The taste or hulwun of fasting

As regards fasting, we were simply told this: observe the obligatory actions (fara'idh) and meet the required conditions (shurooth). This is simply the recipe. No assurance that the food would be delicious. There needs to be an expertise, a knack, which would add taste to our dishes. We have called this expertise 'kaipunyam' in Malayalam.

The knack of adding taste to fasting, or any religious observances for that matter, is not discussed, nor can it be learned from, law books. But law books have set the backdrop of an average Muslim's world view or weltanschauung ever since his/her tutelage started at madrassas. As a result, without what spiritual masters call hulwun (sweetness/taste) Islam has ended up tasteless.

I am not arguing a case against law books. None who is concerned about dishes can argue for burning recipes.

In the history of Islam, there has been a synthesis between law (fikh) and spirituality (tasawwuf). Law, unless legal scholars and jurists understand and ameliorate the mental backdrop and spiritual essence of individuals to whom legal pronouncements are applied, is dead.

The synthesis of jurisprudence and mysticism was made on many occasions possible in the history of Islam. One of the noted scholars worth mentioning in this regard is Imam Ghazali. In his 'Al-Munqidhu Mina-Dhalal' (Deliverance from Error) and Bidayathul hidhyaya (The Beginning of Guidance)-Montgomery Watt's translation of the two titles was brought out as a compendium by the Islamic Book Trust, Kuala Lumpur- I read the following extract on the taste (hulwun) of fasting:

Fasting beyond abstinence

When you fast, do not imagine that fasting is merely abstaining from food, drink and matrimonial intercourse. The Prophet has said: 'Many a one who fasts has nothing from his fasting save hunger and thirst.' Rather perfect fasting consists in restraining all body organs from what God disapproves. You must keep eyes from looking at things disapproved, the tongue from uttering whatever does not concern you and the ear from listening to what is forbidden-for hearer shares the guilt of the speaker in cases of backbiting. A tradition runs: 'Five things make a man break his fast-lying, backbiting, malicious gossip, the lustful glance and the false oath.' Prophet Muhammad said: 'Fasting is a protection. If one of you is fasting, let him avoid obscene speech, loose living and folly; if anyone attacks him or insults him, let him say: 'I am fasting.'

Excessive food during Ifthar

Then endeavour to break your fast with lawful food, and not to take an excessive amount. The aim of fasting is to oppose your appetites and to double your capacity for works of piety. If you eat at night more than you do normally because you are fasting by day, there is no difference between eating it at one meal at night and at two meals (one during daytime, one at night).

(From 'Deliverance from Error and the Beginning of Guidance', Imam Al-Ghazali, translated by W Montgomery Watt, Islamic Book Trust, Kuala Lumpur)

I think no law books will restrain us from obscene ifthar parties being organised amidst poverty which threatens to enlarge the chasm in the society.

Reading 'Kafka' in a Sufi text

Until friends of mine Ajay P Mangadu and Auswaf Ahsan suggested him to me, Mesa Selimovic was an author I had hardly known about. But there was gradualism in my absorbed reading of Death and the Dervish. It was just as I developed my love for my senorita: from indifference to expedient acceptance and from blunt refusal to whole-souled devotion. There was such pervasive sadness in the novel that I cold-shouldered it in the beginning. But somehow, the book refused to stay away. The whirling dervish on the cover was a magnet. As my reading faltered ahead, the novel formed around me a whirlpool that pulled me into it.

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DandD is all about a Kafkaesque world set in a Bosnian Kasaba (town). The novel subtly illustrates how the political grand narrative snakes its way into the mindscape of a dervish named Ahmad Nuruddin. Power has invisible tentacles and allurement that even a mystic's mind conditioned by irja (which in Islamic theology means 'withdrawal' brought about by leaving judgement to God) can't escape it. Just like the vortex the novel formed around me, politics metamorphosed into a whirlpool that begins to whirl so violently around Ahmad Nuruddin, a Dervish who finds ecstasy in whirling, as to shatter his identity.

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Each chapter of the novel begins with a verse from the Quran, which is again echoed in the narration of the chapter. The novel is full of Quranic symbolism. Though a traditional Quranic scholar finds it disturbing to read her holy text retexualised (sometimes, detexualised), she can only console herself by the assurance that it's Mesa's reading of the Quran in the context of Bosnia where individual self is by and large hemmed in by political manoeuvres.

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One sentence in the novel remains engraved in my mind:

' More lives have been ruined in attempts to prevent sin than because of sin itself.'

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Thanks Ajay and Auswaf for a month of worthy reading.

Nudity: Three anecdotes

Masks have covered the essence. When they are peeled off one by one and layer by layer, we come to truth. Nudity is truth.

Every disclosure of truth happens at a decisive moment, when we hardly expect someone out there who has come to disclose it. I have heard an anecdote¹ about someone destined to be called 'insane' by a society which unfortunately considers itself sane. The man was running naked. He abhorred clothes. The whole village is running after him to clothe him. 'Civilisation is indispensable,' the chasers remind the man, 'the faster you run, the nearer you are to getting civilised.' They caught him, bound him down and, despite his wild, empty, wails, clothed him.

I got thought-provoking feedback to this anecdote. 'Was it not a great achievement for them to give him awrat,' the Islamist said, having relieved about an averted calamity. 'The man is a rebel and a revolutionary in the making. There is no doubt about that. The problem is that his rebellion and revolution does not have an organised and formal outlet,' the Marxist said, as if the organised naked marathon of the whole Polit Beareau members would turn the capitalist social order upside down.

Anecdote 2: Mary Haskel: Nudity, love and hatred (From my reading of Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet, a new biography, Suheil Bushuri and Joe Jenkis)

For Gibranophile, Mary Haskel needs no introduction. She was the patron, lover, teacher and editor of the Lebanese poet. When Gibran moved without direction, she anchored him. She gave him money whenever he needed it (to set up studio, to organise an exhibition etc). Mary thought her financial aid to Gibran was a token of her love. But she did not reveal it to the poet (How intensely he would dislike the love founded on money). But she insisted on the repayment of money through his gifting of his paintings to her instead. This was meant for keeping the poet responsible to some extent. But the pent-up secrecy in these dealings exploded one day. Mary could not drive the poet home to why she was helping him, leading him to misunderstanding. They parted.

Later, painter Arthur B Davies made arrangements for drawing Mary. 'When she arrived at his studio, he asked her to pose nude. She was surprised, not shocked: “it never occurred to me to suggest waiting till we were better acquainted. It seemed wholly impersonal. We talked and it was over.” When she told Gibran that she posed nude, he burst into jealous fury. [Arthur was Gibran's sort of rival].

To this anecdote, Noushad, himself a Gibranophile who gave me the book to read, responded: 'I think love enables you even to hate.' I did not think in the same way. I smsed back: 'Perhaps, lovers frustrated over not being loved in the same intensity and abandon that they love, would go to whatever extent possible to give vent to their frustration. It's unpredictable. This frustration is not hatred. But love in its stark intensity.'

At the surface level, as for an aesthete like Mary, posing nude is a non-issue. But, deeply, does she not believe in the sanctity of body being covered, when she violates it at the spurt of her anger? Although Gibran had drawn many nude models before, he had not drawn the one of Mary before. Nor had Mary posed nude for anyone before. Do all women not believe in the sanctity of their body, which the ogling eyes and pathologically erect penises violate without her consent or which she is forced to violate out of professional or emotional compulsions?

This leads me to what Alija Izet Begovic says about nudity, while discussing about Milan Kundera's character in his 'Prison Notes':

'Kundera's Theresa felt nakedness as a sign of the compulsory uniformity of concentration camp, a sign of humiliation.'

Is this post-modernity, in which nudity is a cult, not another concentration camp, which, through many a wardrobe malfunction and many an item number, compulsorily but subconsciously unifies the choice of whether to wear or not and of what to wear or not.

Surely, the whole discourse on nudity, including this post, is conditioned, bordering as it is on the nudity of a subject- the women.

Anecdote 3: Teaching the chastity of nudity.

A parent did not send her daughter to Mary's school because Gibran's nude painting was hung on the wall. Of this Mary wrote to Gibran. The poet replied: 'The wisest and kindest thing to do is to take down from the walls all the pictures that offend the girls and their mothers. The thought that a painting of mine is making someone uncomfortable, in body or in spirit, is a source of pain and unhappiness in me. We cannot teach the chastity of nude. People must find it for themselves. We can't lead people to the heart of life. They must go by themselves, and each one must go alone.'

'Nudity and clothes date back to Adam and Eve in Eden. Eden, which was shrouded by the clothes of civilisation, is our dream and destination,' Gibran's nude pictures whispered when I saw them.

1Courtesy Noushad

Pictures: caption and credit

1, Sketch for Jesus the Son of Man, ca. 1923, Gibran Khalil Gibran, Source: Gibran Khalil Gibran: Sketch for Jesus the Son of Man (32.45.5) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art courtesy: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/32.45.5

2, (left) The cover of Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet, a new biography