Short, Short: Bandagi

“No time cometh on you but is followed by a worse.”    Hadith

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."           George Orwell

Note: Bandagi (Arabic, Persian and Urdu) derives from banda, a created being implying a Creator, here specifically meaning being Allah’s banda. To be Allah’s banda, is to be both His servant (abd) and vicegerent (khalifa) in this imperfect, created world.

In the believers’ universe, God was once the presiding idea, the quintessential orienting Idea---the Compass, the celestial and terrestrial GPS---that mattered most in his or her life. All reality, all thoughts and actions, referred, or referred back, to this concrete Reality, to this Source, for their meaning and efficacy, for their very existence. The world of the believers was theocentric (God-centric), through and through: they saw God everywhere and in everything.

Now, we live in an age of content-less forms, of deceptive images that make us believe that our fantasies and fancies are more real than reality itself. It is an age of bumper-sticker “philosophies” that emanate from the depths of our unexamined and corrupted self, our inner hells. The Idea, the Sacred, is not even anthropocentric (human centered) anymore; it is outright machine-centric, or thing-centric. We make and invent things and then the same things become our measure, the measure of the human as such. This ontic degradation and epistemic bankruptcy is clearly visible in the non-symbolic, reductionist language that many people use nowadays with such novelties as “input”, “output”, “feedback’, “brainstorming”, “interface”, “networking” and so on. The young, in particular, are constantly instructed that the brain is nothing but a “computer”, the very thing that was created by that brain in the first place! In the popular American documentary series called The American Family the character Ashley asks the doctor, "Why doesn't God get a computer so he can figure all this out?"

Drowning in the tsunami of our own creations---the technologies, machines and gadgets that so entice and encapsulate us---we seem to be glorying in our incapacity to resist them, as many contemporary sages have argued. Warns Marty Glass: "the Internet stands as the final perversion, inversion, of God, of the Sacred....Heaven is Cyberspace, the Creator is the Scientist, the Altar is the Screen, the theology is computer technology, the monks are the nerds and hackers, Holy Writ is the Program, the Priests are the Consultants, Salvation is Being On-Line, and Paradise is the Information Age...Money, machinery, and people: One at last." 

“And now we’re blind. We lost our sight.
There’s darkness where there once was light.
It’s still the Garden, we’re still there,
It lies about us everywhere,
But all we see now, all we find,
Are the facts and figures in our mind.

The given world was not enough:
We looked for more, discovered stuff
Behind, beyond what eyes could see,
And called that stuff reality.

The world that instruments reveal,
A world we cannot see or hear,
Wonder, love, respect, revere,
That’s where we live now: our reward.
The angel with the flaming sword,
The exiles in their maze of lies
Who feverishly specialize
In finding ways to numb their pain---
Both are us. We toil in vain.

What’s human suffering but the price
Of discontent in paradise? ”
                                              

                                         (Brief by Mary Glass)