Muharram - a new start

Its been so long since I blogged anything in the seen. In the Unseen I have penned many a post and been thoroughly amused, even impressed, by my efforts! By the rules of the game that's not cricket;  but LIFE has been FULL ON. And since the idea of blogging has been a self-generated one,  merely for the purpose of self expression, no one was let down or disappointed, no contracts were broken…indeed, the world carried on turning much the same as it has for the past X billion years. I was not missed.

Blogging isn't/hasn’t been an intrinsic part of my life, though interior monologues quite naturally are.  In fact, my inner landscape (like yours) teams with them, dozens on multiple levels of inanity and insanity. If it weren’t for salat and meditation I would be a quivering pulsating mass of neurons firing manically. Wait! I’m that in any case! The off-button can be tricky to find.

Most of the time so much has been going on that I’ve been straining to listen to my inner voice – the deep one beneath the chatter, the neutral backdrop, the one that just hums a kind of  ‘Omm’  or ‘Huu’ without judgment, or points deducted for hesitation or digression.  The one that wordlessly intimates that cosmos underlies all the chaos. Its all I can do to just listen and hear and be, let alone wax lyrical about stuff or reduce it to a cyber-bite confections. Arguably it is for me alone to consume. We are each our own project.

And not all blogs need be a dip into an interior journey.  As many topics exist to blog about as stars twinkling in the milky way. For me, however, the impetus starts from inside. I have to feel moved. Everything is so connected: the sublime can bring me to the ridiculous and vice versa, the material connects to the spiritual and vice versa.  For me blogging is about stepping outside of time and sharing what comes.

Muharram brings with it a special quality of contemplative time. The first month of the Islamic New Year, given our history, is impossible to mark with the same kind of celebratory fervor the status quo culture accords its Anno Domini. It may be a ‘new’ year on the Muslim calendar, but it can’t and won’t ever be a time to pretend Karbala never happened.  When I come across the depths of fellow Muslims’ ignorance about this critical event in the history for Muslims I am often dumbfounded, and even more so by the creeping Hallmarkification of 'our new year'. (After all, Eid is like Christmas, right?)

As a fairly unacculturated follower of the school of Ahl ul-Bayt (Shia for short if you must, but these days I quite like the Sushi meme, as my family once had a cat by that name), I have never felt the compulsion to attend gatherings where the events of Karbala are recounted as if it were an act of faith. Here in these majalis the memory of Imam Husayn (a.s.) is invoked and even dramatized.  Over time this has become an increasingly ritualized and stylized act, particularly in the Indo-Pak subcontinent where I have been privileged to live for many years. Privately at home we might retell the story en famille, and be quieter than usual, spend time in dhikr, and consciously avoid the frivolous. Over the years of course I have attended several  majalis and lectures and have even given majlis talks myself, but always with apologies for not following the expected format, as I am not an orator and find myself unable to deploy the much favoured traditional story-telling techniques. It’s a certain flavour more easily grown up in than adopted.  But the majlis can be a most useful institution: for the love of Imam Husayn people halt their quotidian habits to gather and remind themselves of what he symbolizes, and what lessons can be relearnt from Karbala, which are eternal, universal and indefatigable.  

Rather like the punctuation of Ramadan – itself a comma if you will in the grammar of spiritual refreshment decreed for the Muslim -  this new start of the sentence after a full stop give us much to ponder. Man is ever treacherous, ambitious and greedy, especially when he forgets to whom he owes his life-blood; life is a precious bestowal of grace and must be respected;  and leadership is an even more onerous bestowal of guardianship, only dischargeable with true humility and adoration of the One in Whose hand all in encompassed. The battle of Karbala separates and singles out forever a model of selfless adherence to a higher plain of justice. Ultimately, worldly power is not the goal of existence but the test.

The seminal moment is of course on the 10^th, the actual day when Imam Husayn and his family were finally vanquished at Karbala in a mercilessly bloody end that only spared the womenfolk so as to parade them humiliatingly all through Muslim lands to Najaf and Syria and back to Madina.  Imam Husayn’s sister Zainab (a.s.), who lost her two sons in the battle, was a prime preserver of the ongoing memory of what happened.  After all, it was her protection of Imam Huysan’s son, Imam Ali Zayn al-Abidin (a.s.) , too sick to lay down his life alongside his father, which spared him from an early death and preserved his line – using her own body to defy those who would have killed him. It is her brave words before Yazid’s governor in Kufa and Yazid himself in his own court that crystallizes the dense immorality of what had been perpetrated. After the battle of Karbala it falls to the women to bear the burden of grief and I can only marvel at their fortitude… Wa la ghalib illa’llah.

From whichever angle you approach Karbala, whatever you read, reflect and retrieve from it, it will lead you to an ocean of boundless if painstakingly preserved wisdom. Imam Husayn was truly in this world but not of it. For it was the Prophet himself  (S) who declared him and his brother Imam Hasan (a.s.) the leaders of the youth in Paradise. In a world where oppression is meted out in the name of rights, all across the Muslim world and beyond,  the sufferings of Imam Husyan and the Ahl ul-Bayt provide a unifying chord that resonates all around the world. Karbala universalizes the core message of Islam: you are not mere animal flesh and blood to rampage this earth and amass wealth and power at all costs; rather, you are embodied spirits passing through this brief interlude of existence so go with respect, care and dignity for one another, in remembrance of your Creator. I cannot speak of Paradise, but I know Imam Husayn's memory lives on in another world,  the world of collective memory, held in the hearts and minds of millions.

And always will.

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'!