Happy New Year or Temporal Neophilia

A new year dawns. A new year of man's reckoning, as significant a milestone as we collectively wish it to be. Is it worth celebrating the new year? The local authorities where I live are clearly ambivalent about this, oscillating between acceptance (the port authorities hosted a massive fireworks display) and rejection (shutting down restaurants and blocking off roads).

Maybe the magic is the potential impregnated into the word 'new' and is nothing to do with the year at all? Maybe what attracts us is not the passage of time so much as the novelty we associate with its coming.
'New' signifies hope, fresh starts, better times, the chance to transform into a better version of ourselves.
Yet we can do that or choose to do that every day of the year because every day is new. For that matter, every moment is new, every second! Every moment is full of potential for revolution, for change, for becoming what we may be. The Qur'an tells us that every day He is in a state of Glory or upon a new affair - with the word for 'day' (yawm) meaning more than simply 24 hours but a unit of time.

As Muslims we are somewhat robbed of the idea of giddy and slightly crazed new year festivity which secular cultures bring to their ushering in of the solar Gregorian new year. The events of Karbala will forever cast an ignominious shadow over the beginning of the lunar Islamic calendar. This heinous and shameful episode in our history looms as a reminder that one can never forget the depths of treachery, disloyalty and lust for power to which human beings are susceptible. Instead our new year starts us off  introspectively, with deep reflection on what it means to be a Muslim, and with a sense of humility and awe at the sacrifice of Imam Hussain (as) and his extended family. And deep distaste for what so-called  Muslims do to Muslims.What can there be to celebrate when the beloved family of the Holy Prophet (S) was massacred and chopped down so eagerly? Even now every day we see Karbala revisited in what goes on between those who profess to follow the religion of peaceful submission.

Actually we can celebrate, just not wantonly. We can celebrate the tough choice the Imam made to stick to his beliefs - that rulership had to reflect noble, humble, selfless and god-conscious conduct, to stand up to forces that abused the power of the growing wave of Islam for self-interest and worldly gain. We can celebrate the fact that during this first month of the year, Muharram, in which the battle of Karbala took place, a line was forever drawn in the proverbial sands of time about the true intended nature of Islamic leadership. Needless to say, that model of Islamic leadership has yet to arise on any scale worth noting, though there have been plenty of pious, honourable and visionary Muslims who have led their communities and cities well. We can celebrate the triumph of truth over falsehood.

Having grown up in western oriented or Christian societies in which new year is celebrated, I cannot help but also be affected by a tremor of expectation at what the new year might bring. Even as I know it to be foolish and over-commercialized, the vestiges of my social conditioning still twitch my imagination on the occasion. Of course, the New Year hoohaa is the tail end of the Christmas drama, which in itself was invented as a convenient way of marrying pagan rites with Christian observance and then later Coca Cola got in on the picture.

Maybe we still resonate with the echoes of our pastoral and agri-rural past when we were all consciously locked into the cycles and seasons of sowing, sprouting, harvesting and storing. Modern day amenities like abundant food supplies, plumbing and central heating have inured us to the sheer life/death scenarios of survival, but deeply ingrained in us is the knowing that life is cyclical and somehow we are compelled to mark the beginnings and endings in significant ways so that we can share in a collective history of our community. After all, it is this shared sense of history that shapes us in our individuality as much as our DNA and upbringing.

But the love of the new - neophilia - is irresistible. Apparently our love of novelty is probably hardwired into our brains, according to a recent study; maybe because it  lights up the Ventral Striatum -  the pleasure processor. Or maybe it is because  dopamine is involved in deciding on new ventures. From what I've read, it seems the threat of the new is outweighed by the benefit of trying it out. Even as we seek to perpetuate the familiar for continuity and productivity, we crave the new to satisfy our interest and creativity and the love for being surprised. Its as if we need our apparatus of perception or the affective domain or our EQ to be refreshed and recalibrated.

Maybe the love of the new is the light of the soul pulsating beams into our consciousness, harkening us to a deeply buried secret inherent to the human condition, namely that life itself is a shimmering, glimmering, dazzling miracle. In Surat ul-Mulk in the Qur'an Allah tells us to  'return [your] vision twice again. [Your] vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued. Other translations render 'fatigued' as 'exhausted', and 'humbled' as 'dull, discomfited' or 'confused'. The implication being that you will feel overwhelmed with witnessing the perfection of creation.

And surely that is why we want the new year to be happy and good for ourselves and for others. Our soul is telling us, 'Look! Do you see any imperfection in it?' And that is the vision with which we are impelled to reconnect. There is always hope, so do not allow the murkiness of your vision to veil you from that potential of experiencing serendipity and a higher order of harmony within your beating breast.

So I pray that in this new year we turn away from man's mad machinations (the angels had a right to complain!) and look instead to be inspired by creation and nature, by its perfect order and symmetry, its astonishing cause and effect, its organically sublime 'pretzality' (my coinage!), its offerings and takings, its awesomeness and exquisiteness, its majesty and beauty.

In this way, I greet you all with a heartfelt prayer for a 'Happy New Year'!

Light-Detector Heart

October was a busy month. And the start of November. I was so busy being in the moment I didn't have time to process or analyze. Just had to be! Or was I becoming? Particle or wave? Cue emoticon for wink.

My father was visiting Pakistan after a gap of two and a half years. This much maligned but blessed country has long provided an orbital pull on him. In his early days of awakening to his higher purpose he dedicated much time and wealth to working with people in this land. He even went far down the path of trying to move his whole family here, buying land and starting to build, but that plan never came to fruition and South Africa claimed him instead.

And here is where we leave off the father part and start the teacher bit. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri has been my teacher and guide since my late teens. It was one of those things I knew at the age of 18 beyond conscious thought: he would be my teacher, like it or lump it. And even though I had cause to reconsider this state of affairs many years later, I chose, once again, his light, his flavour, the offering of his portal to higher wisdom sciences that would help me 'become' who I am in essence.


In the early days of his spiritual awakening, he would regularly go 'wali-hunting', that is, travelling throughout the Muslim world to meet and commune with beings of light, living or deceased. In Pakistan that meant he travelled through Sindh and Punjab visiting the shrines, taking the light detector of his heart to observe and feel the traces of luminescence left in their wake. He also connected deeply with a few living beings, the more prominent among them being: Shaykh Ikram Chishti, a hakim and shaykh in Hyderabad, Sufi Barkat Ali with his Qur'an 'hospital' near Faisalabad, and a humble soul known as Samandari Baba who lived on the very edge of Karachi, in a hut made of  marine flotsam and jetsam which barely stayed above sea level.

Several of his students, myself included, have been the beneficiaries of these exposures.  Over the years, many have come from abroad to experience something of the legacy of these awliya, and a few of them have been fortunate enough to accompany Shaykh Fadhlalla on these trips. These are my favourite types of adventures, for with such a highly calibrated tuning fork in our midst, miracles often happen. Not that we are looking for miracles per se; Shaykh Fadhlalla often emphasizes that mere breath is a miracle - so what more sign could one want? And indeed the very word miracle in Arabic, mu'jizah, derives from a verb which means to be weak and feeble, as if to imply that one's trust and faith being weak, one seeks the supernatural in order to be restored to the essentially deeper state of knowingness that all is from the One, sustained by the One, and returning to the One.

What I mean is that we get to be in the midst of serendipitous confluences of hearts and events, where aha! moments abound, epiphanies wash away our virtual cataracts, and sheer humility in the previously unappreciated paradoxes of human experience floods our veins. In his company we are shown how to witness perfection. We tend to give better attention, to  notice, to hear, to listen carefully, because we are accompanying a being who has truly aligned all the feathers of his self with the light beacon of his soul. And that's a delicious slipstream to fly in.