A Spiritual Synthesis

Most of the early forms of literature in Bengali are found in the forms of devotional poetry and songs, transmitted mostly through oral traditions. Thus, looking at oral tradition can help locate the specific understanding of a monotheistic God — Allah — amongst the mass peasantry. Perhaps, using the example of Bauls will demonstrate the point with some clarity. Baul means the one who is struck by the mad wind. Bauls can be identified, as a group of ascetics who roam around the country having renounced the material life to compose and sing devotional songs. They are usually tied to one particular group and fraternity similar to the Sufi khanqas. One prominent feature of the Baul group is that often their religious identity will remain obscure.

The Bauls started appearing in Bengal history starting from 15th century. The beginning of the Bauls is often attributed to Vaishnavite saint Nityananda, or alternatively to the 8th century Persian minstrel Ba’al. Vasnavism and Sufism are considered the two main influences on the Baul groups. The advent of Vaisnavism and the cult of Vaisnavite Bauls roaming across the delta must have began to incorporate the Islamic influences, since Shah Muhammad Sagir’s 15th Century Ballad of Yusuf and Zulekha was known to be performed widely by the Bauls in the eastern delta of Bengal.

Before the coming of Mughals to Bengal, the Hindu population was followers of Vaisnavism as well as numerous cults of Gods and Goddesses. The Hindus residing in the Eastern part of the delta were less integrated into Brahmanical Hinduism; rather, they participated in worshipping numerous local deities. The Baul remained the disseminator of spiritual philosophy to the mass and remained instrumental in preparing the ground for Islamic monotheist faith in the delta.

The Bengali peasantry’s subscription to the cult of a monotheist Allah can be located in the Vaisnavism where the concept of a monotheist all encompassing Divine entity appears. It is this all encompassing Divine being who exists everywhere, yet nowhere, the Shunno Niranjan (the one with no attributes, the zero, the absolute) that prepared the peasant spiritual psychology to comprehend a monotheist “Allah.” Sri Chaitanya has been known to have used the phrase Anal Haq or “I am truth”, borrowing from Mansur Hallaj. It is this overlap and combination of Vaisnavism and Sufism that finally shaped the Muslim peasantry’s highly devotional, however, not quite rigidly-religious Islamic faith.

The Buddhist patron Palas in early 11th century built a number of monasteries in East Bengal and provided sufficient state patronage for the spread of Buddhism. Then, as early as 1053 we have Shah Sultan Rumi in Mymensing and Baba Adam Shahid in Dhaka by 1119. Thus, between tenth and fifteenth century in Bengal we have Buddhist monks and monasteries, a range of popular Hindu Goddess worship, bhakti movements like Vaisnavism, and Sufi saints all converging into the rural areas. East Bengal became the devotional melting pot of three major religions of the world: Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.

As Bengal historically remained local in character and rural in origin, any centralized ideology, let it be Brahmanical Hinduism or Perso Arab Islam had to localize itself in order to enter into the rural landscape. The Baul songs and philosophy testify for such processes of localization of faith. By closely examining the songs of Baul Lalon Shah (1774-1890) we can notice the full infiltration of Central Asian, and North Indian Sufi philosophy into the heartland of Bengali rural peasantry. Looking closely at Baul philosopher Lalon Shah will further demonstrate this point.

Lalon Shah’s birth origin is unknown. He was rescued by a Muslim couple from the bank of a river after having suffered from small pox. Lalon grew up in a Muslim household as a Muslim. In history he has appeared as a Sufi Shayakh from the Chisti order, a fakir, and most commonly as the Baul Shomrat or King of Bauls. During his life Lalon composed numerous devotional songs through, which he established a specific Baul spiritual philosophy. As he lived in the rural village, and all his songs were only transmitted orally; we can conclude that, the origin of his philosophy was organic to the rural socio-religious consciousness of the peasantry. As we will see, the theme of the ultimate Divine without whom no other reality exists is a central theme of Lalon’s philosophy.

Lalon’s verses often use the motif of ochin pakhi or unknown bird. This bird is associated with the illusive Divine entity that resides within us: One that we constantly fail to chain down. Human body is the cage which restricts the bird to fly to the Divine, and it is the human body that Lalon wishes to use as a cage to capture the Divine bird. Within this paradox we find the crux of the Sufi dialectic: humanity is the very barrier to reach the Divine, yet, humanity is the only divine manifestation available through which Divine can be reached. The moth can fly into the flame, but that union also means the end of the moth!

“Allah” or Khoda appears in many of Lalon’s songs interchangeably with Shunno Niranjan, Probhu (lord), Bondhu (friend), Maula, Ochin Pakhi (eternal bird) to denote the ultimate reality, the only Absolute, the all encompassing Divine beyond attributes. In the following song an intimacy with the Divine is desired through the connection of mon,

Where are you, Khoda? In the realms of heaven? Nobody knows the answer, then why do they point to the sky when I ask about you?

Who is that speaking in my inner room, not listening to that I look at the sky
Lalon says, where is He will be seen through Divine knowledge.

This song again attempts to establish that, one’s mon or heart is the best way to reach the Divine, in this case denoted by the Persian word Khuda, which is interchangeably used with “Allah” in Bengal. Since no one knows where Khuda resides then why locate him far away in the realms of heaven or the sky? Why not locate him in the inner heart? If one listens carefully to one’s heart then one will surely see where the Divine resides.
The only precondition for the mon to reach the Divine is the awareness that, the Divine exists as the ultimate reality and we all are a part of it. This philosophy simply asks one to find a gateway to one’s heart with utter simplicity and honestly. In a rural setting where economic hardship and heavy agricultural work ruled the lives of peasants, following one’s mon dharma seems like an option they would have taken up in the place of five ritualistic daily prayers. Baul Durbin Shai, in his song asks the forgiveness of “Allah” for not being able to say his prayers or namaz,

“During the time of Magrib prayer I was in gohai ghor (a place to keep the cow), the cow hasn’t come back and other one is not tied, during the time of Isha wife said we don’t have any rice at home, listening to the laments of my children, I, Durbin Shai cry with them, I couldn’t pray Allah, I didn’t pray.”

By the beginning of 20th century, Mon dharma, still remained the peasant’s dharma. “Allah” surely has entered the peasant spiritual cosmology as the Absolute Ultimate Divine, however, the devotional practices remained that of somewhat pre-modern. The shrines of Sufi saints, Hindu Pirs are widely visited and the deeply devotional philosophy common to Vaisnavism and Sufism paints the backdrop of Bengali peasant spiritual psychology where “Allah” has taken up just another name to denote the ultimate Divine, the Shunno Niranjan.

A 20th century study of Muslim religious practices in Noakhali has shown that the villagers believed in jinns, ghosts, supernatural beings, and often went to the Sufi saint for a solution. The author also noted the practice of specific namaz and fatiha to invoke rain and enhance land fertility. Thus, the preoccupation of the peasantry remains agriculture, and it is in relation to the agricultural work that they mostly turn to the Divine, to “Allah,” “Allah megh dey, pani dey, chaya de re tui,” meaning, Allah give us clouds and rain and shade, addressed in a tui form, denoting extreme intimacy in Bengali language.

The nineteenth century devotional songs of Hason Raja, “Hason Rajay Koy, Ami Kichu Noy Re Ami Kichu Noy, Ontore Bahire Dekhi Kabol Doya Moy” meaning, “Hason Raja says, I am nothing, and I am nothing. In my heart and outside of it is only the Doyaamoy.” Doyaamoy means the one with compassion, again, in Hason Raja’s popular devotional songs we find the inmost of Vaisnav and Sufi philosophy that the Divine is the ultimate reality, and nothing else exists, except for Him/Her.

However, a significant turn in Bengali Muslim history is the advent of “Wahhabism” imported from Arab by Haji Shariatullah after making a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1799, and returning  to Bengal in 1818. He condemned the worship of shrines and wanted to purge Islam out of the so-called Hindu and Buddhist influences. It was noticed by the census of 1956 that local Muslims in East Bengal who previously had names like Chand, Dutt, Pal now renamed themselves in Syed, Sheikh, Mughal, Pathan or furnished their names with Arabic surnames commonly, Mohammad and Islam. The Wahhabi identity was flared by the agitation along the communal lines where mostly Muslim peasants used their religious identity as a crystallizing force against the oppressive Hindu Zamindar and Jotdars.

The gift we have historically is that, ‘our Islam’ makes room for other religions, and allows a secular environment where all religious practices can co-exit, even inter-mingle. If in the hype towards secularism and hatred towards terrorism and mullahs, we throw Islam out like the baby with the bath water, it would be an act of misleading the nation. As a nation who has digested Vasinavism, Buddhism and Sufism, spiritual transcendence has become the staple food for Bengalis like rice and daal. We should not deny ‘our Islam,’ rather, we should engage with it, track the real history of Islamization in Bengal, and fill with our voices  the void Bengali intellectuals have created over the past decades by neglecting Islam. This void has allowed for the Islamic faith to be misinterpreted by uneducated mullahs, and Islam to be used as a political tool.

source link : http://www.theindependentbd.com/weekly-independent/27829-a-spiritual-synthesis.html

 

Weekend Independent | Friday, 17 December 2010 |  Rubaiyat Hossain  

Belief in Bengal

The starting point and the very historical processes of mass “conversion” to “Islam,” in South Asia has long been contested and politicized. For instance, the heavy Muslim settlement in the Eastern Delta of Bengal became a very important political factor in 1947, when the nation-state building apparatus drew boundaries to join the eastern delta of Bengal to West Pakistan on account of the high concentration of Muslim populations in both the regions. There followed yet another consequence of that partition: after the formation of Pakistan with the two wings—East Pakistan and West Pakistan—the heavy concentration of peasant Muslims in the Eastern Delta, the rural atraps found themselves under the economic, political and socio-cultural hegemony of the West Pakistani ashraf. This created rifts between both groups on issues of economic exploitation, political policy and leadership, language, culture, and religious practices. Ultimately Pakistan broke in half, a new country emerged: Bangladesh.

What were the socio-cultural, economic, and political phenomena that can account for the failure of Pakistan—the Muslim majority state of South Asia? When the persistent dreams of a separate homeland for the South Asian Muslims had actually been materialized; one may inquire: what was the array of forces that eventually led to a mass revolt against the West Pakistani military atrocities to establish yet another Muslim majority nation-state, those belonging to the Eastern Delta of Bengal in the South East?

This question has been instantly answered by Bangladeshi historians with the model of an unequal relation between the Eastern and Western wings of Pakistan tied in an unhappy marriage of economic exploitation, top down imposition of socio-cultural and political hegemony, and finally a clear-cut racism of the West Pakistani ashrafs over the East Pakistani atraps.

However, by looking carefully at Richard Eaton’s theory about the mass conversion of low caste Hindus to Islam in the lower delta of Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Eastern delta of Bengal today Bangladesh, between sixteenth and eighteenth century; one could provide a missing piece of Bangladesh’s socio-cultural and religious history to explain the gulf of differences, which remained so persistent and bore historical consequences for the Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslims.

Eaton accounts for the high concentration of Muslim population in the Eastern delta of Bengal to the changing courses of the major rivers in region, which resulted in the creation of new land in the lower delta of Bengal. The new agrarian developments created settlements, habited previously uninhabited areas, and a new peasantry came into being between sixteenth and eighteenth century under the Mughal rule. Eaton concludes in his deduction that, the eastward movement of the Mughal empire’s agrarian frontier and the incorporation of the rice boom in East Bengal into the economic hub of the empire created a new wave of settlements in East Bengal; where “Islam” was introduced in the new lands as a, “Civilization-building ideology associated both with settling and populating the land by constructing a transcendent reality constant with the process.”

Sufi masters were sent by the Mughal kings with land endowments, grants for building of a mosque to initiate civilization in the new settlements. It is no wonder that most myths surrounding renowned Sufi masters like Hazrat Shah Jalal, Shah Paran, Makhdum Shah relate to the miracles or keramats performed by these Sufi masters to clear out the area of inauspicious elements: Jinns, ghosts, snakes, tigers, crocodiles to create habitable landmass. The famous 19th century scroll depicts a Sufi master riding on a Royal Bengal Tiger, in his right hand prayer beads and in his left hand a snake.

The Eastern delta of Bengal—the landmass, which is now Bangladesh has historically been a downward pushing delta frontier. It has been settled by Dravidians and looked down upon as ritually impure area in the Vedas. These areas also lie outside the geographical stretch of Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. Thus, this area possessed its own local pagan religious practices different than Brahmanical Vedic Hindu practices. In Abul Fazl’s Ain-e-Akbari, the region of Syhtlet was described as a place where people lived in caves and practiced black magic and paganism. However, Sylhet appears again in Ibn Batuta’s narrative in 1345 when a Sufi khanqa or monastery has been established under the leadership of Hazrat Shah Jalal. The myth tells of Hazrat Shah Jalal crossing the river on his prayer rug and coming to Syhlet with 313 men. These men married into the local society and preached the message of Islam.

In Bangladesh/East Bengal, even though Sufi saints started to appear as early as 11th century; between 16th and 18th century there was a wave of massive conversion of the rural peasantry. During this time the changing courses of the rivers created new land in the lower portion of Bengal delta where the Sufi masters would simultaneously preach Islam and initiate a process of civilization building. These two processes went side by side, and Islam became the most important force for the peasantry to count on against natural calamity, epidemics, snakes, wild animals or bad harvests. As Islam’s reach seeped down into the soils of East Bengal to initiate a rice boom and shaped an agrarian civilization, Islam also reached very deep into the bones of the East Bengali peasantry as it continued to support them against natural adversities to harvest their crops.

source link : http://theindependentbd.com/weekly-independent/24324-belief-in-bengal.html

Women on the Move?

Rubaiyat Hossain ponders whether equality is all that it is cracked out to be

AMDADUL HUQ/DRIKNEWS

Twelve years ago, I was thrown out of a rickshaw by the richshaw-wallah because I had lit a cigarette. Today, more and more women are smoking in Dhaka city; their portrayal also visible in the media. One can say that the social and culturally defined role of Bangladeshi women has shifted significantly over the past decade.

For one thing, this nation has been bowing its head down to female PMs for the past twenty years! Women have become more visible in the workforce. In the public domain: their presence can be noticed on top rungs of the corporate ladders, they now hold important political positions both in central and local government.

Our Nobel prize winning enterprise Grameen Bank’s success is largely due to the honesty and diligence of its female clients, gender studies departments have been set up at public and private universities, and finally, our highest foreign currency buying products are produced by women.

Most importantly, when I walk around Dhaka city in a pair of jeans I feel significantly more comfortable and secure than I did twelve years ago. Our society, I feel, has taken a somewhat positive turn where the necessity and reality of having women in the workforce, in the public domain has become accepted as the larger social and cultural normative female ideal.

There are now single women renting their independent flats in Dhaka city, sharing places with room-mates and enjoying relatively greater scopes of social freedom in comparison to their sari-blouse-petticoat-clad domesticated mothers and mother in-laws.

Today we need to ponder, what does it really mean to be a free woman? Freedom itself is a relative term. Does being free simply mean to do as one wishes? Or does being free mean having the opportunity to develop one’s fullest human potential, get an education, get a job, be equal to men?

Or does it mean the time and scope to explore one’s personhood, grow one’s subjectivity and opt for a greater level of transcendence, where the fullest shape of female subject manifests itself, not with men as the ultimate ideal in the horizon as their standard of freedom to achieve, rather a horizon where the Feminine Divine entity glows as the final destination of surrender for female subject.

The earliest feminist movements concentrated their strengths to gain women’s voting rights, property rights, and women’s rights over their bodies and selves. There has also been another very important factor, and that is the mushrooming of gender studies departments in western universities.

The psychoanalytic school of thought, especially the contributions of Freud and Lacan, have situated gender and sexuality at the analytical core of identity formation. It can be said that gender and sexuality have become a part of academia, maybe not exactly in the way feminist scholars would like it, but at least the visibility of the issue has emerged significantly over the past years.

Women can now marry women and even have babies. If heterosexual unions are painful and oppressive, then today there is a socially accepted route provided to seek refuge in homosexual unions.

Women can today choose to live with a man without the union of matrimony, women can today make the decision to be single mothers with multiple lovers, women can today have a husband and a lover too, women today are permitted to go to parties and drink, women today can have jobs and money and power, women today can do whatever men do. But is this what we really want as women? To be equal to men?

French feminist Luce Irigaray rightly points out that it is extremely misleading to desire to be equal to men. Women must strive to be equal to themselves. Women today must strive for what is truly feminine in their nature and try to nurture and nourish the feminine element in them.

Today, the ideology of masculinity has already failed: the fallacy of western philosophy has been stripped off by Foucault, Derrida and the French feminists, the new world order of nation-state-democracy-capitalism is gasping to deal with the ghost of terrorism it has created, the phallo-centric philosophical claim to a binary of either/or, and the claim to one unitary phallic linear truth has created nothing but violent ways of living in politics, media, culture, religion even relationship. There seems to rise a need today to look outside the masculine ideals of power to look towards a feminine principle of surrender, acceptance, love, and sustainability.

Rabindranath Tagore in his play Rakta Karabi has offered an analysis of the cultural economy created western science and philosophy. He defined Rakta Karabi as the vision that has come to him in the “darkest hours of dismay,” thus, this piece of work is ought to be looked at carefully.

When the play came out, western readers were very confused about the content; thus Tagore wrote a short piece in English to explain the context and content of Rakta Karabi. I will here quote a rather long passage from Tagore because his viewpoint about western civilisation is best understood in his own eloquent words:

“It is an organised passion of greed that is stalking abroad in the name of European Civilisation. I know that this does not represent the whole truth as to its character, and therefore the pity of it is all the greater when mainly this aspect of it is forcible presented to us, causing the spread of dumb sadness over a vast portion of the world and the dread of a devastation of its future into an utterly bankrupt life. Such an objectified passion lacks the true majesty of human nature; it only assumes a terrifying bigness, its physiognomy blurred through its cover of an intricate network — the scientific system. It barricades itself against all direct human touch with barriers of race pride and prestige of power. The impersonal pressure which, from its aloofness, it applies our living soul is enormous, ever narrowing our prospect of growth, something the power in initiative of our mind.”

In Rakta Karabi, a highly allegorical and symbolic play, Nandini, the central female character is considered the ultimate saving grace, because unlike others in the underground mine Nandini is unaffected by the chains, whips, and shovels. She is not scared of the opaque omnipresent king. She is free and fresh and innocent. She is the only one still alive enough to comprehend absolute beauty, love, the Divine. In Tagore’s own words: “The divine essence of the infinite in the vessel of the finite — has its last treasure-house in woman’s heart. Her pervading influence will someday restore the human to the desolated world of man.”

Just as the French feminists are seeking a new feminine multiplicity of knowledge in search of a female subjecthood, it seems Tagore has also hinted towards the feminine principle as the saving grace of humanity as the “darkest hours of dismay.”

Now the question that looms large over our heads is: what is femininity? How much of what we conceive as femininity is social constructed, how much of it is myth and how much of it is real?

If we leave aside the discussion of femininity as social and cultural behaviours, codes and practices; and in order to get to the root of matters ponder upon feminine principles in philosophical terms, then we are left a very important question: what should the feminine subject look like?

AM AHAD/DRIKNEWS

How does the feminine subject differ from the masculine subject? I will attempt to answer these questions mainly drawing from two prominent French feminists and philosopher, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

Kristeva uses the female body as a metaphor for feminine subjectivity. The significance of the maternal body is that it cannot be neatly divided into subject and object, self, and other. For Kristeva, A woman or mother is a conflict — the incarnation of the split of the complete subject.

Pregnancy is an identity that turns in on itself, and changes without becoming other. If pregnancy is a threshold between nature and culture, maternity is a bridge beztween singularity and ethics.

When Kristeva talks of the maternal as a site of splitting, she employs it as a metaphorical device, rather than a literal description of a mother’s body to illustrate the temporary constitution of the subject, a subject-in-process.

Subjectivity, for Kristeva, appears to reside in a gap, and the constant dialogue between self and other. Kristeva wants to offer a means of dismantling the binary logic of the selfsame, and of putting in its place a dialogic frame for subjectivity that crosses back and forth between self and other.

According to Irigaray, western civilisation is without any female philosophy or linguistics, any female religion or politics. All of these disciplines have been set up in accordance with a male object. In the 60s and 70s, she went on to philosophise that social order determines sexual order, and that our cultural economy is based upon the commodification of the female.

Another of Irigaray’s major theoretical contributions is the idea that sexual difference exists only in nature — not in culture. According to Irigaray, “man” does not mean the same thing as “male,” “woman” is distinct from “female.”

The latter terms are inescapable qualities of being, while the former involve the cultural qualities we assume after birth. Inevitably, women will remain faithful to their biological sex (female), but should question those gender identities that exist in society (including “woman”), for these constructions originate with men.

Irigaray makes a very important point about the construction of female subjectivity. In her own words: “If she is to become woman, if she is to accomplish her female subjectivity, woman needs a God who is a figure for the perfection of her subjectivity.”

If women look up to man as the ultimate model of what they can become, then women will be bankrupt. She needs to look towards the horizon and imagine a God with feminine principles. In Christianity the struggle to comprehend a female God is very stark since the holy trinity of Father-Son-Holy Spirit leaves very little room for the female to be anything more than the flesh and blood entity whose only purpose is to give birth to the son of God.

However, in Islam we are privileged to have Allah who is gender neutral. The sinful attribute bestowed upon Eve and the biblical interpretation of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden is also absent in Islam. In Quranic scriptures Adam and Eve are equally blamed for consuming the forbidden fruit thus being banished from Eden. In Islam, men and women must struggle together to get back to Eden.

Though the women of today have overcome the social and cultural to enjoy greater privileges and scopes to explore and enjoy life, are today’s women really becoming real feminine subjects as described by Tagore, Irigaray and Kristeva?

The answer seems to be a very grim “no” to me. It seems that the women of today are eager to do what the men do, today’s women have found a rather easy route to power and success by following the masculine principles; thus, instead of becoming feminine subjects, they are simply becoming men with breasts and ovaries. The sexual identity and behaviour of today’s woman probably best illuminate this fact.

TAYEBA BEGUM LIPI

Women find it liberating to have multiple sexual partners, to pose in provocative positions in front of the camera, and to use sexual charms to buy power. However, what women do not realise is that by conforming to the ideal of sexually desirable women, they are yet again, despite of all their hard earned freedom, happily wearing the shackles of sexual subjugation and abiding by the rules of sexual desire set by men.

Women today often find religion to be oppressive, thus they never have time to look back at the powerful women of Islamic history such as Khadija, Fatema, Ayesha; rather, even among Muslim women Draupadi is a popular role model due to her power of juggling five sexual partners.

Women today do not find it degrading to wear little or no clothes to grab attention. Women today have thrown out of the window their ethical morality of keeping a family together, the role of women as sustainers of the family has been brought into question and the family structure itself has been somewhat broken down.

As a result, women today are enjoying their lives more, indulging in their so-called freedom more, and having orgasms more. But none of these have brought women close to freedom. It has rather brought them an illusion of material freedom, but their feminine souls remain locked under masculine principles, and the purity of their feminine body organs are sold in the market more nakedly than ever.

Without comprehending the spiritual centre of the feminine heart, without searching for the “divine essence of the infinite” as Tagore puts it, women can never become complete human subjects.

It is women’s duty today to look beyond material pleasures and gain to hold in their hearts the feminine principle related to nature, love and absolute beauty. After all, it is women who have been gifted with the capacity to give birth to life and nourish life with milk produced by their own bodies.

If women go against their nature and opt for masculine principles as a short cut to power and success than it would cause them to go around in a circle of disillusionment. And if women escape heterosexual unions simply because they are oppressive, and if feminists today call to dismantle the gender binary, then it would be in Luce Irigaray’s words, “the biggest catastrophe of humankind.”

 Rubaiyat Hossain is an independent researcher and film-maker.

© thedailystar.net, 2010. All Rights Reserved 

source link : http://www.thedailystar.net/forum/2010/july/women.htm

Hidden Treasure
Spirituality in Cinema

Part I

Rubaiyat Hossain 

'Stalker' (1979) by Andrey Tarkovsky

“I was a hidden treasure, and I wanted to be discovered, so I created creation that I might be known.” (Hadith-e-Kudsi)

In Sufi philosophy, this particular verse is taken as foundational in understanding and interpreting the relationship between Divinity and humanity. The relationship between Divine and human is a symbiotic one. Divine and human feed off of each other, through human consciousness, through the consciousness of the universe, through our sensory organs ready and equipped to experience life, we the little facets come into consciousness, in order to enable the Divine to feel and sense itself.

However, we don’t experience the universe fully. Humans, with our fractional sensory perceptions are not even able to experience the different shades of light and wave lengths of sound that already exist in this universe; then, how do we expect, with this fragmented existence to comprehend and articulate the Divine fully?

“If you split open your breast in search of a thought or idea and take it apart bit by bit, you won’t find any thoughts there. You won’t find any in your blood or in your veins…for they are without physical quality. You won’t find them on your outside either. His control of your thoughts is so subtle as to be without trace, then consider how subtle and traceless He must be who is the Creator of all this!” (Rumi, Jalaluddin, Signs of the Unseen)

The feeling which flow in our heart, the emotions we enjoy and suffer from everyday is the workings of the Divine. If human heart is polished through submission, devotion and permanent acts of love; if the sense of separation from the Divine shed tears from the devotee’s eyes, the mirror of heart is washed clean, ready to reflect the face of the Divine.

Creative impulses are extremely valuable because they come from divine inspiration, they deliver mysterious meaning and senses, pouring down into the human heart, whispering factions of the ultimate knowledge, glimpses of absolute beauty. The purpose of art is a constant search for the ultimate truth and absolute beauty. After coming into human existence we have been separated from the unity of being with the Divine. This sense of incompleteness runs through our bodies; a cry residing within, flapping its soft feathers, creating a source of permanent melancholy in the human heart. Emotions that derive from the impossibility of union with the Divine pulsate through our existence and create a burning hollow of longing and questioning. That is where creative impulses and art come from, to mediate the complex question of human existence,

“…the goal for all art, unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer,’ like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (Tarkovosky, Andrey, Sculpting in Time).

Unfortunately, in today’s world, there has been a price tag put on every piece of art. It has become extremely difficult for artists to survive and create art purely for the purpose of ‘posing the question’ of human existence. Cinema, one may argue, has suffered the plight of consumerism more than any other form of art. First of all, making a film involves large groups of people, complicated hierarchical structures, elaborate-time consuming arrangements and to ensure all of that, a huge amount of cash flow. Thus, it becomes almost impossible for a filmmaker to create his/her art in solitude, purely for the purpose of self discovery. A film maker must think ahead and make plans to distribute and market the film, to write pages of babbles to communicate and sell his/her creative art, and to finally pay off the producer’s debt.

There is no getting around the web of investment and profit; however, at least there is scope to reflect back on the concept of cinema as a medium of art, to realise that there are certain implications to cinema’s origins, cinema’s crafts, cinema’s unique form of self expression, that can help us locate new definitions and significance to the attributes of cinema as a medium of art.

Subarnarekha by Ritwik Kumar Ghatak

There are two types of filmmakers in the world. The first group are those who are fascinated, taken a back, overwhelmed by the technicality, gimmicks, stylization, power and glamour attached to the world of cinema. Then there is a second group of filmmakers, readily the example of ‘Rittwik Kumar Ghatak, who looked at cinema simply as a medium of self expression, “[C]inema for me is nothing but an expression. It is a means of expressing my anger at the sorrows and sufferings of my people. Tomorrow, beyond cinema, man’s intellect may probably rear something else that may express the joys, sorrows, aspirations, dreams and ideals of the people with a force and immediacy stronger than that of the cinema. That would then became the ideal medium” (Bhattacharya, Sandipan, Dasgupta, Shivaditya, Shakkhat Rittwik)

Andrey Tarkovsky, for example, says problems of technique are child’s play, one can learn it any day. What is more important in cinema making is, “thinking independently, worthily…[N]obody can be forced to shoulder a weight that is not merely difficult, but at times impossible to bear; but there is no other way, it has to be all or nothing.” (Tarkovosky, Andrey, Sculpting in Time)

The creative individual, therefore, is doomed. S/he has to carry the cross, bear the burden, to polish the mirror of heart, and be finally ready to be delivered with the truth and the absolute beauty. This is where responsibility of an artist comes in. When one creates art to be consumed by an audience; there surfaces the responsibility of bearing a superior consciousness, and delivering not just whatever the artists feels like or whatever is going to get him profit, rather following truthfully and faithfully the traces of Divine that has dropped into the wine cup of human heart.

Cinema makers need to be completely responsible for their creation because cinema as a form of art is extremely potent. Cinema has the potential to create a parallel universe, a make believe reality, a journey into the lives of unknown people, tastes of alien emotions though images, sound, colours, motions, faces, words; a complete fragment of time for us to live in, to experience an(other) life in a dark cinema hall. This potency of cinema is also its downfall; because, banking on this strength huge industries have been created around the world to sedate human beings, numb them, allure them into a world of desire with the flashy images.

A boy residing in a slum goes to watch ‘Slum-dog Millionaire’ and experiences the unreal reality of success. Cinema flashes human flesh, mutilated female bodies to choke men with sexual desires, to keep them on leash like panting dogs, running after unlimited impulses to indulge. The commodification of human bodies in the media has been accepted as social norms. Men and women are comfortable today watching women dancing with almost no clothes on in sexually charging postures. Even little children are inspired to imitate those gruesome dance moves through television shows and competitions. What is sexually appealing or not, what constitutes female beauty, what constitutes manhood is today defined largely by the media.

Media plays a very important role also in the construction of nationalism, culture and identity. Media today, significantly regulates the flow of information in the world, thus contributing to the construction and trajectory of world politics and realms of thoughts. Because of its unique way of constructing parallel reality, cinema plays a central role in media politics.

I guess what I am trying to get at is: cinema is powerful. It has to be handled with care and fragility. It cannot and should not be taken as a form of entertainment. If one looks at the history of cinema it becomes clear that from the very beginning there were two approaches to cinema: one is spiritual, an approach that has been ignored and bypassed; and the second is commercial and entertainment oriented, an approach that has largely survived and given meaning to what we understand by the term ‘cinema’ today.

There is an alternate history of cinema that we don’t usually come across. We are taught that Lumiere brothers invented cinema. The first image recorded was of a train coming into a station. The impact of a moving image, the recoded passage of time, the possibility of re-playing a bygone time totally fascinated the world audience. People went to cinema to see something wonderous and miraculous, as one would expect from a circus. Interestingly, before the Lumiere brothers, there were experimentations by ‘spiritualists,’ feminists, and other marginalised groups with the technology of cinema. These interventions were spiritual in nature, as they aspired to use the technology of cinema to connect to a world of spirits; to create a passage way between the Divine and the human. This bit of history is little known,

Parallel to the ingress of capital in the development of cinema, were other mysterious catalysts. ‘Spiritualists,’ black magic practitioners, planchette experts, Madam Blavotsky and Colonel Olkot’s international patrons played an important role in the development and expansion of cinema. Cinema is not a trade. It is not, as influential theorists define itthe so called ‘seventh art:’ Cinema is a tantra. (Rahman, Ebadur, Cinema Tantra)
Now, if cinema is a tantra, and not a trade, then what could be said about ‘cinema’s destined role?’

to be continued…

Copyright (R) thedailystar.net 2009 

sorce link : http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2009/11/02/perceptions.htm

Hidden Treasure
Spirituality in Cinema

Part II

Rubaiyat Hossain

continued from last issue

Now, if cinema is a tantra, and not a trade, then what could be said about ‘cinema’s destined role?’

I think we are out of Tarkovsky’s era of hopefulness to assume that cinema will fill in the spiritual void of modern time. Neither do I believe it is possible to have a meaningful, sustained, two way dialogue to develop a synthesis of thoughts between the cinema maker and his/her audience in today’s market ridden, entertainment saturated world.

However, what is worthwhile revisiting in Tarkovsky’s writing, is his concept of ‘imprinted time;’ the filmmaker using ‘time’ as his/her primary raw material to create art. It is within time and with time, that a filmmaker has to sculpt; create a seamless chunk in time, a complete fragment, an enclosed capsule where audience observes in a nutshell the entire life spanseven the cosmic destinies of the characters living within the time frame of the film,

Cinema came into being as a means of recording the very movement of reality: factual, specific, within time and unique; of reproducing again and again the moment, instant by instant, in its fluid mutabilitythat instant over which we find ourselves able to gain mastery by imprinting it on film” (Tarkovsky, Andrey, Sculpting in Time, University of Texas Press, Texas, USA).

There is something inherently specific about cinema’s technique of imprinting on celluloid the residue and remains of objects, people, and a particular reality in time. The technology of photography creates an avenue to transfer one form of existence into another; in the process to reinterpret, create and deliver a new reality within time. Cinema should not be taken lightly, because it is a tantra: it has special power; an unmitigated and unresolved command brought into man’s hand by the advancement of technology, a power largely misunderstood and misused,

Photography is an imprint or transfer off the real, it is a photochemically processed traced casually connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables (Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA).

If we take these words seriously then we also need to think seriously about the consequence of taking imprints from real objects and real time. The consequences are both ways: for the objects, people and time objectified for the purpose of cinema; and for the cinema and cinema maker who has taken of from real objects, people and time to create a fragmented experience of time. Men’s superiority in film making lies in his/her capability to harness time, to be able to have a specific chunk in time under his/her control, to be able to replay it, change it, put meaning to it, and to finally own it. 

While a person attempts to make a film, he/she has to be extremely careful and cautious about what and how he/she is representing reality within the film. Unfortunately, cinema has become a fashionable trade today; and filmmakers feel powerful and glorious being able to maintain such large units, being able to control and create time, and finally being able shout ‘action’ and ‘cut’. This madness of power has ruined the ethics of filmmaking.

There is something inherently specific about cinema's technique of imprinting on celluloid the residue and remains of objects, people, and a particular reality in time.

When one is shooting a film, one must never forget that the film is being shot from one single perspective, and that is the perspective of the director. Only the director’s eye, his/her way of seeing is the centre of all visibility. In order to externalise the concept of reality the director see’s his/her own mind, the camera is used as an artificial eye to create multiple perspectives and create a sense of multilayered time,

I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, maneuvering in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explained in a new way the world unknown to you (Written in 1923 by Dziga Vertov, the revolutionary Soviet film director, in Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, London)

With the invention of camera the world has entered a new realm of reality where the language and currency of images have become extremely powerful. The meanings and signifiers of our day to day concepts such as love, sex, marriage, romance, nationalism, even spiritualism are invented and dictated by the politics of images. Take for instance Jai Santoshi Ma, a film made in 1975 by Vijay Sharma depicting a woman working endlessly in her domestic realm to finally materialise with her devotion and truthfulness the figure of a Goddessthe Santoshi Ma. Goddess Santoshi Ma is forever sympathetic to the woman’s cause and promises to save her from all disgrace against tremendous odds. After the release of the film, in particular regions of India women started giving pujas in name of Jai Santoshi Ma, these pujas still continue on.

This is why, particularly in our region of the world, cinema is a tantra. In South Asia, visual images are so powerful that, it can and has created Gods. In Bangladesh, people take to the streets protesting the death sentence of a fictional TV drama character. How much more careful then, South Asian film makers must be while they are responsible for creating crucial mass public emotions and opinions? As John Berger says, “[E]very image embodies a way of seeing…seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.“

Images are potent and provocative; however, we must remember that, they are not toys. They are not to be taken lightly and trivialised. Human doesn’t become God just because men have learnt to harness technology and creative impulses to give birth to one. Human mind remains limited with its fragmented sensory organsnot even capable to comprehend and experience the universe they live in. All we can do is to embrace our only miracle; and that is, the workings of the Divinethe spirit and emotions that run through us to make us capable of miracles.

Rubaiyat Hossain is an independent writer and filmmaker. 

Copyright (R) thedailystar.net 2009 

sorce link : http://www.thedailystar.net/magazine/2009/11/04/perceptions.htm 

What has changed?

Rubaiyat Hossain asks difficult questions about women’s emancipation in Bangladesh

In the struggle for survival we tell lies. To bosses, to prison guards, the police, men who have power over us, who legally own us and our children, lovers who need us as proof of their manhood.

There is a danger run by all powerless people: that we forget we are lying, or that lying becomes a weapon we carry. I want to reiterate that when we talk about women and honor, or women and lying, we speak within the context of male lying, the lies of the powerful, the lies as false source of power.

Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of their experiences. Our future depends on the sanity of each one of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.                                    

                                                                                            –Adrienne Rich 

Not long ago, I was watching a talk show called Agamir Kontho on BanglaVision. The topic was women’s participation in the workforce. However, the discussion evaded dialogues about women’s freedom and rights, and revolved around the challenges that occur in families and society at large, when women become part of the public sector.

This highlights a very important social attitude of Bengali patriarchy, and that is when women’s social and cultural position changes because they have stepped out from the andarmahal, we initiate a social and moral debate about whether or not it is okay for these women to do so. Further more, this whole charade is defined as the women’s emancipation project.

Take for instance, the Agamir Kontho episode on women in the workforce. Supposedly, it was to be a show where women speak up about their challenges of juggling home and career, however, the show turned out to be a discussion with a rather patronising moderator about getting men’s opinion and permission to let women take part in the work force. A few male students in the audience said: “If my wife can be a good homemaker then I don’t have any problem with her going out and working.”

Women are individuals and not means to others. They do not need to be permitted to go to work by immature men on patriarchal TV shows! However, the irony remains: by presenting a TV show like this, we believe that, we are participating in a project of women’s emancipation! This phenomenon is reminisce of eighteenth century essay competition on topics like “Female Education” where Bengali men took part, gained prizes, and believed themselves to be a part of the female emancipation project!

Really, over a hundred years down the road from Begum Rokeya, what exactly has changed?

We still live in a social setting where patriarchal values decide the extent to which a woman will be liberated. Yes, she can go to work, but she needs her in-laws’ and husband’s permission, yes, she can wear jeans, given her husband permits, yes, she can stay out late, given her husband will also stay out with her, yes she can drink, given her husband will pour it for her, and the list can go on. This new modern twenty first century woman, just like her comrades in colonial Bengal, is emancipated within the bhadramahila parameter, the only difference is that now she has been turned into a sexual commodity and brainwashed to believe that, the whole process of commodification has been emancipating and empowering.

Girls are starting to become sexual objects from a very early age, and being “sexy” has become something very important, empowering, and a precondition of women’s success. Becoming the most desirable sexual object with shiny tan skin, flat tummy, and straight hair has become the goal for today’s women. In Bangladesh, women today are more conscious about how they look, what they wear, what they eat, and how much they weigh, than they were even ten years back. Women have been fed this message very, very clearly over the past decade that, however successful or educated one might be, one’s looks and sex appeal comes first. No woman in today’s world is allowed to carry body fat and appear unattractive, she has to be pretty and sexy in order to win the race.

S M Waliullah

In Bangladesh, with the micro-finance hype, women’s participation in the Union Parishad, RMG sector, and finally the token representation of women in the parliament have created a social backdrop where it’s believed that, the women’s problem has been sufficiently dealt with. In reality, there has never been a systematic social and cultural discourse to change the definition of socially constructed “Bengali woman.” The NGO activities providing women with primarily legal aid, healthcare, and micro-finance persistently refuses to go deep into Bengali patriarchy to challenge the social norm; rather, they target dowry, child marriage, acid violence, rape on a very surface level, ultimately failing to create a long lasting impact on women’s lives.

The overall process of political pseudo-Islamisation in Bangladesh has created yet another trope for using women as the battleground of ideology. Ali Riaz argues that Islam (more precisely, pseudo-Islamism) has been consciously used as a tool in Bangladesh to earn public consensus as the state ruling bloc failed to come up with an ideology suited both for the elites and the mass. Using state repression to force gain a dominant hegemonic power structure has been common in Bangladesh. The Non-Muslim and Tribal community in Bangladesh faced systematic violence after the 2001 election. The violence was inflicted by the ruling bloc with the intention of homogenising an ostensibly Muslim polity as well as gaining economic benefits by abstracting property from the Non-Muslim and Tribal community. Women were targeted as a sexually vulnerable group in the backlash against Non-Muslim and Tribal groups after the 2001 election. Even in the recent battles of politically and economically motivated pseudo-Islamists against the Non-Muslim, Tribal groups, NGO workers and other secular forces, women become the contesting ground for establishing a superior ideology.

Fatwas have been used by local mullahs to establish a superior ideology based on their inadequate knowledge of the Islamic scripture. Women are the prime targets for humiliating and brutal fatwa verdicts. Thus, women’s bodies become the displaying ground of the power and legitimacy of the new ruling bloc. Women’s behaviour, social appearance, reproductive rights, sexual rights, economic rights — all become susceptible to a new set of revisions based on the ruling bloc’s interest, and their subsequent, and often inaccurate interpretation of pseudo-Islamic sanctions for women. The “politicisation of sexual violence” in Bangladesh creates a ground where “women’s bodies once more became the sites and symbols of a variety of battles.”

Use of female sexuality for the purpose of creating an alternative modernity, and establishing the legitimacy of a politicised pseudo-Islamist authority, and finally the strategic abuse of women’s sexual vulnerabilities, yet again establish women as a domain upon, which Bangladeshi nationalism attempts to validate its authority. The politics of pseudo-Islamisation in Bangladesh, thus, creates a greater scope for the removal of women’s agency from the socio-political narrative of national politics.

Critically looking at women in India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Egypt can illuminate the incessant trap that women have been caught into between colonialism and nationalism, imperialism and patriarchy, and Western modernising efforts versus “traditional” often Islamic hubs of resistances.

Women in Bangladesh are also caught in similar traps, only no one is taking notice of it yet, because somehow there is an overall believe that, Bangladesh would never turn into a state whose primary moral and social idioms are decided by Sunni Islam. However, the risks are not merely negligible since the root of religious nationalism has been a part of our political past as Bengali Muslims for about over a hundred years now.

As Bengali women we already carry the burden of the bhadramahila tight skin imposed on us by the Bengali nationalist struggle against British colonial rule. It might be useful to recap on the construction of Bengali womanhood to realise the immense weight of cultural symbolisation we have inherited from our foremothers.

It was under the back drop of colonial political economy and the exchange between the British and the Bengalis about nationalism and modernity, that the bhadramahila was socially constructed. The new woman under the new patriarchy was ready and equipped to uphold the inner realm of national sovereignty by acting as the perfect sahadharmini for the modern Bengali bhadralok.

However, this bhadramahila’s only precondition for existing in the first place remained the cause of nationalist politics, thus, this woman could never step out of the nationalist mold. She could never display her individual will. She always had to submit to the bigger cause of the nation and uphold her respectability. As respectability and social status of the bhadramahila was constructed by separating them from the “vulgar” women of the working class, it became the stamp, which distinguished bhadramahilas from the rest of the women. Respectability situated bhadramahilas in a realm of relatively higher social privileges, and clinging to it became the core existence of bhadramahilas as a social group.

                                                                                                            Amirul Rajiv

We Bengali women today cling to this mark of respectability, to this title of bhadramahila. We don’t smoke or drink in public, we conceal our sexual histories, and finally we never get around the corner to explore our lives as independent individuals with free flowing dreams, rather we tailor our dreams and pursuits to the societal norm of getting married and playing a certain wifely role.

Just the other day I met a woman who was applying to doctoral programs to Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia University. She is a very bright young woman and would probably get into at least two of the schools she is applying to. However, I was shocked to hear her tell me: “I will have to get married before I leave, my parents won’t let me leave without getting married.”

Why should marriage be a pre-condition for graduate studies for Bengali women? Why does she have to fight immense social odds to reach the level she has reached, and still struggle to keep her head above the patriarchal clouds that, attempt to force her into marriage so she would be denied the opportunity to spread her wings in a foreign-land? Why do I meet women every day, who seem to be wearing a very tight mask, which only serve to keep the society happy?

Where are the real women behind the billboard smiles, silky straight hair, sexy waist line, power moms, and sweaty housewives at the gym?

The fact is, women are systematically discriminated against so they end up in a condition where their basic human dignity is sacrificed, and the scopes are removed for them to explore their full human capabilities and reach their full human potential. After fighting all the odds, when she only begins to taste success, her family asks her to tailor it to the family needs. She has to sacrifice scholarships, lucrative job postings to Mumbai or Dubai, give up her dreams to go to graduate school, and finally never be able to find a piece of land beneath their feet where she treated as an individual, and given credit for her achievements.

If this is what we have learned to call “freedom,” then, I can’t help but desperately wonder, really, two hundred years down the road from Begum Rokeya, haven’t we actually gone backwards?

1. Siddiqi, Dina, ed. Human Rights Bangladesh 2003. Dhaka: ASK, 2004.
2. Hashmi, Taj. Women and Islam in Bangladesh: Beyond Subjection and Tyranny. New York: Palgrave: 2000.
3. Siddiqi, Dina, ed. Human Rights Bangladesh 2003. Dhaka: ASK, 2004.
4. Sangari and Vaid ed. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
5. Sen, Amartya.

Rubaiyat Hossain is an independent filmmaker.

© thedailystar.net, 2008. All Rights Reserved 

source link : http://www.thedailystar.net/forum/2008/january/changed.htm

Our Islam

Rubaiyat Hossain explores the roots of Islam in Bangladesh

I dedicate this piece to Dr. Syed Nomanul Haq, Assistant Professor, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

Just the other day bombs were blasted in the railway stations of a few major cities in Bangladesh, killing one unfortunate rickshaw-wallah. The bombers left aluminum plates that had messages inscribed on them, which declared that NGO workers and Ahmadiyas would be prosecuted.

This is not news to us.
In Bangladesh, after the four-party alliance came to power in October, 2001, minority religious communities were systematically marginalised and brutalised. In the meantime, all English medium schools have introduced a mandatory subject called “Islamiat,” but failed to mandate Bengali literature and grammar syllabus.

The other day I saw a news clipping on NDTV (India), where a 12 year-old kid was shown slaughtering a man. Imagine: a few young kids standing around, pieces of black cloth with white Arabic lettering tied around their heads, with perfectly innocent expressions, chanting “Allahu Akbar” and gently pushing a sword down a man’s throat, while a few others hold him down by his arms and his legs.

The news gave me a chill like no horror movie ever did. This was real. These were real 12 year-old children, like my cousin or your brother, slaughtering another human being. The level to which such violence and brutality in the name of Allah have been normalised in today’s world, made me thoroughly sick to my stomach.

Isn’t it time that we took notice and thought twice about such phenomena? When I turn on the television each night, I hear Peace TV preachers give answers to questions such as “Can Muslim women work?” in a room packed with a male only audience. I have to remind myself that this is the year 2007. Does this seem normal to everybody, or am I just losing my mind?

Recently, I have noticed a growing number of women covering themselves in different modes of purdah. Some wear complete cloaks which cover from head to toe, some wear chadors to cover their upper body, some wear stylish, colourful head-scarves to match their daily outfits, and, finally, if one watches the home-bound garment factory workers every evening, one will certainly notice that most of these women cover their heads.

In a place like Bangladesh, where violence against women is an accepted social norm, and women’s movement in the public realm is yet to be respected by men, it is no wonder that women would cover themselves to save them from being sexually harassed, especially if they commute after sunset.

It is also quite apparent that there is an effort in present day Bangladesh to create a certain mode of Islamic society, and it comes as no surprise that women’s bodies would become the ground for pronouncing such ideologies through the surveillance of female sexuality by measures such as purdah and fatwa.

When Awami League, which believes in secularism, agrees to sign a treaty to legally validate fatwa, we know that we have nearly lost the battle to remain secular. It is yet to be seen if the new regime proves successful in dealing with religious militancy, and with the shadowing effect of a force that attempts to establish a new moral/national ideology to create a certain brand of Islamic state.

In the meantime, when I speak to my friends or my students I feel that there are two camps within the young population: a group that defines religion as the mother of all malice in today’s capitalist world, and the other group which feverishly holds on to a certain notion of Islam handed down to them by their families and communities. In most cases, kids from neither group are fully aware of the historical, theological, and mystical aspects of Islam. Both groups fail to realise the beauty and liberation offered by the particularity of Islam in Bengal, especially the wonderful ways Sufism has to offer in achieving spiritual awakening.

If we throw out religion altogether because it has been used by the capitalist system as the “opiate of the masses,” or because atrocities have been carried out its name, then we commit a crime larger than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We throw out thousands of years of philosophy and human effort to reach divinity.

On the other hand, when we refuse to acknowledge the history of Islam in Bengal, and fail to realise that we are not actually aware of Islamic scriptures, and we are blinded by societal norms handed down to us by previous generations, we participate in a mis-construct in the name of Islam.

I must clarify that I am fully aware that I don’t speak for the masses: but my experience is shared by a fragment of the middle-class society, which is informed by a certain political milieu, and I write based on that experience. Even though I was born in a devout Muslim family, I grew up completely misinformed about Islam.

I had an Arabic teacher who came every Friday morning, but I didn’t learn anything worthwhile, except to fear mullahs from the mosque. I learnt that Islam was a tough religion. The rules were rigid, and hell was a blood-curdling place.

It wasn’t until I was fortunate enough to be a student of Dr. Syed Nomanul Haq that I learnt the history of Islam in South Asia, and the bounties it has to offer to a soul searching for pure bliss. Professor Haq introduced me to the wonders of Urdu ghazals, Sufi poetry, and Islamic mysticism. I came to read Faiz Ahmed and Iqbal’s poetry, where nothing else mattered except for the love for Allah.

If one looks at the history of Islam in Bengal, then it becomes apparent that the type of Islam that spread in this region made its impact because of the uniqueness it offered in creating a spiritual tradition where nothing seemed more important than the love between humanity and divinity. When Islam came to South Asia, it didn’t arrive in a vacuum. There was thousands of years of unbroken spiritual tradition developed by Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. The tension of spreading a “foreign” religion in the new land remained as one of major challenges for Islam in South Asia.

When Pakistan was created as a land for Muslims in South Asia, many Muslims protested, including Hazrat Khawaja Enayetpuri, a Sufi saint residing in East Bengal. According to him, this partition was not going to gain anything for South Asian Muslims other than years of endless violence. His prophecy came true when Bangladesh bathed in bloodshed gave birth to a nation in 1971, that started of as secular, but soon began persecuting its Hindu, Buddhists, Christians, Ahmadiya and Tribal population for a homogenised Sunni Muslim country.

Does this mean that as South Asians we have failed to mitigate the differences between Hinduism and Islam? Does this mean that as South Asian Muslims we really can’t do without separate homelands? If the answers are yes, then we must look back at pre-British South Asia to contemplate how Muslim kings ruled in this land for hundreds of years without incidents of massive riots that later became so prevalent in British India. I am not proposing that before the British came it was all a rosy picture, one simply can’t forget the atrocities carried out by Aurengzeb, for instance. Then again, one couldn’t speak about Aurengzeb without mentioning Akbar, who made a very genuine effort to honour and incorporate Hindu, Buddhist, and Zen religious beliefs into his own practice.

Akbar (1556-1605) went as far as proposing a new religion called Din-i-Ilahi. If a king did that in this day and age, he would probably be called a heretic, but most surprisingly back in those days, one of the strictest Sufi leaders of South Asia, Shayakh Ahmad Sirhindi, considered Akbar’s actions were only as bida, something that was done against the fabric of the society, something that deviated from the norm.

I have mentioned earlier that, one of the biggest challenges of Islam in South Asia was to infiltrate in the local geographical, social, and cultural setting. Poet Amir Khasru pronounces the dilemma of Islam being planted in a “foreign” land in his writing Ashiqa celebrating the love of Muslim prince Khizar Khan for the Hindu princess Dewal Rani. What is significant in Amir Khasru’s writing about India is his insistent attraction towards Indian landscape and the moral dilemmas he suffers with Islam and Hinduism.

Historically, many attempts have been made in mitigating the gaps between Islam and Hindu and Buddhist ideals and beliefs. As Akbar intended to settle the debates in a high philosophical ground at his Ibadatkhana, Kabir, a popular 15th century poet, attempted to bridge the gap for the common Muslim and Hindu men and women living side by side in villages.

In Kabir’s verses, Krishna is aligned with Karim, and Ram with Rahim. Still at the end we find poet Kabir actually rejecting both Hinduism and Islam. Akbar, similarly, we can conclude, felt such unease with the presence and co-existence of Islam and other indigenous Indian religions that he was compelled to get rid of everything and create a blend of his own.

It seems to me that both Kabir and Akbar felt very confused at different stages of their lives with the question of how to juggle and peacefully co-exist two distinct, strongly developed, and, may I say, quite opposite human philosophies in comprehending the higher being.

What makes South Asian Islam so beautiful is the struggle it has gone through in mitigating the differences and finding commonalities between two uniquely different spiritual systems. After all, that is what is so unique about South Asia is its ability to assimilate and localise people, culture, religion, language, food, clothes, music, etc. When Islam and pre-existing Hindu societies intermingled with each other, they shared cultural customs, devotional practices, geographical space, however, they remained most distinct about one singular point, Islamic monotheism.

In Islam one couldn’t visualise God and one couldn’t share God’s attributes. He was only one and not many. This foundational belief served as the crux of disagreement between Islam and Hinduism, a problem often solved by the Vedic notion of a monotheist God.

The riots that we have witnessed in recent days and the gruesome incidents of partition, can be understood as politically motivated. The actions could be seen as their struggle to assert a certain socio-cultural identity, but it was far from simply defending one’s faith.

The challenge of monotheism if that God is not visible. How does one then fathom the deity? Visual art in India has always made attempts to paint the face of God. In Hinduism, God is transcendental, he is everywhere and yet nowhere. Thus, one of the main challenges of Islam in South Asia becomes visuality in searching for the beloved or Allah or God. Here, the vision of God couldn’t be fulfilled. And this search for vision is one of unique particularity of Islam in South Asia. If God can’t be seen then any type of manifestation becomes a veil and the vision is arrested in the veil.

It was the job of South Asian Sufis to ponder such questions. Since in Islam, Allah is One, then rises the question of plurality. How can singularity have produced plurality? If there is no ontological existence of the reflection of Allah, then how will human beings reach the divine? It is in response to such predicament the Sufi religious traditions in South Asia flourished.

Sufi orders are not mutually exclusive, but they often overlap each other. It is a cumulative tradition, which has gained its unique flavour in South Asia. Chishti — a widely respected and practiced Sufi order has become accessible to the South Asian people regardless of their religion because of this order’s inclusive nature. The use of music to invoke the divine, which is particular to the Chishti order, has made it closer to the Indian tradition. Central to the Chishti practices are listening to music and the recollection of Allah — zikr. The practice of zikr in Chishti order approves of vocal zikr, whereas Naqshbandi order condemns vocal zikr and emphasises the silent recollection of Allah.

The incorporation of local cultural practices in the Chisthi order doesn’t limit itself to music, but Indic yogic practices are merged with the practice of zikr. Even zikr in the local language is permitted in this order. The shrine of Shaykh Mu’in ad-Din Chishti in Ajmer has been a popular pilgrimage site for Sufis from all different orders. Even Taj-ad-Din ibn Zakariyya (d.1646), who later became dedicated to Naqshbandi order, initially began his spiritual quest by visiting the dargah in Ajmer sharif.

As the lines are blurred between religious groups and various Sufi silsilas within Islam, Chisthi silsila and Sufism as a whole begin to look very fluid. However, taking a closer look at some of the key Chisthi practices reveal that this order even though fluid and open to all, follows a strict practice of the sharia, especially praying five times a day, fasting, following the ways of the Prophet along with the practices of sama and zikr.

Sama comes to occupy a special place in Chishti practices, as it makes this silsila open to a wider range of people and unique to the South Asia context. Sama or listening also brings forth a very important paradoxical question, which lies at the crux of Sufism: the relationship and dialectic of union between the lover and the beloved. If humanity is the very barrier of reaching the divine, and reaching the divine means the moth burning itself in the flame, the only precondition for union remains the annihilation of the lover’s human form into the beloved. On the other hand, the love relation between the lover and the beloved loses its intensity if the dialectic of knowing and not knowing, getting and not getting, finding yet not finding is removed from the spiritual relationship between the human and the divine. Sama explores these contradictions by seeking a musical solution.

Maulana Ahmed Riza Khan Barelwi (1856-1921) was the towering central figure of the Barelwi movement, the only reformist movement in colonial India that supported the trend of Sufi devotional practices that have developed in South Asia starting from the 12th century. Ahmed Riza Khan was associated with Qadiri silsila, and highly regarded the place of the Prophet in Islamic theology. He celebrated maulud, and wrote based on the Sufi doctrine of nur-imuhammadi or the “Light of Muhammad.”

This light had derived from God’s own light and the prophet was himself this light, which was hazir o nazir, “present and observant” in all places. Taking this stand about the Prophet he linked himself more closely to Sufi devotional practices, and distanced himself more from the Wahhabis. It must be mentioned that overall, the urban educated elites supported the Deobandhi and Ahl-iHadith movement, whereas for the rural and less educated population, the Barelwi was more accepted.

Shah Waliullah’s (1703-1762) views on Sufi practices were ambivalent. He supported many practices, but also opposed them by saying that practices like sama can overpower one’s soul with a full scope of fitna. In fact, his views on Sufi practices went through an evolutionary process which is exposed him to the practices at the young age and later as he gained his own standpoint where he sharply condemned it: “What people have devised in the matter of shrines, taking them as grounds where melas are held, belongs to the worst heresies.”

However, it must be noted the Shah Waliullah was far more supportive of Sufi practices than he is credited. He was certainly concerned about the deviation from the central monotheist theology of Islam, but by no means was he condemning visiting shrines and continuing other Sufi devotional practices. The Ahl-i Hadith claimed to be the real followers of Sayyid Ahmed Barelwi. They rejected cults of saints, and the taqlid of laws. They regarded no other source authentic than the Quran and the Hadith. They also opposed the practices of ijma. Overall, they claimed to go back to the authentic sources and authority of Quran and Hadith and cut across anything that came between the way.

It is apparent that the challenge of breeding a “foreign” religion in this land remained a big issue for Sufis in South Asia, a challenge we still are struggling to resolve. As Bangladeshis today, when we evict Hindus from their land, and pronounce loudly that we are nothing but Sunni Muslims, we do so by remaining ignorant about the complicated and dialectic history of Islam in this region. The regimes we have had since the inception of Bangladesh didn’t address these issues seriously, rather they used Islam as a political tool to homogenise the population under the banner of religion when all other state ideology had failed.

Today we fail to acknowledge that Sufi masters were the single most important factor in South Asian conversions to Islam, particularly in what is now Bangladesh. The Qadiri, Naqshbandi, and Chishti orders were among the most widespread Sufi orders in Bangladesh. Most Bangladeshi Muslims are influenced to some degree by Sufism, although this influence often involves only occasional consultation or celebration rather than formal affiliation. Both fakirs and pirs are familiar figures on the village scene, and in some areas the shrines of saints almost outnumber the mosques. In some regions the terms fakir and pir are used interchangeably, but in general the former connotes a holy man and the latter an established murshid, a holy man who has achieved a higher spiritual level than a fakir and was able to show a path to divine knowledge.

A number of Islamic practices are particular to South Asia. For example, the anniversary of the death of a pir is observed annually. Popular belief holds that this anniversary is an especially propitious time for seeking the intercession of the pir. Large numbers of the faithful attend anniversary ceremonies, which are festive occasions enjoyed by the followers of the pir as well as orthodox Muslims. The ceremonies are quite similar in form and content to many Hindu festivals.

Several 19th and 20th-century fundamentalist reform movements, aimed at ridding Islam of all extraneous encroachments, railed against these and similar practices. Nevertheless, the practice of pir worship continued to grow. Hindu influences can be seen in the practice of illuminating the house for the celebration of Shabi Barat (Festival of the Bestowal of Fate), a custom derived from the Hindu practices at Diwali (Festival of Lights). Rituals to exorcise evil spirits from possessed persons also incorporate Hindu influence. Often, villagers would fail to distinguish between Hindu and Muslim shrines.

Post-1971 regimes sought to increase the role of the government in the religious life of the people. The Ministry of Religious Affairs provided support, financial assistance, and endowments to religious institutions, including mosques and community prayer grounds (idgahs). The ministry also directed the policy and the program of the Islamic Foundation, which was responsible for organizing and supporting research and publications on Islamic subjects. The foundation also maintained the Bayt al Mukarram (National Mosque), and organised the training of imams. Some 18,000 imams were scheduled for training once the government completed establishment of a national network of Islamic cultural centers and mosque libraries. Under the patronage of the Islamic Foundation, an encyclopedia of Islam in the Bangla language was being compiled in the late 1980s. Finally Islam was proclaimed as the state religion by the infamous Ershad regime.

None of the regimes, however, sought to critically revisit the socio-cultural history of Islam in this region. We are still all very confused about what it actually means to be a Bengali Muslim. Anthropologist Rehnuma Ahmed notes that, one of the failures of secular intellectualism in Bangladesh has been constantly remaining uncomfortable with Islam and avoiding engaging with it. As Islamic interpretation was left to the mullahs, we continued facing problems of extremism and violence.

We grow up devoid of proper Islamic knowledge in our so-called secular families, yet we are not secular enough to let Islam go altogether. So we continue to seek the knowledge from mullahs, and now from Islamic TV and Peace TV who are more concerned with controlling and exploiting female sexuality then to reach divinity.

When will we rise with Faid Ahmed’s prayer and acknowledge that as South Asian Muslims what matter to us most is the love for Allah? When will we awake to realise that if anything is foreign in this land then it is the orthodox Islam we encounter today? When will we open our eyes and realise that a few hundred years ago we were all Hindus and Buddhists? When will the Muslims of Bangladesh seek refuge in Sufism to counter the violence we witness in the name of Islam?

A’iye hath utha’en ham bhi,
Ham jinhen rasm-e-du’a yad nahin,
Ham jinhen soz-e-mohabbat ke siwa
Ko’i but, ko’I khuda yad nahin…
Come, let us also lift our hands,
We who do not remember the custom of prayer,
We who, except for the burning fire of love,
Do not remember any idol, any God.

Rubaiyat Hossain is a Lecturer at Brac University.

© thedailystar.net, 2007. All Rights Reserved 

source link : http://www.thedailystar.net/forum/2007/july/islam.htm

Feminism for men

It is not just women who benefit from feminism, but men as well, argues Rubaiyat Hossain

Nobody can possibly disagree that in order to make the world a better place for all of us, we need to establish an equitable distribution of power and resources. Establishing an equitable order within the family could have a ripple effect of ultimately changing the entire society. Feminism as an ideology can help us launch a movement to establish a just order in our families. However, when I told my friend that I was writing a piece titled “Feminism is for everybody,” she immediately responded: “Don’t use the word feminism — use something else.”

The word feminism (or naribad) has been tainted with the negative attributes imposed upon it by the patriarchal media. Feminists are portrayed as men-hating women demanding to be equal to men, but in reality feminism as an ideology and as a movement can help us make a change towards the betterment of everybody, especially in today’s world when the ideology of domination by force and accumulation of power have led us to worldwide unrest and terror.

Even though men benefit from the patriarchal system, in the end, they are actually not comfortable with the system either. Every father who loves his daughter is ought to feel sad about the discriminatory and exploitative societal measures against her. Every man who loves his wife ought to feel furious when other men look at his wife as a sexual object. Every brother who loves his sister ought to feel uneasy about the unequal legal rights of women to inherit property.

Gaining power through domination and exploitation comes with a price and the price is guilt and self-hatred. Men constantly feel the invisible psychological pressure of their inner enemies. It makes them irritable, less confident, and finally more oppressive towards their women.

Unnecessary fear stands in the way of love between a man and a woman because of patriarchy. Men are deprived of the true and pure sense of love from women because of the uneven societal system against women. If the world was a place where men and women were treated equally, I am more than sure that every man would be loved by his woman in a way they’ve never known before, because a free woman is capable of loving better than a bonded and deprived woman.

If the world changes for the betterment of women, I am more than sure that men would benefit from living in that world just as much as women. But the reasons why most men are hesitant to raise a movement to create that world are, firstly, because they fear losing the powerful position and the male privilege, and, secondly, they are not certain what will happen to the world order if patriarchy was to be demolished.

Basically they fear change.
It is not only men who fear change, but it is women as well. Not only men, but women can be just as sexist. Patriarchy as an institution is guarded by women as well as men. Feminism as a movement could aim to change the minds of not only men, but women as well. Men could be feminists as well as women in order to make our world a better place.

If we take bell hooks, an African-American feminist theorist’s definition of feminism, then it will become apparent that feminism is not a movement against men, but “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”

I must point out that a prevalent misconception about feminism is that it is a Western movement, but women in our country have been fighting to end sexism and sexist exploitation for over a century now. Women who took part in our muktijudho denied their societal role as domestic beings by stepping into the public realm.

NGOs in Bangladesh work very hard to gain women’s legal rights and to stop institutions of sexist exploitation like domestic violence, rape, child marriage, and dowry. Everyday, millions of Bangladeshi women fight to get their equal share in both the public and the private arena. We can say that all these women are actually working to make the world a more equitable place for men and women, and therefore, they are all part of the feminist movement.

As bell hooks has pointed out: “Initially when feminist leaders in the United States proclaimed the need for gender equality here they did not seek to find out if corresponding movements were taking place among women around the world. Instead they declared themselves liberated and therefore in the position to liberate their less fortunate sisters, especially those in the ‘third world.’”

But there have also been counter-arguments made by feminists about the local movements around the globe. Women in Bangladesh obviously have a different set of issues to address than those in the United States, China or India, but the common ground is that feminists around the world desire to throw of sexist discrimination and exploitation for a more equitable system.

By labeling feminism as men-bashing and inherently Western, we actually shut ourselves off from taking the opportunity to create our own definition, ideology, and agenda of feminism.

Women in Bangladesh are becoming more and more visible in the workforce. Women working in the garment factory are the backbone of our foreign exchange, but still women are culturally dominated and exploited along the sexist lines. It is because we don’t yet have our consciousness raised about gender equity.

Feminism as an ideology can help us gain that consciousness, and the first step towards that could be at a personal micro-level. Each man and woman can practice it in their everyday life and creative work. For example, if a person is a children’s book illustrator then that person could initiate writing children’s book that focus on issues of gender inequality, take the Meena cartoon for example. We simply need more of that. We simply need more people, regardless of their gender to understand the ideals of feminism and incorporate it in their lives for the betterment of everybody.

It is just as hooks said: “Come closer. See how feminism can touch and change your life and all our lives. Come closer and you will see: feminism is for everyone.”

Rubaiyat Hossain is a Lecturer at Brac University and an independent film-maker.

© thedailystar.net, 2007. All Rights Reserved 

source link : http://www.thedailystar.net/forum/2007/june/feminism.htm