By Anonymous,
It is the time of hate. Everyone around is outraged by the inexplicable evil of the other. How could they walk in and gun down people? How could they invade and turn entire countries into rubble and blood for freedom and democracy? The “eastern unreasonable God” and the “western racist super states” dance on airwaves, news papers, coffee shops… I tremble in fear before both.
File Photo of an anti-terror vigil.
On an ordinary day, I am a student who might be struggling with a deadline or the insane living costs of London. I could also be seen as part of the Muslim problem or the immigrant problem depending on the hate tides of the day. On the bright side, though my skin pigment is brown, people don’t think that I am going to blow them up when I cross to their side of the road because I don’t have a penis. In a world that is ruled by penises, the lack of one has its rare advantages. So far, unlike many of my male friends, I have never been stopped at the border for further questioning. The worst that has happened is bursting into tears before the perfectly legal taunts about “why are you here?” at the UK border.
But according to news reports, there is a possibility of threats from female jihadis as well. How I wish I could be like that friend who refuses to read newspapers! It is the season of sleeper cells; anti-terror raids in ghettos. Reason enough for surveillance facilities that can snoop into all kinds of real and imaginary conversations. Terror might be a word like infidel. The moment you utter it, every other conversation can stop. There is no point in enquiring why infirst class liberal democracies with suppressed colonial notions and evident racisms, third-class coloured inhabitants turn to violent religious cults.
Trust me, I have never been to Syria or Iraq or most part of Middle East. I wouldn’t even be able to tell all the countries that border Syria. As for those Syrians and Iraqis who are fleeing violent wars, one can mourn for them when they land on the shores as lifeless toddlers.
And about Jihadism, I do condemn it in all its forms. Which sane person wouldn’t? But, I can’t keep guessing about its parentage in its various mutant forms. Is it a product of some sort of orgy between colonising powers and religious fanatics? How much is fathered by Bin Laden and how much by Bush? How much of its European DNA is from rabid Jihadi preachers, how much from European far right? Did it get its violent genes from the deadly combats in Middle East or the progressive racism of liberal democracies? I know such thoughts are blasphemous; both against Supreme God and Supreme State.
Our dead and their dead! May be they all meet in the same place and mourn about the stupidity of it all. Westerner, easterner, Islam, colonialism, white, non-white, civilization, barbarism…the deadly cocktail of words, bombs, proclamations, outrages. I sometimes wonder if it is possible to reach Jalaluddin Rumi on speed dial. To figure out where west starts and east begins….to know how much melanin or history would make me white, brown, black….to understand how many time zones and national anthems will make me belong here or there. Who will recite those lines?
“Not Christian or Jew or
Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.
Not any religion
or cultural system. I am
not from the east
or the west, not
out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not
natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all.
I do not exist,
am not an entity in this
world or the next,
did not descend from
Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is
the placeless, a trace
of the traceless.
Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved,
have seen the two
worlds as one and
that one
call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner,
only that breath breathing”.