The King lost, even before the war had begun. Without a second thought, all the blame was put on the swords, the armours, the horses, the arrows, the shields, but himself. He ordered the execution of all the horses, whom he blamed chiefly for the defeat in the battle which he never fought. Replacement for the old horses, whom the common man, without doubting their King, blamed for the annihilation, was called for. They were to be replaced by new horses, who were burdened with duty of fetching a triumph in every battle they fought, even if they had to go without an army. Cutting edge sabers were made for the soldiers, who were known to lose a battle even in the best of their dreams. The King wasn’t ambivalent at all about his newly devised strategy. This autosuggestion, according to him, could put even Napoleon’s army to shame. Subsequently the battle was fought again with an overwhelming might and they won, by ‘they’ I mean the enemies. They say that the King, the horses and the soldiers were all united, not by patriotism but by death.
The author is definitely not a King but a reflection of the King’s ideology can be seen in the mirrors of his narrative (Reh Gayee Rasm-e-Azan 20/7/2012 by Naeem Akhtar). The author contends that appointing a permanent muezzin will provide a solution to, what appears to me, a deep rooted problem. The replacement will raise the status of azaan, from being a mere rasm to…to…I don’t know what? But what I know is that, it’s like replacing the shepherds’ staff with an assault rifle and expecting the cattle not to go astray. It seems to challenge the faculties of human intellect, the way the author has identified the problem to be. The argument given for the same is as paralogical as, blaming the wall on which the spider tried to climb again and again, but shook hands with failure. The problem, close to me, is not of non-punctual muezzins who don’t act in harmony and cause befuddlement among the masses. The questions that bother me here are that, how many persons are actually blanketed in the confusion between the timings of tahajjud and fajr in a ‘non-ramzaan’ month? Let’s keep tahajjud aside, how many do even leave their cozy beds for fajr? Why does the azaan strike like a thunderbolt and not like rains to a barren land? The problem isn’t the absence of an apt muezzin’s but the absence of a burning conviction, the lack of an apt Eema. As Al-Pacino puts it, “There is nothing like the sight of an amputated spirit. There is no prosthesis for that.” Neither the author nor can I provide prosthesis for our amputated convictions. The tumult from the loud speakers is obviously bothering the author, but who is to listen to silent sobs of our faith? Lastly the author quotes one of the fables of ‘Mewlana’ Rumi to emphasize upon the already found problem by him, but fails to acknowledge that the princess in the fable might have reverted to Islam after the caravan left but we on following the pathway of this ‘mewlana’ will certainly end up dancing along with the replaced muezzins inside the mosques.  

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Lastupdate on : Mon, 30 Jul 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:00:00 IST