Violence, Resilience, 'Beingness' & Light

Lately I've been reading a lot about what women in conflict zones go through and it leaves me feeling as if my solar plexus has been gouged out. The sufferings of women in places like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Congo, Sudan (the list goes on and on)... seems endlessly awful. Here in Pakistan a war of attrition is visited upon women, and not just of the underprivileged classes. To traditional cultural practices of  honour killings  (Karo-Kari, Watta Satta) and other suffocating social customs, are added other ills like acid attacks, social inequality, collateral damage from the 'war on terrorism', mishandled rehabilitation post-'natural' disasters, and the ghastly misinterpretation of religious precepts in frankly nonsensical laws (e.g. the Hudood Ordinance).

Given my nature, my training, and the purpose of this blog, how does this have anything to do with the idea of living life at a higher vibrational frequency? How can the profound ugliness of rape and violence connect to the quest to live life in a loftier, purer, happier state of beingness? Surely all this grossness is evidence of what beingness is NOT about: injustice, disharmony, prejudice, vilification, implosive destruction?

My daughter's high school recently put on a play that drew you in to literally taste the personalized trauma which Bosnian women went through during the four years in which the rest of Europe ignored them, while the Serbs waged their genocidal war against them (Eve Ensler's play 'Necessary Targets'). You might think that a bunch of privileged teenagers wouldn't be able to do justice to the depth of trauma and suffering needed to be conveyed to make for good theatre, but you would be wrong. They performed astonishingly well. The hairs on my arms stood up for hours beyond the curtain call. 

Maybe it was talent and excellent direction, but maybe also the fact that growing up in Pakistan, human suffering is not removed from their lives; they can witness it all around them, and experience it through the characters populating their daily experiences. Contrary to the consistently skewed slant on news bulletins on Pakistan, the philanthropic element in human nature is thriving in this country, though it is certainly still insufficient. Without the numerous private charitable and developmental enterprises sustaining and bolstering the human will to survive and develop, the true extent of the government's manifold shortcomings would be even more obvious. As it is, the good works of such non-governmental agencies (not just NGOs I must add, but 'unregistered' private citizens) remains the secret key to why this nation is not a 'failed state'. The resilience and perseverance of Pakistanis is admirable.

And this is what I want to talk about here: the will to live, human resilience. It is so deeply connected to the root of our being. In extremis the will to survive can become a purely selfish end. More often than not, however, we are surrounded by examples of selfless service where the efforts of one, or several individuals coming together to work as one, help to give others a chance to live and thrive and do more than just survive. There is an instinctive sense at play that once we are assured of our survival, we need to share with others, that somehow our own fortune is tied to the fortune of the greater collective - 'no man is an island unto himself.'

Deep within us there is something that never dies: a life-line called soul, breathed into our forms from beyond time and space by Divine Command - or however you may label it. As a Muslim I am naturally awed by the Qur'anic account of the moment when Divine Will is manifest in creation: 'Kun fa yakun!' Be and it is! [2:117]

We come into existence, into form bound by time and space and are governed by the persuasive illusion of chronology, by the Creator (Al-Khaliq), the Originator (Al-Mubdi'). We are kept alive by the Ever-living (Al-Hayy), the Eternally Self-Subsistent (Al-Qayyum). The human soul knows, understands and hankers for the Ever-Alive and seeks the impeccable self-sufficiency of the Eternally  Self-Subsistent.

It seems to me that the soul energy of our 'beingness'  gives rise to our resilience. It lends power and energy to the will to survive. As long as the decree favours breath, we humans have no option but to struggle and strive, to recover, to mend, to adapt, to grow, to heal, to make changes, to ameliorate, to share. 

Resilience is something that may be weakened or bent, diminished or increased, but rarely expunged. There is always an exception to be found, however, like the case of Fakhra Yunus, a woman disfigured by acid thrown on her by a vengeful husband and who, after 12 years of plastic surgery could no longer muster the effort to live and threw herself out of her apartment building in Rome.  I cannot conjecture what limit she had reached that pushed her literally over the edge. I cannot help feeling that she was not solely responsible for her own death; the society that allowed this to happen, and enabled the perpetrator to go unpunished, and still allows this heinous crime to occur, must surely also bear the guilt of a slow murder.

Equally there are other stories like Mukhtaran Mai's or Waris Dirie's. There are no happy endings, just catalysts for ongoing change - slow, painful, but necessary change. Being resilient means hovering between fragility and strength, and above all being tenacious.

The predisposition for resilience is there within each one of us, reflecting the ongoing nature of the soul which, though it may slough off its mortal coil at some point, continues to radiate beyond the confines of cellular life. Our resilience is coded into the very blueprint of our soul. Allah is the 'Light of the Heavens and Earth' [24:36]. Nothing will satisfy us unless we have some of this light in our lives. We can never be satisfied with the darkness that lurks in the tenebrous depths of human nature. Like moths impelled to lamp-light, we too seek 'Nur', for this Light is beautiful, luminous, glorious and eternal.


Glossary:
Nur: Light; Allah's Light.