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review Plagued by
love A
word about letters
review Tareekh
Mashaikh-e-Chisht By Sarwat Ali It is difficult to write
about a movement that strikes roots in a different time period. The
parameters This is how the entire phenomenon of Tasaawaf can be thrown into a quandary. The bold initiatives and some compromises of yore might appear to be totally at odds with the scale of values against which moral, political decisions and achievement are measured nowadays. Tareekh Mashaiq-e-Chisht does not directly set about addressing these issues but focuses on the central role that this movement played in the early years of the Muslim settlement and rule in India. The beginning of the millennium was a hard time for the Muslims -- their central empire or caliphate had been ransacked by the Mongols and a large number of people had started to flee and migrate to other lands. One such adjoining area was India and that was the beginning of the of the dominant influence which the Muslims of Central Asia started to cast on the politics, society and culture of the people living here. Khaliq Ahmad Nizami in the first of the intended five volumes on the Chishtia Silsila has divided Tassawaf into various parts. The first part of the Sufi movement was after the Khilafat-e-Rashida when a simple egalitarian system was converted into a malukiat -- religion and politics parted ways. Many conscientious people disengaged themselves from the running of the government which led to the formation of the first centres of Sufia in Basra and Kufa. These people were more involved in khesiat-e-Ilahi than Hub-e-Ilahi. They repented and purified themselves. It was limited to the individual self. These people had a tense relationship with the ulema and very little of that period was written and documented. The second phase belonged to a later era when the Greek philosophical ideas resulted in the rise of Rationalism and religious beliefs and rituals were being weighed and judged on their basis. Reason took precedent over faith .The sufia of this phase tried to neutralise the doubts raised by rational discourse by stressing on the value of ishq. The third phase came with the rapid expansion of the Empire forced open the doors of ijtehad. It spawned various schools of jurisprudence but these interpretations were considered to be as definitive as the word of God and no scope was left for further ijtehad. Gradually people finding these impractical started to find religious caveats in them. The sufia of that phase, wanting to generate the real spirit of Islam as against the followings of practices and laws that negated the true spirit of faith, concentrated on Islah-e-batin. The Chishtia Silsila which, like many other silsilas, traces its spiritual origins to Hazrat Ali was initiated by Khawaja Abul Ishaq in the 10th century. Muenuddin Chishti, during the reign of Prithvi Raj came to India and settled in Ajmeer. Since this silsila was particularly mindful of the local traditions and intellectual environment it became a movement involving the ordinary mortals. They did not feel culturally alienated from it. Qutbuddin Bakhtiaar Kaki established its centre in Dehli but after Naseeruddin Chiragh-e-Delhi the centre fell apart and regional set ups were established all over India. The strength of the book is that the author has examined a large number of sources assessing them on the basis of building a moral code pivoted on a universal system. Then he has assessed the entire movement of the Sufia by placing it in the context of history -- it has a crucial historical dimension. From the 7th to the to the 14th century the Sufia remained a dynamic and a revolutionary movement, usually led by people who were of non Arab origin in lands which had been conquered by the Arabs. They distanced themselves from the centres of power and did not think of starting a counter movement in the view of a discriminatory attitude and repression that they had to go through. They basically lived in their own hermits without compromising with the ruling elite. Then gradually some compromise was struck with the ruling classes and the entire complexion underwent a change as they became the intellectualised spokesmen of the class. In return the sufia were granted jagirs and other endowments thus losing their dynamic and revolutionary character. Due to the great change that swept the world in the last five hundred years these movements became irrelevant and have lost their dynamic character. Though they may appear to be irrelevant now but the rationale of their existence can be revitalised drawing strength from its original inspiration and placed in the contemporary context.--to reject all laws and customs that are contrary to convictions, reject accumulation of private assets and property, promote the notion of sharing, to concentrate on scholarship and make the shrines centres of learning, peaceful disposition and individual freedom. These can be the basis of regeneration of ideas and conduct so badly needed in our lands and the people. Tasawwaf was nothing new -- it has been part of the human system of thought. In many other religions and cultures it existed and since it is based on the premise of the discovery of a true and solid basis for authentic existence it has kept manifesting itself in different ages with different requirements It should manifest again to revitalise the thoughts and attitudes of people living in the Muslim lands.
Love in Camus' works is a refusal to let adversity steal one's life away, a refusal to give up existence unless by one's own will and pleasure By Mina Farid Malik Love and plague seem to be
a highly incongruous pairing. When one's survival is at stake, does one Camus writes that "[the] divorce between man and his life, between the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity." If this is true, then we are faced with a solemn dilemma, because love is one emotion that bridges this gap, and La Peste then a rather non-absurd text because for most of its principal characters are all concerned with love -- from Dr. Rieux to Father Paneloux and Grand and Rambert in the middle, all these men are in love in one way or another. Love may be absurd in the demands it makes on men, but each of La Peste's men, in his own way, lives his love in a parallel with his 'real' life. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus writes that man "does not want to do anything but what he fully understands...he demands that he accommodate himself to what is and to bring in nothing that is not certain." Nothing is certain in the world, and while La Peste illustrates this in Tarrou's death just when things were getting better, it also balances it with Rambert's reunion with his wife. Tarrou dies for an idea, while Rambert lives for one. His volunteer work is first offered when he is told that Rieux is in fact not the heartless official he thought him to be, but a man in the same boat as him -- suffering separation from his beloved, but working ceaselessly to try and prevent others having to suffer the permanent separation of death. Rieux is not a religious man, but his job is one that exhibits the same love that Father Paneloux has -- a love for humanity, a love for God's creation. Paneloux wishes to save people's souls, Rieux wants to save their bodies. Even Tarrou's central ideal in life is a people-oriented one; all three wish too prevent pain from reaching others. Rambert's love is the most identifiable, and also the most interesting to study. While Grand is wrapped up in his quest for the perfect word -- and in the novel Grand is the closest one ever gets to an artist in dull, unimaginative Oran- Rambert's quest is the alleviate "the great longing of an unquiet heart...to possess constantly and consciously the loved one." Rambert's love is 'real' because the object of it is alive and reciprocal; Grand and Rieux are bearers of dying torches. Rambert has the hope of 'a fresh start' that the other two men do not. This hope is precisely what renders his love non-absurd, and when it asks him "to leap, blindly" he does, and crosses his abyss successfully. Rieux and Grand are not the leaping types- their "answer is that [they] don't fully understand" and thus will not make that leap of faith required by love. Paneloux is one man who puts his trust in the unseen, and while Camus does not reward him for it, he does not punish him either -- Panleoux dies with the inner serenity of a man dying for the idea he based his entire life around. Paneloux is written as the symbol of the people who stave off the absurd element of life with God, and Paneloux wills death to take him lest he have to face what Camus calls the "problem of freedom... [and] evil." Sisyphus's life and death is fixed to his love, to the world -- the sand, the sea, the sky. He tricked the gods into letting him live once more so he could punish his wife for not giving him a proper burial; when he set eyes on the world again he remembered how much he loved life. His punishment is for his cupidity, and for trying to be a trickster, for trying to evade death so he could live a little longer. Camus calls Sisyphus happy, Homer called him wise. Maybe in the myth lies something we don't know, an idea that Rambert has a whiff of in his little speech about man being an idea based on love. Sisyphus loved, and in Camus' version of it he loves his endless toil too, and in accepting his fate he is defiant, he loved, and is not sorry for it. The capacity for love that Rambert speaks of is man's salvation, and while death or deliverance, as the journalist puts it, is inevitable, finding the ability to love within oneself is what makes the difference between being a disconnected shadow of a person drifting through life and really living. By taking life -- and whatever it throws you -- by the horns you push absurdity away with the force of your humanity. In the face of an evil, personified plague men like Tarrou, Grand and Rieux survive because of the strength of their convictions and refusal to escape the pestilence. By becoming the people who stay, as Father Paneloux preaches in his second sermon, the central characters are the last and ultimate symbols of rebellion. As Daniel Stern writes, "If we decide to live, it must be because we have decided that our personal existence has some positive value; if we decide to rebel it must be because we have decided that a human society has some positive value. Hence: I rebel, therefore, we exist." The Cartesian statement at the end should be carefully read: if I exist, then we all do. The benchmark of existentialist thought, the concept applies to La Peste and its theme of love. If love exists, in whatever form -- be it love for survival, like Cottard's, love for a woman, as Rambert's, love for art, as Grand's or love for humanity as Rieux, Tarrou and Paneloux's -- then people can, for it is in love that they can be truly alive.
By Kazy Javed Stranger in Istanbul The man who came out to
save 150 years old Tolliton Market in Lahore from the nasty official Many beautiful buildings of the old days have been saved by Dr Ajaz Anwar 'on paper'. Their physical structures have vanished and, in most of the cases, replaced by plazas that are embodiments of architectural ugliness. Son of Anwar Ali -- an illustrious cartoonist and fictionist who penned some of the best short stories in Punjabi language -- Ajaz Anwar is an artist as well as a scholar. He has been teaching at the National College of Arts for the past many years. He received his doctorate degree in Muslim art and architecture from the Istanbul Technical University in 1977 and, later briefly in Uganda. Dr Ajaz Anwar was the Lahore Art Forum's guest past week. He spoke about the years he spent in Turkey for the completion of his education and also read some relevant pieces from his recent book Nai Reesan Shehr Lahore dian. He particularly related some of the amusing incidents that took place because of his total ignorance of Turkish language during his early days in Istanbul. He not only speaks fluent Turkish but has also written a memoir in it, soon to be published from Turkey. The book will most probably be the first book written in Turkish by a Pakistani author. But he admits: "I haven't written many events in the book. You know, there are things in life that can be shared with close friends only." A tragic end Andre Gorz was the last amongst a dozen writers, philosophers and social scientists who were born in Vienna before the Second World War but made immense contributions to the 20th century thought after migrating to Western Europe and the United States. Andre Gorz who settled in France in 1954 was certainly not as famous as some other members of this group which included names like Sigmund Frued, Ernst Mach, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank and Sir Karl Raimund Popper, but his highly critical writings about capitalism have influenced many. Andre Gorz, 84, committed suicide past fortnight together with his English wife Dorine who had been ill for some years. On her 82nd birth anniversary last year, he wrote to Dorine: "You have just turned 82. You are still beautiful, gracious and desirable. We have been living together for 58 years and I love you more than ever." These lines remind me of another philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who at the age of 95, wrote a passionate poem for his fourth wife Edith whom he married at the age of 80 in 1952. It goes: To Edith Through the long years I sought peace, I found ecstasy, I found anguish, I found madness, I found loneliness, I found the solitary pain That gnaws the heart, But peace I did not find.
Now, old & near my end, I have known you, And, knowing you, I have found both ecstasy & peace, I know rest, After so many lonely years, I know what life & love may be. Now if I sleep, I shall sleep fulfilled. Raja Rasalu's demise Do not forget to bless Raja
Rasalu when you come across young educated Punjabis who are proud of But his commitment to Punjabi language and culture was not his only appealing quality. His simplicity and faith in personal relations and readiness to help others also won him many friends and admirers. At 80, he was working as secretary of the Punjabi Abadi Board as well as office secretary of the Punjab Writers Guild. His responsibilities kept him engaged for more than ten hours a day. But he was never found in low spirits. Raja Rasalu died in Lahore on the 30th of last September.
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under which it
germinates and then thrives usually differ from the ones that are prevalent
these days. The contemporary parameters or criteria of judgment are so
variant that the most dynamic and revolutionary initiatives in history might
appear to be retrogressive now.
really have time for love? And yet in books and movies about war and
pestilence the great underlying theme of it all is love, love surrounded by
death. Perhaps the two are inseparable, the Eros and Thanatos that constantly
come into conflict within the human mind and body. Death is a full, final
experience; love is more or less the same quality of self-annihilation but
instead of surrendering to infinity one surrenders to another person. Love in
La Peste is then a form of rebellion, a refusal to let pestilence steal one's
life away, a refusal to give up existence unless by one's own will and
pleasure. Love keeps people alive, and at the end of the day,
"everyone's hopes for personal happiness seem to be killing the
plague."
guillotine loves Lahore with all his heart. He has been painting old
buildings and bazaars of the city for the past four decades.and has painted
the city more than any other artist. He feels "it is just the
beginning." because a lot is yet to be done as these old structures are
fast disappearing. "I feel", he writes "I am losing the race
when a building is pulled down. It seems that the debris of old wooden
balconies lying around are saying bohat dair kee aatay aatay. I could have
saved it at least on paper."
their mother tongue and do not considers it to be a crude and unsophisticated
language. For more than half a century, he upheld the cause of Punjabi and
kept telling people that it was not only as civilized as any other language
of the world but also it had a great literary tradition that produced many
world-class poets like Baba Farid, Baba Nanak, Baba Bulleh Shah and Khawaja
Ghulam Farid.