Two Pulls

Is the essence of human life to only obey what has been revealed to the Prophet PBUH and the Quran? What about diversities of ways of being and ways of living?  If a woman who lives in a tribal context who has to climb trees to seek food for herself doesnt dress in a hijab, is she a sinner? Doesn’t her immediate context justify her way of dressing? Or should she strive to go beyond her immediate context upon her contact with Islam and give up her livelihood, immediate community, ease and relatedness and be a woman  who covers herself up and secludes herself from the men in her community?

Let me think through this… i imagine her coming to contact with Islam.. she progressively becomes attracted to it’s principles… she starts practicing the religion little by little. some of her family and community members supports, some resists. she engages in constant dialogue with her community about why she is changing. the dialogue sometimes validates her decisions to be Muslim and sometimes unsettles her. Was who she was as a tribal woman so sinful? She was dressed in the way that was her tribe’s. It drew no lewd looks within her tribe. But within the purview of Islamic guidance, the dressing was inadequate in modesty. Should she then hold the position that the rules laid down by Prophet PBUH living in the 7th century Arabia expandable and subsuming her local context a thousand and three hundreed years later in a tropical land far east and south? Where rain grew little wildflowers in paths that was freshly cut to make way for moving caravans? 

What do I, Febna, think about it all? 

I think the clay in my body and the Earth of this Earth has a discursive, fantasy seeking aspect. I dont know if it is the water in the clay or the earth in the clay that makes it so.. but there is a way that life, body, minds needs a bit of tangible and fatastical mysticism to make it feel at peace. Be it the case of a praying man who wants to hear the sound of the temple bell chiming to feel that his prayers are heard or the romanticism in a woman to see a wild spirit in a river and pray to it every day as she took bath in it, there is an aspect in human psyche that seeks the mystical, imaginary, discursive .. that wants a somatic version of that mystical communion even. in the form of rituals. ranging from smearing ashes to forehead to smoking a tobacco pipe to communion with ancestral spirits. I used to cherish this aspect of humanity in others and in myself. I saw it as the alchemist healer who metaphorically saw the world as an interface for healing interactions.. 

Islam insists that Allah is the only one we rely on for guidance and refuge. Any transverse currents that seeks relief and meaning in landscapes and dieties and earth spiritis or anything of that sort is discouraged. I did not know I could shut down that aspect of me that relished the metaphorical mystical healer in myself so quick and thorough. I stopped reading and practising about how feeding crows nourishes the Shadow self. How wearing ashes on forehead cools the forehead. How a blue sapphire ring keeps you company reminding you of the virtues and punishment of Saturn. Dua to Allah and Namaz became my only tools for spiritual healing. For mind peace. 

I am happy. I feel less profuse. More contained.  But then for the same reasons I feel dry sometimes too. Like am not washed constant by the rivers of Sansara in this planet. Like am not sticking my feet into muddy crevices of earth around. 

Sometimes am able to feel rain and breeze and mist all in the ascetic practices of Islam.. but that is when I invoke to my consciousness the poetry in Allah’s rahma- compassion, the love in Allah’s care, the majesty in Allah’s being.. It was the old structures of metaphors and colorscapes that were mined and experienced with pagan mysticism that give me the tools to perceive and appreciate Allah so.. For instance when I think of Kali and Shiva and Vishnu and Brahman and then think of Allah encompassing, subsuming, overriding so totally completely all those powers, I can tangibly feel the majesty of Allah. The richness of our taste palette will help us appreciate the taste of new entity.. which is even subimer? .. Hmm.. now that I typed it so, I pause and wonder. Does eating a lot of indulgent tapioca and fish curry make one perceptive to the subtle sweet and heady taste of roseflowers and sweetened sesame seeds that are given as offerings.. I guess not. That is of a different meter in taste. Something that is more nuanced and subtle and airy and ethery than the guttural elements of the tastes evoked by fish curry and kappa… 

Maybe, yea, there is a tussle between the guttural and the sublime.. the pagan and the semitic. That are two different ways of flow of energy. This is not new. The upward triangle in Hindu religious symbolism has for a long time symbolised the masculine ascetic, as opposed to the downward triangle that symbolised the feminine pagan. But in true essence, the Hindu Masculine concept of Godhead is not really un-pagan. With digressions into idolatory, metaphorical comparisons with sensory and sensual entities in environment, it has some earthly-visceral-guttural elements. As opposed to the Islamic concept of Allah that is way above comparisons to any earthly entities. 

The answer that is Allah is non circuitous. Straight. Clinically clean. There are no mazes. No cul de sacs. Compared to that of pagan mystical traditions. So the visceral pleasure in unravelling myths and riddles and iconography is not there in Islam. That makes it seem dry to the regurgitating, cud chewing mind. 

Relishing tradition- relishing nature - this is an aspect of Human mind. The kind that seeks the joy of chewing and sucking on a bone to have it release its hidden flavours. That kind that seeks the joy of creating a name and a story for a river and a crane and how they married and finally engages in a ritual that connects the story a prayer and the river and the crane.  Islam is matter of fact- remembering Prophet’s hadith here that talked about perceiving the world as a wayfarer or a traveller.. Islam makes sense when we see it against the background that- the Earth was never meant to be our permanent abode. We were sent here for a time. Our allegiances, our compass head lies elsewhere. With Allah.