Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.
My dirty laundry is strewn all over the place,
and the dishes in the kitchen sink rot so much
that I have to go check each night
if there’s a dead rat in there.
Still, I miss you
not for the clean dishes
nor ironed uniforms
but
for your peals of laughter
more musical and sacred
than a Buddhist temple’s
on a distant mountaintop.
A younger cousin asked me this week.
After school, graduation, a job, marriage, a child… Have you scratched the bottom of the well? I’m curious because I haven’t thought about much after marriage and a child. You’re already past that so what are you looking forward to now?
Hope that all makes sense.
Of course it does make sense. It’s hardly been a decade since I have crossed the threshold of teenage and this was pretty much all I could think of too. Back in the days, I visited Sufi meditation cults, joined discussion circles of idealogues planning on reviving the caliphate and attended resident workshops of a LUMS’ professor working for Muslim Renaissance in order to find my own, unique calling. I now miss those days for my cynic, firm and passionate religiosity but more so, for the freedom I had to pick a path and then change it. The freedom we all lose a little with every passing second by virtue of the very nature of time itself. The future looked daunting to me but also equally enthralling. I could be anyone and be anywhere. The advertisment of Turkish Airlines on the Readers Digest back cover always had me daydreaming of the future:
Too many places to be
Too many faces to see
In spite of those days tinged with the delicious flavor of infinite freedom, I secretly yearned to settle down. I saw my university professors hard at work through their lab windows at nights and ached for a job to consume me and pay me well for it. Yes, it has been an eventful decade in that I managed to check off quite a number of items on the success-checklist (if there exists such a thing at all). Having scored a decent job and started a family of my own, it may seem like I have ‘scratched the bottom of the well’. Yours is an interesting question asking me what’s next. To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to it myself.
I think as you move on in life, even if you get lucky and everything turns out to be amazing for you as it did for me, unfortunately you don’t get to stay there as you’re still moving on after all. The happiest moments soon become a thing of the past as the euphoria of an achievement gives way to a new normal, raising the bar. You realize happiness is a mirage and find yourself wondering if there’s a deeper purpose to life than chasing it. Plus, as time goes by, happiness too is harder to come by.
As you climb up the career ladder, your job starts to encroach more on your family time and you basically find yourself juggling between that and family and any of your personal interests (for me, these are fitness and literature). Weekends become your only refuge from this tedium and exhaustion when you can actually give time to the latter two. Yes, sometimes, during a morning run while running on a splendid dirt trail into the rising sun, as the sky erupts into red flames raging in blue ocean, life does seem beautiful and intriguing. Even lovable, perhaps. You start to live from one such moment to the next.
I once looked forward to ‘settling down’ but the routine is gradually wearing me down. The cost of my static, well paying job is starting to outweigh its charm. I find myself dreaming once again of traveling the world; of a stylishly dressed Turkish air hostess wearing a red beret and head scarf on an old Reader’s Digest back cover with a poetic tagline reminding me what I had forgotten for long – there were too many places to be and too many faces to see.
I also think I have discovered a lot of things I’m good at but I’m yet to discover the one where I’d produce excellence. The very excellence that my university professors produced working like a bee in their labs. Their faces gleamed with a strange expression I could never put a finger on as they locked their labs each night and ventured glowing into the darkness. I think it’s the eternal search for the unknown which keeps us relevant; gleaming. The voyage is important and the destination, perhaps, just secondary. I’ve been waiting too long at the destination for miracles to happen. Now I need to plunge. From all kinds of comfort. Into chaos. To find my very own voyage and more so, the courage to embark on it. And for that, I believe, I’m ready.
Leaving the service quarters temporarily allotted on an assignment after you are posted out to a new place should not feel as blue as this photograph of the pomegranate tree stannding just outside in the compund lawn.
I had a speech last week in which I discussed the French President Macron’s remarks on Islam being ‘a religion in crisis across the world’. I drew the audience’s attention on the French side of the issue and said that the Muslim world’s response needs more maturity as we cannot afford to go on a killing spree. Following is an abstract of the speech.
French President Emmanuel Macron remarked that Islam is a religion in crisis globally following the recent decapitation of a French teacher over his showing of Charlie Hebdo’s supposedly ‘blasphemous’ caricatures in his freedom of expression class. The Muslim world has reacted strongly to it with the Turkish President going so far as to say that Macron has lost his mind. I have carefully selected these two pieces of news to present to you – two highly polarised sides to the same issue. While we perfectly understand the Muslim side, I think more effort needs to be put in to understand the French side.
Since the start of the current clash and even before that when Charlie Hebdo’s office was attacked in 2015, I have discussed the issue of blasphemy with many people and it strikes me how most of us believe that blasphemy is hate speech and is therefore, illegal in France itself. That’s unfortunately not true. While French freedom of expression has its limits; hate speech being one of them, religious blasphemy doesn’t fall under its umbrella. Hate speech, as defined by the French Act of 1881, is defamation of people but not divinities or religion. And it’s perfectly understandable why post-French-revolution France would not protect religion. The highest French ideal is democracy and such protections of faith tend to lead to concentration of power with custodians of faith who in turn may derail democracy. French’s historical aversion to church is another factor.
It is also wrong to view this crisis as a West Vs Islam situation. There are many undercurrents to it which need to be understood. For example, the French Muslim attacks have been carried out by Muslims who belonged to the lower financial stratum of French society. They might have already had a grudge against the French society for not having allowed them equal opportunity to flourish and when this situation came up, it may have just blown the lid off. We need to ponder why rather well integrated Muslims were not involved in any of those attacks? Perhaps by virtue of their social and financial status, they had no prior grudges and hence, were able to recognise the satire and handle it more maturely.
As Muslims, we need to make a distinction between people who blaspheme for the sake of it and those who do because they are unaware of the role of the Prophet in the formation of the modern egalitarian society. It is up to us how we choose to introduce the latter to the great man: by engaging in a productive dialogue or by going on a killing spree. I think the choice is not hard to make.
My speech was met with mixed reaction with most of the audience booing me for being a “liberal” – apparently a hate-worthy species in Pakistan. Some came over to pour appreciation for having said what needed to be said and demonstrating the courage to share my opinion with an unreceptive crowd. Regardless of their disapproval, they said, my speech had at least managed to disturb the audience’s calm equilibrium, which comes from living in a cocoon protected from the outside world, by exposing them to a wildly different view point which would surely trigger more discussions. I responded that as long as there are discussions, there is hope.
It concerns me to see that the literalist hardliners are gaining traction in our polarising world. Not surprisingly, their interpretations are also the root cause of religious violence. One of the problems with literalist interpretations is that they tend to assert greater authenticity for themselves than warranted for an interpretation. This is because they derive their “infallibility” from their proximity to The Text and this is where the problem lies. By gaining a higher moral ground, they discredit bolder interpretations as heretic and therefore, eliminate any possibility of a respectful dialogue. If a dialogue occurs after all, it is merely a concession than a mutually informing discussion. The first step should be to restore dialogue between the two schools of thought for a modern understanding of the religion. The bottom line of that dialogue could be a consensus on the principle that if the outcome of an interpretation is not in line with the spirit of Islam (e.g. violence), there’s something wrong with it no matter how close it may seem to The Text. Islam is the religion of mankind and as mankind evolves there’s no way, Islam would remain static. I’m sure our religion, if interpreted correctly, has solutions to the modern dilemmas and has the capacity to lead us out of the frantic chaos the world is plunging in. If only, we gather the courage to free it from the people who have held it hostage.