The story of a small skirmish: Sufi poetry sets young Muslims’ minds in motion

By Farrukh Dhondy

"Cover up thy daughters, my pious friends-

There is enough ugliness in the world!"

From The Scorpion Speaks by Bachchoo

This is a report from the front line, a dispatch from the war between the pen and the sword. In Britain and in most diasporic spreads of Islam the battlelines between the two are drawn. This is the story of a small skirmish in this global war.

The scene is Mansion House in London. It is a regal building in which affairs of State and great ceremonies are conducted.

The Muslim population of Britain, immigrants in the main from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Somalia and a smattering from Arab states, have today established themselves as a small but significant fraction of the country and the city. Their affairs and opinions are debated in the national press. Their public protests are taken seriously. They are, presumably, though one can't have evidence of this, under the surveillance of the British security services, because from their ranks come the namak haram who live off the British taxpayer and in the name of Islam hatch plots to bomb, kill and maim people going about their business on the streets, in the buses, trains and planes.

Islam in Britain has been, according to my Muslim friends, some of them intellectual apostates, some of them devout believers, distorted to perversity by ignorant or politically paid and motivated preachers.

The demographic spread of immigrant Muslims has facilitated this concentration of primitive and fundamentalist ideologies.

Britain imported Pakistani and Bangladeshi labour to work the unacceptable shifts in its Yorkshire and Lancashire mills. The populations of Mirpuri and Bangladeshi peasantry accumulated in these mill-to-mosque towns.

In London the East End was inundated with Bangladeshi labour willing to work in the rag trade, machining and sewing buttons on shirts till China and India undercut their profitability and trumped their trade.

These frustrated communities gave rise to their own isolated hatreds, resentments of a British society from which they had locked themselves out and became the breeding grounds of hate-filled Mullocracies.

Meanwhile, the Muslims from traditions more attuned to mysticism or to philosophical rather than murderous interpretations of Islam, settled in scattered formations, unable to exercise any political presence as a "community" or form a vote-bank for opportunistic Labour politicians who would genuflect to any demand or position if it won them the bulk of the Muslim vote.

The Islamic organisations of Britain are, consequently, clients of Wahabism and one or other form of political Islam.

The poor mayor of London, knowing nothing of this developmental formation, invited "Muslims" to an Iftar party where he and they would break the fast of the day together.

I go to the session with my friend Mahmood Jamal, who has been invited to read poetry after dinner.

Mahmood has serious credentials. He is compiling the Penguin book of Sufi verse (though that may not be its final title on publication) and he is of the opinion that of all Islamic art, architecture being the body, poetry is its soul. He has ancestral pedigree too. His grandfather is the Islamic scholar Bari Miah of the Firangi Mahal in Lucknow, and he numbers several serious Islamic scholars among his relatives.

At the dinner Mahmood finds himself seated next to the mayor on his right and the head of the "Muslim Council", one Abdul Bari, on his left. Ranged before him at the other tables are the stalwarts of the fundamentalist interpretations of the faith, men and women who have worked their way into this assembly as representatives of the Muslim groups of Britain.

The dinner finishes and the time comes for Mahmood to read his poems. He begins in fine and traditional form with a praise of the Almighty, a Hamd, and then a tribute to the Prophet, a Naath.

He then recites from his translations which I reproduce roughly here:

"It was a dark night

The gates to the Ka'aba and temple were locked,

And yet the door to repentance was open

The taverns were alive with light"

There was an uneasy silence. Mahmood gauged the tenor of disapproval in the audience. He unrelentingly went on to recite a poem by Mansur Hallaj, the famous Sufi martyr, who declaimed "I am the truth". Anathema to the fundos.

Then he read Jalaludin Rumi in his own translation:

"What can I do

My fellow Muslims?

I do not know who I am!

I am neither Christian, Muslim, Jew nor Hindu

What can I do?

What can I do?"

Silence. This assembly of municipal Muslims, beneficiaries of Saudi funds, claimants from the ignorant munificence of the British State, vehement opponents of Sufiana, were restless, uncertain and appalled. Was the mystical Islamic tradition gaining municipal recognition? God forbid!

Mahmood continued reading. Here is his own poem You & I:

You want to speak of War

I want to speak of Peace.

You say Punish

I say Forgive

You speak of God's Wrath

I speak of His Mercy

Your Quran is a Weapon

My Quran is a Gift

You speak of the Muslim brotherhood

I speak of the brotherhood of Man

You like to Warn others

I like to Welcome them

You like to speak of Hell

I like to speak of Heaven.

You talk of Lamentation

I talk of Celebration.

You worship the Law

I worship the Divine.

You want Silence

I want Music

You want Death

I want Life

You speak of Power

I speak of Love.

You search out Evil

I warm to the Good

You dream of the Sword

I sing of the Rose petal

You say the world is a Desert

I say the world is a Garden

You prefer the Plain

I prefer the Adorned

You want to Destroy

I want to Build

You want to go Back

I want to move Forward

You are busy Denying

I am busy Affirming

Yet there might be one thing

on which we see eye to eye

You want Justice

So do I.

The mayor, the white entourage and the young Muslims who had never heard any such thing, applauded the reading to the rafters. The fundos sulked. After the reading Mahmood was surrounded by young Muslims, all invited there as clients of the fundo organisations, who had never been subject to this mainstream version of philosophical Islam. They wanted to know. Why had this beauty of their religion been denied them? Why had they not been told?

Source: Asian Age, New Delhi

URL: https://newageislam.com/war-terror/the-story-small-skirmish-sufi/d/772