pen of a fiction-monger or an opinionated blabber.


Worse yet, the pen reveals everything, in spite of you.

Three sentences composed and the human mind lies flat on paper, for everyone to look at and deal with in their own individual way. Many enjoy that exhibitionism perhaps (and I apologize, not too sincerely though, for the loaded meaning of that word) but worshippers of Silence, seekers of grace in reticence… remain in terminal claustrophobia with words flying in the cosmos, on paper. It is as if the nothing in world seems to exist in silence anymore, every meaningless, meaningful joy, act of love and pain MUST be rendered in words … to paradoxically loose its meaning.

And the counterargument of the philologist (linguist) inside me comes out, “But words came into being to communicate. You are too limited to communicate otherwise…philosophers and historians of all dusty ages communicate with us even today, because they left words behind them, for us…”

And the pious rises at this moment too, “And how can you forget? Your Creator corresponded with you in words…”


Did He?

I ask again, did my Creator communicate with words? Does anyone have an answer to that? Weren’t all divine scriptures revealed as inspirations first, and translated into scriptures by the prophets, saints?

Time for the poet now, to shower her emotional gibberish, “When your limbs are wounded, they bleed with blood… when the heart is wounded, how else would it bleed, but with words…”


…

How to argue with them…
When these voices are a part of me, not extrageneous…?

And when, even with the aspiration to join the amorphous worshippers of Silence up in the Alps, the genetic endowment kick chemicals every now and then to pick up that pen – I can’t keep the vigil of silence up for long.

Write, I must.
Begrudgingly.

Ugh! What a waste of cyber space - - -

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