Light and Darkness
"Except before it die, the seed will bear no fruit." (Anonymous)
"The knowledge which results in renunciation (zuhd) consists of the realization that what is renounced is of little value in comparison with what is received".
Abu Hamid Ibn e Muhammad Al Ghazzali
"Desire is slavery; renunciation is freedom." Hermes
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Jalwa: It's what you do in your khalwa.
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On fasting, on Ramzan.
An old German proverb tells us that it is not possible for us to be truly cultured if we do not practice some degree of asceticism in our lives. When we deny ourselves our basest desires and cravings, we prepare ourselves for actualizing our potential to be truly human. When we say "no" to our lower, animal instincts, we say "yes" to our higher, spiritual yearnings issuing from the Spirit that resides in all of us because we are the "ashraf al makhluqat", because we carry the "breath" or the "light" that has been placed within us by the Creator. When we resist the incessant demands of habit, of what has become our second nature in this world of transience and contingency, we begin to recall and remember the forgotten melodies of our primordial nature (our fitrah). When we refuse to plunge and drown in the hellish depths of the corporeal 'self' (nafs), we make ourselves ready for flight, for transcendence, which is the real purpose of our temporary existence in this world". Says Robert Browning, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
Fasting is a kind of knowing, or a way of acquiring knowledge where you don't think or intellectualize your way to the truth of a matter. When we fast, instead of knowing something abstractly, we experience or intuit it, or we taste a higher form of knowledge, hence we taste the truth, with our being. This kind of immediate, direct and existential knowing is much more profound than any other form of exclusively cerebral knowing. It is like the unveiling of mystery, a form of kashf. Imagine describing or explaining water to a thirsty person in contrast to giving him a glass of water. Just as that water is more meaningful, or it has more reality (wujud) than its descriptions and explanations for the thirsty person, similarly the conscious self denial of water and food (and all the other things for which they are used as symbols) gives us access to those faculties within us with which we can taste of that (higher) Reality whose reflection all these other realities are. From water to thirst, from reality to Reality: in the former, we seek to quench our thirst; in the latter, we seek thirst. In the former, we seek shade in the sun; in the latter, we want to become light, we seek the sun. This is why Rumi says, "Seek thirst, not water". We partake of God's gifts, which are the contingent lower realities, to satiate our transient selves; we deny our transient selves those gifts (the ephemeral realities, which are ultimately unreal, or are mere shadows of the Real) in order to taste of the eternal Reality. God gives us when He gives us, and He gives us more when He takes from us. "Often in giving you something He is (in reality) denying you something, just as He may, in denying you something, be really bestowing a gift upon you." (Ibn e Ata Allah al-Iskandari)
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What is most complicated and complex in modernity can only be countered with traditional simplicity; the toxic worldview of modernity can be effectively countered by the "salt of the earth".
Your wealth, your possessions, your fame and popularity, your knowledge and rank, even your good words and good deeds, will not save you if you are not sincere. The essence of faith is sincerity.
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The crisis of The System in Pakistan: The Vampires, the hollow men, have been exposed like never before, and that is the best thing that has happened in all this turmoil and chaos of Imran Khan's dethronement.
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Pakistan: the rulers are guilty because they have committed innumerable crimes; the people, the awam, are guilty because they have been committing the sin of tolerating all those crimes for too long.
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When it became difficult to say what one wanted to say, when it became almost impossible to develop any kind of meaningful relationship between "reality" and words, geniuses like Garcia Marquez, Bulgakov, Calvino and even that pompous ass Rushdie and others came up with "magical realism". What next? What now in Pakistan?
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Two things sell the most and the quickest on the Internet: food and sex. Start a food channel and you will get thousands of views and followers (and "likes") in a day or two, if not in an hour or two. Upload your own, or your or somebody else's wife's, daughter's, sister's explicitly nude or even sexually suggestive images and videos, and millions will rush to your website or to your channel. Modern digital technology is by default, by its very conception and design, meant to enslave us to our bestial instincts, to make us slave to our carnal desires and appetitive faculties. Or, it is nafs-oriented. On social media, send/share/forward anything that will titillate them below the waist and you will become a celebrity overnight, a hero with lots and lots of followers and loads of "likes". Send anything that will require the use of that strange thing they carry around on their shoulders and chances are you will either be ignored or will get blocked! And then there are the qualifying excuses that are often instinctively, knee-jerkingly, added to arguments such as, "...but there is so much good...." which are nothing but symptoms of naivety about and ignorance of these digital contraptions. Of course it is true, just as there are some good things and good people in hell, too. But that does not change the nature of hell.
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Who is a traitor in Pakistan?
The disappeared or those who carry out the disappearing?
Those who are vilified as traitors, or those who are paid to vilify others as traitors?
Those who sell their conscience (zameer), or those who force them to do so?
The rulers of the awam, or the overlords of these awami rulers?
Those who make and defend unjust laws, or those who break them?
Those who break their fast with dates grown and harvested in Gwadar and Turbat, or those who start and break their fast with Papa Jones pizza?
Those who start dollar jihad, or those who do a jihad against such fake jihad?
The innocent who get hanged and murdered, or the criminals who flee the country after murdering and hanging the innocent?
The blackmailed or the blackmailer?
Those under the boots, or the wearers of those boots?
The whisky drinking, cocaine snorting armchair jihadi ideologues, or those who blow themselves up under the influence of much deadlier drugs, both concreate/material and abstract/ideological?
The Sick of the Centre, or the deceived of the periphery?
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For more: On the significance of fasting
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