Is Covid-19 Proving Stronger Than Faith?
By
F.S. Aijazuddin
23 Jul,
2020
COVID-19 is
the new heresy. It has no credo, no liturgy, no clergy, no redeeming faith. It
has come like some unannounced apocalypse. And, it has a divine power over life
and death.
There is no
one now whom Covid-19 has not touched. There is no family that has not seen or
heard of death by Covid-19. Among some buried with frugal mourning is a
well-known friend Nadeem Mumtaz. He passed away this week from Covid-19. He had
been attending two of his sons, both of them stricken by this scourge. Then he
caught it. They recovered; he didn’t.
Since 1947
at least, his family had been prominent providing medical supplies to our
community in Lahore. Ironically, in the end, these could not help him, no more
than all of Steve Job’s riches could give him what Queen Elizabeth I begged for
in her final moments: “All my possessions for a moment of time.”
Is Covid-19
proving stronger than faith? Has it destroyed belief, like those vandals who
unearthed a life-size Gandharan statue of Buddha in Mardan district and then
smashed it beyond repair? It took an ancient artisan half a lifetime to create
that monument to patient piety. It took zealots of Takht-i-Bahi minutes to
destroy it. “If we destroy something around us, we destroy ourselves,” Gautama
Buddha once preached. In dishonouring him, we are disfiguring ourselves. We are
true sons of Bamiyan.
Recently, a
Sino-specialist contrasted the study of history in the West and the East. The
West sees history as linear. Events follow each other like camels in a
constantly moving caravan. Eastern scholars believe in the cycle of history.
There is nothing under the heavens that has not happened in some form, at some
time, somewhere before. We simply lack the memory or the means to recall it.
Modern
historians like Prof Peter Frankopan have challenged the Western-centric
approach to history that extols the achievements of the Greek and the Romans
but ignores those of other civilisations, such as the Chinese or the Byzantium.
Frankopan began as a Byzantine buff. He can be forgiven for reminding us that
the Byzantine empire lasted longer than many better-known empires did. It
survived for more than 1,000 years, being founded in 330 BC (the year Alexander
the Great defeated the Persians) and continued until 1453 AD.
For
countries as recent as ours, history is too disjointed to be linear and not
long enough to be cyclical. Our surviving monuments are Mohenjo-Daro, Mughal,
British and then Modern. How does one draw an uninterrupted line connecting
them?
Archives
are one source of history, if they are sensibly declassified and openly
accessible which ours are not. Letters are another valuable resource. We have
had only two prolific letter writers in our stunted history — Quaid-i-Azam M.A.
Jinnah and Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The Quaid’s papers and letters have received
lavish treatment. Their 37 volumes fill an extended bookshelf. Many of Mr
Bhutto’s papers though were removed from his house 70 Clifton by Gen Ziaul
Haq’s hob-nailed minions and, if not already destroyed, lie buried somewhere
where democracy cannot penetrate.
Mr Bhutto’s
letter to his daughter Benazir, written from jail, has become a vade mecum for
PPP stalwarts. It is no secret that Mr Bhutto consciously borrowed the idea
from Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to his daughter Indira Gandhi which tacked
together became his magnum opus The Discovery of India.
Today, in
an age of tweets and electronic messaging, handwritten letters are as
fashionable as wooden spinning wheels. (Incidentally, M.K. Gandhi’s collected
writings and letters span 98 volumes. More are being discovered.) When
available, such letters provide historians with a flashlight into the times in
which they were written. Bereft of them, historians look at their shoelaces for
inspiration.
If one was
to choose out of the trunk of history a single letter that conveys the
qualities every letter should have — brevity, immediacy, and emotion captured
in ink — it would be one written by Vilma Grunwald to her husband on July 11,
1944. She, her husband and their two sons (one of them challenged) were
arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Seeing her
disabled son being isolated for extermination, she left her healthier son and
husband and joined him. Hastily, she scribbled a brief note to her husband.
Part of it read: “You, my only one, dearest, in isolation we are waiting for
darkness. The famous trucks are already here and we are waiting for it to
begin. I am completely calm. I will be thinking of you and Misa. Have a
fabulous life, we must board the trucks … into eternity.”
Her letter
survived. She didn’t.
F.S.
Aijazuddin is an author.
Original
Headline: New heresies
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/is-covid-19-proving-stronger/d/122445
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