For the last few weeks, something within me put me in a precarious situation as a consequence of which I have become a reticent speaker, always hiding myself lest I be forced by the circumstances to speak and voice an opinion or two. Even though I don’t neither have the aura of being a good speaker nor am I so knowledgeable as would qualify me being astute. This deliberate reticence has given me significant time to reflect upon my life, its purpose and the immediate social order prevailing around us. I have always believed that unless someone is put in a conflict (cognitive), one can’t come out of the self-made cocoon and look at the prospective ways of dealing with a situation. And this reticence has made me understand that even though religiosity is an obligatory part of our lives, yet we must have a humanistic as well as academic angle to our demeanour that would act as prerequisites to get our religiosity weighed and valued before man and God. Our society is full of scholars yet all the strata of the society are uniformed or ill-informed about the real objective of being a human or being a religious. The society is scant of people who are engaged in a sustained thought process. Neither are those who ‘lead’ us nor the ones who ‘follow’ them. This is why all we foresee is an abyss.
I might sound pessimistic but this is all one can infer from the situation we are in. All that we focus upon is ‘mundane’ and ‘trivial’, like posting a snap on Facebook and liking the comments that describe it as smart and ignoring, or simply deleting, the ones not so magnanimous in describing the snap. This is not a postmodernist trait of celebrating the ‘mundane’ but a severe lack of thinking and lack of knowing the real objective of living a life. This intellectual famine has made us more susceptible to being misled, mis-ruled, oppressed and crushed. Though death is everyone’s lot, it is this class of people who are never heard of post their death. Some of us do embrace death to sprout again but most remain in metaphorical dust forever. The intent of creating a welfare society is nowhere to be found and even if it is, the same dies before seeing the light of the day. That ‘Subah-e-Roshan’ is no way near since all the prerequisites for it are stalled at the very outset. Who stalls such intent or quest is known to us all! It could be our over-enthusiastic quest for material or the co-opting tactics of our tormentor. But before we point fingers at others, we must understand, it is we who have let the ‘other’ to devour us, physically as well as intellectually. Allama Iqbal, the great visionary, was right when he said that the quest for absolute knowledge was what created fissures in the Western model of life which led it to rampant atheism. However, he cautions that even though the Western model got punctured, yet the acute reliance on knowledge propelled them towards greater prosperity and development. But the East, as per him, chose not knowledge but music (Qawwali) which he says poisoned it to the level of destruction- being occupied by the West and post the colonial period, it got engaged in doing hate politics and replicating its old masters. As a result, the human rights situation is pretty abysmal (the recent UN report is a reference in this regard). The intellectual deficit has constrained Muslims from creating a niche for themselves at the grand stage. The modern Muslim has lost its way for he has ceased to be a practicing and a thinking Muslim. He has long back closed his eyes, like the ostrich, believing the predator would be unable to find him. In 1944 alone, 23 books of philosophy were written by Hindu scholars. But only one such work of philosophy was authored by a Muslim scholar in a period of about more than two decades. The tragedy is that this work The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is still alien to many academics in the Muslim world, not to talk of the common readers. It still remains to be translated into Arabic or Persian- the major languages of the Muslims. Allama laments:
Kis tarah huwa kund tera nashtar-e-tahqeeq
Hote nahi kyun tujhse sitarun ke jigar chaak
The common masses are engaged in ‘my-this, my-that’ attitude and the academics – religious as well as curricular- are focussing on the trivial! This illusion of knowledge, on part of such pseudo-scholars has been more damaging to the cause of knowledge. Unless the scholar in Muslims wakes up, there isn’t going to be any liberation from bondage, poverty and treachery. The optimist in me, however, believes that this community of ours shall seize the opportunity and a new bright morning (Subah-e-Roshan) shall be our lot. We need to go back to our basic religious tenets to start the reformation process.
Kitab-e-millat-e-baiza ki phir shiraaza-bandi hai
Ye shaakh-e-haashmi karne ko hai phir barg-o-bar paida
ln.tanveer@gmail.com