February 15, 2008	Friday	Safar 07, 1429

KARACHI, Feb 14: The western capitalism breeds and nurtures terrorism, which is generally state-sponsored as common man cannot afford to buy costly weapons and terrorise innocent people like him, said Ayatollah Syed Aqeel al Gharavi, a visiting scholar from India, here on Thursday evening.

In capitalist societies where skills and vocational training have replaced education in arts and literature, he said it was no wonder that religion and religious institutions too had become industries. In this situation, he said, spirituality was the only way out to protect oneself against the dangers of capitalism and its threat to humanity.

He expressed these views while referring to the human sufferings and the role of literature in mitigating them during his lecture on “Poetry, Philosophy and Ghalib” at the Karachi Arts Council’s auditorium. The programme was organised to mark the 139th death anniversary of subcontinent’s peerless poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib who still rules the hearts of connoisseurs of Urdu literature about one and a half century after his death on February 15, 1869.

The Ayatollah, who also supervises PhD students at the prestigious Aligarh University, kept his speech confined to the theme that in spite of referring to Islam during his lecture, he succeeded in avoiding the discussion to take a religious colour. He was precise in his talk about poetry and its relation with and difference from philosophy.

Author of several books on literature and religion, Aqeel al Gharavi said that the poets preceding the master of muse strove to perfect the art of expression in delicate language but their thought remained, on the whole, formal. “It was left to Ghalib to strike out a new path, both in expression and thought, though still within formal and well-defined limits of the genres of poetry,” he said.

He said that Ghalib’s philosophy transcended the immediate and the mundane and took on a more profound tone while investigating life’s mysteries. He said that Ghalib might not appear a practising Muslim but he was pious from within. Ghalib had an in-depth sight into religion which today’s religious scholars did not.