Sufi approach & vision

So easy to remember, but so comprehensive, is the Quranic supplication to God asking for 'well-being in this world' and 'well-being in the next world', and 'protection from the torment of fire.'

In fact, this prayer confirms what the Sufis, or Muslim mystics, suggest - that every human being, irrespective of where and when one is born, has to complete the life-cycle of three stages of existence, physical, spiritual and eternal, after reckoning and retribution.

In the present period of global unrest and the war against 'terrorism' which is being waged on a universal scale by the 'coalition of the willing', anyone who is for peace and justice is tempted to interpret human life in a different light.

Not in terms of the Darwinian dogma of 'struggle for existence and survival of the fittest' and Nietzsche's notion of superman's power to subdue the 'ant-hill of individuals' - the two strands of scientific and philosophical thought that have been the driving spirit of the West since the Victorian era when Christian values of kindness, meekness, charity and altruism were thrown to the winds and overpowering strength and conquering spirit became the ultimate virtues.

For a better change we have to rediscover the meaning of life. And one of the ways to do so is to define human destiny in terms of the sufistic concept of peaceful co-existence and compassion for fellow humans who are, like one's own self, the creation of that one God who brought into being the first human couple in His own image by 'breathing into them some of His own Rooh or spirit' (to quote from the Quran - 15.29).

This 'rooh', or soul, is therefore, of Divine origin and is not subject to decay and death. Thus, it has to be treated as a sacred object deserving of greater care and attention than our body, the physical mould created from earthly substances which must decay and die during our existence in this world. The Sufis lay great stress on cultivating the soul.

What is 'rooh', or soul? The listeners of the Holy Quran had quizzed and the Prophet (pbuh) looked up to the Almighty whose exact words defining the soul, as preserved in the Quran (17:85), can be rendered in English thus: "The soul is by command of the Creator and you (humans) have been endowed with only a little knowledge (making it difficult for you to comprehend)."

So, except that the soul is a manifestation of God's creative power, one cannot have specific knowledge about the chemistry of the soul. Command of the creator has been explained in another context thus: "He is the all-Wise Creator; and when He intends a thing, He only has to give the command, 'be' and it happens (36:81-82).

So, all of us are alive and active because of God's command 'be'. We cease to be alive when this command, or soul, is withdrawn. The Sufis are not to be compared with the Christian hermits of yore inhabiting medieval monasteries, practising celibacy and penance, neither with the Buddhist monks or 'bhikshus', shunning worldly pursuits and living on alms collected from door to door.

The Quran condemns monasticism as did the holy Prophet who discouraged asceticism and the life style of a recluse having little to do with worldly affairs and concentrating only on prayer and fasting.

The Sufis were known as 'Aarifun', meaning gnostics, having true knowledge of God's attributes. The leading Sufis were, called 'waliullah', or lovers of God, who perceive through piety and prayers what the general run of men cannot even think of. They 'understood nature from the inside', as Sayyed Hussain Nasr puts it ("Science & Civilization in Islam").

According to him, most of the scientists and mathematicians of Islam's golden period were Sufis as they perceived and knew what the exoteric theologians did not.

The Sufis blended intellect with intuition. The latter merely interpreted facts through logic and reasoning. Human consciousness and all the five senses of perception are governed by the soul; and as human knowledge, or science, progresses and produces better and more effective tools of perception, the senses can see distant images and hear distant messages, and so on, but the limit is the material universe.

The senses, though controlled by the soul, cannot perceive objects beyond the realm of matter. But the same senses do see things, hear sounds, taste fruits, smell fragrant flowers and touch articles made of rarest metals, - all of this belonging to a world outside the material universe - not when one is wide awake but in a dream, which is, according to the Sufis, a temporary phase of freedom of the soul from the confines of the body.

This substantiates their claim that as a person detaches oneself from the 'material pollution', the inner faculty, embedded in the soul, finds a free hand and enables the person to see the inner aspect of things on the spiritual plane.

The Sufis seek knowledge by purging and purifying the mind, which is also governed by the soul. This exercise meant to face the spiritual world does involve denying oneself the luxuries of life - rich food, fine clothes, a comfortable home and worldly pleasures.

The Sufi, in this respect, can be likened to a practical socialist who believes in eliminating the social inequalities and reducing the wide disparity in living conditions of the rich and the poor.

According to the Sufis, the soul and the body of an average person, not initiated in the mysteries of mysticism, are mixed together like cream in milk. To separate the cream, milk has to be boiled and then cooled to let the cream settle on the top of milk in the form of a rich and thick layer.

Similarly, after purging the body of its material and carnal desires, through austere and pious living, the soul dominates the body and takes it on the illuminated path where peace prevails and God's blessings are showered on the 'Saalik', or the wayfarer, on the road to salvation.

Left on the rise in India

For the first time since independence, the 'Left' in India has gained a place in governance at centre although, paradoxically, even while opting not to accept any seats in the Congress-led cabinet. Historically, the Left and the Congress belonged to the opposite sides in the game of politics.

Before 1947, in the days of the Raj, the 'Left' was divided, broadly speaking, between the Communists and the Socialists and both were bete noir in the eyes of the British rulers, lumped together as 'progressives', hunted and hounded by the so-called agencies.

This practice continued like a bad habit for some time after partition though in India the left is no more seen in bad light. India's close relations with Soviet Russia almost from the outset obviously had their influence.

In Pakistan the progressives continue to be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion to this day. Our close strategic relations with the US could not have developed otherwise.

In any case, the Americans as well as most of the rest of the West generally believe that Islam cannot coexist with a socialist disposition of a people. The Pakistani upper class elite share the same feeling.

Following the May elections both communist parties of India decided to support the Congress in its bid for the formation of a coalition at the centre. They are closely allied with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) with Dr Manmohan Singh as the prime minister.

As described by a section of the Indian media this is something of a U-turn for the Communists as they had called Dr Manmohan Singh's budget (when he was in the government the last time) as 'pro-rich and anti-people'. They were bitterly critical of his economic reforms at the time.

As a result, the UPA's Common Minimum Programme (CMP) is perceived to have been the work of the Left Front. An Indian news-weekly says that the phraseology of the CMP, productive forces, is a straight line from Karl Marx's The German Ideology.

It is pointed out that President Abdul Kalam's speech at the inauguration of the new Lok Sabha was "peppered with Marxist terminology". The Communist Party ideologues are divided between two separate parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM with 44 seats in the newly elected Lok Sabha, and the Communist Party of India (CPI) which has ten votes in the lower house of parliament.

The CPI leader, A.B. Bradhan, has conceded that his party is a junior partner, but it has made a concession for the sake of maintaining the unity of the Left. In any case while the CPM has been in power in one of India's largest states, West Bengal, for well over 20 years, the CPI wields influence because of " the base of its trade-union wing", the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC).

It claims to control the employees' unions in banking, insurance and energy sectors. Harkishan Singh Surjeet, CPM secretary general and the party's top leader, Jyoti Basu, are among two of the Indian politicians held in the highest esteem.

Muslims of India as a rule have supported the Congress and the present UPA also has a substantial support of the Muslims. Traditionally Muslims of West Bengal have been supportive of the CPM government and of Jyoti Basu's leadership. A Muslim remained the speaker of the West Bengal assembly for nearly 20 years.

Incidentally, one of the first actions after coming to power of the Manmohan Singh government has been to appoint the author and scholar Dr Mushirul Hasan to the post of Vice-Chancellor of the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, something that had been unnecessarily controversial and held over for years.

Commenting on the appointment, Arjun Singh, Manmohan Singh's minister for Human Resources Development, has said that it was part of the government's policy to make sure the minorities have the opportunity to run institutions and to benefit from various schemes.

As the Left Front moves into a strategically important position providing support to the Congress-led governing coalition, a debate has begun in the rank and file on how to bring in young blood in the leadership of the Communist parties.

In the CPM particularly the debate is intensive. While the 88- year old Harkishan Singh Surjeet should be seen as the architect of the coalition UPA, because of his skill in getting different factions to sit together and agree on a working arrangements to implement the political programme, it appears that there is a second line of young leadership which is calling the shots.

In fact, it is believed, that the race has begun among the front- runners in the CPM to replace Harkishan Singh Surjeet. Comments in the Indian press suggest that the real source of power is political links in New Delhi but what is perhaps equally important is a firm foothold in two other states, West Bengal and Kerala, which have provided nine out of the 16 politburo members of CPM.

In the 71-member central committee of CPM also 12 are from Kerala and 16 from West Bengal. Out of 44 CPM MPs, 26 are from West Bengal and 13 from Kerala. In this situation, a young leader, Karat, from Kerala appears to be emerging as "the key player".

It is said that it was under Karat's direction that "an overwhelming majority of the central committee decided that the party should not join the UPA but only support it from outside".

It is also said that it was Karat (and not the senior leaders) who worked on the draft of the UPA's common programme until it began resembling the Communist Manifesto. So the politics of the Congress-led government will find its direction from Karat.

However, it is also realized that the biggest challenge to Karat comes from another comparatively younger leader, Sitaram Yechuri, said to be at 51 the youngest politburo member in the CPM.

An exchange of bitter wits between Karat and Yechuri was reported in an Indian newsweekly recently: They hold two different views on a critical issue. Karat has claimed that the CMP has not endorsed the Common Minimum Programme (CMP), to which Yechuri has retorted: The CMP is not a bank cheque that you need to sign before encashing.

There are also "bitter tussles" between the conservatives and liberals of the party over the future of economic reforms. All this has been reported under the caption: Even as a new generation of leaders rises to the top there are fissures within the CPM, with the comrades divided over reform and the issue of joining government.

A young Muslim member Mohammad Salim of the CPM from Kolkata North-East has been reported as saying: The race has begun among the front-runners in the party to replace Surjeet.

The race unfortunately has the risk of weakening the support of the Left Front to the Congress-led UPA and the components of the coalition which has just come into power must realize its fatal implications before it is too late.

Can a bigot be cultured?

The defining difference between the Englishman and the Italian is the gesture. An Italian speaks on the telephone with both hands, neither of which may actually hold the instrument.

The phone is cradled between chin and shoulder, leaving the hand free to gesticulate while the fingers create intricate patterns to reinforce meaning to someone miles away, at the other end of the phone, and therefore completely unable to see this hand-dance.

The real purpose of this exercise in stress and delicacy, in other words, is to express for the sake of expression, rather than for the sake of communication. Thus does every telephone conversation become an art form, a dance of hands and fingers to the rhythm and nuance of speech.

The Englishman from the rigid, Teutonic north does not know the potential creativity of hands. The Englishman not only has a stiff upper lip but also a stiff lower hand.

John Cleese in Fawly Towers may exaggerate, but his excess is firmly rooted in fact: the Englishman prefers to walk or talk with his fingers pointed firmly south. The Italian of the liquid, Latino south is more like an Indian.

A 'where', a 'must', a 'there', a 'what', or any of the wide range of exclamations is incomplete without the finger dance. The only time Italians throw their arms down is when they are flabbergasted. The only time an Englishman throws his arms up is when he is flabbergasted.

Is this subconscious? One must address this question in these Freudian (or perhaps just slight post-Freudian) times. Does the Englishman associate raising his hands with surrender, and therefore considers it beneath his dignity? Could be.

These tough colonial types hate surrender and will do anything to prolong the agony of conflict rather than obey the dictates of common sense. Italians, on the other hand, so to speak, have surrendered to the pleasures of good life for countless generations.

Duty doesn't call around here anymore. They did their best fighting about two thousand years ago, and now sell that memory to tourists while they concentrate on the joys of living off an extraordinarily beautiful land.

Perhaps that is why Winston Churchill growled, when informed that Italy had joined Germany and the Axis Powers in the Second World War, that it was only fair: after all, Italy had been on Britain's side in the First World War. They should become someone else's handicap this time around.

When was Florence born? The facts are arid. It was an Etruscan village like thousands of others whose names we do not remember. Julius Caesar created Florentia (meaning flowering) in 59BC for the best of reasons, because it was the most convenient crossing point on the river Arno for his armies.

Before Caesar, the village was a mere truth; he reshaped it into reality. The difference is magnificent. The power of Italian genius lies in its ability to lift truth to a higher dimension by a powerful vision.

And so, when Florentians sneered that Michelangelo's statue of the dissolute Giuliano was too heroic to be a likeness of the wastrel son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo answered: "In a thousand years no one will know how they looked!" Or, they will look as I have made them look, because my art will last a thousand years, while their bodies and their reputations will be consumed by time. Time surrenders only to art and fable.

Such was the myth of the Roman empire that it continued to be called Roman long after Rome had nothing to do with it. The term "Roman" added legitimacy to emperors of the east and west of Europe who were Turko-Greeks, French or Germans.

Florence flourished under the pagan Romans, and when the eastern Roman empire under Constantine made Christianity legal, constructed a church on the spot where the glorious cathedral now stands, overpowering an opulent city with its scale and splendour.

When power shifted west, Florence was ruled for three centuries by Charlemagne's Franks. In 1100 it won independence from the Germans who had taken possession, and with this began its age of glory as a city state, before bowing to Napoleon and then the Hapsburgs.

In 1848 Italy began to cohere as a nation under Victor Emmanuel. Florence joined the new kingdom in 1860. Rome became the capital of modern Italy in 1870; Florence remains the capital of European art.

Any city that can claim Giotto the architect, Donatello the sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini the jeweller, Dante ("I am the father of the Italian language") and Petrarch the poets, Boccaccio the storyteller, Amerigo Vespucci (now you know where America comes from) the discoverer, Galileo the scientist, and Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo the artists as its children must have superlative genes.

The statues of the city's best and brightest adorn the courtyard of the Uffizi gallery, home to Europe's greatest artistic treasures. The most remarkable of the statues are those of Dante Allighieri and Nicolo Machiavelli.

Dante seems a contradiction. Could anyone so austere and purse-lipped really be in love with anyone but himself? And so Beatrice, his love and guide, must surely be an artistic conceit necessary for his journey through faith and prejudice across Paradise, Purgatory and Inferno.

Did Machiavelli really look that Machiavellian? The Florentines certainly think so. His eyes glitter in stone. they slant to the right as if a direct gaze would be too honest.

A smile of high intelligence and low craft plays upon his lips. His head is bent forward, his shoulders seem to participate in a ploy, tilting to hide a stratagem. Those familiar with The Prince know that it is more realpolitik than ruthless, but the statue is a fine image of cunning.

I did not find the cunning despicable. It was craft in service of power, not the craft of a moneylender who steals from the poor. And yet it made me shudder. For this was an image of power unhinged, of power without morality, or power unredeemed by any idea of service. The dharma of such power was only more power.

I have not seen a statue of Chanakya. My image of him comes from a reading of Arthshashtra, a cool treatise rather than a cold one; untrammelled by sentiment but as heavily anchored to the good of the state as to the good of the monarch.

I can see why Jawaharlal Nehru once flirted with the idea of becoming a Chanakya, even as he laughed at himself for such fantasising. He had no time for Machiavelli. A story illustrates the difference.

Chanakya, after winning a kingdom for his prince, Chandragupta Maurya, sought permission to retire and return to Takshila. Chandragupta was aghast, for this was the time to reap the rewards of victory and rule.

But for Chanakya, this was enough. He had a last word of advice to the new monarch. He should make the defeated general a commander of his armies. This, said Chanakya, is the best guarantee of future peace.

The lesson applies in today's politics as well. The first thing to do in victory is woo the next enemy, not make an enemy of a potential ally. Machiavelli went to prison and died powerless because he was too much in love with power. Chanakya died in peace because he knew the limits and limitations of power.

Are art and culture synonymous? Are you automatically cultured because you can create great art? I am not sure. Dante wrote super poetry, but was he cultured? It is fortunate that no one reads the whole of Dante in India.

I got a brief look at him at university and returned to his work at greater length only during my researches on the conflicts between Muslims and Christians. Anyone who has read Dante on the Prophet of Islam and on Islamic icons like Hazrat Ali will know that Salman Rushdie has been banned for much less. Dante is vicious. Can a bigot be cultured? I think not.

Florence is overwhelming even when glimpsed briefly. I have seen nothing, and yet after a visit to the New Sacristy of the Medici Chapel it seems as if I have seen everything, and must pause before I return to see more.

Michelangelo's elegy to time in four statues is a pinnacle of human achievement. Lorenzo II died without a male heir at the age of 27, of tuberculosis and syphilis, symbol of the decay that killed the most colourful and eponymous dynasty of Italy, the family that made Florence both a Jerusalem of art and a Babylon of sin.

The artist was commenting on age that had disappeared, on a family that he loved, and on his own age, for he was in his 50s now, and tired ("If I work one day, I need four to rest" said the man who when inspired used to work with minimum sleep and less food).

During the fourteen years he spent on the chapel, he lost his father, his favourite brother, his bastard-stepbrother Pope Leo X, the Medici dynasty, and, to raise the ante, witnessed the plagues of 1522 and 1527.

Time is defined by four images: Dawn is a woman, with restless eyes, her body half asleep from the night and half-thrusting for the promise of the day. Beside her is Dusk, a man with a fading face, whose tired body heaves as it seeks rest from the labours of the day: you can see the marble body heave gently, and the illusion becomes the reality.

Across the sacristy are Day and Night. Day is a powerful man whose face has been left deliberately incomplete, an impressionist series of chiselled notches. Night is beautiful, a gentle woman who sleeps in supple strength.

The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.

Are terrorists on the run?

The book is called "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" and it officially comes out on 4 July, but its author, 'Anonymous', is already giving interviews.

He is, we are assured, a senior counter-terrorist expert still working in one of the US intelligence agencies, and his message is that the Bush administration has played into Al Qaeda's hands. In fact, he thinks that Osama bin Laden might even campaign for Mr Bush, after his own fashion.

"I'm very sure that (Al Qaeda) can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now," said 'Anonymous' in a pre-publication interview with the 'Guardian'.

"One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president." To which the only possible response is Homer Simpson's favourite reply: Duh.

There could be no better evidence of the abysmal quality of the thinking in official circles in Washington than the fact that this trite statement of the obvious is seen as bold dissent.

Of course Osama bin Laden would vote for Bush. Not only did Bush do what was expected of him after 9/11 and invade Afghanistan. When that didn't work out as well as Al Qaeda expected (it didn't end up in a draining ten-year guerilla war for the United States, as it had for the Soviet Union), then Mr Bush invaded Iraq.

Osama bin Laden could not have foreseen that, because he had no links to Saddam Hussein (as the bipartisan commission in Washington investigating the September 11 attacks confirmed last week).

Nor was Osama the real reason that the Bush administration invaded Iraq, although it misled the public into believing that Saddam had Al Qaeda links. But for the Al Qaeda leader the invasion of Iraq was a gift from God: his own plan to bog America down in an Afghan quagmire failed, but Mr Bush then voluntarily plunged the US into a even worse mess in Iraq.

The US occupation of Iraq is producing all the images bin Laden originally hoped would be coming out of Afghanistan: Muslim women and children blown apart by American bombs; American soldiers torturing and sexually humiliating Muslim men; Muslim fighters armed only with light weapons, faith and a willingness to die successfully defying US military power in places like Falluja and Najaf. Why would Osama vote for John Kerry, whose first move (though he denies it now) would be to get American troops out of Iraq? Bush is his main man.

Osama bin Laden can influence the US election either by launching terrorist attacks in the United States before November, or withholding them until later. If he is still able to micro-manage the timing of such attacks from his refuge somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border, which way will he jump? The answer is not as simple as 'Anonymous' suggests.

One may recall that this writer brought this question up in October of last year, and that the calculations Osama had to make were not simple even then. President Bush has positioned himself as Mr Security, the wise war leader who has kept Americans safe from another disaster like 9/11.

So if the aim is to give him an electoral boost that carries him back into the White House in November, not just any old terrorist attack will do. Another big terrorist attack like 9/11 - supposing that Al Qaeda's remaining sleepers in the United States were able to mount it - would not necessarily help Mr Bush win reelection.

It might just as easily be seen by the American public as proof that he had failed in his main job. In fact, it is so hard to predict whether another terrorist attack in the US would help or harm Mr Bush that so long as he seems to be headed for victory in November anyway, the safest course for Al Qaeda has been to do nothing.

On that basis, I have been predicting for the past eight months that there would not be a further terrorist attack in the United States before the November presidential election. So far, so good, but there is one thing that could invalidate that prediction.

If Mr Bush's numbers start to slide badly in the next couple of months and it begins to look like Mr Kerry will win the election, then Al Qaeda may decide to act. But even if it does, it will almost certainly avoid doing anything very big.

Carry out an attack that kills a thousand Americans, and you have discredited Mr Bush beyond hope of rehabilitation. But an attack that kills only a couple of dozen Americans - enough to remind voters that the terrorists are out to get them, but not enough to raise questions about Mr Bush's competence in dealing with the threat - could be just what the Bush campaign needs to squeak back in in November.

So if the proportion of decided voters intending to support Mr Bush sinks below 40 percent by August, then there is the distinct possibility of a small-scale terrorist attack. -Copyright