Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part piece. Read part two here.
“Your lips are sealed, but, your eyes — they tell a story. Tell me, what it like was to love her?” she asked.
“The blank pages of my heart were filled with her name. The silence of her thoughts were broken by my words. She was the morning light to my sleepless night. I was the enchanting moon to her haunting sky. Each moment was a lifetime and each lifetime was filled with infinite moments,” he replied.
“Oh my dear Majnun(Qays)!” she exclaimed.
“It is in us that the sunnah of Mansur and Qays lives on!
(hamīñ se sunnat-e-mansūr-o-qais zinda hai)
Thanks to us is yet the wearing of flowered-shirts and crooked-hats!
(hamīñ se baaqī hai gul-dāmanī o kaj-kulahī),” he responded with the popular Urdu couplet of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a widely read Muslim poet.
“Crooked-hats (kaj-kulahī)! Who are these?” she questioned.
Let’s dive into the world of the crooked-hats (kaj-kulahī). The world where the sea meets the sky. The world where we go beyond prescription and into exploration to experience the Divine Truth. The world where we go beyond literal interpretations of Divine words. The world where we dive into the ocean of love and search for meaning. Yes, this is a risky business but then what are you afraid of? As Faiz Ahmed Faiz said,
If you are betting on love, then bet everything. Be fearless!
(gar baazī ishq kī baazī hai jo chāho lagā do Dar kaisā)
If you are victorious then you have won everything! In case you are ‘defeated’ then you have still ‘lost’ nothing
(gar jiit ga.e to kyā kahnā haare bhī to baazī maat nahīñ)
One day, Shaykh Nizam-ud-Din (literally translated as order-of-religion) Awliya, one of the most revered personalities of Islam in the Indian sub-continent, placed his cap to the side of his head (crooked/tilted-hat), sat by the river Yamuna, and observed Hindu devotees as they performed their purification rituals. Just then, his friend and devotee, Amir Khusraw, a poet and a musician, dropped by.
Wait. Pause. Replay. What thoughts might have captured the Shaykh? How do you think his devotee responded to seeing his Shaykh, the order-of-religion, amuse himself with this spectacle?
The Shaykh turned to his friend and voiced his appreciation of the Divine Way by saying:
For every people: its path, its din, and its prayer-direction!
(Har qawm ra-st rahi dini o qiblah-gahi)
He was obviously referring to the Qur’anic verse:
For each among you have we made a prescribed law and a way. Had God so willed he would have made you a single people [5:48 Surah-al-Ma’idah]
His poet friend immediately responded:
I have set my qiblah straight in the way of the crooked-hatted!
(ma qiblah rast kardim bar samt-i kaj-kulahi)
In other words, Amir Khusraw is declaring that his mode of interpreting Islam is aligned with the process followed by those who wear the crooked-hat (in this case Shaykh Nizam-ud-Din). Shahab Ahmed provides further insight into this genius statement in his compelling, “What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic,”
Amir Khusraw’s response to Nizam-ud-Din’s opening poetical gambit…is a gem of paradox and of play; but the salient point is that he is constituting crooked-hatted-ness as din and qiblah — that is in terms of the basic vocabulary of Islam which indicates the orientation of a people towards divine truth, and that he is doing as a Muslim — crooked-hatted-ness is Amir Khusraw’s din and qiblah; it is a statement of Khusraw’s being Muslim. Amir Khusraw is not making a “secular” or a “profane” statement, nor is he suggesting that the prayer-direction of his qiblah takes him-unlike the Hindu bathers-outside Islam; rather, by constituting crooked-hattedness in terms of Islam, Amir Khusraw is constituting Islam in terms of crooked-hattedness.
Resting place of Shaykh Nizam-ud-Din Awliya in Delhi, India.
So, for the crooked-hats, for these particular type of Muslims, acts like tilting your hat a certain way and wearing flower-embroidered shirts were a way of declaring their mode of going about Islam and in the process defining Islam. In urban terms, we may take some liberty and view the crooked-hats as (original) Mipsterz! Now, this is not some overenthusiastic act of “resistance” against orthodoxy, but rather an alternative normative way of going about their Islamic life. This is evident by the widespread popularity and celebration of this story, to this day, in qawwali (defined by Shahab Ahmed as “ecstatic singing of poetry that aims to bring its audience into an auditory experience of the Real-Truth of the divine”) of Indian sub-continent. In fact, Amir Khusraw is regarded as the “father of qawwali” whose poems are found in both Mughal and Ottoman cannons. You are welcome to lose yourself in one such qawwali celebrating the relationship between Shaykh Nizam-ud-Din and Amir Khusraw by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Amjad Sabri.
Qawalli performed at the mausoleum of Shaykh Nizam-ud-Din Awliya in the movie "Rockstar." Courtesy: Eros International
Traditional Muslims, having a sense of continuity with the past, do not hesitate to derive value, in Islamic terms, from acts like crooked-hattedness or for that matter the love story of Layla Majnun, but the modern “secular” and “fundamentalist” will immediately pose questions like: Is this religious or secular? Is this Islamic or non-Islamic? We, the children of colonialism, hold religious-secular binary as self-explanatory and universal, and are almost programmed to reflexively separate actions into one of these two categories. The issue is not with the binary itself but rather our application of it with no analytical rigor. Clearly, crooked-hattedness or meaning-making through Majnun refuse to fit into any of these binaries but rather dynamically links them together. We, however, almost with an air of superiority, continue to insist on imposing this pseudo-universal religious-secular binary, born out of post-enlightenment Christianity and therefore representing a specific local historical experience, and lecture “others” (read: “less educated”) on what their “religion” should do instead of understanding what it actually does. How can we call ourselves living people when we refuse to analytically question the categorization handed down to us by our predecessors? Yesterday’s world was local and somewhat connected, but today’s world is global and interconnected. Are there any significant structural and/or procedural similarities between our times and our predecessors that warrant the continued imposition of this binary, especially, on traditions which have different historical experiences? If it indeed does, then do we thoroughly comprehend the social, political and economic implications of such an imposition?
For example, when we view Hinduism as a doctrinal “religion” (as the term is understood in modern discourse) instead of the Sanskrit term “dharma,” we are limited in our conceptualization and fail to recognize that it goes beyond the individual to include the ordering of society. Caste system, arguably, plays a central role in Hindu life (from marriages to professions), far beyond scriptures or any philosophy of salvation. In fact, in modern India, so widespread is the impact of caste system that it is not uncommon to hear slogans from Dalits (lower-caste Hindus) demanding “freedom (azadi)” from “oppression” of Brahmins (upper-caste Hindus). It would be accurate to note that Hinduism, like all traditional religions, is similar to secularism in its function — ordering of the individual and collective. So, when we, the urban educated elite, restrict the role of traditional religions by imposition of a pseudo-universal binary, and order the society based on its principles, the traditional religionist views it as a truth-claim made by secularism, thereby making it a rival religion. One can’t help but speculate to what extent the rise of far-right Hindu “nationalists” (they are antithetical to Nehru’s secular vision of India) and so-called “gurus” who shamelessly extract pseudo-spirituality from traditions, marry it with misguided capitalism, and sell it to vulnerable lost souls, can be attributed to imposition of this binary. In its more recent avatar, secularism has become increasingly anti-religion, almost mocking it, and, sadly, has more in common with the “fundamentalists” who view religion and secularism as opposites instead of two distinct but overlapping ways of achieving the same goal.
My point is that, in the context of traditional societies, we must argue on the merits and demerits of imposition of religious-secular binary and, maybe, stop viewing it as a binary. In India, the modern secular nationalist has fallen into this trap and failed to recognize that this binary is perceived as anti-religion or anti-Hindu by the majority and puts at grave risk the most reliable and vocal supporters of secularism — the lower caste Hindus and Muslims. It would do well if the secular nationalists in India and other parts of Asia including the Muslim world, seriously question, to what degree can the social and cultural tensions be attributed to religion? Is there a fundamental issue with religion itself or the way we have come to understand and shape religion? If secularism actively aims to conquer all spheres of human life including, more recently, the individual conscience, then why is religion the scapegoat for the generated violence? If there are individuals or groups who feel alienated and perceive this as an attack by global secularists and find refuge in religion, then shouldn’t we look at inclusion mechanisms and re-consider our application of this binary? Whatever our responses, one cannot deny that religion is being reshaped by the secularists, and my concern is that, maybe, imposition of this pseudo-universal religious-secular binary in our times without any analytical rigor, is actively preventing us from comprehensively identifying and solving real-world issues that we together face as a species. Simply put, we are living people burdened or may be even haunted by our inheritance.
Shahid has a Masters in Engineering from UCLA and works in the tech industry. He views the world with the eyes of a poet, analyzes it like an engineer, and at the core is a lover. He is skeptical of the overly optimistic belief that technology will save us from all our vices. He is instead of the opinion that technology is a means to achieving the end goal of building people with the right kind of heart, mind, and will. Through his writings he attempts to explore what it means to be a human: possess all the properties of an ocean but yet be a drop in the ocean of love. You can follow him on Facebook and Medium.