... A step at a time...

Easy said.

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...From the Town of Selective Blind Spots...

Cities have their idiosyncratic temperaments, flavors and side effects. Just the way people look at you in a city, sends some of those flavors up your nostrils. There is something ironic about this city. It is perhaps the latest organized city on the country’s map, but markets here are lined with old book shops and antique stores. Hub of documented politics, colored number plates, plaster-faced people in big cars, labeled houses, guards and trees, but something about the temperament of this place stills any possibility of real life philosophy.
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Is it just this city or the whole country? Like a score board of an ill-fated game, every morning newspaper brings with it a certain number of casualties, from Swat, Waziristan, Islamabad, Karachi and other cities, with phrases like ‘human limbs hanging from lamp posts and trees’. I read somewhere that philosophy is for the rich and poetry for the poor but I don’t know if either of these arts exist anymore. Or perhaps I am a simpleton, unable to filter them out from modern day journalism. When I realized I will be moving here, I was thinking trees, winters and long silent roads, not to stimulate me to write but to pacify some worn neurons. But something about the city has changed. There are hidden blood stains and a post-traumatic silence. Blood of the previously unseen, down trodden articles of this rich city – madrassah going people, security guards, dhabba owners. Before these carnages, people probably thought there was no poor man in the capital.
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A Pakistan Studies teacher once told us about his friend, who had come from East Pakistan. He sniffed the air of the capital here and said, “I smell the jute of Bengal here”, since it was, perhaps, the work of dissatisfied Bengalis that fed the establishment of a capital in West Pakistan. I don’t know, I wasn’t there - I am not qualified to verify or contest the statement. But I smell the blood of many other cities here.
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I can suddenly see the poor people here. They suddenly mean something, like the mountains up North suddenly meant something more after their long silence, on that October day two years ago. Like the blood lost in all other cities is fueling something right here, right at the heart of where the blood is dispelled from. Incoherent, self-contradictory, illogical philosophy – that is all I can produce for now.

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I love this city, but it will never be mine, not with its selective blind spot.

… From the town of Headless Mannequins…

So, we give in.
It’s not so easy to enter Heaven. No secrets, equivocation or exaggeration about it.
So, we give in. Sometimes, we give up.
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How simple it was for him, the Sahabi who recited the qalima, carried a sword and became a martyr, in the real sense of the word martyr. No battle of nafs in everyday things, no prayers, nothing. Faith and martyrdom, direct and conclusive. But I wouldn’t go so far with assuming, who knows, he may have wanted to live through this test here. Allah knows.

Back in the town where the clear distinction between native men and women is black and white, literally. The town where you see two mosques for every twenty houses. The town that almost entirely kneels and bows with every categorical solar positioning. The town with His House on the left, and Prophet’s home on the right. The town, where, like before, I feel protected and a little more honest to myself than my hometown allows, or will ever allow?



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The town of Headless Mannequins.


God says there’s a purpose for all of this.
I believe Him. I don’t see it, but if He says it’s there, I believe it. I’ll try to, at least.

... About the Heart...

From the time human language began making sense to you, it has been about the colored paper called money.
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It has been about documents.
It has been about rules set down by the convoluted growth of our civilization.
It has been about those with more white hair on their heads than you.
It has been about those born with power through a little game of destiny.
It has been about those whose synapses work out more magic than yours ever would.
It has been about conventions that have passed down, questioned and unquestioned.
It has been about those who profess a little more faith than you do.
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The world has always been about them.
When was it about the heart, anyway?

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One dream or a thousand dreams, who consults the heart when it comes to decisions? When you were a speechless toddler, you could see your dreams through: no documents, rules, synapses or conventions stood between the heart and reality. It was all about the heart for you then. But the minute your secret went out, the minute you began understanding something about how the world runs, your dreams are not seeable anymore. Your heart still goads you to create magic mountains and stardust in a little fantasy corner… and life teaches you to pluck each grain of dust out of that chimera. Something about it bites, but letting go of those dust particles becomes routine work.
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It doesn’t become easy, ever, though.
Take that.

… Rumi Fa’ani … Iqbal Ba’qi …

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“All that dwells on the earth is annihilated and there subsists only the face of your Lord, the possessor of majesty and generosity.”

Surrah Ar-Rehman, 26-27

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Fa’ani is annihilation, the third step on the Sufi path: one who is dead in worldly attributes and alive in divine attributes, only. Complicated talk, perhaps.

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After roaring expansion in Eurasia, during the medieval era, the thirteenth Gregorian century brought Islam’s political downfall, an affliction it never quite recovered from. This seems to be the course of events in human race: happy times produce extravagance, monuments and babies; troubled times produce criminals, angst and poets. While it cost Islam many lives and lands, the disturbed times produced Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, goading his falling people into rhymes of mystical uplifting and spiritual love.

After ruling the subcontinent for centuries, the Muslims lost it to the foreign powers. While the explicit enemies were Mongols in Rumi’s time and the British in Iqbal’s time, the common implicit adversary for Iqbal, and his spiritual guide Rumi, was decentralized leadership and struggle for power. What added to Iqbal’s uneasy times were the fall of Khilafat, a puppet icon of Islam’s once flourishing history, stagnation of Muslims’ collective intellect, and the academic and professional progression of Hindus the Muslims once flaunted in ruling.

Rumi, in his writings, employed the term ‘qalandar’ to describe a Sufi who has achieved the highest state of annihilation (fa’na) from himself, and all that is left (ba’qi) is the Self. Typing this out on an electronic keypad, in the twenty-first Gregorian century, I wonder if I even know what they mean, all these words I just put down. Isn’t “Qalandar” the word you hear from qawwalis, pseudo-qawwal pop stars, and at pseudo-oriental-drum-banging-burger-class-hangovers of spirituality?

The trick of learning from associations is so mechanical that when readers, who are striving to be authentic believers, see these two words (fa’ani, qalandar) coming from one author, they tend to suspect his ideology.

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I, myself, have always had problems digesting ‘fa’ani’ and my simplistic understanding of it. Does it really mean Sufis aspire to reach such a height of proximity with God that they would annihilate themselves from the world, including the rights of their body and those who depended on them? Is this really what Allah Subhana Wa’tala refers to in verses twenty-six and twenty-seven of Surah Rehman? Or, is Fa'ani just annihilation from the wonts and wants of your nafs, your lower self?

Iqbal, although an enthusiastic follower of Rumi’s spiritual teachings, rejected the Sufi concept of Fa’ani. As R.A. Nicholsan puts it,

“As much he (Iqbal) dislikes the type of Sufism exhibited by Hafiz, he pays
homage to the pure and profound genius of Jalaluddin, though he rejects the
doctrine of self-abandonment taught by the great Persian mystic and does not
accompany him in his pantheistic flights.”

Iqbal’s negation of fa’ani rescues Islam from the seemingly Buddhistic theories of annihilation and self-desertion. He condemned ‘fa’na’ as a concept, which was a complete antithesis to his theory of ‘khudi’ and what he considered “more dangerous than the destruction of Baghdad” (an ironic quote for these times, isn’t it?).

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Rumi employs the term ‘mirror’ for a ‘fa’ani’ and one wonders what that means. My understanding (simplistic, like I said) is that annihilation should be from justifications and explanations of our iniquities. The mirror-self of the fa’ani should be so pure that it should reflect sin as sin, and not diffuse your inner eye into working out a defence mechanism to find excuses for your misdeed. Like Rumi says of one who has annihilated,

“He is neither this, nor that: he is plain”.

It is that pursuit for ‘plainness’ which may bring Rumi and Iqbal on the same table of Fa’ani.

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...Art Therapy...

When words aren't left... anymore.