On simplicity and simple people

A portrait of an old woman by Sofia Minson

"...he who seeks to gain all things by cleverness ends by losing all in blindness and ineffectuality...it is better to go to heaven artlessly than to go intelligently to hell..."      
                                                        Shaykh Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad

"We live in an age of plenty, but what use is plenty of rubbish?"  
                                                       Lord Northbourne

“Yogurt! It’s yogurt”, she said to me once. “The secret to my long years is yogurt. A healthy person always has a natural desire to have yogurt”, she used to say. She lived to be 96 or 97. Originally from the Sistan region of Iran, she was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with engaging, sunken eyes and an aquiline nose set on a time-worn corrugated face that often reminded me of the graceful Red Indians or the First Nations of North America. The resemblance was not just physical but also, and more importantly, metaphysical. She was our paternal great grandmother. She was our, and everybody else’s who knew her, Aaja, the Faarsi word for a grandmother or a grandmotherly woman. In this blogpost I want to recall and reflect upon the “philosophy” of this wise woman who belonged to a generation of people, who are now all but extinct, like the human version of the unfortunate Dodo, both species being the victims of the vicissitudes of what we often mindlessly celebrate as “our time”---as if it were an objectively real and eternal phenomenon and not just a blip in the current cycle of time---or just “the times” that always seem to be “a changin…”

Aaja used to say that goodness travels the furthest in life, so try to do good as often as you can. The good will live and will be remembered the longest than all the other acts done and words spoken: both the goodness of the tongue and of the deed. On food and eating, her one most valuable advice that I will never forget and which I often pass on to others was, “ When you sit to eat, never leave the dastarkhwan (or the meal table) with a full stomach; always stop eating just before you start feeling full. Don’t eat that last bite if you know that it will make you feel full!” The tone in which she would utter that last part of her advice and the facial expression that underlined its gravity were most suitable for saying something like, “Stop killing yourself!” or “Stop digging your grave with your teeth!”  Years later, I discovered similar insights on food and eating in the works of the great Islamic theologian and Sufi Al- Ghazzali. Another of her gems was, “Observe more and talk less. Listen and listen attentively, because the art of listening is the most difficult to master and the one least taught these days. Therein lies man’s true tarbiat (education)”

I have called her utterings as “philosophy”. She was a philosopher, in other words. By that I mean philosophy not in the usual, modern sense which often amounts to not much but mental gymnastics, one or the other kind of cerebral monkey play. I use the expression in its ancient sense, which is also its original form: as a way of life, manière de vivre or as bios in the French classicist Pierre Hadot’s words. Philosophy, according to this view is not just a truncated and compartmentalized discipline of knowledge that provides information or informs but what transforms the student, or forms its practitioner. It was, therefore, always called taleem au tarbiat, and not just education or taleem. In that kind of world, knowledge was essentially transformative in nature.

Old woman, a portrait

These “philosophers” were straight talking, simple and down to earth people. The simplicity, the unpretentiousness in both their thinking and lifestyles was more than anything else a reflection of the fact that they never confused the few things that are essential in life with what is accidental---the ever-multiplying flotsam and jetsam that first compete for our attention and then distract, disorient and eventually destroy us. They were people who were closer to the origin of things and hence were the "true"  originals than their amnesiac modern and postmodern counterparts. Many people nowadays think of original, or of originality, as novelty, as something new. But the word “original” has its roots in the word origin which makes something original to be closer to its source, and not just being novel.

Comfortable living with many ways of seeing and understanding the past for example, through myths, shared memories, stories, parables, sacred poetry, songs and so on, and not just consumers of hyper-rationalized, scientized history written by professional historians, they knew very well that history does not take man towards a clearer and more sophisticated understanding of his world and reality, but that history is always a house of paradoxes and ironies. In other words, they held that progress in one domain is undermined by regression and decadence in others. Or that every story of a chest-thumping civilization is also a tale of soul shattering barbarism, a sobering lesson that many modern Westerners not so much learned but re-learned the hard way in the latter half of the twentieth century mainly through the critical work of the Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin and what they called “negative dialectics”. We may have progressed technologically and materially but not morally and ethically. Morally, we are pygmies in front of our “naïve” and “simple” ancestors, while technologically we stand tall as giants. But the modern techno-monstrosities that we have produced reflect those same paradoxes and ironies of history:  they may well become the source and cause of our annihilation, of the annihilation of life as such on this planet.

We congratulate ourselves that we are sophisticated and complicated people and those who came before us were naïve, simple. Simple, yes, but simpletons they were not. In our self-congratulatory mood, we often forget that stupidity can also come wrapped in sophisticated worldliness speaking the urbane language of the metropolis. Just a quick look around us will confirm the truth of that claim. As a sage has reminded us, “…complication does not make error less false, nor stupidity less stupid.” In fact, the pathologies of modern forms of rationality are now more destructive, deadlier than those of the irrationality that we quickly and unthinkingly associate with most things, if not everything, past and with which we reproach everybody who lived in that past.

Nobody I think has provided a better formulation, in verse, of our Aaja’s philosophy than the great contemporary poet and thinker Iftikhar Arif when he says:

Buss ek hee rasta hay duniya ko zer karnay ka, jeetnay ka

Yeh jittni pur pech hoti jaaye ussi qadar sehl au saada ho jaa 

(There is only one way to win over and conquer this world,

The more it becomes complicated, the simpler you must become)

My great grandmother was semi-literate like most people of her generation in that part of the world. Judged according to the criterion of literacy-as-we-understand-it now, that is. But I do not know many people who are as literate, to use this word in its best sense, as Iftikhar Arif. He is the very model, the very definition, of authentic literacy and integral education. As the well-known poet, writer and literary critic, Saleem Ahmed, once said: “The poetry of Arif is the poetry of a man who is clearly in his own class when it comes to thought, feeling and expression.  Most of his contemporaries fail in one of these departments: those who know how to think cannot express or articulate, and the ones who can articulate, cannot think clearly. And when they are good articulators and thinkers, they are emotionally infertile.” The erudite Indian literary theorist and critic Gopi Chandar Narang has called Arif  “The empathetic poet of new (modern) alienation” by which he means that as an artist, Arif is someone who “first and foremost, has a profound love for humanity, enjoys life and living” ( what the French so charmingly call joie de vivre) and who is keen on understanding and feeling the suffering that is the human condition, by being both inside and outside of social structures because only by having a cold and objective stance on, or distance from, these structures and social norms, can one have the epiphany of that suffering, of that dukkha.  Such is the art of this man, the aesthetically sublime and philosophically profound quality of which is matched by his character as a decent, caring and humble human being, as witnessed by all those who have had the privilege of meeting him.

So, what Iftikhar Arif is saying in his verse is what our Aaja and people of her generation---at least the philosophers among them---were the embodiment of. They were people in possession of the sharp sword of simplicity that could cut through the complicated and accumulated layers of dross that engulf the contemporary man. Those “naïve” old-timers, who lived philosophy rather than propound and preach it, had eyes and vision that could penetrate through the fog of compound ignorance parading as authentic insight. They were people who were acutely attuned to quality rather than craving quantity, as I have also argued elsewhere in one of my blogposts; they knew that to be truly rich and contented one had to possess less. For them what was not absolutely necessary to sustain life, was just corrupting burden. That is how the sehl au saada in the above verse should be understood.  Life always meant being first and then something else, and definitely not just having or possessing.

I am not an expert interpreter of Iftikhar Arif's work but let me try to open up what he says in the above verse lines a bit more. Saadgi, or simplicity, affords us the power of discernment with which we can make the crucial distinction between what is real and what is illusory, between error and falsity, necessity and contingency, or between light and darkness. This ability is actually a kind of critical thinking whereby the simple person has courageously protected his or her ability to discriminate between what is right and what is wrong, between truth and falsity; in them, this critical ability is intact and whole because they have refused to let the clutter of this world inundate their minds, harden their hearts, and corrupt their entire beings. Unlike in the past, in our times the real problem is not the lack of information but its excess; we are submerged in it 24/7 and 365 days a year, bombarded with it from all directions and in all forms and formats. We are floating, nay, drowning in information. So, the critical skill that is urgently needed is not just to have access to information and knowledge but to filter out, to sift and sort, to separate and dig out the deeply buried wisdom and truths from under the mountains of falsities. The late historian and philosopher of art Ananda Coomaraswamy expressed it beautifully when he said, “It is far better not to know how to read than (not to know) what to read.”  What can be more insightful in this post-truth age of information glut, of alternative facts and fake news? That, the critical filtering and sifting, can only be done if one has made a conscious choice to live the simple, the saada life, just like Aaja and the other old philosophers would have liked us to live.

Ay Dost Bataa Tu Kaisa Hai?

Dervaish's Quetta Youtube Channel (Click)

TGB: Tierno Bokar and the religion of the heart

The Well (of taqlid and ijtihad)

"The well that receives its waters only from outside itself receives at the same time a thousand things that have been caught up by the current. Such a well is exposed to all this litter and to something even more dangerous: to find itself dry as soon as its water has been drawn out. On the other hand, the well whose “eye” is situated within itself has no need of rain to fill it. Its water, filtered through the cracks of the earth, remains abundant, pure, and fresh, even during times of greatest heat. It is the same with those whose faith in God depends on outward relations and with those who take their faith from their own meditation and intimate conviction. The first are subject to variation and their faith is not exempt from doubt. The second group remains steadfast. They are in the full Light, the full moon of their faith, which never knows darkness."

The Rainbow

"The rainbow owes its beauty to the variety of its shades and colors. In the same way, we consider the voices of various believers that rise up from all parts of the earth as a symphony of praises addressing God, Who alone can be Unique. We bitterly deplore the scorn that certain religious people heap on the form of divine things, a scorn that often leads them to reject their neighbor’s hymn because it contrasts with theirs. To fight against this tendency, brother in God, whatever be the religion or the congregation to which you are affiliated, meditate at length on this verse:

The creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and of your colors are many wonders for those who reflect.  (Qur'an 30:22)

There is something here for everyone to meditate upon."

Truth.   Goodness.   Beauty.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar,  by Ahmadou Hampate Ba, Bloomington: World Wisdom Books, 2008.

 

Propaganda and language

"Do not believe it until it's been officially denied." Claud Cockburn

"Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs."                                                                    Joseph Goebbels 

"Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language."                                                                 Chris Hedges

 

It is a commonplace to say that Americans are the most propagandized people in the world, the most misinformed and dis-informed. We Pakistanis are not far behind. For example, most, if not all, Pakistanis have some pet conspiracy theory up their sleeves. The most popular ones are: Yehudi saazish, CIA, MI6, Mossad, RAW or that generic evil mastermind behind all mysterious and mystified things, the “foreign hand” (behrooni haath)---the all-purpose, all-mighty explanation that is so beloved of the bungling Pakistani ruling elite of all political stripes. I am not really against what is now disparagingly called “conspiracy thinking”. In fact, the expression “conspiracy theory” itself is a conspiracy construct, the creation of conspiring vested interests! It was first used, intentionally and systematically, by the “invisible” establishment forces (now commonly known as the Deep State) in post-WW2 USA, mainly to discredit those who refused to toe the official line on the John F. Kennedy assassination and the related narrative on the Cuban missile crisis. The label of “conspiracy theorist” is akin to name-calling, a propaganda shaming term typically used by the privileged and powerful against the powerless with the sole purpose of discrediting them. But the way it is used nowadays, indiscriminately and vindictively, it is more of a psychological thought stopper. In a world where everything and everybody is suspect, especially the official narratives of the ruling classes everywhere, it is often employed by the mouthpieces of the high and mighty to slight, contain or control certain dissenting narratives, and to prevent critical thinking. So, one must be mindful of the pernicious uses of such terms and instead of knee-jerk reactions, use one’s critical faculties, ask inconvenient questions and analyze the evidence first.
In this blog, I want to touch upon some aspects of the dark art of propaganda and especially the uses and abuses of language therein.

In our highly politicized world with its obscene wealth inequalities and unbridgeable power disparities, language is not, and cannot be, innocent. In such a world, language often encodes and reproduces wealth inequalities and unjust power relations. Increasingly, it is the instrument of choice, the lubricant, for systemic exploitation and violence. Real, physical violence smoothly follows linguistic violence. The initial injury is done through the malignant uses of language. In any act of violence, the first casualty is that of language itself. Violence, especially state or state-sanctioned violence, requires the distortion and abuse of language first, so that the minds of the masses can be corrupted and the ensuing violence made palatable to them. Again, before the physical injury and elimination, the victim is linguistically attacked and mutilated; before the napalms, cluster bombs and daisy-cutters are dropped, before the gunship helicopters arrive, and the mushroom clouds hang above their heads, the victims are systematically demonized with the devious use of language and toxic images. This has been a constant in twentieth century conflicts involving the modern West and the rest, from WW1 trench warfare, to Hiroshima to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.

Propaganda is part and parcel of the modern social and political landscape everywhere. Since the early years of the twentieth century when its potential as a “public relations” exercise was first recognized, courtesy of pioneers in the field like Edward Bernays who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, it has become more and more sophisticated over the years. But its common or essential techniques have remained the same. One of the early critical analyses of propaganda techniques was carried out by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). Established in 1937, the IPA lists these common techniques as follows:

• Word games (name calling, glittering generalities and euphemisms)
• False connections or associations (transfer and testimonial)
• Special appeals (plain folks, bandwagon and fear)

Let’s focus on some of these. For example, the propagandist language of name calling, fear mongering, and the use of glittering generalities serve demagogues and political extremists well. Through name calling the other (the target individual, group or country) is vilified and dehumanized. A culture of fear is created, frightening and discomforting metaphors and imagery are used to disorient and disarm the masses. The result is a sense of vulnerability in the people. Immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims in the USA. Rohingya in Myanmar / Burma. Certain ethno-religious minorities in Pakistan and India, are some examples. 

As a propaganda technique, glittering generalities play a very important role in our current political milieu, both national and global. What is a glittering or glowing generality? This is how Wikipedia defines it:

“A glittering generality (also called glowing generality) is an emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason. Such highly valued concepts attract general approval and acclaim. Their appeal is to emotions such as love of country and home, and desire for peace, freedom, glory, and honor. They ask for approval without examination of the reason. They are typically used by politicians and propagandists.”  (emphasis added)

As vague words, phrases and expressions with positive connotations, glittering generalities are what the IPA calls “virtue words”.  Strongly appealing to our emotional faculties, they disable our critical faculties and make us susceptible to all kinds of manipulations. Glittering generalities are words like science, rationality, development, progress, civilization, motherland, fatherland, democracy, freedom, human rights, sustainable, international community, civil society, community development, grassroots, empowerment, poverty alleviation and so on. These are all abstract in nature, meaning different things to different people and, therefore, amenable to manipulation. 

Let’s take one of these concepts, sustainable development (SD), to see how it works. Sustainable development as a “buzzword” is one of those concepts which are widely (ab)-used by all sorts of individuals and interests, from the ecologically destructive industrialists to slimy politicians, from NGO  and civil society missionaries, social justice activists, opportunist environmentalists to compromised (lifafa) journalists, intellectuals, writers and artists. I think nobody has improved upon Lele’s early critique of the concept. He wrote way back in 1991,

“SD is a ‘metafix’ that will unite everybody from the profit-minded industrialist and risk minimising subsistence farmer to the equity seeking social worker, the pollution-concerned or wildlife-loving First Worlder, the growth-maximising policy maker, the goal-oriented bureaucrat, and therefore, the vote-counting politician.”

These noble sounding, fix-all words, these magic wands, are all suspect. In our times, they have become like sacred cows, their particularly constructed meanings are constantly guarded by the powerful and nobody can challenge them without suffering some form of retribution. Exhibit: in recent years, the USA has destroyed at least four countries in the Middle East / West Asia with the help of mere three, although very powerful, of these glowing generalities: "democracy", "freedom" and "human rights." To challenge these is to invite the scorn and ridicule of the Western and westernized secular-liberal mobs everywhere. Often, these are like empty vessels into which are poured the interests of the powerful, the oppressors and victimizers. Following fear mongering, glittering generalities are then employed to give the frightened and the now vulnerable a sense of security and superiority.

With the fear also comes rage which, in this socially fractured and chaotic age of political and historical amnesia, is a godsend for the demagogues of all sorts. For example, nowadays populist politicians with fascistic tendencies see and understand only too well the pent up anger and frustration in the masses who are the victims of no-holds-barred casino capitalism around the world. These mendacious sheep herders exploit this rage for their own purposes, often by redirecting it onto minorities and marginalized groups of society, as has happened in the United States under The Donald, in India under Modi, and in Hungary under Victor Orban, to name just a few.

Language that hides, confuses and ignores, always serves some ulterior motives. George Orwell, one of the most profound critics of linguistic distortion, had good reasons when he advised writers, among other things, to write clearly and to use idioms and metaphors that help us visualize, that shows more and tells less. Ambiguity and impersonality in language use may sound nice and formal but they are often in the service of power and not speaking truth to it. When a doublespeaking politician uses the passive voice and says, 'Mistakes were made", then we know that language has been corrupted and truth has been distorted. We are not told mistakes were made by whom?, or who made the mistakes? and why? This evasive language hides and obscures in order to shun responsibility and to avoid culpability. It is language designed to deceive and injure. It is a communication blocking technique that often frames the issues in such a way that the audience is readily turned into a bunch of losers!

As elsewhere, this dark art is also practiced, tragicomically, in the mainstream Pakistani media, especially in its electronic form. The aim of these channels is not to inform and enlighten, but to keep the masses perpetually entertained, which often means dumbing them down. These days the shows on the mainstream channels, especially the news and talk shows, serve the same function as the old Pakistani dramas used to do some decades ago, minus the quality, the civility or just plain decency. Everything is staged, with all the paraphernalia of sets, make-up, scripts, rehearsals and all; it’s one big vacuous spectacle with bad performers. Notice how most of them are bad clones of western mainstream media---BBC, CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC--- down to the minute details of dress, stage, mannerisms and music. Oh, the music. The non-stop tasteless music that plays in the background of news and talk shows also has the crucial function of disorienting the viewer. Once disoriented, the audiences’ minds become like blank slates, tabula rasa, upon which anything and everything can be inscribed or, “consent is manufactured” through a combination of denatured language, noxious imagery and disconcerting sounds. It is this "sickness of language" to which the Trappist monk Thomas Merton alerted us long time ago and from which we need to protect ourselves.

Worth reading:

George Orwell, "Politics and the English language"
Thomas Merton, "War and the crisis of language"

Short Short: The American

“We are not the doctors; we are the disease!”    Alexander Herzen

"Never overestimate the intelligence of the American people."

H.L. Mencken

A hundred years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois, an astute observer of America and Americans, wrote, “Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” It seems the latter part of his prognosis has come true. America is now a rapidly declining imperial power. The emerging consensus among informed and thinking people, both inside and outside the country, is that it is a socially and morally perverse and intellectually bankrupt society. It is an old and told story.

An American is essentially, nay, “exceptionally” a hustler. While a Muslim (the non-bamboozled type, that is) solemnly declares, “There is no god but God”, an American impulsively inquires, “What’s in it for me!”* Yes. That is his or her real motto, the kalima and tawheed, the first “principle” of the holy American creed that guides the majority of Americans through life and shapes their weltanschauung. It is everywhere: in thoughts, words and acts of the Americans. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer”, said the writer D.H. Lawrence. Ignorance. Fear. Arrogance. Greed. Hatred. Violence. These are the quintessential, the All-American “virtues”---as American as the proverbial pie and Bruce Springsteen--- shamelessly brandished and celebrated by its predatory oligarchy, its ruling elites of all political stripes, as this imperialist empire enters its twilight zone. As they sit down for after-dinner chit chat, these genocidal elites, The One Percent, light up their cigars and casually ask one another, "What country are we bombing this week?"

For the segment of humanity outside this war mongering imperium, those who are often the unwilling recipients of the American gifts of “freedom”, “democracy” and “human rights”---these perennial masks that hide the worst forms of bigotry and hypocrisy, the weapons of mass deception---these “virtues” are now so visibly on display on the world stage under the leadership of The Donald who has promised his insouciant flocks of sheep to “make America white again”. "America is an exceptional country" and its people exceptional beings, the world is lectured frequently by the empire's cheerleaders. It is, indeed. In one of the most racialized and racist societies on this planet, this popular black / African-American axiom captures the nature of this “exceptionalism” so well: “When white people say ‘justice’, they mean ‘just us’ ”.

The real American motto (Idea source: Morris Berman)

*Morris Berman is fond of using this description for his fellow Americans. In addition to his many excellent books on this and other similar subjects, he also blogs here . 

Short Short: religiosity

“Religion can be deformed by only two people: a stupid Muslim or an intelligent priest.”                                 (Albanian proverb)

(Contemporary Pakistan)

Only the form is religious, only the name pious sounding; the content is nothing but satanic. Humility is practiced so that the practitioner can luxuriate in it. Charity replaces justice and hides the most vulgar forms of self-seeking and self-promotion. Faqr and tawwakul give way to avarice, to conceit, or self-worship. Time was when the truly pious used to give away this world for gains in the next world. Today’s celebrity mullahs—the fraudulent Sufi sheikh, the fatwa spouting rabid mufti and the wrathful ayatollah, these “scholars for dollars”--- give away the next world for gains in this world. For the former, the next world was Real---the really, only Real--- and this world was an abstraction, a dream, an illusion; for the latter, this world is the only reality that matters: they sell “abstractions” and seek “real” worldly gains. Upon being asked the question, “What do you want?”, the sincere and oriented believer would reply: “I want not to want”. Now, the religiosity brigade wants to “cut a deal with God” and “they speak of God as if He were a cow!” as Meister Eckhart once exclaimed.

To borrow from the madman Nietzsche, this religiosity must be destroyed so that RELIGION can be restored (renewed / tajdeed) and the authentic religious ways of life---of knowing, doing and being---made possible again.

On books and the demise of the rental libraries of Quetta

The Rental Libraries of Quetta

"The sight of books remove sorrow from the heart."

                                                                             (Moroccan proverb)

"If we are imprisoned in ourselves, books provide us with the means of escape. If we have run too far away from ourselves, books show us the way back."

                                                                             Holbrook Jackson

------------------------------------------------------------------

The scene: Quetta in January. Cold. Freezing cold!  It’s early Sunday morning---another bleak, January day. The pothole infested back lanes, off the main Toghi Road, are frozen and slippery. My friend Ibrahim and I, shivering non-stop and, using our gloved hands, perform the intermittent ritual of cupping our faces and ears and wiping our moist, leaky noses with the back of the same hands every few minutes as we stand and wait at the corner of Musa Jee Lane and Zonki Ram Road for Qadeer bhai to appear and open his rental library. Clad in the similar polyester LT jackets, or LT look-alike (fake) ones, and engaged in the same cupping-wiping ritual trying to keep warm, there are a few other boys, too, all of them waiting. Tucked under our arms, in the warmth of our armpits, are pairs of books that we have just read, the day before.  I have two of the recent installments of Maut Ka Taaqqub series, and Ibrahim has his favorite, the Umro Ayyar books. We are waiting to get our hands on the next books in these two incredibly popular series. Qadeer bhai, a ridiculously quiet man with a trade-mark sad smile on his face, is a laid- back guy, a Quetta version of the “The Dude” Lebowski, minus the size. And he never shows up on time!

Quetta in the late 1970s and early 1980s had many of these small rental libraries. Most, if not every, mohalla, or neighborhood, had one. Our favorite was the Qadeer (Rental) Library. It was behind the old Delight Cinema (now demolished to make way for a new shopping mall, I am told), on one of the side streets, off the main Toghi Road. The usual overnight rent for a fiction book was eight ana (50 paisa) in those days, which went up to a rupee in the later years. Hot or popular books, like the ones in the Umro Ayyar and Amir Hamza series, Tarzan series, Imran series, Inspector Jamshed, Inspector Kamran Mirza and especially Maut Ka Taaqub series had long waiting lines. While I also read books from most of the other ones, my favorite was the 50-part Maut Ka Taaqqub series (The Chase of Death or Death Chase). I was too fascinated with the three main characters in the story: Umber, Naag and Maria, all of them with super-human powers, both physical and intellectual. To give the reader a sense of this fascination, for many of us these books were like H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, J.K Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Ludlum and Stephen King all rolled into one super-adventure-cum-horror-cum-fantasy-cum-science-fiction. This is no exaggeration. After all, with nothing else to have a claim on our attention in those days---no video games, no computers, no smart phones or Internet and social media etc.---the books were the main source of entertainment (“infotainment”) for the youth, especially in the freezing Quetta winters.

Yes, there was TV, and cinema, too. But they were nothing like what we have today with unlimited number of on-demand channels providing programs on and about everything under the sun. TV had limited shows and hours. There were only two channels, one national, PTV, and a local channel, with only a few shows for children. Cinema was a once-in-a-blue-moon affair for many of us, depending on the movies and the mood of the parent, usually the father.

The MTV age arrived with an AV (audio-visual) bang, and probably the very first video song played on it was The Buggles’ chart topper, an extended jingle actually, titled “Video Killed the Radio Song”. Lots of other stuff followed, all of which re-defined entertainment. We know everything changed after that. Well, at least those of us old enough to have witnessed and experienced the phenomenon know that it did.  In the realm of music, video may or may not have killed the radio song, but I think what really killed the small rental libraries in Quetta was not so much TV or MTV and its clones, or not just the TV alone, but what connected to it via a black cable: the VCR, or the Video Cassette Recorder and Bollywood movies. Both the hardware and the software, so to speak.

It all started with the Sony BetaMax machines which were very soon replaced by the ubiquitous industry standard machines based on the VHS system. Actually, before these two, for a short while there was the Philips Video Player with bulky, brick sized video tapes, three of which were needed to store a single two hour plus Bollywood movie. So primitive was this piece of European technology, or perhaps because it was designed solely for use in cold Europe, that a separate pedestal (portable) fan was needed for preventing it from overheating as it played the latest Bollywood blockbusters! With the arrival of the VCR, it seemed that we had permanently moved on, from the universe of the printed word to the age of the moving images, fully complemented with stereo sound and I am not sure if that move was real progress for us. 

To be precise, it was Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman, Rekha, Rakhi, Rishi Kapoor, Shashi Kaporr, Hema Malini, Neethu Singh, Shatrugan Sinha, Amjad Khan, Pran, Danny and a host of others that killed these libraries, to use that apt word from the MTV song. Soon after the VCR became cheap enough to possess, and along with the TV, became a must-have item for families, these rental libraries were replaced with video shops. At one point in early / mid 1980s, there were at least ten of them on Toghi Road alone. They were everywhere in the city, the famous ones with huge collection of movies being on Shawak Shah Road and Abdus Sattar Road. While at many homes the bookshelves made way for fancy TV-VCR combo cabinets fully equipped with theatre quality sound systems, in the neighborhoods the rental libraries vanished, one by one. If I am recalling correctly, Qadeer Bhai’s library closed down in or around 1984. Like his old book sanctuary, he also vanished.

The Roman orator-statesman-philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero has said, "A room without books is like a body without a soul.' Books have always been at the center of great civilizations, at the core of their great cultural achievements in the form of arts, sciences, discoveries and inventions. For example, the Islamic civilization during its more than half millennium rule of glory was the envy of the world. It was especially known for the books it relentlessly churned out in all major fields of knowledge, from astronomy to mathematics, to medicine and philosophy. It was able to do so because Muslims, as the followers of the last monotheistic religion, the last “people of the book,” then knew the importance of books. After all, The Holy Quran, The Mother of All Books (Ummul Kitab), was at the center of their faith, the very definition of it, the heart and soul of their deen. They knew very well the deep significance of that fact, the centrality of The Holy Book for them as a people of faith. Its deep and all-encompassing symbolism was never lost on them. Since in Islam the Word of Allah was made into book, into The Book, how could a Muslim not be a producer, reader, collector, promoter and a lover of books?

Such is not the case today, alas. Today, the annual number of books produced in the entire Islamic world, the Ummah, is less than what a small country in Europe produces annually. The 57 countries in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) spend a mere 0.81 % of their annual GDP on research and development, out of which usually comes the bulk of publications. The situation is even worse in the Arab-Muslim world. For example, in 2005, Harvard University produced more scientific papers than 17 Arabic-speaking countries combined. As the recent UN Arab Human Development Reports have noted, the total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1000 years is fewer than those translated into Spanish in one year! That’s how bad it is. The Arab potentates of today are known not for their humane and valuable contributions to the collective knowledge and cultural pool of humanity, but for the brutal public hanging and chopping up of dissenting clerics, critical writers and bloggers and artists. In short, books are no longer central to the civilization of Sina, Farabi, Ghazzali,  Rushd, Razi, Arabi, Khayyam, Khaldun, Suharwardi, Tusi, Sadra and other luminaries of the Islamic past.

I don’t know about my friend Ibrahim, but the books from Qadeer Bhai’s library, in addition to the pulp fiction that we had at home---all bought at book stores like The Book Land and The Quetta Bookstall on Jinnah Road---and my father’s monthly Suspense, Sabrang, Jasoosi and Ibn e Safi digests did great wonders for me. They instilled in me not only the habit of reading regularly but also a love of books, a passion that has grown more intense over the years. There aren’t many things in this world that can bring me the kind of deep joy I experience from reading a good book on a cold, rainy day. From what I read and observe, I must say that many of us are now quickly becoming incapable of experiencing that kind of authentic joy, the calm satisfaction that often comes from doing things that require concentrated attention, are demanding, time consuming or what we now routinely complain about as being “inconvenient” for us in all sorts of ways. This is especially true for those of us who happily withdraw en masse into the wordless, paperless, image-based universe of digital technologies. One can understand the wisdom in the critical observation of the writer Ray Bradbury when he wrote the following: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Originally published in Balochistan Voices 

Dervaish's Quetta Youtube Channel (Click)

Fun with modern philosophy

“If there is no God, then I am God!”,  says a Dostoyevskian mad man in one of his great novels, The Possessed (Kirilov, part 3, Ch. 6, A Busy Night). If one were forced to define the essence of secular modernity in a line---a bumper sticker definition---this would be the best among all the other contenders. Modernity, and secular-modern life in general, in the West (its authentic home) and in the non-West, is essentially marked for its Godless character, for the absence of any sense of the Sacred. It is peculiarly neglectful of transcendence; it has this total disregard for the Biblical axiom that says, “Man shall not live by bread alone…” (Mathew 4:4). Indeed, modern man lives by bread and bread alone.*

“God is dead” pronounced that "illuminated psychopath" Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century. And, therefore, “Man is God” on earth. Given the colonial, imperialist and racist history of much of the past couple of centuries, this new "man" is actually the modern, Western white (and now, the whitewashed) man. With this death of the “object”---or of objective Reality of which man has always been a shadow, a reflection or image and form on earth in the millennial sacred traditions---modern man moved toward a Kantian subjectivity. Objectivity is denied and we are left to indulge in our subjectivities. This is also the beginning of modern philosophical relativism and, in a sense, of nihilism.

Postmodernism (PoMo), which is the current condition of this modern man, now screams: “This man, this God-killing modern Western man, is dead!” PoMo and its prophets of suspicion have now murdered the already sick and violent subject of modernity, too! (the “de-centered subject” as it is known in the academia) With its “anything goes” Weltanschauung, the PoMo superhero moves a step closer to nihilism. The absurdity of PoMo can be summed up as follows: “There is no Truth. There is no ultimate Reality, no God. And this is the Truth!”  (postmodernism is, therefore, self-defeating)

For Nietzsche “Power is Truth”. Man is “will to power”. Further, there is no truth: there are only interpretations. “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors…truths are illusions” said the man.  Nietzsche’s follower, Michel Foucault, a giant of the PoMo pantheon, stretches this suspicion further: Truth is nothing but a construction of power. Power defines what is true and what is real. 'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. These systems are called regimes of truth. Now, contrast this with what the perennial Tradition of man, or authentic religions say: Truth is power (right is might, and that vincit, omnia veritas). Only Truth (Haqq) IS: everything else is mere interpretation.

Before Nietzsche, Kant—the so-called “philosophers’ philosopher”---said (in words to that effect): “We can never know noumena (things in themselves, things as they really are) because our perception stops us from having a pure and undiluted access to it. In other words, Ultimate Reality or God is impossible!  What this sage of Konigsberg was saying amounts to this:  “I cannot jump and slam dunk. So, there is no such thing as the sport of basketball!” (this is the famous epistemic turn of modern Western philosophy after which modern man became solely concerned with how questions of epistemology and forgot all abut ontology, which Heidegger tried to revive in the twentieth century). This man, Immanuel Kant, never left his small European town where he lived, never met a non-European, but was not hesitant, just like his predecessor David Hume, to pronounce Eurocentric and even racist evaluations of Africans and other peoples. The millennial traditions of Asians and Africans with their rich and diverse ways of knowing, doing and being amounted to nothing to him! Says Bruno Berard about Kant in a recent article:

If, in philosophy, there is a 'before an after Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), this is because he has inverted the meaning of intelligence (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft) as understood by all preceding philosophers: from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Leibnitz, Malebranche, and beyond, all said to labor under an illusion which he (Kant) alone was able to recognize and dispel!

Frithjof Schuon adds, on Kant and Kantianism, as follows: 'If we take the example of a doctrine which is apparently completely intellectual and inaccessible to the emotions namely Kantianism, considered as the archetype of theories seemingly divorced from all poetry we shall have no difficulty in discovering that its starting point or “dogma” is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason acting alone; it voices therefore, a priori an instinctive revolt against truths which are incomprehensible rationally and which are considered annoying on account of their very inaccessibility to ordinary reasoning. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or “brilliant” if you wish, but contrary to truth. What is crucial in Kantianism is not its pro domo logic and its few very limited lucidities, but the predominantly “irrational” desire to limit the intelligence which it voices; this results in a dehumanization of intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if the state of man earns the possibility of surpassing oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.' (F. Schuon, Reflections on Ideological Sentimentalism)

Whereas modernism says “God is abstract / is an abstraction; we are the real/reality”, authentic, revealed religions say, “God is the Real; we are the abstraction”.  Cogito ergo sum ( “I think, therefore, I am”) said Descartes, the father of modern rationalism and of modern philosophy.  Cogito, ergo Est ("I think, therefore God is” or "Because God is, I can, therefore, think") say the sacred religious traditions of man.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian-German philosopher who was most responsible for giving this modern philosophy a "linguistic turn", focused on the limits of language and ended up saying:  “The limit of my language is the limit of my world” and that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” For him, all reality is nothing but constructions of language, nothing but language games; truth, reality, goodness----all are social, linguistic constructions. “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes”, he went on to say before his death. Heidegger, another well known continental philosopher of the twentieth century also confirmed this kind of linguistic determinism when he said, "Language is the house of being." Hans Gadamer was only too happy to agree: "Being that can be understood is language."

Jacque Derrida, perhaps the greatest of the PoMo thinkers, dresses his similar suspicions differently. Says he: “There is nothing outside the text.” By “text”, he does not mean just some written book. Everything is a “text” for him: books, works of art, history, man, truth, beauty, goodness and so on---the so- called grand narratives---texts that must be read and, because they are all arbitrary constructions, they must be endlessly “deconstructed”. We are, therefore, stuck in this never ending exercise of constructions-deconstructions-constructions-deconstructions... 

Despite its claims to be "after" or "post" modernity, postmodern relativism which a Muslim thinker has aptly called the New Jahilliya, is actually a form of late modernity---as many Marxists have insisted---a continuation of its worst tendencies, especially atheistic ones even as it puts efforts into developing a PoMo “death of God theology!” But to deny the existence of God is to see the wave and deny the existence of the ocean. To deny God is to see a speck of dust and deny space. To insist on asking for the “proofs” of God is to be like that naïve, little fish that asks its mother for the proof of the existence of water. The fact that we can actually ask such questions is the proof of God is something that is never entertained by the profane(d) mind!

* Note: I use the word “man” in these blogposts in the old sense of the word, as homo and as al-insan, which is inclusive of both the sexes of the species.

For more, please click: Chacha (uncle) Marx, On Solitude

The unexamined life

The Canadian writer Henry Giroux reports that, ”plastic surgeons in the United States have seen a surge in demand for procedures ranging from eye-lid lifts to rhinoplasty, popularly known as nose job, from patients seeking to improve their image in selfies and on social media”. Moreover, he says,   “A search on photo sharing app Instagram retrieves over 23 million photos uploaded with the hashtag #selfie, and a whopping 51 million with the hashtag #me. Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Madonna are all serial uploaders of selfies. Model Kelly Brook took so many she ended up ‘banning’ herself!”.

In a previous blog (On noise and solitude), I ended my piece with a twist on Descartes’ Cogito. I start this one with another pun on that famous uttering (Cogito ergo sum---I think, therefore I am) of the father of modern rationalism, but this time with the voice of the late Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who once described this aspect of the social media phenomenon like this: “I am seen, therefore I exist!”—or, the more people see me, “like” me and “like” what I post, share and forward, the more I am. Image is now everything. Visibility, a la image, is existence and graphic promiscuity is the highest and purest form of being. “It takes real practice to appear authentic!” as one prolific Facebook user opines.  

A friend has asked me to say something about the digital plague of narcissism and celebrity obsessed exhibitionism that is engulfing whole societies like a deadly squid. Most people when asked say that they join social media to “keep in touch with family and friends”. That makes sense but many naively think of platforms like Facebook, or Twitter, as one big phone directory---or that only. Studies have shown that within days and weeks of signing up, for most people the boundaries of that raison d’etre extend to include all sorts of other justifications for a plethora of obnoxious online activities. There are reasons for these and also consequences.

A feature of modern living is the complaint of boredom and depression. Young people are especially prone to these malaises. Traditional cultures---societies where secular modernity has not made deep inroads yet----lack words for these modern pathologies of the soul. There is no Urdu word for boredom, for example. The very ideas and concepts are alien to these societies. A word or an idea is often preceded by a condition: no condition, no word for it. As the psychologist John F. Schumaker has shown in his meticulous studies, most of the cases of depression are actually cases of demoralization which he defines as “a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s cognitive map”.  Schumaker identifies this condition as, “…an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfillment. The world loses its credibility, and former beliefs and convictions dissolve into doubt, uncertainty and loss of direction. Frustration, anger and bitterness are usual accompaniments, as well as an underlying sense of being part of a lost cause or losing battle.” What drives these, he tells us, are, “individualism, materialism, hyper-competition, greed, over-complication, overwork, hurriedness and debt” and whose symptoms are “passivity, short attention spans, over-indulgence and a masturbatory approach to life.” This is the life that sages of old like Socrates and Plato in the Greek tradition and mystics and failasufs in the Islamic world have called the “unexamined life”. In its simplest explanation, this is a lifestyle where man lives a life devoid of any serious reflection, shunning thought and the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. It is a form of living that confuses what is essential with what is accidental in life. In those who opt for it, there is a lack of awareness of our true origin and end, of where have we come from and where we are headed. In essence, for Socrates, it was the reality of death that made him utter his famous words and for many Muslim sages, the question of forgetfulness and the truth of afterlife, of aakhirat (ma’ad).

Living an unexamined life results in the loss of a sense of being and belonging. With the encroachment of unrestrained individualism and hedonism, a true sense of community disappears; trust, friendship and intimacy plummet. And, contrary to the belief of digital utopians, those who slavishly worship the god of modern technology, real communities cannot be formed in virtual Internet spaces. Real communities mean having a sense of place, having roots. It means a willingness to share the responsibilities of communal living. There are not only privileges but also burdens; there are rights, but also duties, duty to oneself and to the neighbor. There are consequences, real consequences, of what we say and do to others in real communities. Just like we cannot “unfriend” someone real with the click of a mouse, real communities cannot be erased either by ticking against a “delete and unjoin” option on some drop menu on a digital screen!

In the increasingly angst infested, self-obsessed cultural deserts, young people in particular grow up confused and lost, without any guiding principles or an integrated philosophy of life. Once traditional or religious sources of meaning are destroyed and the inner and outer wells of morality and wisdom are polluted or dried up by the invasive norms of modern consumer culture and its anti-social tricknologies (perversely called “social”) that constantly titillate our lowest desires, people are demoralized and become victims of boredom and depression. Boredom is often a natural outcome of shallow and effortless lifestyle that is on display in the form of digital self-representations on much of the social media: “since nothing lives up to the hype, the world of consumer is actually an ongoing exercise in disappointment”, Schumaker tells us. The resulting sense of futility and powerlessness overwhelm which further leads to self-destructive mindsets and behavior: drug abuse and suicidal tendencies, for example. In the absence of rewarding, interesting or meaningful experiences, these fragile, meaning-starved and unmoored selves snap very easily.

The demoralized “trance generation” of online and offline cultures that feed on celebrity-fed inanities are for the most part “products of invisible parents, commercialized education, cradle-to-grave marketing” a morally, intellectually bankrupt generation celebrating its consumer consciousness “with an insatiable appetite for any technology that can downsize awareness and blunt the emotions” continues Schumaker.

Boredom is essentially meaninglessness of the worst type, a feeling of void within. Traditional cultures have always had ways to counter such inner maladies, for example, through the inculcation of the virtues of qana’at and ridha, or contentment and simplicity, in the individual. Modern consumer culture and its ethos of accumulation, dynamism and perpetual action---“just do it!”---on the other hand, sells us unrestricted hedonism and denigrate the contended soul as “less developed”, “static”, “backward” and “lazy”. The traditional Japanese contrast this mode of restless, fragmented existence with their own when they tell us, “Don’t just do something. Sit there!”

Materialist consumption may give us satisfaction up to a certain limit beyond which things lose their fulfilling potential. The reason for this lies in our very nature, our fitrah, the way we are constituted as human beings, as insan. We all seek meaning but the sources of meaning are not only in the material. To seek satisfaction and meaning in the material only is a sign of an unhealthy self, and which will always lead to psychic numbing and spiritual malaise. All this attachment, all this wanton consumerism, this khud beeni and khud numayee---narcissism---this endless craving and desire for the profane and the trivial eventually lead to suffering of the worst kind, what the Buddhists call dukkha. For Muslims, whose religion has also been called “the religion of married monks” by others, it is a requirement to engage with this world (al-duniya), but we are also constantly cautioned to keep a safe distance from it and not to indulge in it heedlessly: “Be in the world but not of the world”, as the Sufis say. We are to be vigilant, to constantly reflect and examine our thoughts and acts. We must listen to Socrates when he tells us that “an unexamined life is not worth living.’

Note: Saal e nau mubarak to all the readers of this blog. Happy New Year!

Originally published in Balochistan Voices.(The unexamined life)