Illuminations # 3

Light and Darkness

"People look and talk and smile and are nice and the abyss yawns. The niceness is terrifying."                     Walker Percy, Love in Ruins

" If you look too deeply, everything breaks your heart."
                                                        Ben Okri, Songs of Enchantment

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Old Quetta: goodness and beauty were essential; evil and ugliness, accidental.

New Quetta: evil and ugliness are essential; goodness and beauty, accidental.

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The eleventh hour or signs of the times (in Pakistan)

A soft-spoken, BMW driving mullah massages the "conscience" of the members of the criminal wealthy classes and whispers sweetly in their ears, "You have done nothing wrong."

An obscene, self promoting maskhara sells vulgarity on the screens citing and reciting from the sacred books of the Deen.

TV and movie actors imitate the already corrupted and unreal reality around them and then reality is made in the image of that imitation art and.... It is an infinite regress, a race to the bottom.

Social justice warriors scream and protest, make a lot of ugly noise, both on screen and off screen, until they receive their salvation ticket from the lords of humanity: a visa to a worldly paradise in the modern West.

Whiskey guzzling, cocaine sniffing power elites after adequately programming and training them, let the head chopping, self blowing jihadi monsters loose upon the PSL and Coke Studio watching narcotized and bamboozled awam (the public).

Perverse hustling is the new religion of the land. Everything's for sale: people, town, country, dignity, respect, principles, laws, morality and conscience...

The spectacle of spectacles: TV "senior" anal-ysts analyze nothing that really needs critical analysis and, instead, constantly engage in anus gazing.

Too many preachers and reformers but the only progress is a steady decline and constant regress in the most basic forms of human decency.

The fraud of CPEC: The Sick of the Centre tell the deceived of the periphery, "Forget the rickety trawlers and the fish. Soon you will all be eating Papa Jones Pizza. Very soon, you all will be developed to death."

Social media: everybody now has the full freedom and the right to bully and blackmail everybody else.

Mera jism, meri marzi: yes, the jism is yours but the marzi is not yours at all. It would be nice if it really were your marzi.

The naked emperor threatens everybody who dares to talk about his non-existent clothes.

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Religious Violence vs. Secular Violence

Force is part and parcel of nature. Any denial of this fact is itself an act of violence.
As a means to an end, ideally speaking, religious force (which is always carried out to restore mizan, or equilibrium) has one very important and distinct feature. Every act of outward force, or violence against the "other" or the world, is at the same time countered or balanced with a much bigger effort, or violence against the self. The first is the smaller battle (jihad e asghar) and the latter, the larger battle (jihad e akbar). Only in this way the outer violence is justified in authentic religious worldview. And this is also the meaning of Imam Ali's (AS) double-edged, twin-tipped sword, The Zulfiqar: one cannot fight the demons without (outside), without also fighting the bigger demons within. In other words, this is a combination of action and contemplation, one can never be without the other. Now compare this ideal with contemporary force, or violence, that is carried out in the name of religion.

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Theodicy, or the problem of evil

Where there is light, there is shadow, too. That is how we should see the problem of evil vis-a-vis goodness. Man wants light and when light is made available for him, he protests and cries, "Why is there shadow?"

"If God is, whence come evil things? If He is not, whence comes good?"        

(Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy).
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Observe and understand the symbols in the daily prayer: when you stand upright, you are the Khalifa Allah; in prostration, you are Abd Allah. Man is both lord and vassal in the castle. Only when he is a vassal to the Lord of the lords, he can be a lord of the castle; otherwise, he is nothing but a lowly servant to all the other (pseudo) lords.

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Contemporary Pakistan: Orwellian contradictions all around

The mullahs corrupt and destroy religion; lawyers destroy the laws, judges dispense injustice; teachers destroy education; doctors destroy health and well being; politicians destroy politics and damage democracy (whatever that means now); journalists and TV anchors distort truth and lie through their teeth; the police create fear, protect the criminals, murder the innocent and destroy public trust; the men in uniform encourage all this corruption, this decadence and, therefore, help destroy all state institutions, save their own.

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Pakistan: some of us are innocent. Some are ignorant. Some are the victims. Others, the victimizers. Some, the oppressed; others, the oppressors. But we are ALL responsible. 

(to borrow from Rabbi Joshua Heschel)

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Hope: there is a lot of it still there. In the dark ocean of inhumanity which is becoming darker and meaner by the day, like a huge eutrophic lake, these powerful rays of light still penetrate and sustain life. Find them, join them, become light and save yourself.

For more: On Belief ,   The Two Perspectives ,  Religiosity

And some more: Harf e Dervaish # 10 ,  Illuminations # 1