Mediocrity of our lives, is of our own choosing…..

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus; and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves,that we are underlings.

Only shakespeare can say it so eloquently.

Reading this passage, really provides the answer to the question that I have been looking for in my own life. I am at a place of mediocrity because the path I chose to walk upon and the way I chose to walk it has lead me to this place. This is of my own choosing, my own decisions and desires in life. I chose to be here and nothing and no one is to blamed aparts from myself.

I walk through this place hoping that there is something around the corner that propels me into the glorious future of my dreams. Instead I walk underneath demigods, never aiming to topple them. Instead walking underneath them peeping out, reservedly, waiting to get to my dishonourable grave.

This is the single greatest dogma of being an average person. I have tried shock and awe and have thrown myself into paths unknown, yet when I get up and start walking on these paths, that spectre of mediocrity comes back to haunt me. I have tried distant lands, tried exhaustive trades yet this spectre never leaves me.

So the fault has to be in myself… and not in my stars.

Breaking News – Pakistan hysteria links with the 1962 Tanganyika’s outbreak

It has been reported that there have been outbreaks of mass hysteria in Pakistan which have suspected links with the Tanganyika Laughter outbreak from 1962. Only in this case, people are suffering from what has been referred to as Mass Naara Baazi (Sloganeering) and flag waving on the streets. The source of the hysteria was reported to have originated in the Lawyers fraternity who have now transmitted it to wide areas of the Punjab Province. The punjabis, who are pretty hysteric at their best, are now in a state of meltdown. One of the commentators of dubious origin, highlights this to be related to demogasry, which is an infectious gas only recently released in the echeleons of Pakistan. (After a number of previous attempts to release demogasry went up in smoke, quite literally)

Sources also confirm that the military is in the wings ready to upheld the constitution, which in Europeon terms is Pakistan’s answer to the Champion league football. The current Constitutional football league results indicate, the PPP to be two points ahead of the PML-N. PML-N star striker, Nawaz (Ronaldo) Sharif has been suspended with a red card, because he was complaining to the Referee Mr Asif (Maradona) Zardari , who also happens to be the coach, striker, defender, goal keeper and ball boy of the PPP, who immediately showed Sharif the red card, and red cards to his brother and defensive player Shahbaz (Rio) Sharif.

Some of the symptoms of this hysteria includes, watching Geo News (Even the blue screen since the channel has been banned), wearing black coats even if the only law you have read is the ‘No Parking’ sign, jumping up and down to the beats of dholaks, and screaming confusing slogans to remove person A who was only brought in to remove person B with the help of person C who is now supporting person D who does not know what the poppins is going on.

People in pakistan are advised to report any of the above symptoms to their nearest political party’s Qurbani ki Khaal (Sacrificial Skin Collection) centre, whereby they will be transported to an area of mass gathering and sloganeering. The government has already developed and unleashed their anti-dote to this epidemic, which includes a massive dose of Lathi Charge (Baton Charge), kicking and indiscriminate beating. Our Prime Minister has been banned from all such events due to his medical condition called “gropingsherryrehman” fever. Some suspect that Sherry Rehman’s recent resignation was in fear that the PM will again suffer from attack of the aforementioned fever that is caused by such hysteric conditions.

 

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_Laughter_Epidemic

Nazis back in this world – (Just as the SS Stood by whilst Innocents were Gassed)

Gaza: ICRC demands urgent access to wounded as Israeli army fails to assist wounded Palestinians
Geneva/Jerusalem/Tel Aviv (ICRC) – On the afternoon of 7 January, four Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to obtain access for the first time to several houses in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza City that had been affected by Israeli shelling.

The ICRC had requested safe passage for ambulances to access this neighbourhood since 3 January but it only received permission to do so from the Israel Defense Forces during the afternoon of 7 January.

The ICRC/PRCS team found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.

In another house, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israel Defense Forces nearby as well as two tanks.

“This is a shocking incident,” said Pierre Wettach, the ICRC’s head of delegation for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.”

Large earth walls erected by the Israeli army had made it impossible to bring ambulances into the neighbourhood. Therefore, the children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart. In total, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team evacuated 18 wounded and 12 others who were extremely exhausted. Two corpses were also evacuated. The ICRC/PRCS will recover the remaining corpses on Thursday.

The ICRC was informed that there are more wounded sheltering in other destroyed houses in this neighbourhood. It demands that the Israeli military grant it and PRCS ambulances safe passage and access immediately to search for any other wounded. Until now, the ICRC has still not received confirmation from the Israeli authorities that this will be allowed.

The ICRC believes that in this instance the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded. It considers the delay in allowing rescue services access unacceptable.

For further information, please contact:
Florian Westphal, ICRC Geneva, tel.: +41 22 730 22 82 or +41 79 217 32 80
Anne-Sophie Bonefeld, ICRC Jerusalem, tel +972 2 582 88 45 or +972 52 601 91 50

Oreintalism and Genocide – Israeli Missle vs Palestinian Stone

In a recent re-reading of Edward Said’s masterpiece, Orientalism, the parallels of orientalist thought continued in this day and age by mainstream global media are baffling. No where is this orientalist western outlook more vehemently displayed then in the context of Israel’s barbarous genocide currently being carried out on the civilians of Gaza. The news media, including TV, Radio, Internet and the Printed mainstream newspapers, toe this exceptionally defined line (based on the age old anti-arab bigotry and racism of the past) whereby Israel is the victim and the Palestinian the aggressor. Where Israeli actions including heinous war crimes such as blowing up a UN School in Gaza and killing women and children are just mere defence of a brave people, so much so that a stone thrown by a Palestinian is more potent, malicious and destructive an attack than any million dollar missiles launched indiscriminately by Israel, upon the imprisoned populace of Gaza. This disproportionate view is presented wall to wall from all major global news networks and the convoluted defence of Israeli war crimes is symptomatic of the obvious impartiality of the Western governments, who sign a unwritten law, giving Israel every chance to commit atrocities, that would put the Nazis to shame, should they have witnessed this irony unfolding in the name of a Zionist Israel. Hitler is probably sitting on his high horse in Hell, looking over amusingly at the irony of the children of his victims, acting out the fantasies he unleashed upon this world. Coming back to the media however, the rot that causes the western medias short and long sightedness when witnessing this saga is based on two key things. One as described so eloquently by Said, is the continued Orientalist mindset that affects the majority of people of all hues and shades living in the West and the second is the West wide guilt shared by most Europeans and Americans of the terrible Jewish Holocaust. Offcourse the Western complicity in the holocaust is undeniable, as they had ample opportunities to prevent Hitler and did not, as it served a higher purpose of their anti-semitism at the time. So the West is pleased to see by allowing the Fish Barrel wars carried out by the genocidal and psychopathic Israeli Zionists, some of the West burgeoning guilt with the holocaust might be lightened. Together these two factors cause the 41 year old ethnic cleansing committed by the Russian Zionists in name of the West.

O Gaza (Pable Neruda’s I am explaining a few things)

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *

Complicity in Silence – Obama, a very ordinary extraordinaire

It is said that when Hitler was adamant planning the persecution of the Jewish german diaspora based on his murderous and bigoted views, all the European nations were in aware of his planned actions. None however were brave enough to stop that mad man and his Nazi followers before he ensued one of the most terrible event in human history. It was only a threat to there own lands which actually started the ‘Good war’.  In 2008, Israel is committing as heinous an act as the Nazi’s conducted and the Western powers are still not brave enough to stand up to this Holocaust.

 

Gaza, in many ways is a paradox of the continued western guilt of complicity in Hitler’s holocaust, mixed with imperialistic ambitions that ensure that the West refrains from any Israeli atrocity and the continued ethnic cleansing, Israel has been practicing over the Palestinians for the last 60 years. Today, the right wing Zionits (as evil an ideology as Nazism) are carrying out a pre-election holocaust that ensures that a certain party gets into power, with the sole success of the party that commits the worst atrocities and sheds the most blood of innocent women and children. This demonstrates the majority psychological murderous mindset of Israelis supporting these parties, in the name of whom the Israeli military conducts these atrocious acts of genocide. Obama, with his cowardly silence is just demonstrating and there is no western power or leader morally brave enough to recognise this huge genocide that’s taking place right in front of us here in 2008. It confirms what many of us dared not thought when we were supporting him during his election campaign, all of us hoping for a new change in our world history. Obama was given this immense change to bring a neutrality and fairness to this world and if this maddening silence shows us anything is that he is in fact no different to his predecessors and will continue to bow to Zionism as it provides him with lucrative votes and election campaign funding. The likes of Rahm Emmanuel will ensure to that.

 

His silence also kills all hope that we powerless people within the non western world, subjugated to a complete lack of democratic institutions and political power by the corrupt and morally disabled leaders that rule most of the Muslim world, would have had any chance of retribution a more equal world. However as Obama confirmed, he can only speak if the persecutor and the persecuted are right nationalities that meet the dogmas of western imperialist bias. Therefore he spoke out against the atrocities in Mumbai, yet has nothing to offer for the far worst and heinous crimes that are being committed in Gaza. Shame on you Obama, for your moral weakness, you were a supposedly extraordinary individual who gave us all hope, yet you turned out to be an ordinary and below average human being, with similar convulted moral compass as your infamous predecessor.

Musharraf’s Departure – The beggining of the End (Part 1)

 My friends and my road-fellows, pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion. Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress. Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block. Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

 

Khalil Gibran

 

Gibran must have had foresight about the land of the pure, Pakistan, when he wrote this eloquent piece.

 

Musharraf’s resignation ends the depressingly familiar story of a military man, starting out with good intentions, and eventually succumbing to the seduction of absolute power. He made some excellent starts, and even bigger mistakes along his nine year rule. But never in the long history of our nation, had a leader left with so much credibility as to his personal accountability and desires and as a nation we must thank him for not ripping the country off with his own hands (Although the minnows that surrounded him might have helped themselves). He was wrong on many fronts, the whole debacle of the Supreme Court Judges, the PCO imposition, were actions of a man shooting from the hip and supported by pygmies acting as advisors. But looking back at his time, one must also admire his bravery and the ability to take a stand on principled positions. The support for the US War on Terror being a case in point. This leads us onto the current situation. After Musharraf and all his faults, the country is about to truly go to the dogs. And the leaders of these pack of dogs have names, such as Zardari, Sharif etc. If Musharraf can be blamed for his final act of treason against the country, it is to allow this so called pack of dogs back into the country through his ill-conceived “Reconciliation” movement, allowed them to form government. Lets not be confused about what these pack of dog (Zardari, Sharif) represent. They represent everything that is bad about Pakistan, absolute greed, corruption, power mania with blood on their hands. Zardari did not hide his desire to have a puppet president, Cheif Jusitice and State Governer, in the back of his pocket and truly embark on a gluttony of corruption that will be both historic in its audacity and bloody in its implementation.

 

If we think the country was in worst off or had been before, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

 

(Part 2 tomorrow, to look at the biggest impact on the nation which is the War on Terror)

 

China Fever – Red Red Whine

Of Hypocrisy and Whining

 

Every time I read or view news about the oh so righteous activism of the every men, woman and their dog in the West against the Chinese Olympics, in order to highlight the Chinese persecution of the Tibetans. I just get the UB40 song from the 80s (Red, Red Whine) looping back continuously in my mind.

 

Is there a west wide checklist of criteria before tom, dick and harriet decides on whose rights they will support. There is no doubt that communist China has tried its best undermine the unique culture of Tibet and have introduced state wide immigration of other Chinese ethnic groups to come and settle in Tibet. However, last time I heard, there were no cruise missiles striking on the Tibetans, no aerial bombing of key targets, no creation of walls to starve the Tibetans to death(Although I did hear the monks burned down a mosque in Lhasa, which did not feature in any news reel or opinion making anywhere in the west). No that was much closer to the west, happening right near the coast line of Europe, an area known as Palestine, for those with selective memory disorder. Yet, there are no demonstrations against the Israelis or the Americans supporting them in this vicious ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.

 

On the questions of occupation, there are no questions raised when the West occupies Iraq for oil, or deny the Kurds a fair right to exist as a nation, allowing Turkey to strike deep into Kurdish areas. No, that’s acceptable genocide by Western standards.

 

China however is fair game as it’s a convenient punch bag for the western soul to flush out its guilt ridden sense of justice out on. But then this is an old story. In the west nobody has an opinion, everyone just mimes the national media lines and tow the government policies against regions with no inconvenient truths. It’s a shame to see this selective sympathy and all headlines are load of whining by morally corrupt westerners, whose moral compass needs to be calibrated with government policy.

 

Shame on you the collective west and all westerners crying crocodile tears for Tibet. I wish China a successful Olympics and hope that they change their attitude to the Tibetans, the Chinese Muslims provinces, the Taiwanese and others through their own social metamorphosis, rather than any Western media based agenda backed by the CIA, cannon foddered by righteous western arm chair fanatics, selectively applying their goodwill around the world.

A Good Word is Like a Good Tree by Annemarie Schimmel

Here I am reproducing an extract from a speech that is not only utterly beautiful in its eloquence, but is also urgently meaningful in the times we live in. (Italicised some of the most beautiful extracts of this speech)

A Speech by Annemarie Schimmel
March 1996Honourable assembly, Your Honour Mr. President. I am very grateful for the guiding speech by which you honoured me and in which you emphasised so strongly the importance of tolerance and of understanding foreign civilisations, which are indispensable to our foreign politics. When I learnt to my great surprise and joy that I had been awarded the Peace Prize, nobody would have imagined that during the following months a campaign would unfold – a campaign of such force that it seemed to destroy my life’s work, which was and is devoted to a better understanding between East and West.2 This hurt me to the very core of my heart and mind, and I hope that those who attacked me without even knowing me in person or having read my works will never have to undergo a torture like that.I learnt one thing: the methods and ways of scholarship and poetry are one thing, those of journalism and politics something else. Both sides however agree on one point: that is the central role of the word, the free word, in our lives.

I think during the last months I have stated often enough that I loath the disastrous fatwa against Salman Rushdie and I will help in my own way to defend the freedom of speech, of the word. In the 1950s my Pakistani poet friend Fez wrote from prison;

“Speak! for your lips are still free,
speak! for your tongue is still yours,
speak! your straight body is still yours,
speak! for your life is still yours,
See, how in the Blacksmith’s forge
the flames are sharp, the iron is red,
The locks’ mouth begin to open,
every rind in the chain becomes wide!
Speak a little time is plenty
before body’s and tongues’s death.
Speak truth is still alive,
speak out whatever is to be said.”

And this leads me to the very subject of my address. Sometimes I thought: if Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866) were still alive he would certainly deserve the Peace Prize, as his motto was: “Weltpoesie (global poetry) alone is Weltversohnung (leading to the reconciliation of worlds)”. During his lifetime, he produced thousands of masterly poetical translations from dozens of languages and knew that poetry, “the mother tongue of the human race”, connects people as it is part of all civilisations.

But in the period when Ruckert spoke of poetry as the medium of global reconciliation, and that means, of peace, people had a different relationship with the non-Western world from what we have now. Amazed and shocked, the West had observed in the 8th and 9th centuries the Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean, but thanks to the Arabs who ruled Andalusia for centuries, it has also inherited the foundations of modern science; medical works by Rhazes and Avicenna were considered standard works in Europe to the beginning of modern times; the writings of Averroes played a role in theological discussions and prepared the way towards the Enlightenment. The translations of Toledo, where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived peacefully together, made Arab learning the poetry of the West. The Catelan scholar Ramon Lull, again, taught the mutual respect of religions which, in his opinion, should end not only in discussion but lead to a common enterprise – that is to foster peace.

After the siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1529, bloody dramas about the Turks were part and parcel of a widespread anti-Turkish, and that meant anti-Islamic literature, but at the same time, Europe came to know another aspect of the East thanks to objective reports by travellers and merchants. The first French translation of the Arabian Nights at the beginning of the 10th century showed the West an oriental world of fairies, jinnies and sensual attractions which inspired generations of poets, painters, and musicians; at the same time Arabic and Islamic studies as well as Indology gained an independent status among the sciences thanks to the Enlightenment. Scholarly studies and translations triggered off a current of orientalising poetry, which was headed by Goethe, whose West-Oestrlicher Divan with its “notes and dissertations” is an unsurpassed analysis of Islamic culture.

But when Ruckert published his first poems inspired by Persian poetry in 1820 (one year after Goethe’s Divan) people listened to the tales “when far away in Turkey people fight each other” (as Goethe says in Faust).

As for us, we are not only informed day after day of news events but rather are entangled by the mass media to watch pictures of the Muslim world, to which we owe so much. This culture appears strange and alien to most Europeans, and is constantly blamed because it seems to have no reformation, no Enlightenment, and is therefore considered “incapable of changing” as Jacob Burckhardt claimed a century ago with a deadly aversion. But do not most people know that the Islamic world between Indonesia and West Africa presents us with most diverse culture expressions, although it has the common basis in the firm belief in the One and Unique God and the acceptance of Muhammad as the last Prophet? To look at the Islamic world as something monolithic is as if we would overlook in the West the difference between Greek orthodox Christianity and North American Freechurches. But in times where we are constantly flooded with condensed, brief information, it seems next to impossible to differentiate, and to recognise the softer shades and positive aspects of Islam as it is lived.

“Man is the enemy of what he does not know.” says the Greek as well as the Arabic proverb. Maulana Rumi, the great mystical poet of the 13th century, tells in his Persian prose work that a little boy complained to his mother of a black figure that appears time and again to frighten him; finally the mother advises him to address the terrible apparition, as one can recognise someone’s character by his answer. For the word, as Persian poets like to repeat, discloses the speaker’s character by its “smell”, just as an almond cake stuffed with garlic discloses its true character although it may outwardly look quite appetising.

“A good word is like a good tree.” Thus says the Quran, and in most religions the word is regarded as the creative power; it is the carrier of revelation: God’s word incarnate in Christianity, or His word inlibrate in Islam. The word is a good entrusted to man, which he should preserve and which he must not weaken, falsify, or kill by talking too much. For it has a power of its own which we cannot gauge, it is this power of the word upon which rests the extraordinary responsibility of the poet and even more of the translator who by a single wrong nuance can cause dangerous misunderstandings.

The ancient Arabs believed that the poets’ words were like arrows, and even in the Gulf War the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain used poets to propagate his will to victory. The power of poetry is much greater in the Islamic world than with us; we are touched by music, the Muslim mostly by the sound of language.

I have discovered Istanbul corner by corner through the verses which Turkish poets had sung for five centuries about this wonderful city; I have learnt to love the culture of Pakistan through the songs that resound in all of its provinces, and when one of my Harvard students had the misfortune to be among the American hostages in Tehran, he experienced a great change in his jailers’ attitude when he recited Persian poetry; here, suddenly, a common idiom emerged and helped to bridge deep ideological differences.

I agree with Herder’s words: “It is from poetry that we gain a deeper knowledge of times and nations than we do from the deceptive miserable way of political and martial history.”

The long dirges which Urdu poets in 19th century India wrote in memory of the martyrdom of Hussain, the prophet’s grandson, served at the same time to criticise the British colonial power in coded words. We have to decode them to understand their explosive political message.

For centuries poets have complained about exile and jail. It is sufficient to mention the contemporary Iraqi poet al-Dayati:
“I dreamt, and separation,
oh beloved, was pain
for I am homeless
I die in a foreign town
die alone, oh my beloved,
without a fatherland.”

Hermann Hesse, whose Morgenlandfahrt is well-known to all of us, said in his Peace Prize speech in 1955: “It is not the poets’ affair to accommodate to any actual reality and to glorify it, but rather to show beyond it the possibility of beauty, of love, and of peace.” Did not the Lebanese poet Adonis intend the same thing when he wrote during the horrors of the Lebanese civil war:

“Take a rose, spread it out as a pillow
after a little while
weakness will devour you
in murky dirt
heavy bombs will make you
their victim
after a little while
Take a rose and call it songs
and sing it for the world”

The later poetry of Islamic peoples is largely influenced by mysticism, but one should not, as is usual, equate mysticism with obscurantism, with fleeing from reality or as something that has no meaning for post-Enlightenment people. Many of the great mystics were rebels against what they regarded as injustice, against corrupt states, against hairsplitting jurists who, as the great thinker Al-Ghazali in the 11th century wrote in his autobiography, “knew the tiniest details of the divorce laws but knew nothing of God’s living presence”. Such an attitude of mystics is found in all religious traditions; in Christianity, male and female saints actively tried to change the fate of their countries, and the same is true for the Chassidim in Eastern Europe as we understand from Martin Buber’s books. Because they emphasised spiritual values, these people often came to criticise the society intensely and became fighters for social justice.

The history of Islam contains numerous names of such mystics, whose lives were devoted to the realisation of their love of God and mankind. The greatest among them is al-Hallaj, who was executed in Baghdad in 922, in part because of his daring religious claims but in part because of his political activities. He remains a symbol for the Muslims to this day, hated by the traditional orthodox, admired by those who regard him not only as the representative of pure love of God but also as a fighter against the establishment. His parable of the moth that casts itself in the flame to gain new life through dying inspired Goethe’s famous poem “Selige Sehnsucht”. The apotheosis of this “martyr of Divine love” whose name is conjured up by progressive writers in all Islamic countries is a scene in Iqbal’s Persian epic, Javidname, where Hallaj warns the modern poets:

“You do exactly what I once did – beware!
You bring resurrection to the dead – beware!”

That is, resurrection from a fossilised world of legalism, and this is by denying human responsibility but as a fulfilment of man’s real role in the world. Does not the Quran state that God has honoured humans by entrusting to them a precious good (Sura 33:72)? Iqbal’s, the spiritual father of Pakistan, is perhaps the best example of a modern interpretation of Islam. His poetry was on everyone’s lips in India in the 1930s, for the largely illiterate masses could be reached only by the poetical word which can be memorised easily. Iqbal (whose works, incidentially are banned in Saudia Arabia) had under the influence of Goethe and Rumi, tried to postulate a dynamic Islam; he was aware that the human being is called on to improve God’s earth in cooperation with the Creator, and that one should exhaust the never-ending possibilities of interpreting the Quran in order to survive changing circumstances. But he also taught that one never should rely exclusively upon intellect, as much as modern technology and progress can be admired and man is called on to participate in it. In a central poem of his, “Message of the East”, his answer to Goethe’s “Divan”, he writes that science and love, that is critical analysis and loving synthesis, must work together to create positive values for the future.

This brings us to a point which appears increasingly important to me – this is the problem of lovingly understanding foreign civilisations. Unfortunately the word “understanding” seems to be equated today with an uncritical acceptance and general forgiveness. Yet, true understanding grows from a knowledge of historical facts and many people lack such a knowledge. Spiritual and political situations however develop out of historical facts which one has to know first before correctly judging a situation.

St. Augustine said “one understands something only as far as one loves it” and our mediaeval theologians knew that “love is the intellect of the eye.” One can of course claim that such a love makes the lover blind, but I believe that such a deep love also opens one’s eyes, for we see all beloved beings’ sins and mistakes with much deeper grief then those of an unknown person. We spent our lives in studying the world of Islam in its manifold facets and tried to show its positive aspects to a public that has barely an idea of this complex world. Therefore for us it is a much more terrible shock to follow the developments that appeared in some parts of the Islamic world during the last decades.

In a civilisation whose traditional greeting is Salam “Peace” (like the Hebrew Shalom) we observe at the moment a horrifying narrowing and stiffening of dogmatic and legalistic positions. At the beginning we believed that this could be explained as an attempt to shut the floodgates against the increasing influence of the West, in order to be such that the believers follow the straight path shown by the Prophet Muhammad. Now, however it looks different: in large areas we are confronted with sheer power politics, with ideologies which utilise Islam more or less as a catchword, and have very little in common with its religious foundations.

At least I have not discovered in the Quran or in the Traditions anything that orders or allows terrorism or the taking of hostages. On the contrary, the Golden Rule is valid everywhere in the world of Islam. No thinking individual can appreciate acts of terror wherever they appear and in whichever ideology they are rooted, and nobody would be happier than we, whatever our special field of research may be, when death sentences or imprisionment of persons of deviant opinions or critical thinkers would no longer be pronounced. Many of the radical fundamentalists seem to forget that the Quran says la ikhra fid-din “no compulsion in religion” and that the Prophet warned against declaring anyone a kafir, an infidel. The fundamentalists try to recruit followers among the unemployed, rootless youth whom they supply with a few simple formulas to manipulate them easily. But such a politically misused Islam is something completely different from lived Islam; it is, as Tahe Ben Jalloun writes, a caricature of true Islam, “for it stands for a political doctrine which was nonexistent until now in the Arab-Islamic world”.

But the image of the West in the media of the different Islamic countries is also often distorted, and we need to enlighten both sides. Strangely enough even liberal Muslim intellectuals are but little aware of their own history and the works that Muslims in other parts of the world have created; they are most grateful when they are gently led to recognise the great traditions of their own civilisations which nowadays often seem to be forgotten under a crust of centuries-old developments and yet could help them find their own way into a modern future that is genuinely their own. Gently, I said, and not by lifting one’s index finger like a teacher for that can result immediately in a negative reaction to suspected “cultural colonialism”.

I speak from experience after giving innumerable lectures during the last 40 years in different oriental countries. During those years that I, a young non-Muslim woman, was occupying the chair of History of Religions in the new faculty of Islamic theology in Ankara (at a time when there were barely any chairs for women in German universities) I had also to teach `Church History and Dogmatics’. And that was very important. For we usually forget the great role Jesus, the “Spirit of God” and his mother play in the Quran and Muslim piety. Once in a while we should remember a sentence which Novalis in his novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” (published 1801) put in the mouth of the imprisioned Saracen woman in Jerusalem: “Full of respect, our princes honoured the tomb of your saint whom we too regard as a divine Prophet. How beautiful would it have been if his sacred tomb had become the cradle of a happy understanding and the reason for eternal beneficial alliances …”

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam knew the ideal of eschatological peace where lion and lamb lie together in the time of the just ruler. But peace is nothing static. The UNESCO Declaration about “The role of religion in the promotion of a culture of peace” (Dec. 1994) says: “Peace is a journey, a never ending process.” There is nothing that is not kept alive by the principles of change and polarity; a heart that no longer beats is dead. Peace too is a process of living growth which begins in each of us. The Muslim mystics considered the constant struggle with their lower qualities the real jihad: “the greater war in the way of God” and when their souls had finally reached peace they were capable of working for peace in the world.

One may think that the picture of Islam which I offer is too idealistic, far away from hard political realities, but as a historian of religion I learned that one has to compare ideal with ideal. The Swedish Lutheran Bishop Tor Andrae (d.1948) a leading Islamologist, wrote in his biography of Muhammad: “A religious faith has the same right as every other spiritual movement to be judged according to what it really intends and not according to how human weakness and contemptibleness have stained this ideal”.

My picture of Islam has emerged not only from a decades-long interest in Islamic literature and art, but even more from the friendship with Muslims all over the world and from all levels of the population, who accepted me into their families and acquainted me with the poetry of their languages. I owe them an enormous gratitude, a small part of which I want to acknowledge today. People like Mevlude Genc, the Turkish woman in Solingen who forgave those who caused the loss of many of her family members, are representatives of that tolerant Islam which I have known for so many years. I am so grateful to my parents who educated me in an atmosphere of religious freedom, permeated by poetry, as well as to my teachers, colleagues and students each of whom has expanded my horizons in his or her special way.

I am most grateful to the Borsenverein whose election committee had the courage to elect me into the illustrious circle of the recipients of the Peace Prize, although Ibn Khaldun, the great North African philosopher of history in the 14th century says in the headline of one of his chapters that “the scholar is one who among all people is least acquainted with the ways of day-to-day politics.”

The scholar’s duty is to explain cultures to himself and to others. Martin Buber pointed out in this place in 1953 that the acceptance of the other is the basis of dialogue. That is also true of the relations between the West and the Islamic world, as much as Islam appears to be the enemy after the end of the East-West conflict. Yet, like Buber, I still believe in true dialogue, which, as he says, consists in the acceptance of the other as he is, for only thus differences can be overcome – though not taken out completely – in a human way.

This Peace Prize is an honour – which I had never dared dream of, and it will be an incentive to continue and increase my efforts for a better understanding between the Occident and the Orient as long as my strength will last. The words which the President of the Federal Republic of Germany has addressed to me will strengthen me on this path. But first and last I owe my thanks to Him about whom Goethe says in his “West-Ostlicher Divan”:

“The East belongs to God
The West belongs to God
north and southern lands
rest in the peace of His hands,
He, the sole just ruler,
intends the right things for every one,
Among His hundred names
- be this one glorified and praised
Amen.”

Annemarie Schimmel
March 1996

Endnotes

1. The above speech was delivered to an assembly of writers, publishers and public officials, including the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Roman Herzog, on the occasion of the bestowal of the German Book Trade’s annual Peace Prize to Annemarie Schimmel. The speech was translated from German and published in the London-based weekly, Q-News. JUST has reproduced the speech with the kind permission of Q-News.2. When the award of the Peace Prize to Schimmel was first announced in April 1995, two hundred German and European intellectuals protested on the grounds that she was a supporter of so-called Islamic fundamentalism. A number of other groups and individuals in Germany and elsewhere, however, came to her defence and rejected the malicious allegations against Schimmel. JUST was one of those organisations that submitted a petition to the German government on her behalf.

A Pakistani Midsummer Night’s Nightmare – The monster within…..

Whilst the Shakespearean antics of Pakistan’s political elites transpire, as the greed infused leaders (underlings really) work away to grab as much power as is available, in order to create more wealth and opportunity for themselves and their beloved ones.  (Love in this case is bestowed only upon power and wealth). The nation suffers from the bloody uprising of the fundamentalist monster raising its heads and making itself heard through murderous suicide attacks on public institutions and targets.  

What is this monster and where does it originate from. It is too simplistic to blame the disenchanted of Pakistan and hold them responsible for this. The bearded mullahs and the hate some of the fundamentalist amongst them are espousing is part of the greater problem. The nation is torn and divided. We have amidst us dissenters, who have taken religion and confused it with the backward cultural symbolism of religion, as preached by those who have lived in culturally segregated rural areas, bordering Afghanistan. They were bred with hate back in the 80s for a purpose to fulfil the anti-soviet mission and zeal of those times, supported by the West. That zeal has now being turned on its head and yet this inbred hate remains, in the hearts of men. Now these hateful individuals and their young recruits who are disenchanted by the absolute hypocrisy and barbarity of the West in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, use this explosive mixture of hate and powerlessness to set upon the Pakistani targets associated heavily with their Western overlords.

 

This is an unfair world, where the ones in power (the West) are mostly racist, greedy and opportunistic, ranging from the White house to the Number 10. And therefore no real change or help can be associated with them. Our army and our Politicians are below average men/women, who have no intellectual prowess and no ambition to solve this national crises, apart from reactionary and violent offensive means, which is the only power they can yield , albeit unsuccessfully vis a vis Waziristan.

 

This monster, will grow unless, we the people of Pakistan assume full responsibility to fight the growth of this monster. We have to challenge the perception of those around us to critically assess, our own interests. We cannot keep questioning our loyalties and confuse ourselves between nationhood and religion. Our ancestors gave up a lot during partition, for us to still be confused about what it means to be a Pakistani. This is our nation and we need to assume our role in its protection, especially as those in charge are unable to do their jobs of protecting this nation. We need to start engaging with those who are amalgamating within this growing monster of fundamentalist hate. We need to pull them out of this murderous road to nowhere and tell them to believe that we can be one society and one people. We need to fight the division amongst us, provincial, origin, language and come together as people, facing a crisis, borne of utter division. The suicide bombers are not a problem that could be solved by military action or engagement by the erstwhile and thoroughly incompetent political leaders. Its is a rot at the very heart of our soul as a nation, who are using religion, to front their powerlessness and lack of opportunity in this society of haves and have-nots. We can do this, as a people and maybe this will define us and our times. Yet, if we do not engage and let this monster grow, we would loose this nation, one bomb at a time. This could eventually become a very long midsummer night’s nightmare.