Just wanted to post a tiny snippet of a conversation I had with my grandmother today. It may look like a trivial thing but quality conversation is so rare these days that I really cherish and try to preserve it when I have one.
We were listening to Jagjit Singh’s ghazal,
ہوش والوں کو خبر کیا بےخودی کیا چیز ہے
عشق کیجئے پھر سمجھیے زندگی کیا چیز ہے
“The sensible will never grasp the state of ecstasy; Dive into love, and learn what life can be.”
when she exclaimed how volumes of timeless poetry had been written by men head over heels in love but when some of the same men eventually found or married their love, they were unable to live up to the romanticized unions of their own poems.
I agreed with her acute observation and marveled at her ability to note such an objective point while listening to, and appreciating, the lyrical rendition of Nida Fazli’s celebrated poem. I responded,
Women and men make classic, tantalizing milestones in each others’ journey of Love. The destination of Love continues to be someplace else though. In a higher calling than flesh and blood.
She fell quiet for a moment then responded aptly with the following verse of Iqbal:
متاع بے بہا ہے درد و سوز آرزو مندی
مقام بندگی دے کر نہ لوں شان خداوندی
“The true treasure glows in longing’s secret blaze; I spurn the loftiest rank, preferring humble ways.”
I think all great poets and philosophers have pondered upon the remarkably evident thirst that women and men fail to satisfy in each other in the name of love. Love, like unquenched fire burning in the very center of one’s being, demands desperate action. Iqbal, in this verse, holds this suffering dearer than any material or spiritual wealth. Knowing its subject (God, woman, etc.) though cannot alleviate the pain, it can certainly impart the sense of it being worthwhile thus, making it more tolerable, and even, enjoyable for some as it’s in the case of Iqbal.
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.
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.
I’ve an unresolved affinity for Maulana Rumi (Mevlana in Turkish) – an intuition that he might be the only saviour I will ever have. I taught myself basic Persian 3 years ago only to read his Masnavi and I still haven’t read it.
What if he doesn’t live up to my expectations of him? What if I fail to live up to his?
Konya is home to Rumi therefore, it was hard to come to Istanbul and forget Konya. Though I couldn’t visit it during my first layover in Istanbul while traveling to Italy, I made sure I see it on my way back. If you’re traveling to Europe from Pakistan and are interested in visiting Mevlana, Turkish Airlines will be your cheapest bet. After landing in Istanbul, you’ll have to take domestic flights for Konya and back because it is not an international airport.
Landing in Konya on an overcast day. Taurus mountains can be seen in a distance.
Besides being a small public airport, Konya is also a military base so I could spot Turkish Air Force’s C-130s on the tarmac while my plane taxied to the terminal. I had already booked a motel room near Mevlana Türbesi (Rumi’s tomb) earlier while departing from Milan. Soon after I had landed in Konya, i realized my European sim wasn’t exactly functional here and the natives wouldn’t understand English. I could very well see a disaster unfold – how on earth was I going to navigate my way to my motel and then to Mevlana’s tomb if not with the internet or a local guide understanding my language? Thanks to Mevlana though; he became my guide, my host. All I had to say to the passport control at Istanbul airport, the bus driver, the pedestrians, the random strangers, the beggars and the prostitutes of Konya, was the word “Mevlana”. It seemed to be a word from some universal language. A word powerful enough to warm up a stranger to another, a host to a guest, a guide to a lost traveler. Not long after, I was in my motel with Mevlana just 400 meters east.
I spent that night in conflicting emotions. It was not exactly spiritual, to say the least. The room next to mine was occupied by a couple who started to let off their steam right after I unlocked the door to my room. I flipped open the Masnavi in my phone to distract myself and tried to read it over the loud thrusting and moaning but eventually had to give in, put my phone aside and wait for them to finish.
Next morning, I set off early before sunrise. Remember I had no internet so I navigated my way in the morning twilight like ancient wayfarers and caravan guides with the rising pinkish hues on the horizon being my sole sense of direction for east. I went about my usual way, preferring narrow streets over wide roads every time I had a choice. This might have taken me long but led to some hidden treasures too.
Nar-i-Ask – a small streetside art gallery I came upon. Nar-i-Ask is a Persian word, written here in Latin and Arabic script, meaning “The fire of love”
Eventually one of the streets left me at a wide traffic-less intersection and a huge structure stood in the middle of it. I knew I had reached somewhere important. My heart skipped a beat – it could be Mevlana Türbesi.
The western front of Cami Selimiye – a minaret of Rumi’s tomb can be seen at it’s back (to the right)
I soon realized it was not. I walked past the intersection and around the building to reach the courtyard in its front. The wall inscription beside the door read “Cami Selimiye”. The architecture was similar to the mosques of Istanbul and the tiled space stretching in front of it seemed more like a public square due to its vastness.
I was confused. Though magnificent it was in its own right, i was too close to the Rumi’s tomb to be happy for finding Cami Selimiye. Mevlana was nowhere to be seen. Or so I thought. Upon my inquiry, the street selling woman sitting on the stairs outside the Cami, told me what I saw to my left was in fact my destination. I zoomed out and yes, there it was. I had probably mistaken it to be an extension of Cami in spite of its very distinct architecture.
It was a moment of epiphany, regret, happiness, sadness – quite a turmoil of emotions. I wanted a close up of Mevalana’s final resting place.
My return flight was 1000 hrs and the tomb was to open for visitors at 0900 hrs so this is the closest I got to Mevlana. I could see a series of small minarets of Mevlana’s tomb from the courtyard and wondered what life would be like for dervishes in the cells underneath them.
Perhaps I was too impure to be let inside. Mevlana might have wanted me to read his Masnavi first before visiting him. So be it. I turn back.
I’ll see you again, Mevlana.
I took some steps then turned instinctively, one final time, perhaps to etch the memory of this place forever in my mind.
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.
Baal-e-Jibreel, put simply, is Iqbal’s monologue with God except that the persona they both take on is not the traditional, master’s and slave’s; but somewhat mystic, lover’s and beloved’s (though Iqbal is not to be confused with Sufi poets). The verses ooze with fierce, unintimidated love instead of respectful, humble worship. The first few odes that basically set the tone for the entire collection come out as quite aggressive. You feel the raging passion of a daring, cocky lover addressing his Beloved, telling Him that the obstacles in the way of love suit his adventure-thirsty nature just fine. If you wish to see how perfection borns out of the imperfect, you need to read the following couplets wherein a weak man can be seen to be begetting strong love. The stark contrast drawn between the guilty self of a man and yet the unapologetic love he is capable to experience is simply awe-inspiring. Understandably, the references to the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve, and good and evil, are numerous throughout the thread.
قصور وار ، غریب الدیار ہوں لیکن
ترا خرابہ فرشتے نہ کر سکے آباد
خطر پسند طبیعت کو ساز گار نہیں
وہ گلستاں کہ جہاں گھات میں نہ ہو صیاد
مقام شوق ترے قدسیوں کے بس کا نہیں
انھی کا کام ہے یہ جن کے حوصلے ہیں زیاد
As you read on, you know Iqbal is not an ordinary lover who is too wasted by passion to acknowledge reality. His extensive use of hyperbole and visual imagery, which is comparable to the ancient epics, does in no way make him depart from the subject which is exploration of self and God. Instead they empower him far beyond this by enabling him to take quick, pithy jabs at philosophical conundrums of his time. For instance, the wonderfully poetic way he addresses the contemporary problem of Zaat (Essence) Vs Siffaat (Attributes) is mind blowing. No wonder his daring takes (بت کدئہ صفات) have oft landed him in hot water with the religious establishment of his time.
میری نوائے شوق سے شور حریم ذات میں
غلغلہ ہائے الاماں بت کدئہ صفات میں
When it comes to ‘yearning’, Iqbal has a lot to say. Man’s yearning, as he sees it, has led to the creation of churches and synagogues and the same yearning has destroyed the idols of Kaaba and Somnaat. In a way, Iqbal is not-so-tacitly coining a similitude between God and Man – each engaged in a passionate cycle of creation and destruction to find the other.
گرچہ ہے میری جستجو دیر و حرم کی نقش بند
میری فغاں سے رستخیز کعبہ و سومنات میں
And here goes one of my most favorite couplets.
متاع بے بہا ہے درد و سوز آرزو مندی
مقام بندگی دے کر نہ لوں شان خداوندی
The universal tragedy of the inhabitants of the gray world that they don’t belong anywhere, could not be better put.
اپنے بھی خفا مجھ سے ہیں ، بیگانے بھی ناخوش
میں زہر ہلاہل کو کبھی کہہ نہ سکا قند
When yearning suffices the yearner, there’s hardly anything of substance that can be snatched of him, least of all, his happiness.
ہر حال میں میرا دل بے قید ہے خرم
کیا چھینے گا غنچے سے کوئی ذوق شکر خند!
And a sweet end to the daring opening part of the book.
چپ رہ نہ سکا حضرت یزداں میں بھی اقبال
کرتا کوئی اس بندہ گستاخ کا منہ بند!
The concept of the grey world was first explained to me by a doctor of philosophy I came across rather coincidentally, when I was a morbid radical undergrad who had just begun to look for alternative paths to The Meaning. I remember what a pain it was to listen to him the first time. He was surrounded by his disciples who I would later come to describe as ‘cultists’ which held true for every definition of the term except that they would conveniently leave if they deemed it better, and the cult, given its fundamental principle of intellectual freedom, would make no tantrum or effort to hold them back (quite a thing for a radical associated with a highly possessive, volatile organization). I carefully listened to him, disagreed with him strongly and finally gave in to his eloquence, authority, reason but far more importantly, his history. It ‘felt’ like he traveled the same road as I did, only twenty years ahead of me. As i look back, it feels to be the greatest irony of my life that I chose the path of ‘reason’ because an ‘intuition’ told me so. Perhaps it was the first grey of my life, the grey between the black and white of reason and intuition, that eventually opened up the grey universe for me.
It took me quite long to embrace the ideal of greyness that suggests that there exists murkiness between black and white which isn’t necessarily a wrong as opposed to right/sin as opposed to virtue/falseness as opposed to truth/ or zero as opposed to one. In a way, it made the job trickier because it directly implied that if there is such a thing as a ‘golden rule’ in this mayhem of a universe – a rule that would streamline all its contradictions and bring them into harmony, then there is a possibility that such a rule may exist NOT in the light of its whites but the murkiness of its greys.
The grey world, I’m beginning to realise, is more like a black hole – As vast as a universe in itself yet invisible to the external eye. Those who enter it, never come out. And somewhere along the way, they lose regard for what’s white/ one/ light/ virtue because it holds no proprietary right on the Golden Rule which is quite fair; only too far from what’s conventional and orthodox.
The black-hole similitude for the grey world leaves much to say. Signing off for now. Cheers.
While doing a quick round up of the eminent theorists from some major schools of thought in Psychology, Dr. X told me why he thought Viktor E. Frankl’s psychoanalytical system left a “working” space for religion, not just a symbolic, sympathetic one, as you might find with his more popular counterpart, Carl Jung, and his brethren. I was familiar with the growing fascination among boys over Frankl but wasn’t able to read him before. Dr. X’s eloquent synopsis was something that came in handy.
He said that Frankl’s system was unique in a way that it would begin to treat a patient by stressing him more instead of trying to relieve him of it. And it worked as miraculously as the tenth century Chinese inoculation where they injected the patient with the same virus they wanted to protect him from to immunize him from future viral attacks of the sort. However, the way in which Viktor E. Frankl stressed his patients was surprising. His psychotherapeutic method began with insisting the patient to find a meaning in life, hence his best-seller book, Man’s Search For Meaning (Have you read this book yet? Please do. It’s enlightening!).
That brings me to my topic. At some point in our lives, we all wonder if there is any purpose to this meticulously elaborate drama of life. We ask ourselves, for example, where do we fit in the grand scheme of universe? What does it mean if we lie on top of major ecological chains as ultimate beneficiaries of all that universe has to offer – why exactly does this universe seem to be at our service? These questions have substance and they demand answers just as substantial. Everything that matters hangs delicately on these questions.
We, as human beings, have an innate tendency to find our answers – to know the reason of our creation, to shake sense of all that is out there in relation to our own self and its connection with the universe. We are sometimes referred to by the evolutionary scientists as the only intelligent design that inhabits the universe. Of several hundred million different species of Earth and counting, it’s really flattering to know this but it has its downside: we can’t just wake up in the morning and leave to make a living unless we have figured out what is it that we want to live for. Even a jackass is smarter than us in that it just grazes away when it has to and doesn’t really need to grapple with this conundrum.
During my discussions with people, i have discovered that the very term “purpose” induces great anxiety in most of them and they don’t want to pursue the discussion any further. While they might have their own reasons to do that, the reason I’ve been frankly cited at times is that purpose, in its own cold, calculative and mechanistic manner, tends to kill freedom. And its totally understandable. If you wake up in the dead of the night hungry as a wolf and aim for the fridge with a clear purpose in your head to eat something, you definitely won’t be much amused with a Santa Claus, should you find one, standing in his chariot blocking your way. In fact, you might as well walk right through him! That’s the case with purposes. They block a significant number of exciting possibilities from entering your life. But then, you have to ask yourself what’s more important after all? Finding your destiny or living ‘one hell of a life.’
When God created us, he left an aching void in us that could only be filled up by His love. Therefore, mankind embarked on a painstaking journey to find Him back and since nobody had actually seen God or knew what He looked like, the only tool they had to identify Him was the love-void inside of them: whatever filled that void up was to be the God!
As long as His Beauty transcended the reach of their senses, they kept searching for it until they caught a reflection of it somewhere. Every time that happened, the caravan would halt there, closely inspect the thing that’s apparently exuding the Light of God, term it as mere illusion, discard it (or carry it as a relic) and move on. The ancient journey stretches to and continues up until our time.
Our unconscious mind is a mysterious, intricate web of memories, lived and default. The Promise of Alast عہدِاَلَست is one such default memory that’s not actually lived by our bodies (although our souls were made witness to it in The World of Souls i.e. عالمِ اَرواح), is weak and hazy and lacks objective details like all other memories – but amazingly, it has a surprising capacity to override much stronger memories in order to storm our conscious mind to remind us that we have a Beloved to seek. The dormant yearning, thus catches fire. The torture it brings is familiar to us all.
Our love-void is like a massive black hole consistently drawing us into anything that resembles God in the least. It could be anything from purity to strength to character to beauty because God alone is the origin of all likable attributes. Even if we encounter a single one of these traits, in the least of degrees, in somebody or something, we might feel immensely attracted to them because of our predisposition to fill up the void in ourselves, and start loving them. We can love them for as long as they stay true to our idea of God. Obviously, none but God fulfills this promise. So there come disappointments and the love eventually fades away with time as we start again to seek His Beauty until we find someone else. Only this time round, we make sure they last longer in the face of our godly ideal.
People ask if the journey ends somewhere. No, it doesn’t. They’ll keep asking for more. At least, that’s the case with the perfect lover and the perfect Beloved: no one can love Allah more than Muhammad (S.A.W.) did, yet in His last days He used to say, “Forgive me, God, I couldn’t know Thee as I should have.” You see, he yearned for even more of His love.
Don’t you hate your Nafs ever. It’s something that eventually gets you to your destination. What happens when you place an obstacle in a fast moving river. The water initially stops, gathers around the obstacle and its level begins to rise. The river gains greater strength near the obstacle until it either breaks it apart or sweeps it along. Same goes for Nafs. While attempting to resist our pursuit of Beauty by engaging us in distractions, it only manages to be an obstacle in the course of the free river of Love flowing inside of us. Every time that happens, our river stops for a while, we feel that we are missing something important though we might not know exactly what it is and we may even fall into depression. But ultimately we break away the obstacle and come out stronger and nearer to God in the journey of love. That’s how it goes. Had there been no obstacle, there would have been no progress either, see?
Last and the most important question: How can you gain His love in this world? There’s a mystic saying about it: there are as many paths to God as there are human souls on earth. However, there are some baby steps that we can take. Read about the people who actually gained His love. Drop your guard for your inner sense of Beauty in order to let it guide you freely. But above and beyond everything else, read Allah. He, of all the beings, knows how do we get to Him and He has made no secret of the Path. The opening chapter of Quran, Surah Fatiha, consists solely of the supplication that addresses this fundamental need of ours: اھدنا الصراط المستقیم i.e. Guide us to the right Path and it seems like, as Dr. Israr says, the whole of Quran that follows, is a divine response to this supplication.
So it’s definitely well worth a read. But what happens when you first open it? I’ll hopefully write on this later and I’m quite positive you’ll be able to relate!
P.S. This was originally written in response to a host of questions posed by an old fellow who grew up mainly in a liberal atmosphere but felt a growing void and a yearning for the divine inside of her. I just wanted to connect the two using Iqbal, Dr. Israr and Dr. Rafiuddin. Another thing that i had in my mind while writing this, was a casual discussion with a fellow blogger. Please feel free to comment, add, discuss or correct!
Though God is an ethereal spirit with no sexual connotations to its gender, the debate over His “actual” gender has passionately raged in the recent decades particularly in the wake of the rise of radical feminism in reaction to the timeless patriarchy that had reigned supreme. The reason i am writing this is that this debate is not distant, irrelevant or academic, it rather dictates how we perceive God in our day to day lives, defines our faith and how we act under its influence.
The most prevailing understanding of the gender of God is that God is predominantly a powerful masculine figure. This understanding possibly originated and strengthened over centuries in attempts to explain the attributes of God being Strong (Qawi), Subduer (Qahhar), Avenger (Muntaqim) and Compeller (Jabbar). Though there are other equally important attributes like Jamal (Beauty) that are the prototype of femininity but since these scholarly attempts were made in patriarchal societies so it is not very surprising for male-chauvinistic interpretations to have made their way into the sacred religious texts passed on to later generations. This partially explains why today, we refer to, and more importantly understand, God as a watchful man-guard over the universe though theological descriptions leave sufficient room for alternative explanations.
The question remains: Is God REALLY a watchful man-guard or is He more of a compassionate mother – the love of whom envelops the universe?
Islam has a distinctive edge over other religions of the world in that its Holy Book i.e. Quran has survived literally intact for centuries under conflicting and sometimes, even battling Muslim governments after the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.). Karen Armstrong brings to our notice a commonly recited but strikingly overlooked piece from Quran i.e. the very Bism-illah-irrahman-irrahim.
…Nor was God distinctively male. Each recitation began with the invocation: “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate (al-Rahman) and the Merciful (al-Rahim). Allah was a masculine noun, but the divine names al-Rahman and al-Rahim are not only grammatically feminine but related etymologically to the word for womb(!)
It must be a shocking revelation for anybody who recites Quran on a regular basis. In the very tasmiah, God uses one masculine and two feminine names for Him(?)self, which although does not prove that God is predominantly feminine, in the very least points to the fact that God doesn’t want this side of Him(?) to be taken any lightly.
I was scrolling down a forum when i found this gem posted by MariaS.
Some people may say when huwa means “he” and “it” and hiya means “she” and “it” then why is God using huwa if hiya and huwa both mean “it” as Allah says : Qul huwAllahu ahad [Say he is One and Alone]? Answer: In A’rabic grammar, there are certain rules and criteria for feminine gender: 1) If it is feminine in nature like ummun [mother], ukhtun [sister]. 2) If the word ends with an A’rabic word ‘ta‘ like mirwaahatun [fan]. 3) If the word ends ‘badha Alif‘- an A’rabic letter. 4) Pairs of the body like yadun [hands], a’inun [eyes]. As the above criteria are not getting satisfied, by default Allah uses huwa-it.
I am not concluding this piece because i understand that people have different opinions. I do not intend to “establish” anything here neither do i feel the need of doing it nor do i find myself qualified for that. It’s just that i am going through a spiritual crisis where invoking God is, as i see it, the only way out and invoking a mother God feels much easier and more natural. Besides, I feel it’s really important for us to see God in the universe. The watchful man-guard is hard to see, the compassionate mother is hard not to.
Also, in case you are into literature, Paulo Coelho, in his book “By the River Piedra, I Sat Down and Wept”, makes an overwhelmingly beautiful case for the feminine God.
My return flight was 1000 hrs and the tomb was to open for visitors at 0900 hrs so this is the closest I got to Mevlana. I could see a series of small minarets of Mevlana’s tomb from the courtyard and wondered what life would be like for dervishes in the cells underneath them.