Eastern Vagabond

Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.

Category: Musings

  • On French Freedom of Expression & Muslim Response

    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.

  • Protected: On Eating out in Peshawar

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  • The inseparable H’s

    Hashir’s obsession with the kid next door i.e. Hafsa is getting out of hand these days. She is an adorable and intelligent seven year old who happens to visit us frequently. When she doesn’t for a day, you find Hashir raving like this.

    He’s apparently calling “Hafsa”
    The sombre play-mates
    Kids in black

  • The Auburn Fall and a Verse

    Here’s another October heralding the onset of perhaps my favourite season i.e. autumn. While taking a leisurely stroll in the front lawn of our apartment building, as I walked over the withering, auburn leaves accompanied by the music of their melodious rustle, I took this photograph to save the beauty and timelessness of the fleeting moment and reflect on the nature’s eternal cycle of life and rejuvenation in the busy coming days as I was soon leaving home yet again for another job assignment that would finish by December.

    Photograph: The Auburn Fall

    I shared the photograph with a friend who commented on it with an Urdu verse which I thought was very apt and when he told me it was his own and he had just come up with it tout de suite, I was almost surprised and fell in love with it.

    یہ تیرا بکھرے پتوں کا ذوق
    میری بکھری زندگی کی داستان

    Your taste for scattered leaves,
    (Explains) the story of my scattered life

    That man has been my friend since early school years and that he had a poetic side to him was never known to me even after our countless conversational night walks through the narrow, partially paved streets of the desert town where we both lived and contemplated the meaning of life and it’s various themes for quite a number of years.

    This just gives me another reason to suspend my judgements in a world full of surprises. Being ephemeral beings, the comfort of the certainty of knowing someone or something completely is simply not for us. Let’s bask in this fundamental limitation of all our knowledge and help create a better, more tolerant world.

    Happy October!

  • 43 Notifications

    There was a time
    when a seductive, blood-red
    Facebook notification
    would trigger in me
    waves of dopamine
    which flooded my bloodstream
    like amiodarone, lidocaine
    and a handful other
    difficult-to-spell drugs
    which i hope
    you never learn to spell,
    as they enter my papa
    through an IV cannula
    while he lies sedated
    amidst beeping, blinking screens
    and a flock of apathetic doctors
    desensitized by
    too much disease
    too less equipment
    and too often death.
    For too long
    I have been addicted
    to that dopamine
    while aching for interactions
    meaningful enough
    for a homosapien
    to carry on
    the futility, monotony
    called modern life.
    But now I ask
    if that really is “enough”.
    If, in my ten days of inactivity,
    43 notifications
    of a virtual book club’s activities,
    of the memes I have been tagged in
    made by sullen,
    self loathing, suicidal teens
    that are ironically intent
    on making their viewers laugh,
    of unreferenced, unverifiable anecdotes
    no better than oldwives tales,
    of pandemic-related quackery
    both religious and secular,
    of birthdays of people
    I haven’t seen in years,
    of friend requests by
    people I don’t recognize,
    really mean anything.
    It’s silly how important
    we think we are,
    when we are nothing
    more than
    43 notifications.

  • Hashir

    Meet Hashir. The tiny owner and CEO of the Shit and Spit Factory (my wife came up with this comic name tonight). Born in turbulent times amidst fears of an impending nuclear war, outbreak of the deadly nCov virus and subsequent global recession, he can currently afford to be blissfully ignorant of the turmoil around while his father (i.e. I) takes the brunt of war deployments, salary cuts and overtime hours. Regardless, Hashir has been a bundle of absolute joy for me and taught me more about love in the past 6 months than Pablo Neruda ever did. That love is effortless. That its incremental and sacrificial. One day, I understand it will be painful. And maybe Neruda will be helpful then. But for now, I’d rather bask in its pleasure than wait for the inevitable pain. Did I just talk about the taboo on the eve of my son’s half birthday? Yes, I think the prospect of separation (death or otherwise) brings perspective to communion. It reminds us that humans can still commit to love when they’re aware of its devastation.

    I love you, son. And I thank you for restoring my trust in my ability to engage in unconditional love. Happy half birthday!

    Hashir – Day 180

  • Mediocrity

    ٰAs I am advancing in years, the transition seems more from abstraction into concreteness than in age, really. I preferred to think of myself as some sort of a prodigy, a precocious savior of humanity who is prowling in the dark alleys, waiting for his time to rise and shine. Unfortunately, as it turned out, neither the alleys were particularly dark nor was I, the brightest kid in town. And as this much-loathed realization of mediocrity – the sense that I lie somewhere right under the geometric center of the bell curve of any imaginable global statistical survey – hits home, I am left with an ominous question mark on my own identity – if I am not the top guy, who really am I? My fixation on being the best, shaped partly by my father and partly by my own idealism, had been so strong that it took the form of a purpose to me until I realized that being the best is not always viable for me.

    So as the fog starts to clear up, I realize that you can’t satisfy yourselves by standing on a victory stand in every competition life throws at you. Victory stands are in fact the biggest distractions for ambitious men. Competions are to be chosen wisely. When you are 27 years old and you can see life slipping out of your clenched fist like river sand, it becomes a critical question: which avenue of life deserves your attention, time and effort. You cant give everything your everything. You have to be selective. You are not limitless. You are mediocre. Let it sink. Yes, you are. Hard though it might be to register but believing in this is the only way you can amount to anything meaningful, anything worthwhile.

  • The Melodrama of Glass

    First time i discovered that glass had an amorphous structure on a microscopic level, an infinitely disordered, messy arrangement of molecules, it was in my science class in grade 8 and i remember to have felt defrauded, even betrayed. It was a weirdly emotional moment. Glass was the most sacred thing to me before, a symbol of perfection, beauty and purity. It was hard to believe that it’s fabric, just like everybody and everything else, had it’s own unholy patches.

    Growing up, as it happens with all the children, I started off with the imagination of a perfect world created in the image of a perfect god. Slowly and gradually, as the reality hit home, I realized that perfection or absolute divinity is rather a rare thing on Earth if it exists after all. I saw that my nicest class fellows cheated in exams, teachers were ignorant, parents were distant, things stood way inferior to their imaginable ideal selves. It was like ideals were bugs and my experience an efficient insecticide. As my ideals diminished with time, the greater was the force I held on to those left. Fast forward to grade 8 where glass was pretty much the last thing I was left with. Giving up on it would mean, giving up hope, if ever, of catching the reflection of God because if not in the glass mirror, where else could you catch it! Though I was too small to enunciate it back then but I knew it in my heart of hearts that it was religiously important for me to establish that glass was divine/beautiful in its own way.

    So i looked closely into its molecular structure, surfed through the internet, downloading all the possible images that I could get my hands on of the striking, though still not ordered, molecular arrangements of the glass insides. I realized beauty does not have to be ordered. Perfection is not averse to messiness.

    Life is probably hard for an honest, thinking man. As long as I hated glass, I broke my fair share of it and now that I love it, I feel bad for all the fragments I have left behind in my path. If that’s a sacrifice life calls for, I think i have paid my dues in full. If there is one take-away from this melodrama of glass, it’s that perfection is over-rated and idealism is unrealistic and needs reality to pivot on to make any sense. All things are beautiful in their own right. Absolutely nothing in this world is totally impure, and if you find one, check the lens you’re viewing the world with. That might just be the only dirty thing around.

  • Konya – Rumi’s Abode

    As Vayu, the tropical cyclone, approaches the coastal towns of South India and particularly Karachi, I think I’ve found a brand new metaphor for my own religiosity in it.

    Recklessly unbridled from outside and hauntingly hollow from the core. Creating a stir all around and changing directions all the same; powerful yet empty in the eye.

    I hope it achieves enough in its power, recklessness and destruction that long after I’m gone, it’s carefully preserved, if not in the meteorological journals then at least in my memos, letters and emails to my victims.

    Call it a stroke of luck or a sweep of typhoon (if you allow me to drag my metaphor this long), I was able to arrange a reasonably long stopover at Konya, Turkey in my upcoming official visit to Italy next week – long enough to pay my respects to Maulana Jalal ud Din Rumi. If you don’t already know my interest in and association with Rumi, now is not the time to share it because this blog will otherwise turn into a treatise. My feelings about the whole affair are quite mixed. I think this is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my poem “Tempest“.

    Have you been to Konya?

  • Sb Maaya Hai

    Yeh ishq bhi ajeeb hai
    Kabhi saccha kabhi jhooṭa
    Donon taraf se mann mera mann tera looṭa

    The song Sb Maaya Hai catches attention with its generous understanding that love essentially remains armed with its characteristic capability to devastate whether or not it’s ‘true’. With it’s rather surprising opening, it calls into question the conventional connotations of ‘true’ and ‘false’ love, tacitly implying that they are but meaningless, irrelevant adjectives that don’t and can’t dampen the severity and vulnerability called love. The song might come as strangely uplifting to anyone who has ever engaged in a love that didn’t eventually turn out to be the ‘ultimate’, and hence what’s conventionally known to be ‘true’, love. The importance placed on the singularity of the beloved in the journey of True Love is perhaps overamplified; love can still be true (or if we discard the meaningless adjective, love can still be love) if each beloved is thought of as a step in a thousand miles journey, a moment in an infinity, a vanishing mirage giving way to a new one in a distance, along the same path.

    I like to think I haven’t overanalyzed the lyrics. Here’s the link to Coke Studio’s version of the song:

    https://soundcloud.com/cokestudio/attaullahesakhevi-sanwalesakhelvi-sabmayahai