Eastern Vagabond

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

Tag: mystic

  • Vagabond

    The advertisement for Thai Airways has been making the Reader’s Digest back cover for quite some time now. The catchline always stirs something deep inside.

    So many faces to see,                                                                                                                           too many places to be.

    It’s perhaps an old desire to be a vagabond.

    Ever since the onset of early adolescence, I have found myself away from home, living in boarding houses. At times, i had to rent cheap hotel rooms in urban sprawls that smelled of semen, cigarettes and shaving creams. I eventually grew to love that just like i loved how the morning sounded there amongst the delightful monikers hurling about distastefully painted corridors and the raspy swearing voices piercing paper-thin hotel walls. Even if it sounds dirty, life is an immaculate piece of clockwork there. Miss a minute and the dining hall is already closing down. The pandemonium dies after eight in the morning, only to return at eight at night. In between the two pandemonia, the hotel, devoid of the hubbub of the early morning hours, feels to have slipped into some kind of deep meditation. Later in the evening, with people teeming back in, dining hall gets to be the center of all activity. A scene out of it can get a jovial laugh out of you or a nasty vomit depending on your disposition. However, the best part about being a vagabond is not the crudeness of places you have to put up with; it’s experiencing the richness of souls you come across. Among the cheapest underclass, you meet the free-est of the spirits and the universal wisdom, if there is any thing such. It’s only beyond the point we have nothing more to lose do we reveal who we truly are and there in such hotels, i have taken a glimpse into what mankind truly is and capable of. 

    Being a vagabond is more about removing the human filters around us and within than traveling far and wide. As long as these filters are in place, the world we move in is not the same as the world that God created. All his life, a bourgeois walks a bourgeois world, a jet set, a jet set world, and an underclass, an underclass. These insurmountable filters shatter the harmony of our world by dividing it into several parallel universes that never intersect, keeping us from experiencing its phenomenal beauty as an organic whole. Breaking free of them is an essential part of what would truly be an insightful transition from being an ordinary traveler to a true vagabond. Being able to admire a diverse cross-section of humanity, irrespective of the social strata they belong from, simply as people, is the first step in this spiritual journey – a journey that is sure to transform the one who undertakes it.

    Godspeed.

  • Mysticism and Contemporary Mainstream Islam

    One of the prominent teachings of Islamic mysticism is that everyone is entitled to their own personal quest for God. An enticing implication of this idea is that one has infinite freedom in making choice of The Path, and nonconformity is not just welcome but highly looked upon, which perhaps is why Islamic mysticism caught on right from its early years. Delivering a serious blow to the contemporary monolithic understanding of religion of the time, it made greater space for spirituality which had almost died when religion began to be commonly equated with the do’s and don’ts of Shari’ah.

    The general acceptance of un-orthodoxy slowly altered the way people understood vice and virtue. Being socially deviant did no longer equate with being a sinner. With that came a greater appreciation for all the ways in which people pursued their Creator and lesser scrutiny of how they dressed, behaved and looked. Uniformity was no longer called for. The complex cultural milieu that took birth was rather celebrated. In fact the whole enterprise of judging people from their Zahir (outlook) came crashing down.
    Logically so, the Eeman acquired the status of a variable that could not be, or rather, needed not be, physically measured in inches (i.e. how high one’s pants from one’s ankles were, how long one’s beard was etc.) and returned to its original definition of piety.

    However, today, more than we want to acknowledge, binary logic runs in the veins of contemporary Dar-ul-Uloom thought, which is sadly the sole representative of religion, rivaled by none. Since the beginning of time, binary logic is known to have made distinctions and bifurcations between different schools of thought instead of bringing about a unification which is the obvious need of time. The result is a highly confused and debated upon system of mainstream Islam. If ever humanity could take a break from that, it was in the period of mystics who made fundamental reformation in the way people saw the religion and taught them its real essence i.e. love, which threads the universe, connecting and molding every fragmented reality into The One.

    Rumi makes exactly the same point when he states in his Masnawi Al Maanawi with an authority only he is entitled to:

    I have lifted the marrow from the Quran and have left the empty bones for the dogs to quarrel upon.

    By bones, he meant endless, trivial debates on Ilm-ul-Kalam that scholars of the time engaged in, leaving out the matters of consequence that demanded greater and immediate attention i.e. spiritual well-being, referred to as “marrow” here. More or less the same thing was said by Jesus as quoted in Matthew [23:23,24].

    You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

    P.S.: I’d like to expand on this post. Ideas, questions and critiques are welcome.