To savour the heights
One must drink from the depths
Yet to merely think of the depths
Is to squander the heights
To Rise and To Fall
Observation – To Claim a Clean Heart
Claiming a clean or pure heart is exactly that which defiles it.
War Wounds – The Promise of Obama
Obama promised to close down Guantánamo Bay Internment Camp 1 upon being elected President back in 2009. He neglected to mention that this could only be possible because a new strategy was being ever more strongly endorsed and carried out, a strategy that no longer needed a prison camp.
Notes:
- Against the grain I choose the description of ‘internment’ rather than the usual ‘detention’ as it is a far more accurate ascription – large groups of people being held without trial ↩
Observation – Workplace Conversation
This conversation chokes me! Every word is a knot stuck in my throat. Every thought about every next sentence is another noose tightening around my neck. I am blacking out in my interest for you and your existence. A necessary automation guides me through the motions, the facial expressions and nods in all the right places, my dead eyes hidden behind dissembling smiles. I never set out to deceive but inanity and utter dullness take hold and lead me like so many counted sheep to sleep with my eyes open till you leave and the nightmare is over. But don’t feel bad, almost every conversation in the workplace is the same. It ain’t personal.
In Memoriam of Asghar Butt (rahimahullah)
That cry, that piercing pain drenched cry. It had to come. We had been waiting on each report, not with baited breath but instead holding it as if somehow it would stop that doom; like the covers pulled tightly over the head of the child fleeing the monster under the bed, a type of pointless comfort. The clock was ticking and his time was running out on and between each stroke.
Life is like the ocean, life is like the sea
Life is like the ocean, cold, empty and dark. It throws you this way and that, up and down, and even when you see the wave coming you are helpless in its path. Life is like the sea, it holds you in suspense, inescapable. It’s enormity is awe inspiring, terrifying, magnificent and horrific, and in it, despite your pretences and protestations, you are lost. More +
Fantasists
We have been brought up as fantasists. Our culture thrusts into our eyes and ears the images and sounds against which we hammer our faces in conformity and compliance, ‘it could be, it should be ME!’ Any intrusion into these fantasies is ill-met with rancour and resentment. ‘You can’t tell me what to do, I am an individual, just like you…’ Indeed, just like us all, sheep in a row.
We have become so afraid to experience reality we now try and live through hyper-realities; take a look around the next time you are at a concert, see how many people are watching through their cameras instead of through their eyes directly at the performance. Mediating lenses and screens and filters and apps colour our world view and the view of us by the world; it is as if we we feel compelled to advertise ourselves to feel in control of ourselves, to feel we matter, maybe just to feel? We are moving beyond being just consumers to being products and thus consumed by others. It is virtual cannibalism. The same might have been said about yesteryears cameras. But now the stakes are higher; digital delivers a higher definition with which to confuse realities; fantasies appear more real as boundaries between mind and the world disperse in the ever increasing pixel count.
Converting/ Reverting: thoughts and fun with semantics
I used to want to be called a ‘revert’ not a ‘convert’ to Islam, but stop the press, it is at last conclusive, I am actually a convert. I think the reasoning on this minor issue of semantics is probably widespread; I am unaware of another genuine argument beyond the one I am about to mention albeit weakly. Our beloved Prophet (SAW) told us in more than one hadīth about the fitrah that each person is born upon. One version goes, ‘Every child is born in a state of fitrah, and then his parents make him into a Jew, a Christian or a Magian.’ [Agreed upon] The word fitrah can be translated as ‘natural disposition’ or ‘natural instinct’; upon this understanding one can take fitrah to be in some sense a kind of innate characteristic.
Elegy for the Nation: Rise and Fall
History teaches many things. Prominently, we might say that it teaches us that nations rise and fall. When nations fall, the prime cause, if indeed causes do exist in these realms, is not external conquest but internal corruption. We may object saying that we clearly see nations conquered by other nations, so surely this is ‘proof positive’ that nations do fall due to external conquest. I would respond that it is due to the very nature of internal corruption that external conquest becomes possible. This is of course a generalisation, but I think it one worth clinging to.
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