Sunday, January 31, 2010

Most Popular

By Syedstauheed, *Tasveer Ghar's 'Illustrated Talk' on Nizamuddin Shrine* - MeriNews - Gurgaon, India
Saturday, January 23, 2010


New Delhi: Tasveer Ghar ["A House of Pictures", A Delhi-based digital archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture] showed its passion for Delhi's pilgrimage site Nizamuddin.

The capital's well known House for pictures, posters, calendar art, cinema hoardings and pilgrimage maps recently organized an 'Illustrated Talk' on the Sufi Shrine. It was held at Max Mueller Bhawan on January 22, 2010.

Yousuf Saeed, the current director of Tasveer Ghar, New Delhi, talked "Popular Islam and Urban Spaces: The Nizamuddin Shrine in New Delhi" with his passionate devotional posters.

The Sufi shrine of Chishti saint Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi is one of the most popular Muslim pilgrimage destinations in South Asia, attracting thousands of pilgrims of many faiths from all over India and the world.

Tasveer Ghar considers the event as work-in-progress and said it is part of a research and documentation project tracing the trans-cultural flows between Europe and Asia in Muslim popular iconography. The research is being conducted under the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows’, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

The illustrated talk put special stress on changes in image practices over time in response to the changes brought about by urbanization, movement of pilgrims, new technology, and competition from the Tableeghi and Wahabi ideologues in the vicinity.

[Visit Tasveer Ghar's website]

[Link to the Talk: http://www.tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/91/index.html]

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Mystical Horn

By Raul d'Gama Rose, *Spiritual Dimensions* - All About Jazz - USA

Friday, January 22, 2010

Every note trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith blows on his exquisite brass instrument brings a whole world of joy.

The sound of the Earth and the Heavens in every echo and ululation of the notes that flow out of his trumpet, dancing the interminable dance of lovers in unison, like sunrise and sunset, day and night. Each is an element of a cosmic double-helix intertwined and waltzing sensuously around each other.

Oh, the joy of Spiritual Dimensions, in the studio with the Golden Quintet on the first CD and in the live versions with octet and nonet groups on the second CD.

Listening to Smith's music is like being seduced by the hypnotic Sufi poetry of Rumi and—for that matter, the great Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros, who gave the world his magnum opus, Gramática Expositiva do Chão (Poesia quase toda) or Descriptive Grammar of the Ground (almost complete poems), that celebrated the spiritual wonders of nature in the in a decidedly concrete form.

Both CDs in this magnificent twin package celebrate Smith's long-standing love for the spiritual and his dedication to doing his bit for an ordered, loving Earth through nothing less than notes that echo with iridescent and glacial splendor. And this seems to be his life's work.

On the first CD, the Golden Quintet meditates on the depths of the divine mystery through a series of songs. Each song is fraught with an ionic charge so energetic that it sparkles from note to note—especially in "Al-Shadhili's Litany of the Sea: Sunrise," a patient and organic development that seems to pulse on the rhythm of daybreak, and through "Umar at the Dome of the Rock, parts 1 & 2," which also sizzles with a myriad epiphany of the confluence of Earth and sky.

"Crossing Sirat" is a sinister meditation of the terrors of the nether world that continue to interrupt the pristine celebration of human endeavor. The preponderance of bass and drums recalls the umbilical connection with the "African-ness" of nature.

The second CD is a live performance from April 2009. In his use of strings, broad echo and primordial wail, Smith takes his horn to a place he occupies in solitary splendor. This is a realm that Miles Davis began to inhabit in the years following his experiments with electronics until his death. Smith however uses minimal electronic interruptions. Rather, he maintains his explorations of spiritualism via extended performances in "Organic" and "Joy: Spiritual Fire: Joy," the latter climaxing in a kind of ecstatic Sufi dance.

In a clever programmatic maneuver, Smith pays homage to Angela Davis, an unforgettable pioneer of Black Consciousness in an eponymous song. And there is a taut musical excursion in a live version of "South Central L.A. Kulture."

There is no mistaking the importance of this record—both in its live and studio incarnations. It is proof that the spiritualism of music did not die with John Coltrane, but rather lives on through the mystical horn of Wadada Leo Smith.

Track listing: CD1: Al-Shadhili's Litany of the Sea: Sunrise; Pacifica; Umar at the Dome of the Rock, Parts 1 & 2; Crossing the Sirat; South Central L.A. Kulture. CD2: South Central L.A. Kulture; Angela Davis; Organic; Joy: The Spiritual Fire: Joy (In memory of Imam Warith Deen Mohammed).

Personnel: Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet; Vijay Iyer: piano, synthesizer (CD1); John Lindberg: acoustic bass; Pheeroan AkLaff: drums; Don Moye: drums (CD1); Michael Gregory: electric guitar (CD2); Brandon Ross: electric guitar (CD2); Nels Cline: 6- and 12-string electric guitar (CD2); Lamar Smith: electric guitar: (CD2#1, CD2#4); Okkyung Lee: cello (CD2); Skuli Sverrisson: electric bass (CD2).

Our Own Stories

By Ben Fulton, *Sundance: Muezzins and mohawks* - The Salt Lake Tribune - Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Thursday, January 21, 2010

The contemporary cultural clash of Muslim punk rockers in "The Taqwacores" -- and other personal and geopolitical faces of Islamic stories at this year's festival

As a Muslim-American growing up in Cleveland, Eyad Zahra experienced the struggle of fitting into American culture.

Driving home from an Islamic conference in Detroit with his father, two pick-up trucks cordoned the Zahra family car on the highway, then pelted it with beer cans.

As an American Muslim studying film at Florida State University, Zahra learned about the struggles of fitting into Islamic culture.

Active in the university's Muslim student group at the time, a co-ed told him flatly that film "was not a Muslim profession."

Years later, while working as a freelance film producer in Los Angeles, Zahra read about The Taqwacores, an underground novel by Muslim convert Michael Muhammad Knight.

The 254-page book tells the fictional story of Yusef Ali, a Pakistani engineering student in Buffalo, New York, whose life and religion get a complete overhaul and new lease on life when he moves off-campus. There, he lives with a group of renegade feminists, stoners and punk-rock Muslims with a taste for partying in the tradition of old-time Sufi mystics.

The book title itself -- a fusion of the Arabic word "taqwa," or love and understanding of God, followed by the suffix common to popular music genres -- was enough to take Zahra's breath away.

"Everything sort of stopped for a minute," Zahra said. "Almost immediately I got hold of a copy and read it in a couple of sittings. It said out loud so many things I had thought myself about being an American Muslim."

Zahra stopped every other project he was working on to meet Knight. He sent the writer a copy of his first film, "Stringed Instruments." Not long after the two met in person at New York City's Malcolm Shabazz Mosque in New York City, Zahra cut to the chase. He wanted to turn Knight's book into a movie.

Filmed on a shoe-string budget in Cleveland, where many of the film's acting cast slept in the basement of the Zahra family home, "The Taqwacores" is one of several films screening at this year's Sundance Film Festival dealing directly with, or tilting around, Islamic themes.

"Kick in Iran," "Fix ME," "The Oath," "Son of Babylon" and "Women Without Men" take on geopolitical issues of the Middle East. More personal is "Bilal's Stand, " which explores the life of a black Muslim teen torn between the family business and upward mobility.

By virtue of its surface and subject matter, it's safe to say that "The Taqwacores" is the most raucous of the group. At the very least, it's the only film of its kind, a modern and Islamic bildungsroman of an uptight young man confronted by peers who identify as Muslim, but in ways he's never known or considered.

Riffing on the Sufi imagery of drunkenness and romantic sexual love of Persian poet Rumi, young punkers help Yusef find his own tools for the creation of a new, individualistic Islam at home in both tradition and the secular world.

Zahra's film adaptation depicts the confusion and struggles of youth, while telling a parallel story about the challenge of creating breathing room for a distinctly American brand of Islam. In the process, the film makes mince of post-9/11 conceptions about the religion, and even bends the curve on how most Muslims see themselves.

"Whatever the media picks up and calls 'Muslim' is beyond our control," Zahrid said. "All we can do is tell our own stories. This is a movie that shows what normal young, American Muslims deal with. Events in Yemen or other places don't define us as American Muslims. At the same time, Muslims try to make themselves out as perfect creatures, when the reality is that we're very diverse."

Speaking from Harvard University where he's currently studying for a master's degree in Islamic studies, Knight said the film adaptation of his book couldn't have turned out better. A convert from his family's Roman Catholic faith at age 16, Knight, now 32, experienced a crisis of faith after spending two years at a religious school in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Disillusioned by Islam's fundamentalist tendencies, and convinced that all religion was flawed to an extent by teachings that strayed from their founding figures, he nevertheless felt he could not surrender his Muslim identity. The do-it-yourself ethic of punk rock, he said, became a sort of mosque without a stern imam.

"I remember going to Sufi shrines in Lahore where, every Thursday night, they bring out their drums, they bring out their weed [hash], and bang on drums and sing to Ali -- and that's Islam," Knight said.

"I'm not trying to show non-Muslims how diverse Islam is. I don't think most Muslims know how diverse Islam is. It's full of characters who rebelled against the orthodoxy and were sometimes killed for it. It's a rich, rich tradition."

Picture: A scene from "The Taqwacores," premiering at Sundance Film Festival 2010.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Bigger Than Self

By Rob Crilly, *Religious divide in Africa masks deep social problems* - The Scotsman - Edinburgh, Scotland
Friday, January 22, 2010

The divide is visible even from space – a band where equatorial greens give way to the browns, reds and yellows of the desert.

But just as the colours on Google Earth show the transition from tropical to arid, so too the transition marks a much more explosive divide: that between Christian and Muslim Africa.The band passes from east to west, splitting the continent in two, and dividing countries such as Nigeria, Sudan and Kenya by religion – Islam to the north, Christianity in the south.

The past week has shown the power of that divide. Not for the first time, the two Africas have collided, causing shockwaves felt all around the world.

In Nigeria, at least 3,000 people have fled their homes in the central city of Jos. Mosques, churches and houses were burned during the latest clashes between Christian and Muslim gangs. So far 149 people have been reported dead. Some 200 people died in similar violence in 2008, dwarfed by the 1,000 victims in 2001. For now an uneasy calm has been imposed, with a 24-hour curfew.

Days earlier, Kenya faced its own sectarian violence.Security forces using assault rifles and tear gas were called in when Muslims gathered in protest at the country's decision to detain a radical preacher. Among the throng were protesters waving the flag of al-Shabaab, the militant insurgent group that has brought a fragile government in Somalia to its knees. Things got out of hand when bystanders joined the police lines, hurling stones at the demonstrators.

It is not difficult to imagine an African future dominated by religious conflict. Muslims and Christians both see the region as a battleground for converts.

The Christian churches have seen their flock grow from nine million to almost 200 million in a century. Missionaries are now exported rather than imported. Africa no longer needs the David Livingstones who first brought the Bible alongside cases of medicine. For Christians, disillusioned with the West's secularism, the continent has become a defender of the Church's morals.

Conservative Anglican congregations in the United States have left their local dioceses to follow bishops in Zambia, Nigeria and Uganda, where Church leaders are pushing a bill that would impose the death penalty on homosexuals.

Meanwhile, radical Islam has made inroads among Africa's traditional, moderate Sufism. The Sudanese government came to power in a 1989 coup that heralded an Islamic cultural revolution. Extremists from around the world – including Osama bin Laden – were welcomed by a regime intent on creating an alternative world order.

Somalia's problems are well known. Beheadings, amputations and stonings are becoming commonplace as al-Shabaab imposes a particularly nasty form of Sharia law in areas under its control. Neighbouring Kenya is jittery, wondering if its own Muslim population will radicalise in the same way.

It is not a big leap to imagine a looming clash of civilisations. But just like the patterns observed from space, so the big picture of two faiths meeting head-on misses the local details that undermine the nightmare scenario.

The truth is that the two religions are not monoliths. Up close there are dozens of different churches, beliefs and creeds. Tensions within each religion – between the evangelists and the Roman Catholics, for example – are just as important as those between the faiths.

Nor was the violence in Nigeria or Kenya ultimately about religion. In a country like Nigeria, riddled with corruption, poverty and tribal tension, religion is often the glue that holds a people together. When things go wrong, it becomes the way that protest is expressed.

The gangs of thugs roaming Jos with murderous intent were not targeting Christians or Muslims out of religious conviction. Rather they were seeking individuals they believe to enjoy economic, social and political privileges.The same is true in Kenya, where an impoverished, neglected northern band of herders can feel part of a bigger community – an African ummah.

The past days have shown the power of that feeling: the power of belonging to something bigger than self on a continent where nationhood has a short, shaky history, where borders were drawn in the sand lumping disparate tribes together.

The violence was real and nasty. But to identity the problem as a problem of religion is to miss the local issues – a bit like blaming football hooliganism on disagreements over shirt colour.

• Rob Crilly's book, Saving Darfur, is published by Reportage Press on 9 February

[Picture from http://www.reportagepress.com/authors-name.php?author=36]

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Blowing In The Wind

By Desk Editor, *Blowing in the wind* - Dawn.com - Pakistan

Which is your favourite Sufi shrine in Pakistan? What sight from your last visit to a mazaar has stayed with you? Share your pictures from mausoleums across Pakistan with Dawn.com.


[Click on the title for the link]

Picture: A man is entranced at the mausoleum of Madhu Lal Hussain in Lahore. His hair, like the branches of the trees that hover above him, sway in the breeze in rememberance of God. Photo: Arif Ali/ White Star.

Through Personal Efforts

By Dr. Manzur Ejaz, *WASHINGTON DIARY: Elimination of ‘ideological boundaries’* - Daily Times - Pakistan

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

For Quaid-e-Azam, Pakistan was just a creation of a nation where the majority of citizens would be Muslims like Algeria, Turkey or Egypt. After their independence none of these countries adopted theocratic rule

A few days back Prime Minister Gilani reiterated that the army is diligently defending Pakistan’s geographical and ideological boundaries. One would like to believe that Mr Gilani is just puttering the oft-repeated cliché of ‘ideological boundaries.’ However, a closer examination shows that the ruling elites, while trying to eliminate armed religious bands, are trying their best to cling to the ‘ideological boundaries’ defined by Ziaul Haq and his pro-theocracy allies led by Jamaat-e-Islami (JI).

There were several questions regarding ‘ideological boundaries’ that had to be addressed first before the implementation of the concept, but Zia and his groomed military-civilian leadership snubbed the opposing views for political expediency of that period. First and foremost the question was: which religious school will be followed in defining the ‘ideological boundaries’? Will it be the Islam defined by the Sufis or by the mullahs? Second, how will the different sects consent to a consensus about the boundaries and third, can Pakistan claim to be a modern state if the minorities are accorded second or third class citizenship?

The most powerful justification for imposing the ‘ideological boundaries’ is given by the slogan that ‘Pakistan was created for Islam’ or ‘Pakistan ka matlab kia, La Ilaha Illilah’. Before 1970 such slogans were very rare and Ayub Khan’s successful suppression, good or bad, of pro-theocracy forces — Maulana Maududi was sentenced to death and his life was spared due to external appeals — shows that religious forces were not in a challenging position.

The religious grouping could not gain credence because they had opposed the creation of Pakistan and the founder of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was quite clear that Pakistan was not going to be an Islamic theocratic state. He was a westernised liberal person with routines that would be prohibited by Ziaul Haq’s defined ideological boundaries. I am sure the great Quaid would have spent his entire life behind bars if he had continued with his breakfast and evening routines. For Quaid-e-Azam, Pakistan was just a creation of a nation where the majority of citizens would be Muslims like Algeria, Turkey or Egypt. After their independence none of these countries adopted theocratic rule.

The slogan mentioned above was popularised to combat Zulifkar Ali Bhutto and his People’s Party. The religious parties and traditional ruling classes perceived Bhutto as a mischief-maker intent upon unleashing, intentionally or otherwise, liberal and progressive trends. As a matter of fact, when the JI popularised the slogan ‘Pakistan ka matlab kia, La Ilaha Illilah’, Habib Jalib gave the real meaning to this slogan in his very famous poem of the time in these words:

“Khait wadairon se lay lo, milein lutairon se ley lo,
Koi rehay na aali-jah, Pakistan ka matlab kia La Ilaha Illilah.”

(Take the land from the feudal and mills from the exploiters. No super-citizen should exist any more. This is the meaning of La Ilaha Illilah.)

Alas! Habib Jalib lost in defining the slogan and his opponents won even during Bhutto’s regime when he declared Ahmadis a minority, banned liquor and racing and designated Friday as a weekly holiday. Zia, supported and brought to power by the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) — a joint front of mullahs, ruling elites with tactical military support — took Bhutto’s hypocritical Islamisation to its logical conclusion.

After the ideological boundaries were fully defined, whatever happened was against every big or small desire Habib Jalib had expressed in his memorable poem. Unlike 1970, land reforms, increasing labour’s share in industry, giving people shelter, bread, education and health services was never put on any party’s election manifesto or were never made the focus of the election debates. In the 1970 elections the atmosphere was so progressive that even the JI had to insert a limit on land holdings in its manifesto.

So-called strengthening of the ideological boundaries freed everyone of social responsibility and in a convoluted manner individuals went on a binge for personal gains. It was in direct contravention of Sufi Islam, where the individual was made responsible to himself and to fellow humans around him/her and the state or Shariah (state-imposed rules) had nothing to do with personal or societal well being. Sufi thought emerged as a revolt against the negative social experience under theocracy. The essence of Sufi thought sought love and liberation through personal efforts, leaving the worldly rule-making in the hands of the state. It meant that the state should be secular and religious practices should be left to individuals.

The Sufis’ experience once again proved its validity. Except comforting the mullahs by banning alcohol, prostitution, gambling, etc., the imposition of so-called ideological boundaries gave birth to every possible social ill. Not only the consumption of alcohol increased manifold, heroin and other fatal drugs became common. Prostitution, ousted from Shahi Mohallas, proliferated in every corner of every city. The only change that took place was that the police and civil administration increased their income from pimps and bootleggers.

Besides the spread of social ills, ideological boundaries gave birth to quite expected sectarianism. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sipah-e-Sahaba, Tanzim-i-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) and many other sectarian organisations created havoc in the country, unleashing the murders of innocent citizens. And it was the reign of demonological boundaries that gave birth to Salafi Islam that created the Taliban and other types of jihadis. It is interesting that other than Saudi Arabia, no Muslim country has emulated the Salafi version of Islam. It is also noteworthy that this version of Islam, prevailing in tribal Saudi Arabia, has resonated in limited circles of Pashtun tribals (not among settled or urbanised Pashtuns) and nowhere else. Therefore, the entire gambit of ‘ideological boundaries’ and its impact has to be re-examined. Eliminating the Taliban or the armed jihadis is just the starting point and the deep rooted ideological troubles are not going to go away automatically.

Heart Touching

By Brief Editor, *Poetic collection of Qudsi published* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Islamabad: A poetic collection of noted Sufi saint Asadur Rehman Qudsi titled ‘Kulyat-e-Qudsi’ has been published from Qalandar-i-Zaman.

The collection consists of three volumes, which has been compiled by senior teacher of Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) Dr. Mahmudur Rehman.

This collection carries a comprehensive biography and memorable photographs of Hazrat Qudsi besides comments of national poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal about the heart touching and spiritualistic poetry of Qudsi.

Hazrat Qudsi went to Madina in 1940 who was Qalandar of Asia at the time and was granted title of Qalandar-i-Zaman.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Unacceptable In Islam

By Ruth Gledhill, *Muslim group Minhaj-ul-Quran issues fatwa against terrorists* -

Sunday, January 17, 2010

A leading Muslim organisation in Britain has issued a fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism, declaring them un-Islamic.
Minhaj-ul-Quran, a Sufi organisation based in East London which advises the Government on how to combat radicalisation of Muslim youth, will launch the 600-page religious verdict tomorrow. It condemns the perpetrators of terrorist explosions and suicide bombings.

The document, written by Dr Muhammed Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former minister of Pakistan and friend of Benazir Bhutto, declares suicide bombings and terrorism as "totally un-Islamic". It is one of the most detailed and comprehensive documents of its kind to be published in Britain.

The fatwa, which was released in Pakistan last month, uses texts from the Koran and other Islamic writings to argue that attacks against innocent citizens are "absolutely against the teachings of Islam and that Islam does not permit such acts on any excuse, reason or pretext".
Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri, who is based in Canada and has written more than 400 books on Islamic law, said: "All these acts are grave violations of human rights and constitute kufr, disbelief, under Islamic law."

Minhaj-ul-Quran is an organisation based in 80 countries that follows Sufi teachings of peace and moderation. It is gaining influence in Britain as the Government seeks to gain ground among Muslim groups eager to combat the radicalisation of young people.

The group receives no government funding but its agenda is comparable to the official Prevent strategy, under which community organisations are encouraged to work together to counter extremism.

Radical Islamists will dismiss the fatwa but it will be welcomed by many Muslims from the large community of South Asian heritage in Britain, among whom confusion about religious teaching is exploited by extremists seeking to recruit suicide bombers.

"Extremist groups start brainwashing the young students from British universities and eventually convince them to oppose integration in British society," said Shahid Mursaleen, a spokesman for Minhaj-ul-Quran.

The fatwa would help fight extremist recruitment of young Muslims and was "one of the most comprehensive verdicts on this topic in the history of Islam", he added.

Inayat Bunglawala, former spokesman of the Muslim Council of Britain and founder of the new group Muslims4UK, set up to counter the radical message of the newly banned Islam4UK and other extremist groups, welcomed the fatwa.

"This adds to the view of many Islamic scholars internationally that terrorism and suicide bombings are unacceptable in Islam," he said. "It is a positive initiative. Anything that helps move young people away from violence and from those who promote violence must be welcomed."

[Visit Minhaj-ul-Quran's website]

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

A Search For Answers

By Fiachra Gibbons, *The prayers of Peter Brook* - The Guardian - London, UK

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Will theatre's great experimenter ever stop? As he nears 85, Peter Brook reveals why his new play, about a brutal religious war, was 50 years in the making

Peter Brook looks straight through you. As he holds out his hand to greet you, you can almost feel the ­actors whose hopes ­foundered as his pale blue eyes took the temperature of their souls. To see the great man, you must cross the stage of the former Paris ­musical hall Brook calls his mosque, and climb up a narrow, twisting ­staircase to a kind of platform where the most influential theatre director of the past 60 years spends his days, perched like a Himalayan holy man, a futon in the corner, above the railway lines of the Gare du Nord, scene of some of the most baleful comings and goings of the last century, from the trenches to the camps.

Just short of 85, the man before me, rubbing his large, expressive hands against the cold, has shrunk in his clothes. The Master is suddenly smaller, older, his nose bigger, his eyes more blue, his voice more nasal. In short, he is more like another of his many monikers, the King of the Trolls.

The day before I mounted the stairs at the Bouffes du Nord, now ­painstakingly restored to a chic ­shabbiness, I rang a young British ­playwright and a director to ask what they really thought of Brook now. "I still believe in God, but I don't feel the need to go to church any more," the writer said. "Look, he has best ­theatrical brain since Brecht, but he hasn't done anything decent for 20 years, not since The Mahabharata. I blame the French. He's gone mouldy like their cheese."

The director bemoaned how Brook had become as much a sacred cow as the "holy theatre" he once raged against. Everything he does is ­expected to be a milestone. "If Brook was to stand and fart for an hour on the stage of the National, you will have people queuing to tell you he is a ­genius. The myth has killed the man."

There is certainly a danger of ­forgetting what Brook has achieved. This is the man who, ­having made his name as a master of eye-popping ­spectacle, suddenly stripped stages bare and let audiences' imaginations do the work for them. In productions like Marat/Sade and The Ik, he pared theatre back to the human body itself; then, with Ted Hughes's Orghast, went one step further by dispensing with words altogether in the search for a universal language of grunts, cries and sighs. Always Brook seems to be searching for the shock of the simple, resurrecting the use of masks, mime and puppets from traditional ritual and performance, to show how little is needed to transport audiences. Yet his ideas, once so revolutionary, have now been so absorbed by the mainstream they have become obvious, even banal.

The Brook I find before me is ­somehow more himself, more ­reduced, more human, as if a balance has finally been found between the Monster and the Mystic. The ­octogenarian Brook is, if anything, more in a hurry than the fortysomething one who burned through the RSC, the West End and Broadway in a fever of ­invention, exhausting the ­possibilities of ­conventional theatre before ­disappearing literally into the desert with a band of actor-disciples including a young Helen Mirren, who got to dig the latrines.

Brook began to slip into exile in the late 1960s, shortly after writing The Empty Space, whose opening lines became the commandments on which modern theatre was built: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."

For the next three years, he tested his theories and the limits of his troupe in every fly-blown African village they threw their carpet down in. He worked and reworked Orghast, as well as his own adaptation of the Persian epic The ­Conference of the Birds, travelling from the Sahara to the Niger Delta and then to India, Afghanistan and Iran, seemingly oblivious to the threats of dysentery and defection. The ­results of these ­experiments changed theatre for ever and made Brook the father of fringe.

'Violence is the ultimate laziness'
Yet only now is Brook finishing the play that was one of the drivers of that journey. Eleven and Twelve has been stewing away in his head for nearly 50 years. Played out on an almost bare, sand-strewn stage with a cast drawn from all corners of the earth, it is the essence of Brook: spare, ­deceptively simple, profound and magical, ­throwing open a trapdoor into a world where its audiences would never ­otherwise have tumbled. The work, which comes to London next month, is based on the memoir of an obscure Malian Muslim mystic, Tierno Bokar, a leader who put an end to a bloody religious war by conceding that his opponents were right. He would have passed unnoticed outside west Africa had not one of his disciples, the writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, bumped into Brook in the 1950s.

On one level, this story of a dispute between sufis (who seek oneness with God and nature) over whether a prayer should be said 11 or 12 times is an ­allegory on fundamentalism. It also works as a critique of divide-and-rule colonialism, with Mali's French rulers turning one group against ­another as demands for ­independence mount before the second world war. But perhaps it is most ­powerful as a parable on the ­sacrifice that ­tolerance demands, as Bokar is ­eventually ­ostracised by his own people.

"To be violent is the ultimate ­laziness," Brook says. "War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol." To him, the tolerance practised by the UN – with its muddy ­compromises and horse trading, born of "old-fashioned English liberalism" – is not tolerance. "It is not taking the bull by the horns and saying from the start: whatever our differences, nothing is going to be the cause of violence between our tribes. That is the most difficult choice of all, and it is one that Tierno makes, knowing, like Martin Luther King, that he will have to pay for it."

Brook has already taken one bite at the story of Bokar four years ago, but typically he wasn't ­satisfied (he ­reworked The ­Mahabharata for 20 years before letting go). The ­perfectionism and endless ­experimentation come from his ­scientist parents. In his ­memoir, Threads of Time, he tells how his father, a man with a quotation for every occasion, would return home to find his wife conducting experiments in the kitchen rather than cooking ­dinner. Brook senior, who invented the laxative that was to bear the family's name and secure its fortune, believed everything could be improved, and never left home without a pencil and paper to prove the point.

"As a young man, I experimented with everything," he says. Men, women, ideas, drugs. "LSD opened me to perceptions I did not know were there, though I only tried it once."

An epiphany with Salvador Dalí
Eleven and Twelve's themes of ­letting go and the need to pass on wisdom chime with a man in the ­middle of his ninth decade. "One tries to leave a ­living trace with people, in which they can reflect on what they are ­doing. The thing that I have a horror of is ­ideological theatre – Shakespeare never told us how to think. I have great ­respect for Brecht, but his path is not mine."

The play keys into another ­side of Brook that journalists and ­biographers have shied away from, ­either out of fear or embarrassment: his lifelong search for a spiritual path, ­beyond the success and ­celebrity that came so early and ­easily. There is more than a little of the sufi in Brook. And in Bokar, he has found a hero of ­Shakespearean scope who matches his own ­spiritual master, the Russian-Armenian mystic George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, whose ­Meetings With ­Remarkable Men, a partly ­imagined ­account of his ­wanderings among the sufis of central Asia at the turn of the last century, Brook filmed in ­Afghanistan before the ­Russian invasion.

Gurdjieff's ideas on movement and proportion, strongly influenced by the dervishes he encountered in ­Istanbul in the dying days of the ­Ottoman empire, had a profound ­effect on the young Brook. "I couldn't believe that scientific thinking and religious ­thinking should be in ­opposition. There must be a link. When I saw that what we call beauty is not an aesthetic matter, but that there is an absolute law, the golden section, that relates to proportions and numbers, I knew at once it made sense." His first epiphany came while reading a book by the ­Romanian prince Matila Ghika while staying with Salvador Dalí in Spain. Classical art, it turned out, owed its harmony to its ­mathematical relationship to the human body. To a boy brought up on his father's ­maxims that everything becomes clear when reduced to numbers, this was powerful stuff.

Gurdjieff had died by the time Brook discovered him, but he still may have taught Brook a thing or two about ­being a guru. Artists don't so much work with him as join him on a journey. The sufi ­disciplines Gurdjieff adopted from the dervishes appear to have given a structure to Brook's restless, questing spirit – which saw its greatest flowering, up until now, in his sublime The Conference of the Birds. In it, the hoopoe bird leads all the birds of the earth towards their master. Only 30 last the course. Yet Brook is guarded, extraordinarily so, about Gurdjieff's influence. "This is something so rich that nothing would be more harmful than trying to ­encapsulate it in a few easy phrases." What would mysticism be, after all, without its mystery?

Yet it is to The Conference of the Birds, and an old sufi parable about butterflies and a candle, that Brook turns for the ­final image in Eleven and Twelve. All the ­butterflies wonder what the light on top of the candle is and what would ­happen if they entered it. The bravest throws himself into the flame and, as he ­disappears, the ­butterflies' master says: "This one has finally ­understood. And he is the only one who knows. And that is all."

Someone came to Brook the ­night I saw the play and told him that this meditation on the search for the truth and the price it demands could be taken as a justification for suicide bombing. Was the butterfly not blowing himself up for God? "I ­suppose," says Brook with heavy sarcasm, "this young person is rather pleased with himself, that he has discovered what all [Bokar's] talk of non-violence really hides – that it is to encourage suicide bombing?" For a fleeting second, there is anger in those cool, blue eyes.

For the past 70 years, Brook has been a butterfly throwing himself at a flame. His life, too, has been a search for answers to the big questions. But there will always be those who don't or won't get it. And, even at 84, you get the feeling that he will never quite understand why.

Eleven and Twelve
Barbican, London
Starts 5 February, until 27 February
(Featuring alongside a season of Peter Brook's films)
Box office: 0207 638 4141

• Peter Brook will give the inaugural Peter Brook lecture at the Barbican Pit on 6 February 2010 at 4pm. He will be in conversation on 9 February 2010.

Picture: Passing on wisdom … Brook in Paris. Photo by Graeme Robertson

Monday, January 25, 2010

A Point Of Reference

By SN Staff Writer, *World Food Program to pull out of Somalia* - Spero News
Saturday, January 16, 2010

Autonomous moderate Sufi Muslims appear to be making inroads in their fight against Muslim extremists: the Shabab militia.

"I am very concerned about the humanitarian situation in south-central Somalia, where 3 to 4 million people depend on international aid for their survival," according to Catholic Bishop Giorgio Bertin of Djibouti, who is also Apostolic Administrator at Mogadishu.

"Now that the World Food Program has decided to withdraw its personnel from the area, the situation of these people may become dramatic. I understand the motivations of the leadership of WFP, but we must find ways to continue to assist these people," said Bishop Bertin. In early January, the WFP decided to suspend operations in Somalia following an ultimatum by the fundamentalist Shabab militia, which had previously attacked and looted the humanitarian organization's facilities several times.

"Also, the Somali refugees in some facilities in Kenya are in difficulty because of the floods that hit the country in recent weeks," said Bishop Bertin. "Regarding the 10,000 Somali refugees in Djibouti, their situation is difficult, but overall stable. The Catholic Church has entered into an agreement with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for a program of help and support for these people."

On the political plane, there have been new developments: autonomous groups of moderate Muslims, Sufi-inspired, independent allies of the legitimate government, are defeating the fundamentalist Shabab militia.

"In Somalia, the Sufi confraternities, representing traditional Islam Somali, have lost much of their influence in comparison to over 30-40 years ago, but they are still a point of reference for part of the population," said Bishop Bertin. "The call to traditional Islam, using the Sufi confraternities, could be part of a strategy to use the religious sentiment against those movements, such as the Shabab, who use religion for political ends, a strategy promoted by foreign powers that have long been interfering in the affairs of Somalia.”

In the northern part of Somalia, Somaliland, a region that declared independence from the rest of the country in 1991 (though their independence is not recognized by the international community), the internal tensions related to the postponement of the elections are likely to cause an explosion of violence among different clans, which had so far, unlike the south of Somalia, secured a certain stability to the area.

"If this happens, the Shabab, which already has tried to penetrate the area, will take advantage," said Bishop Bertin. Somaliland is located opposite Yemen, where the government, which is facing two armed uprisings, is worried that the thousands of Somali refugees will take on extremist positions.

People Do

By ENS Staff Writer, *‘Sufism a panacea for all social evils’* - Indian Express - India

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Patiala: Sufism is a panacea for issues related to violence and hatred and an elixir for those who feel inclined to share and promote love, compassion and empathy among mankind for making this world a better place to live. It is the epitome of secularism and the basic premise of a pluralistic society.

These views were expressed by speakers during the valedictory function of a two-day national seminar on ‘Sufism and Sufi Literature’ that concluded at Punjabi University on Friday.

Syed Sarwar Chishti from Gaddi Nashin, Dargah Sharif in Ajmer and H K Dua, Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune were the guests of honour.

Talking of ‘Talibanisation of Islam’, Chishti said militants, who are bent upon destroying the pious fabric of the religion through their virulent and disruptive acts, were the outcome of false indoctrination coupled with ignorance.

“We have to remain vigilant and cautious against spilling over of extremism from across the border as these brutal forces won’t find scarcity of resources to help them in their dastardly mission,” Chishti said.

While assuring the Vice-Chancellor all support in establishing a Sufi Centre, he called upon the media to play a responsible role to help revive a peaceful and congenial atmosphere.

Dua, in his address, said that Sufism provides the most befitting answer to the theory of ‘Clash of Civilisations’.

Rating internal strifes as more dangerous than external aggressions, Dua said that various existing denominations have no remedies but people do have.

Vice-Chancellor Jaspal Singh reiterated that truthful living was the quintessence of Sufism.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

A Sufi Muslim

By Mading Ngor, *Profile - Yasir Said Arman: The altruistic freedom fighter * - The New Sudan Vision - Canada

Friday, January 15, 2010

On Friday, Yasir Said Arman was nominated as the presidential candidate to lead the SPLM to April’s elections. The profile has been modified to fit current events. It was conducted on August 15, 2007 while Arman was in the United States of America.

(Victoria, BC NSV) - Just from what angle does one begin to narrate the story of an audacious freedom fighter whose prime preoccupation has been a better Sudan for all without understating or overstating? The story of Yasir Said Arman is characterized by altruistic human values, freedom and dignity for all irrespective of race, religion or culture.

At the period when Sudan was undergoing political hardships and upheavals in the 70's and early 80's—at the time when the relative optimism ushered in by the 12 years of Adis Ababa was slowly being dusted by the ominous Shariah decrees of Jaafer Nimeri—Yasir Arman was a student nearing graduation. A son of a primary school teacher who loved taking the young Arman to different places in the north, Arman developed an avid interest in literature and children's books.

At the heydays of his youth, he was a consumer of leftist literature –focusing primarily on identity, ethnicity and ideology. Specifically, he was an admirer of the African National Congress (ANC) and its approach to the diversity question in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-racial country like South Africa at the time when the ANC was deemed a terrorist organization by the apartheid government. Perhaps Arman had Sudan in mind and was glancing outside to reconcile the internal policies and the approaches of subsequent Khartoum governments with the diversity question and settle for the best.

While Arman struggled to understand the myriad realities besetting harmony of Sudan from the South African experience, he not only turned internally to seek for answers but also to provide answers like a field researcher after years of field work. Arman used to have regular intense political discussions with fellow students and colleagues concerning the political makeup and realities of Sudan. One of those was Macur Thon Arok, who he speaks highly about, having partially been instrumental in inspiring Arman to rock the boat of the People's Movement, SPLM/SPLA. Aside from Macur, the SPLM Manifesto, SPLM Radio and Dr. John Garang's vision of New Sudan stirred Arman to the SPLM's direction.

"[Dr. Garang's call for] a Sudan that belongs to all its people struck me very much and I became interested in the political discourse of the SPLM," he says. Previously, Arman has been a student activist where he met those he calls "interesting personalities" at school. He and colleagues were absorbed by the “Southern question” and the first civil war that raged on from 1965 until the signing of the Adis Ababa Agreement between the Anya Nya and the government of Jaafer Nimeri in 1972.

Arman has reasons to subscribe to the vision of New Sudan. As a student he had witnessed firsthand rifts between student movements of divergent political persuasions, religions and ethnic groups. He developed very strong links with southern students both at the intermediate and the university levels. Of the southern students that he befriended in intermediate school were Macur Thon Arok, Chol Biar, Ador Deng Ador, David Bulen Alier, Jacob Bulen Alier and Santino Lado. Macur, who Arman says approached the “southern question” with caution and with whom he exchanged views on southern Sudan went on to become a captain in the Sudanese army. Sadly, as Arman explains, "Macur was killed in cold blood in 1992..." Chol Biar and Ador Deng are now senior SPLM commanders, Arman says, while he gives no mention of David Bulen Alier and Jacob Bulen Alier. Santino went on to become an artist but Arman doesn't know his whereabouts.

In university, his political activism sparked the ire of the authoritarian regime of Jaafer Nimeri. He was detained and locked up in jail together with Southern students he says helped shape his political worldview: Hoth Gor and John Luk of Anya Nya Two Movement and David da Kok. Undeterred, Arman and the three were defiant and unanimously condemned Nimeri's heavy-handed approach to the “southern question” and called for a democratic resolution of the civil war while in prison from 1984 to 1985. Out of prison, he says, "came the great call of the SPLM of Diktoor John Garang de Mabior for the New Sudan."

A Sudan of equality and tolerance that didn't discriminate its citizens based on religion and race was an attractive idea for Arman. Born in 1961 in Jezeera, about 180 kilometers from Khartoum, he traces his roots to diverse backgrounds and tribes in Sudan. His great, great parents migrated before the Mahdist revolution from Damael state near Shendi to Jezeera and Khartoum. A graduate of law, Arman studied at the Cairo University branch of Khartoum and joined the SPLM in the same year, 1986.

Although the SPLM embraces religion and diversity in its manifesto, as a new arrival in 1986, some individuals in the SPLM were ambivalent about him. He says he experienced subtle religious prejudice. Some thought he might have been sent by Khartoum to infiltrate and destabilize the Movement from within. In northern Sudan, he was portrayed as a betrayer and a disgrace to his people. Arman was not the only high-profile Muslim in the SPLM. There were many influential SPLM officers like the late Yousif Kuwo Mekki who believed in the Islamic faith who might have faced religious intolerance at the initial phase.

"As time went on, we managed to overcome those [barriers]. We managed to build confidence with people with whom we were working in the SPLM and we became part of the SPLM hardcore," he says.

"We were building a new society to overcome religion. That helped to overcome whatever happened." A Sufi Muslim, Arman calls his faith traditional Islam integrated with African cultures and traditions as opposed to a militant and political Islam. During the war, it was not lost on Arman that to be a liberator comes with a price tag.

Unlike in other marginalized peripheries where Arman was extolled as a hero, some of his immediate family members looked at him from lenses filtered through the eyes of Khartoum and was to those, a villain. However, he enjoyed wide backing from most of his lineage members, he says. "All my family were very supportive to me. They were proud of what I did and am proud of that too."

Meanwhile, the National Islamic Front would routinely round up and interrogate Arman's brothers to discourage him from his conviction and belief that Sudan must be new and inclusive. However, Arman and family didn’t capitulate to the oppressive regime and stayed true to the cause up to the end of the war. "It's part of the struggle," he says.

Marriage

"This has nothing to do with politics," he says about his marriage to Awuor Deng Kuol. The future husband and wife first run into each other in Adis Ababa when Arman used to work for SPLM information secretariat in 1989.

"We liked each other from that time and now and for the time in the future to come," he declares. A man of principles, Arman has pursued an inspirational revolutionary path. He is an independent thinker. He follows his heart and ideals as his participation in the SPLM demonstrates and his marriage to a Ngok Dinka – an apparent break with tradition for love -- all a revolution and a worthy one, he says.

"For me it wasn't a difficult decision to like my wife and to decide to marry her. That was a decision any person reaches at a time when he decides it's the right time to marry."
He gives his marriage a clean bill of health but cautions, "There are always people here and there who will see it positively or negatively. But the most important thing is; it's me and my wife." A father of two, their marriage is blessed with two daughters, Shanaa 18, born in December 1992, and Wafaa (honesty), 13, born in January 1997. Arman says he is indebted to his wife and lauds her bold efforts for taking care of the young girls as Arman was often away for the SPLA war of liberation. He commends the sacrifices of Awuor Deng Kuol who gave up school, family and education for the SPLM.

A member of the famous Katipa Banaat (Girls Battalion), Awuor, like Arman aspired for a better life for all regardless of differences in humans. The couple saw SPLM as the rightful channel for achieving equity and just peace.

"I am indebted to [my wife] who shared the strength, and herself she is a freedom fighter," he says. "She really contributed a lot in encouraging me and we stood with each other throughout the last fifteen years." Understanding equals love. The marriage of Arman to Awuor was exemplary. Both traditional African ceremonies and Muslim rituals were honoured and observed. They tied their knot in the historical town of Torit, notwithstanding the threats of bombs and guns emanating from Kor Ingiliiz when the NIF regime was trying vainly to make a comeback.

The marriage might have been cross-cultural to many but to Arman, "It was a basic human being wedding."

Politics

"Things will never be changed in Juba, this is the experience of the SPLM. Without changing things in Khartoum you cannot even reach the self-determination," he reechoes the prophetic words of Dr. John Garang that a fish rots from the head and not from the tail. Traditionally, Khartoum has been the head and Arman argues there will not be a quick rear door entrance to south's independence before there is any democratic restructuring of power in Khartoum.

"The self-determination and separation of south Sudan is theoretically in the books, it's a long way to go," he says. His observations are familiar. Khartoum has abrogated several agreements in the past and there is no reason to doubt history may repeat itself as CPA is largely on the verge of collapse. By far the obvious way forward and with many southerners' eyes fixed on separation, he says he has nothing against south Sudan if it opts for secession and warns celebrating separation now is premature.

"To reach the separation of south Sudan, you need the unity of the SPLM. You need those who fought the war with you. People from the Nuba Mountains and South Blue Nile and all over Sudan. Dr. Garang's vision is a great vision which can bring unity on a new basis or separation," he says. Even when south Sudan does separate and form its own independent state, he goes on, New Sudan Vision will still be relevant whether in Darfur or anywhere else.

"The vision of New Sudan is important even if south Sudan separated. How do you rule south Sudan because it is also diverse? There are different tribes, cultures and religions.
"So you need the vision of New Sudan to bring these commonalities together,” he says. Arman urges south Sudanese to rally behind SPLM, saying it's the only organized, diverse and inclusive party in Sudan. "Southern Sudanese, themselves, until the end of Anya Anya didn't have real organizations. There was Anya Nya of Bhar el Ghazal, the Anya Nya of Upper Nile and the Anya Nya of Equatoria.'"

Says Arman: "The SPLM for me is not a political party or political movement or political institution; the SPLM for me is more. It's part of the national building and formation because in the SPLM you get people from different nationalities, ethnic and religious backgrounds together." As a leading figure in SPLM Nothern Sector (now SPLM national presidential candidate), he engaged in rallies in 49 cities in the west, east and the center in post-CPA period.

He says he found thousands who uphold the vision of New Sudan. This compels him to say, "I believe the vision of Dr. Garang is very much alive more than any time before.
"The New Sudan Vision cannot die because if you're talking about it dying with Garang that means Dr. Garang is really dead but Dr. Garang is not dead and as a result his vision is alive." Arman says his proudest moment in life was not when he was carried on the shoulders upon returning to Khartoum with SPLM delegation for the first time in more than 20 years. His proudest day was "When Dr. Garang was received by millions in Khartoum. That was a clear message from all over the Sudanese society that the Sudanese people appreciate the vision and the leadership of the SPLM," he says.

Garang's triumphant return to Khartoum, Arman reasons, suggests the "people in the north and in the center in particular appreciate what we did and they see the reality of the situation and that our involvement with the SPLM is important for the national building and liberation of societies from all prejudices and building a new society to overcome [religious differences]."

He says that by the end of the day, "I believe in the capabilities of our people, whether they are from the north, the south or the west or the east or the center." Arman's relationship with the late Dr. John Garang was that of “comradeship.” He touts Garang as "the best politician Sudan has ever had in more than 100 years." In the 19th century, Arman says, the Mahdist revolution’s front man, Mohamed Ahmed Al Mahdi was the other colorful politician matchable only by Garang's charisma.
“The real question”
At any rate, Arman is an altruistic freedom fighter. His unselfish toils for a new Sudan, he once told Iowa State Newspaper, "Not the Sudan of today, a Sudan of misery and wars and human rights violations. My dream is of a new Sudan, which respects human rights, in which every citizen feels he belongs to that country."

If the question itches you too—don't' worry it's not the real one. What happens to Yasir Arman and Mansour Khalid to name but a few when south Sudan separates? “It's not the real question,” he says. The real question—he says with the vigour in which he took up arms 20 years ago—"The real question is the fate of Sudan, not the fate of individual.

"I never ask myself this question because am not going to live forever but Sudan will live forever. It is the fate of the south Sudan, the fate of the west, the fate of the north, and the fate of central Sudan that's the one concerning me. It's not about the individual because the individual can die or relocate."

After more than 21 years of bush life and the struggle that is ongoing with the challenges facing the CPA, Arman maintains, "I think that it [joining the SPLM] was one of the greatest decisions in my life. I am proud that I made that decision and I thank all the people and everybody who contributed to what I did 21 years ago.

"I am touched by the hundreds of people whom I knew very well. Our martyrs who lost their lives are the ones who made the SPLM: those who are not there."

As it emerges that the SPLM has nominated Arman to be its presidential candidate, it remains to be seen whether this great freedom fighter will be the next president of the Republic of Sudan in April’s elections.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Reverence To The Soul

By Sampurn Media, *Tabla Maestro Sovon Hazra pays tribute to Dr. Anand* - Planet Radio City - India
Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Sometimes there are such promising people who can create new levels of excellence in various fields of life which is not a cake walk for many and Sovon Hazra is one of them.

The Tabla Maestro, Sovon is a well known tabla player who is on an aim to create magical nights for ardent music lovers.

Recently on the occasion of Dr. Mulk Raj Anand’s 105th birth anniversary, Sovon Hazra along with Suhail Yusuf Khan (Grandson of Ustad Sabri Khan) on Sarangi gave a mesmerizing performance to offer reverence to the soul of Mulk Raj in Delhi.

Sovon Hazra had also performed last year on the same occasion with the famous Sufi singer Hans Raj Hans which is still fresh in the minds of the audience.

Behind The Music

By Staff Writer, *Oscar winner plays for peace* - The Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney, Australia

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Amid tension over attacks on Indian students, a musical superstar wants to help, writes Matt Wade.

Can Bollywood rhythms help soothe international tensions? A.R. Rahman, the superstar of contemporary Indian music who created the Oscar-winning soundtrack for the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire, thinks they can.

As fury grows on the subcontinent over attacks on Indians in Australia, Rahman will stage a free concert in Sydney's Parramatta Park on Saturday to "build a bridge of understanding". Rahman suggested the show as a gesture of goodwill.

"This concert is a statement of friendship, peace and love," he says before leaving for Australia.
Rahman's desire to stage the concert underscores how deeply the attacks have been felt across India. He considers it his "duty" as a musician to help promote understanding between both countries.

"The show is to celebrate … music and friendship. I feel a concert is a very spiritual gathering where people from many different backgrounds can come together doing the same thing. It's a great way to make a statement of love and peace."

Rahman's show, which is part of the Sydney Festival, was announced last August after a series of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney. The assaults received blanket media coverage in India and damaged Australia's reputation as a safe destination for students.
Tension has flared again in the past fortnight after the violent deaths of two Indians in Australia, including the stabbing murder in Melbourne of former student Nitin Garg. These incidents have made Rahman's visit more poignant.

He hopes the Parramatta show will help break down cultural misunderstandings and boost the morale of tens of thousands of Indians studying in Australia.
"It's not just the music, it is what's behind the music," he says. "I really hope we get a positive response in Australia."

The celebrated score for Slumdog Millionaire won Rahman two Oscars, a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe last year and introduced him to a global audience. The film's uplifting anthem, Jai Ho, became an international hit, topping the charts in several countries including Australia.
"There is now more recognition for my work," Rahman says. "I can walk into any studio and talk to any artist … I have the freedom to be more choosy and to express what I want to express in my music."

Rahman has achieved hero status in India and his success is symbolic of a new, more internationally oriented and globally influential India. He has fond memories of playing to packed crowds in Sydney and Melbourne in 2005. "They were some of my best audiences," he says. "There was great hospitality … There was a lot of encouragement and a lot of love so that's what forced us to come back again."

Rahman says about 80 people will be involved in Saturday's high-energy concert, which is expected to be one of the highlights of this year's festival.

"It's a showcase of all the stuff I've done for 18 years … It will be packed with lots of exciting things like video, lights and dance. There are a lot of positive things coming together for this and I hope it's a great success."

Even before last year's international triumph, Rahman had experienced huge success in his homeland where film and pop music merge. He started as a session musician and composed jingles for commercials in his home town of Chennai, formerly Madras. Rahman launched his career as a film composer in the thriving South Indian movie industry which produces hundreds of films each year in languages such as Tamil and Telugu.

In 1992 he gained critical acclaim for his score for the film Roja and was soon writing music for Bollywood and beyond. He has written more than 100 film scores, typically churning out five or six a year.

Rahman's film scores and soundtracks have reportedly achieved sales of more than 300 million, making him one of the best-selling recording artists in the world.

A Time magazine critic described him as the ''Mozart of Madras'' and the magazine included Rahman in its list of the world's most influential 100 people last year.

The 44-year-old's personal story reflects India's religious diversity. Rahman's father, a composer, was a Hindu and his mother a Muslim. He was given the Hindu-sounding name - A.S. Dileep Kumar - but converted to Sufism, a mystical and lyrical form of Islam, in the late 1980s and changed his name to Allah Rakha Rahman.

His music has been deeply influenced by his religious experience and Rahman attributes his achievements to divine blessing. "My whole journey in music … has had a spiritual guidance," he says.

Despite his national and international success, Rahman is still based in Chennai and continues to work on South Indian films. He says that working in the Indian film industry has given him great freedom to experiment. ''I often tell directors I want to do this and they say, 'Yeah, go ahead and we'll make sure it works in the movie.' ''

His tens of millions of Indian fans have now come to expect innovation. "The people of India constantly push me to the edge, asking 'What are you going to do next?', so their interest has pushed me to work harder."

Rahman says Indian classical music has provided a base for his composition but he borrows from an eclectic range of styles including pop, folk, rock and hip hop. "I don't like to get typecast," he says.

Rahman believes the success of Slumdog Millionaire has created a bridge between Western and Indian audiences that could lead more people to explore Indian music. The international success of Jai Ho showed that contemporary Indian music can attract an international audience.

"Indian music has potential to have a bigger impact on the world," he says.

A.R. Rahman plays at Parramatta Park on Saturday from 7.30pm. Gates open at noon, and the venue will be closed when it is full.

Friday, January 22, 2010

No Less A Sufi

By Sweta Dutta, *After a lifetime loving India, historian Digby breathes his last: in Delhi* - Indian Express - India
Tuesday, January 18, 2010

It was only appropriate that he breathed his last just 500 metres away from the graves of Amir Khusrau and Nizamuddin Auliya, for Prof Simon Digby was no less a Sufi.

A noted scholar of medieval Indian history, Prof Digby lost his brief battle with pancreatic cancer on Sunday. He passed away on Sunday at his rented flat in Nizamuddin West — he was 79.

Even in his last days, Digby did not let go of his scholarly pursuits. Despite having nothing to do with a young 30-something scholar’s research paper on Kashmir, he painstaking leafed through the study.

For Digby, this was yet another winter in India; that part of the year when he deserted his Jersey (UK) home to live, travel, study and photograph India.

Born in 1932 in Jabalpur, Digby’s association with India can be traced to his lineage: his grandfather William Digby was with the Indian Civil Services and, together with R C Dutt, critiqued the new economic policies in the late 19th Century.

Even after his father migrated to England, Digby kept returning, living briefly in Delhi University and travelling across the country, picking up languages, coins, manuscripts and an array of sources that could tell him anything about the mystery of Medieval India.

“He never held a proper academic position. In fact, he did not want to,” historian Prof Shahid Amin said. “Even at 75, he would come to Delhi in September, ask his driver to pull out his Ambassador and drive down to Lhasa. That year, he called me from Kulu during Dussehra, then decided to travel to Diu, and after a month I heard from him while he was in Kushinagar and then in Gorakhpur, collecting manuscripts.

“He knew Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Nepali well.’

Martand Singh, chairman of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH)-UK, told Newsline, “According to his will, he wished to be cremated and his ashes immersed in running water. We are waiting for his close friend Richard Harris to arrive before the last rites are performed.”

Amin said it would be appropriate if the cremation is held in Lodhi crematorium, close to the tombs of Khusrau and Nizamuddin Auliya, as a tribute to the Sufi scholar.

Salman Haider, India’s former High Commissioner to UK, recalled: “I got to know Simon through my daughter, who did her DPhil thesis under him. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on December 28. When I called him a week ago, he was quite unsentimental: he said, ‘I am dying’.
“He had no close relatives, but a chosen group of friends.”

A former fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and former assistant keeper in the Department of Eastern Art, Ashmolean Museum, Digby was the foremost British scholar of pre-Mughal India, who wrote several foundational essays on Indo-Persian Sufism and contributed to The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1.

His books, War-horse and elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: a study of military supplies, Wonder Tales in India and papers Sufis and soldiers in Aurangzeb’s Deccan and Qalandars and Related Groups are considered path-breaking.

Digby was invited on behalf of INTACH (UK) to deliver a lecture on “The Runaway Mughal Prince” at the India International Centre next month.

[Picture: Nizamuddin Dargah Complex, Delhi. Photo: Wiki]

Thursday, January 21, 2010

A Binding Force

By Saadia Khalid, *Lok Virsa promoting ‘sufism’ in unique way* - The News International - Pakistan
Monday, January 11, 2010

Islamabad: Sufi saints have contributed a lot towards creating a message of love, peace and harmony in the subcontinent. Now there is a need to project their message effectively to acquaint the younger generation with their valuable contributions in the real sense.

This was stated by Lok Virsa Executive Director Khalid Javaid while talking to ‘The News’. He said that the sayings of the sages and the time-old customs, which express the true genius of the people of Pakistan, are major subjects of the Lok Virsa’s mandate.

In this context, Lok Virsa has dedicated a spacious hall, named as the ‘Hall of Sufis & Shrines,’ within its popular living cultural museum — the Heritage Museum at Shakarparian — to depict and portray contributions and messages of the great sufi saints. The display offers beautiful architecture with extremely artistic intricate mirrorwork alongside a pigeons’ landmark, which looks as real as one can see at the shrines.

In the part representing the land of the sufi saints — the province of Sindh — there are life-size statues of musicians in performing postures, singing renditions of sufi saints like Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Sachal Sarmast. Outstanding Sindhi folk artiste and performer Allan Faqir is also among them.

On the other side, the province of Punjab describes pictures of the shrines of Hazrat Data Gunj Bakhsh, Shah Rukne Alam and Sheikh Bahauddin Zakaria. Malangs and faqirs, who form an integral part of shrines, are also seen, paying rich tributes to the sufi saints.

‘Dali’, an ornamented boat-like monument specially created to express tributes to the famous saint belonging to the capital territory known as Hazrat Barri Imam by his spiritual followers during the annual ‘urs’ celebrations, is also depicted in the display.

The display also throws light on the four basic pillars of sufism, which includes ‘Sharia’ (Islamic lifestyle), ‘Irfaan-e-Haqeqat’ (journey towards the embodiment of God), ‘Maarfat’ (journey towards the introduction to Allah) and ‘Tareeqat’ (Acting upon real teachings of Islam).

Besides establishing this display, Lok Virsa has already published a series of books on the works of sufi poets and saints such as Sultan Bahu, Baba Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Waris Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, etc, the Lok Virsa executive director further explained.

The word ‘sufi’ is derived from Arabic word ‘safa’ meaning purity.

Sufism is a mystic tradition encompassing a diverse range of beliefs and practices. This mystic sufi tradition has existed in all parts of Pakistan and is a binding force that brings people of diverse cultures together.

The saints whose shrines dot the landscape are the meeting place of the masses — the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled — serve as a humanising force in society at both cultural and spiritual levels. The sufi saints who came to the subcontinent in large numbers played the most important part in spreading Islam all over the region, preserving the religion’s inner spirit and converting a large mass into Muslims.

They were indeed the men of high moral characters, who stood side by side with the poor masses in all trails and tribulations of time. The concept of equality and brotherhood of mankind preached by the sufis attracted a large number of poor people.

Like other Islamic movements, sufism traces its origin to the Holy Qur’aan and the Hadith.

In order to keep sufism within the discipline of Islam, the sufis organised themselves into ‘silsilas’ or orders. The most important and well known among them are ‘Qadriah’, founded by Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani; ‘Naqshbandiah’, called after Khawaja Bahauddin Naqshbandi; ‘Chishtiah’, founded by Khawaja Abul Ishaq Shami; and ‘Soharwardiah’, founded by Sheikh Bahauddin Zakaria.

[Picture: Lok Virsa Museum, Ancient Carved Door. Photo: Wiki.]

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

For Peace, Progress And Prosperity

PT Wire Service, *Fehmida offers Fateha at Mazar of Khawaja Gharib Nawaz [RA] Pakistan* Pakistan Times - Pakistan

Sunday, January 10, 2010

New Delhi: Fehmida Mirza, Speaker National Assembly of Pakistan visited the shrine of the great Sufi saint and spiritualist for all times Hazrat Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti (ra) at Ajmer Sharif on Friday.

She offered Fateha and laid Chaddar on the Mazar of Hazrat Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti (ra) – popularly known as Hazrat Khawaja Gharib Nawaz (ra) on Friday night.

While paying due respects to the great saint – Hazrat Khawaja Gharib Nawaz (ra) who is the founder of Chistitia dynasty – the Speaker offered special prayers for peace, progress and prosperity of Pakistan.

The Speaker, who is in India connection with Commonwealth Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers offered special prayers for peace and prosperity of Muslim Ummah.

She also visited Jaipur along with other delegates of the conference.

[Picture: Nizam Gate. Mir Osman Ali Khan, The Nizam of Hyderabad Deccan,erected the main gate of the Dargah Sharif in 1911 A.D. Photo from http://khwajagharibnawaz.com/default.htm]

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

"International Conference on Sufism and Peace" held in Pakistan

By Staff Reporter*Moot on Sufism from 14th* - Daily Times - Pakistan
Sunday, January 10, 2010

Islamabad: Pakistan Academy of Letters (PAL) is holding a three-day international conference on Sufism and peace that will be inaugurated by President Asif Ali Zardari on Jan 14.

The PAL chairman, Fakhar Zaman, said this in a press release issued here on Saturday. He said the main purpose of the conference was to highlight the soft image of Pakistan and promote the Sufi poets’ message of love, peace and brotherhood.

Zaman said that the slain PPP chairwoman Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto had announced the holding of such a conference in 1995. He said the academy had organised this conference last year, which was a very successful event.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Zawiyah : A New Publication on Sufism

Introducing a quarterly journal published by Shems Friedlander, renown Sufi author and graphic designer. (A zawiyah or zawiya is a word in Arabic commonly used to refer to a Sufi center.) Click on the picture in order to enlarge it so that the text can be read.

The Laughing Sufi

By Staff Writer, *Gus Dur* - The Economist - UK

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), intellectual and president of Indonesia, died on December 30th, aged 69

Whatever the time or place, Abdurrahman Wahid—Gus Dur, as everyone fondly called him—had a joke to tell. About his predecessors as Indonesia’s president: “Sukarno was mad about sex, Suharto was mad about money, Habibie was mad about technology, but me? I’m just mad!”

About his removal from the presidency in 2001, when he was almost blind: “I need help to step up, let alone step down.”

About losing power: “It’s nothing. I regret more that I lost 27 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

Visiting Tokyo, he was delighted when the prime minister congratulated him on his “erection”. For a Muslim ulama, or priest-scholar, his appetite for smut was remarkable. He had naughty jokes on his website, and was once reported to the police by conservative clerics for emphasising the raunchier bits of the Koran.

Joking was essential, he said, for a healthy mind. Villagers in Jombang in East Java remembered him, as a boy, tied to the flagpole in the front yard for some jest that had gone too far. Visitors to the house would find their shoelaces surreptitiously knotted together. Later on, it was sometimes hard to tell whether he was larking round or serious: as a narcoleptic, he would often lull journalists into a snooze and then snap to, razor-sharp, with the answer to their questions.

Joking got him through the rigours of pesantren, rural Muslim boarding school, and certainly through the turmoil of his 21 months as president from 1999 to 2001. At the end, when his aides tried to restrain him, “It has affected me,” he complained. “Starting tomorrow, I will start telling jokes again.”

The drunken master

His eccentricity could be infuriating. But it usually hid a serious purpose. In sprawling Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, cramped under authoritarian rule for most of its existence, Mr Wahid was committed to pluralism, liberalism, democracy and tolerance.

He promoted these principles in his columns in Prisma, Tempo and Kompas. More remarkably, he believed that they were also fundamental to his religion. “All too many Muslims”, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2005, “fail to grasp Islam.” “Right Islam” was not fanatical. It was tolerant, open and fair.

To some of his co-religionists, he went too far. But Mr Wahid had imbibed the gentle, Hindu-flavoured Islam of Java and the café-table cut-and-thrust of Baghdad’s student circles, as well as the doctrinaire rote-learning of al-Azhar University in Cairo, and had plumped for free expression every time. He had also been brought up in a house that was both devout and cosmopolitan: encouraged to read European magazines, to devour Dickens and Dostoyevsky, to listen to Mozart and Janis Joplin, as well as to get involved in Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the world’s largest Muslim organisation, heavily rural and steeped in animist Javanese tradition, which his grandfather had founded and his father had run.

In time the NU, with its 40m members, became his own power base. He reformed it, as well as removing it, in 1984, from party politics, in order to focus its energies on raising the pesantren to the level of secular schools.

Though a deep believer in mysticism and the spirit world, secularism never offended him. Selamat pagi, “Good morning”, did as well for him as the believer’s assalamu alaykum; both, as he pointed out, meant “Peace be to you”. He accepted the constitution’s doctrine of pancasila —national unity and social justice with freedom of religion— as a useful creed for fissiparous Indonesia. More surprisingly, he kept on cordial terms with Suharto, despite pushing against the strongman both as the hugely popular head of the NU and, from 1998, as leader of his own non-sectarian National Awakening party.

In 1999, in Indonesia’s first (indirect) presidential election, Mr Wahid comprehensively outmanoeuvred Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had in fact done better than he had at the polls. Though hobbled by strokes and blindness, he now grinned from ear to ear at the prospect of power. In short order, he invited outlawed dissidents and communists to see him at the palace; removed the ban against Chinese culture and language; talked to, and tried to make peace with, Aceh and West Papua, as part of a devolution of power away from “corrupt” Jakarta; dismantled Suharto’s press-curbing Ministry of Information, and the extortionist Ministry of Welfare; sacked General Wiranto, who had overseen atrocities in East Timor, and apologised to the East Timorese. He did not manage to control the army or set up diplomatic relations with Israel, but made it clear he wanted to.

The result was chaos. Mr Wahid, out of his depth and surrounded by enemies, soon lost control, and parliament removed him. But he had at least set standards for government accountability and openness in Indonesia, which helped democracy to grow. Even more valuably, he had shown the world a thoughtful, tolerant form of Islam.

He saw himself as many characters: as Semar, the wise demigod-turned-jester of Javanese shadow-theatre, and as the “drunken master” of kung-fu films, expertly waddling in, in his cheap batik shirts, to bang heads together.

But he was also the laughing Sufi of Islam’s mystical tradition, mad—or wise—before the undiscriminating inclusiveness of God.

Photo by Getty Images/The Economist

The Inspiration He Gave

By Achmad Munjid, *Gus Dur’s immortal legacy* - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta, Indonesia

Friday, January 8, 2010

Philadelphia: For most people involved with Islamic boarding schools, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) is not just an organization. NU is a genuine version of ahl sunnah wa al-jama’ah (or aswaja, which means the People of the Prophet’s Traditions and Community, the Sunni).

In this setting, Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid can be categorized as a wali (saint).

A wali in Sufi tradition is a friend of God’s, a moral guardian and protector of other creatures. In our time, what can be more articulate for the true meaning of a wali than Gus Dur’s life?
His life was an extraordinary example of the tireless struggle for freedom, equality and justice for all, deeply rooted in his Islamic faith.

His being literally accessible for everyone made him almost like a crystal to whom every type of group and individual might voice their hope and be assured of human solidarity: human rights activists, politicians, philosophers, clerics, interfaith thinkers, feminists, intellectuals, artists, students, spiritualists, peasants, religious and ethnic minorities, authors, international leaders — you name it.

His simple life was a rare example for more than 30 million NU members, most of them at the grass roots. In 1987, as the NU chairman, Gus Dur still lived in a rented house and frequently used crowded public transportation to get around the city. For years he toiled in his office in the stifling Jakarta heat, with no air conditioning or even an electric fan.

In almost every aspect, Gus Dur was a giant: social class, intellectual capacity, political talent, religious piety. What made him even more unusual was his tireless schedule traveling around the country for silaturahmi (maintaining and improving social relations), to meet people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to share support and wisdom. He kept doing this even after becoming president, even after suffering for years from strokes, blindness, kidney failure, diabetes, etc., until the last days of his life.

Thanks to this intensive silaturahmi, not only did Gus Dur keep in touch with so many real people and their actual problems around the country, or bring great charismatic clerics such as Abdullah Faqih of Langitan to national attention, but he also gave due recognition and introduced local leaders of remote villages previously unknown, people like Shaikh Mas’ud of Cilacap — a collector of rare books written by classical Indonesian Muslim scholars.

Many other local leaders, values and wisdom from the Islamic boarding schools he discovered for the wider public.

His most frequent practice was probably the ziarah kubur (grave visit), which was also the most misunderstood both by modernist Muslims and secular groups. Regardless of how you may want to understand “the unseen world” — a key principle in Islamic faith — visiting a grave, especially to those of saints, is a very well-known practice of spiritual exercise in Sufism throughout Islamic history. By performing this exercise properly and sufficiently, the human spirit will be purified and sensitized. It is this purity and sensitivity that enables a Muslim to translate Islamic faith beyond mere orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

By way of ziarah — praying, chanting, dzikir, learning the lessons of the saints, deeply contemplating in the right time and psychological mood — one may get spiritual enlightenment that will draw one closer to God and human beings. That is why haul (death anniversary) is a popular part of Islamic boarding school tradition. Haul is not so much about remembering death as it is a celebration of life and its meaning in relation to the spiritual world.

Gus Dur may never remember my name. But I am among the tens of thousands of young NU people from remote Indonesian areas who have traveled to far-off countries to explore new horizons of ideas and realities, thanks to the inspiration he gave and the difficult path he walked with sincerity and courage.

I am part of the Islamic boarding school generation, millions in number, born and raised during the Soeharto era. We were an ignored generation under Soeharto. Our attitude toward relations between Islam and modernity was very ambiguous. With no access, we were jealous about the many fascinations of modernity as displayed by Soeharto’s high modernism and development projects. On the other hand, we were so proud of Islamic learning and tradition that was branded backward and irrational, an obstacle to national development and even a potential enemy of the state.

We knew the government was corrupt, unjust and anti-Islamic, but it went unchallenged. We knew Islamic boarding schools were rich and had so much to offer, but we did not know how to unpack it.

We were so powerless and lost.

Thanks to Gus Dur, we learned that students of these schools did have an equally valuable heritage to offer the modern world, and we learned how to present it meaningfully. That Islam is completely compatible with the principles of modernity. That in order for Islam to be rahmatan lil ‘alamin (God’s mercy for the Universe), Muslims should be in sincere dialogue and total engagement with others regardless of their ethnicity, culture, worldview and faith.

At time when most people grow pessimistic about NU, Gus Dur became the loudspeaker who assuaged our optimism. He had unconditional and abundant love for his country, especially NU and more specifically young people.

“No single Muslim organization on Earth has as much potential as NU,” he said repeatedly and confidently to everybody.

The writer is the president of the NU community in North America and a PhD student in religious studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, US.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Most Popular
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By Syedstauheed, *Tasveer Ghar's 'Illustrated Talk' on Nizamuddin Shrine* - MeriNews - Gurgaon, India
Saturday, January 23, 2010


New Delhi: Tasveer Ghar ["A House of Pictures", A Delhi-based digital archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture] showed its passion for Delhi's pilgrimage site Nizamuddin.

The capital's well known House for pictures, posters, calendar art, cinema hoardings and pilgrimage maps recently organized an 'Illustrated Talk' on the Sufi Shrine. It was held at Max Mueller Bhawan on January 22, 2010.

Yousuf Saeed, the current director of Tasveer Ghar, New Delhi, talked "Popular Islam and Urban Spaces: The Nizamuddin Shrine in New Delhi" with his passionate devotional posters.

The Sufi shrine of Chishti saint Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi is one of the most popular Muslim pilgrimage destinations in South Asia, attracting thousands of pilgrims of many faiths from all over India and the world.

Tasveer Ghar considers the event as work-in-progress and said it is part of a research and documentation project tracing the trans-cultural flows between Europe and Asia in Muslim popular iconography. The research is being conducted under the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows’, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

The illustrated talk put special stress on changes in image practices over time in response to the changes brought about by urbanization, movement of pilgrims, new technology, and competition from the Tableeghi and Wahabi ideologues in the vicinity.

[Visit Tasveer Ghar's website]

[Link to the Talk: http://www.tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/91/index.html]
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Saturday, January 30, 2010

Mystical Horn
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By Raul d'Gama Rose, *Spiritual Dimensions* - All About Jazz - USA

Friday, January 22, 2010

Every note trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith blows on his exquisite brass instrument brings a whole world of joy.

The sound of the Earth and the Heavens in every echo and ululation of the notes that flow out of his trumpet, dancing the interminable dance of lovers in unison, like sunrise and sunset, day and night. Each is an element of a cosmic double-helix intertwined and waltzing sensuously around each other.

Oh, the joy of Spiritual Dimensions, in the studio with the Golden Quintet on the first CD and in the live versions with octet and nonet groups on the second CD.

Listening to Smith's music is like being seduced by the hypnotic Sufi poetry of Rumi and—for that matter, the great Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros, who gave the world his magnum opus, Gramática Expositiva do Chão (Poesia quase toda) or Descriptive Grammar of the Ground (almost complete poems), that celebrated the spiritual wonders of nature in the in a decidedly concrete form.

Both CDs in this magnificent twin package celebrate Smith's long-standing love for the spiritual and his dedication to doing his bit for an ordered, loving Earth through nothing less than notes that echo with iridescent and glacial splendor. And this seems to be his life's work.

On the first CD, the Golden Quintet meditates on the depths of the divine mystery through a series of songs. Each song is fraught with an ionic charge so energetic that it sparkles from note to note—especially in "Al-Shadhili's Litany of the Sea: Sunrise," a patient and organic development that seems to pulse on the rhythm of daybreak, and through "Umar at the Dome of the Rock, parts 1 & 2," which also sizzles with a myriad epiphany of the confluence of Earth and sky.

"Crossing Sirat" is a sinister meditation of the terrors of the nether world that continue to interrupt the pristine celebration of human endeavor. The preponderance of bass and drums recalls the umbilical connection with the "African-ness" of nature.

The second CD is a live performance from April 2009. In his use of strings, broad echo and primordial wail, Smith takes his horn to a place he occupies in solitary splendor. This is a realm that Miles Davis began to inhabit in the years following his experiments with electronics until his death. Smith however uses minimal electronic interruptions. Rather, he maintains his explorations of spiritualism via extended performances in "Organic" and "Joy: Spiritual Fire: Joy," the latter climaxing in a kind of ecstatic Sufi dance.

In a clever programmatic maneuver, Smith pays homage to Angela Davis, an unforgettable pioneer of Black Consciousness in an eponymous song. And there is a taut musical excursion in a live version of "South Central L.A. Kulture."

There is no mistaking the importance of this record—both in its live and studio incarnations. It is proof that the spiritualism of music did not die with John Coltrane, but rather lives on through the mystical horn of Wadada Leo Smith.

Track listing: CD1: Al-Shadhili's Litany of the Sea: Sunrise; Pacifica; Umar at the Dome of the Rock, Parts 1 & 2; Crossing the Sirat; South Central L.A. Kulture. CD2: South Central L.A. Kulture; Angela Davis; Organic; Joy: The Spiritual Fire: Joy (In memory of Imam Warith Deen Mohammed).

Personnel: Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet; Vijay Iyer: piano, synthesizer (CD1); John Lindberg: acoustic bass; Pheeroan AkLaff: drums; Don Moye: drums (CD1); Michael Gregory: electric guitar (CD2); Brandon Ross: electric guitar (CD2); Nels Cline: 6- and 12-string electric guitar (CD2); Lamar Smith: electric guitar: (CD2#1, CD2#4); Okkyung Lee: cello (CD2); Skuli Sverrisson: electric bass (CD2).
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By Ben Fulton, *Sundance: Muezzins and mohawks* - The Salt Lake Tribune - Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Thursday, January 21, 2010

The contemporary cultural clash of Muslim punk rockers in "The Taqwacores" -- and other personal and geopolitical faces of Islamic stories at this year's festival

As a Muslim-American growing up in Cleveland, Eyad Zahra experienced the struggle of fitting into American culture.

Driving home from an Islamic conference in Detroit with his father, two pick-up trucks cordoned the Zahra family car on the highway, then pelted it with beer cans.

As an American Muslim studying film at Florida State University, Zahra learned about the struggles of fitting into Islamic culture.

Active in the university's Muslim student group at the time, a co-ed told him flatly that film "was not a Muslim profession."

Years later, while working as a freelance film producer in Los Angeles, Zahra read about The Taqwacores, an underground novel by Muslim convert Michael Muhammad Knight.

The 254-page book tells the fictional story of Yusef Ali, a Pakistani engineering student in Buffalo, New York, whose life and religion get a complete overhaul and new lease on life when he moves off-campus. There, he lives with a group of renegade feminists, stoners and punk-rock Muslims with a taste for partying in the tradition of old-time Sufi mystics.

The book title itself -- a fusion of the Arabic word "taqwa," or love and understanding of God, followed by the suffix common to popular music genres -- was enough to take Zahra's breath away.

"Everything sort of stopped for a minute," Zahra said. "Almost immediately I got hold of a copy and read it in a couple of sittings. It said out loud so many things I had thought myself about being an American Muslim."

Zahra stopped every other project he was working on to meet Knight. He sent the writer a copy of his first film, "Stringed Instruments." Not long after the two met in person at New York City's Malcolm Shabazz Mosque in New York City, Zahra cut to the chase. He wanted to turn Knight's book into a movie.

Filmed on a shoe-string budget in Cleveland, where many of the film's acting cast slept in the basement of the Zahra family home, "The Taqwacores" is one of several films screening at this year's Sundance Film Festival dealing directly with, or tilting around, Islamic themes.

"Kick in Iran," "Fix ME," "The Oath," "Son of Babylon" and "Women Without Men" take on geopolitical issues of the Middle East. More personal is "Bilal's Stand, " which explores the life of a black Muslim teen torn between the family business and upward mobility.

By virtue of its surface and subject matter, it's safe to say that "The Taqwacores" is the most raucous of the group. At the very least, it's the only film of its kind, a modern and Islamic bildungsroman of an uptight young man confronted by peers who identify as Muslim, but in ways he's never known or considered.

Riffing on the Sufi imagery of drunkenness and romantic sexual love of Persian poet Rumi, young punkers help Yusef find his own tools for the creation of a new, individualistic Islam at home in both tradition and the secular world.

Zahra's film adaptation depicts the confusion and struggles of youth, while telling a parallel story about the challenge of creating breathing room for a distinctly American brand of Islam. In the process, the film makes mince of post-9/11 conceptions about the religion, and even bends the curve on how most Muslims see themselves.

"Whatever the media picks up and calls 'Muslim' is beyond our control," Zahrid said. "All we can do is tell our own stories. This is a movie that shows what normal young, American Muslims deal with. Events in Yemen or other places don't define us as American Muslims. At the same time, Muslims try to make themselves out as perfect creatures, when the reality is that we're very diverse."

Speaking from Harvard University where he's currently studying for a master's degree in Islamic studies, Knight said the film adaptation of his book couldn't have turned out better. A convert from his family's Roman Catholic faith at age 16, Knight, now 32, experienced a crisis of faith after spending two years at a religious school in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Disillusioned by Islam's fundamentalist tendencies, and convinced that all religion was flawed to an extent by teachings that strayed from their founding figures, he nevertheless felt he could not surrender his Muslim identity. The do-it-yourself ethic of punk rock, he said, became a sort of mosque without a stern imam.

"I remember going to Sufi shrines in Lahore where, every Thursday night, they bring out their drums, they bring out their weed [hash], and bang on drums and sing to Ali -- and that's Islam," Knight said.

"I'm not trying to show non-Muslims how diverse Islam is. I don't think most Muslims know how diverse Islam is. It's full of characters who rebelled against the orthodoxy and were sometimes killed for it. It's a rich, rich tradition."

Picture: A scene from "The Taqwacores," premiering at Sundance Film Festival 2010.
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Friday, January 29, 2010

Bigger Than Self
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By Rob Crilly, *Religious divide in Africa masks deep social problems* - The Scotsman - Edinburgh, Scotland
Friday, January 22, 2010

The divide is visible even from space – a band where equatorial greens give way to the browns, reds and yellows of the desert.

But just as the colours on Google Earth show the transition from tropical to arid, so too the transition marks a much more explosive divide: that between Christian and Muslim Africa.The band passes from east to west, splitting the continent in two, and dividing countries such as Nigeria, Sudan and Kenya by religion – Islam to the north, Christianity in the south.

The past week has shown the power of that divide. Not for the first time, the two Africas have collided, causing shockwaves felt all around the world.

In Nigeria, at least 3,000 people have fled their homes in the central city of Jos. Mosques, churches and houses were burned during the latest clashes between Christian and Muslim gangs. So far 149 people have been reported dead. Some 200 people died in similar violence in 2008, dwarfed by the 1,000 victims in 2001. For now an uneasy calm has been imposed, with a 24-hour curfew.

Days earlier, Kenya faced its own sectarian violence.Security forces using assault rifles and tear gas were called in when Muslims gathered in protest at the country's decision to detain a radical preacher. Among the throng were protesters waving the flag of al-Shabaab, the militant insurgent group that has brought a fragile government in Somalia to its knees. Things got out of hand when bystanders joined the police lines, hurling stones at the demonstrators.

It is not difficult to imagine an African future dominated by religious conflict. Muslims and Christians both see the region as a battleground for converts.

The Christian churches have seen their flock grow from nine million to almost 200 million in a century. Missionaries are now exported rather than imported. Africa no longer needs the David Livingstones who first brought the Bible alongside cases of medicine. For Christians, disillusioned with the West's secularism, the continent has become a defender of the Church's morals.

Conservative Anglican congregations in the United States have left their local dioceses to follow bishops in Zambia, Nigeria and Uganda, where Church leaders are pushing a bill that would impose the death penalty on homosexuals.

Meanwhile, radical Islam has made inroads among Africa's traditional, moderate Sufism. The Sudanese government came to power in a 1989 coup that heralded an Islamic cultural revolution. Extremists from around the world – including Osama bin Laden – were welcomed by a regime intent on creating an alternative world order.

Somalia's problems are well known. Beheadings, amputations and stonings are becoming commonplace as al-Shabaab imposes a particularly nasty form of Sharia law in areas under its control. Neighbouring Kenya is jittery, wondering if its own Muslim population will radicalise in the same way.

It is not a big leap to imagine a looming clash of civilisations. But just like the patterns observed from space, so the big picture of two faiths meeting head-on misses the local details that undermine the nightmare scenario.

The truth is that the two religions are not monoliths. Up close there are dozens of different churches, beliefs and creeds. Tensions within each religion – between the evangelists and the Roman Catholics, for example – are just as important as those between the faiths.

Nor was the violence in Nigeria or Kenya ultimately about religion. In a country like Nigeria, riddled with corruption, poverty and tribal tension, religion is often the glue that holds a people together. When things go wrong, it becomes the way that protest is expressed.

The gangs of thugs roaming Jos with murderous intent were not targeting Christians or Muslims out of religious conviction. Rather they were seeking individuals they believe to enjoy economic, social and political privileges.The same is true in Kenya, where an impoverished, neglected northern band of herders can feel part of a bigger community – an African ummah.

The past days have shown the power of that feeling: the power of belonging to something bigger than self on a continent where nationhood has a short, shaky history, where borders were drawn in the sand lumping disparate tribes together.

The violence was real and nasty. But to identity the problem as a problem of religion is to miss the local issues – a bit like blaming football hooliganism on disagreements over shirt colour.

• Rob Crilly's book, Saving Darfur, is published by Reportage Press on 9 February

[Picture from http://www.reportagepress.com/authors-name.php?author=36]

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Thursday, January 28, 2010

Blowing In The Wind
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By Desk Editor, *Blowing in the wind* - Dawn.com - Pakistan

Which is your favourite Sufi shrine in Pakistan? What sight from your last visit to a mazaar has stayed with you? Share your pictures from mausoleums across Pakistan with Dawn.com.


[Click on the title for the link]

Picture: A man is entranced at the mausoleum of Madhu Lal Hussain in Lahore. His hair, like the branches of the trees that hover above him, sway in the breeze in rememberance of God. Photo: Arif Ali/ White Star.
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Through Personal Efforts
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By Dr. Manzur Ejaz, *WASHINGTON DIARY: Elimination of ‘ideological boundaries’* - Daily Times - Pakistan

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

For Quaid-e-Azam, Pakistan was just a creation of a nation where the majority of citizens would be Muslims like Algeria, Turkey or Egypt. After their independence none of these countries adopted theocratic rule

A few days back Prime Minister Gilani reiterated that the army is diligently defending Pakistan’s geographical and ideological boundaries. One would like to believe that Mr Gilani is just puttering the oft-repeated cliché of ‘ideological boundaries.’ However, a closer examination shows that the ruling elites, while trying to eliminate armed religious bands, are trying their best to cling to the ‘ideological boundaries’ defined by Ziaul Haq and his pro-theocracy allies led by Jamaat-e-Islami (JI).

There were several questions regarding ‘ideological boundaries’ that had to be addressed first before the implementation of the concept, but Zia and his groomed military-civilian leadership snubbed the opposing views for political expediency of that period. First and foremost the question was: which religious school will be followed in defining the ‘ideological boundaries’? Will it be the Islam defined by the Sufis or by the mullahs? Second, how will the different sects consent to a consensus about the boundaries and third, can Pakistan claim to be a modern state if the minorities are accorded second or third class citizenship?

The most powerful justification for imposing the ‘ideological boundaries’ is given by the slogan that ‘Pakistan was created for Islam’ or ‘Pakistan ka matlab kia, La Ilaha Illilah’. Before 1970 such slogans were very rare and Ayub Khan’s successful suppression, good or bad, of pro-theocracy forces — Maulana Maududi was sentenced to death and his life was spared due to external appeals — shows that religious forces were not in a challenging position.

The religious grouping could not gain credence because they had opposed the creation of Pakistan and the founder of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was quite clear that Pakistan was not going to be an Islamic theocratic state. He was a westernised liberal person with routines that would be prohibited by Ziaul Haq’s defined ideological boundaries. I am sure the great Quaid would have spent his entire life behind bars if he had continued with his breakfast and evening routines. For Quaid-e-Azam, Pakistan was just a creation of a nation where the majority of citizens would be Muslims like Algeria, Turkey or Egypt. After their independence none of these countries adopted theocratic rule.

The slogan mentioned above was popularised to combat Zulifkar Ali Bhutto and his People’s Party. The religious parties and traditional ruling classes perceived Bhutto as a mischief-maker intent upon unleashing, intentionally or otherwise, liberal and progressive trends. As a matter of fact, when the JI popularised the slogan ‘Pakistan ka matlab kia, La Ilaha Illilah’, Habib Jalib gave the real meaning to this slogan in his very famous poem of the time in these words:

“Khait wadairon se lay lo, milein lutairon se ley lo,
Koi rehay na aali-jah, Pakistan ka matlab kia La Ilaha Illilah.”

(Take the land from the feudal and mills from the exploiters. No super-citizen should exist any more. This is the meaning of La Ilaha Illilah.)

Alas! Habib Jalib lost in defining the slogan and his opponents won even during Bhutto’s regime when he declared Ahmadis a minority, banned liquor and racing and designated Friday as a weekly holiday. Zia, supported and brought to power by the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) — a joint front of mullahs, ruling elites with tactical military support — took Bhutto’s hypocritical Islamisation to its logical conclusion.

After the ideological boundaries were fully defined, whatever happened was against every big or small desire Habib Jalib had expressed in his memorable poem. Unlike 1970, land reforms, increasing labour’s share in industry, giving people shelter, bread, education and health services was never put on any party’s election manifesto or were never made the focus of the election debates. In the 1970 elections the atmosphere was so progressive that even the JI had to insert a limit on land holdings in its manifesto.

So-called strengthening of the ideological boundaries freed everyone of social responsibility and in a convoluted manner individuals went on a binge for personal gains. It was in direct contravention of Sufi Islam, where the individual was made responsible to himself and to fellow humans around him/her and the state or Shariah (state-imposed rules) had nothing to do with personal or societal well being. Sufi thought emerged as a revolt against the negative social experience under theocracy. The essence of Sufi thought sought love and liberation through personal efforts, leaving the worldly rule-making in the hands of the state. It meant that the state should be secular and religious practices should be left to individuals.

The Sufis’ experience once again proved its validity. Except comforting the mullahs by banning alcohol, prostitution, gambling, etc., the imposition of so-called ideological boundaries gave birth to every possible social ill. Not only the consumption of alcohol increased manifold, heroin and other fatal drugs became common. Prostitution, ousted from Shahi Mohallas, proliferated in every corner of every city. The only change that took place was that the police and civil administration increased their income from pimps and bootleggers.

Besides the spread of social ills, ideological boundaries gave birth to quite expected sectarianism. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sipah-e-Sahaba, Tanzim-i-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) and many other sectarian organisations created havoc in the country, unleashing the murders of innocent citizens. And it was the reign of demonological boundaries that gave birth to Salafi Islam that created the Taliban and other types of jihadis. It is interesting that other than Saudi Arabia, no Muslim country has emulated the Salafi version of Islam. It is also noteworthy that this version of Islam, prevailing in tribal Saudi Arabia, has resonated in limited circles of Pashtun tribals (not among settled or urbanised Pashtuns) and nowhere else. Therefore, the entire gambit of ‘ideological boundaries’ and its impact has to be re-examined. Eliminating the Taliban or the armed jihadis is just the starting point and the deep rooted ideological troubles are not going to go away automatically.
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Heart Touching
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By Brief Editor, *Poetic collection of Qudsi published* - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Islamabad: A poetic collection of noted Sufi saint Asadur Rehman Qudsi titled ‘Kulyat-e-Qudsi’ has been published from Qalandar-i-Zaman.

The collection consists of three volumes, which has been compiled by senior teacher of Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) Dr. Mahmudur Rehman.

This collection carries a comprehensive biography and memorable photographs of Hazrat Qudsi besides comments of national poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal about the heart touching and spiritualistic poetry of Qudsi.

Hazrat Qudsi went to Madina in 1940 who was Qalandar of Asia at the time and was granted title of Qalandar-i-Zaman.
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Unacceptable In Islam
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By Ruth Gledhill, *Muslim group Minhaj-ul-Quran issues fatwa against terrorists* -

Sunday, January 17, 2010

A leading Muslim organisation in Britain has issued a fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism, declaring them un-Islamic.
Minhaj-ul-Quran, a Sufi organisation based in East London which advises the Government on how to combat radicalisation of Muslim youth, will launch the 600-page religious verdict tomorrow. It condemns the perpetrators of terrorist explosions and suicide bombings.

The document, written by Dr Muhammed Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former minister of Pakistan and friend of Benazir Bhutto, declares suicide bombings and terrorism as "totally un-Islamic". It is one of the most detailed and comprehensive documents of its kind to be published in Britain.

The fatwa, which was released in Pakistan last month, uses texts from the Koran and other Islamic writings to argue that attacks against innocent citizens are "absolutely against the teachings of Islam and that Islam does not permit such acts on any excuse, reason or pretext".
Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri, who is based in Canada and has written more than 400 books on Islamic law, said: "All these acts are grave violations of human rights and constitute kufr, disbelief, under Islamic law."

Minhaj-ul-Quran is an organisation based in 80 countries that follows Sufi teachings of peace and moderation. It is gaining influence in Britain as the Government seeks to gain ground among Muslim groups eager to combat the radicalisation of young people.

The group receives no government funding but its agenda is comparable to the official Prevent strategy, under which community organisations are encouraged to work together to counter extremism.

Radical Islamists will dismiss the fatwa but it will be welcomed by many Muslims from the large community of South Asian heritage in Britain, among whom confusion about religious teaching is exploited by extremists seeking to recruit suicide bombers.

"Extremist groups start brainwashing the young students from British universities and eventually convince them to oppose integration in British society," said Shahid Mursaleen, a spokesman for Minhaj-ul-Quran.

The fatwa would help fight extremist recruitment of young Muslims and was "one of the most comprehensive verdicts on this topic in the history of Islam", he added.

Inayat Bunglawala, former spokesman of the Muslim Council of Britain and founder of the new group Muslims4UK, set up to counter the radical message of the newly banned Islam4UK and other extremist groups, welcomed the fatwa.

"This adds to the view of many Islamic scholars internationally that terrorism and suicide bombings are unacceptable in Islam," he said. "It is a positive initiative. Anything that helps move young people away from violence and from those who promote violence must be welcomed."

[Visit Minhaj-ul-Quran's website]
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

A Search For Answers
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By Fiachra Gibbons, *The prayers of Peter Brook* - The Guardian - London, UK

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Will theatre's great experimenter ever stop? As he nears 85, Peter Brook reveals why his new play, about a brutal religious war, was 50 years in the making

Peter Brook looks straight through you. As he holds out his hand to greet you, you can almost feel the ­actors whose hopes ­foundered as his pale blue eyes took the temperature of their souls. To see the great man, you must cross the stage of the former Paris ­musical hall Brook calls his mosque, and climb up a narrow, twisting ­staircase to a kind of platform where the most influential theatre director of the past 60 years spends his days, perched like a Himalayan holy man, a futon in the corner, above the railway lines of the Gare du Nord, scene of some of the most baleful comings and goings of the last century, from the trenches to the camps.

Just short of 85, the man before me, rubbing his large, expressive hands against the cold, has shrunk in his clothes. The Master is suddenly smaller, older, his nose bigger, his eyes more blue, his voice more nasal. In short, he is more like another of his many monikers, the King of the Trolls.

The day before I mounted the stairs at the Bouffes du Nord, now ­painstakingly restored to a chic ­shabbiness, I rang a young British ­playwright and a director to ask what they really thought of Brook now. "I still believe in God, but I don't feel the need to go to church any more," the writer said. "Look, he has best ­theatrical brain since Brecht, but he hasn't done anything decent for 20 years, not since The Mahabharata. I blame the French. He's gone mouldy like their cheese."

The director bemoaned how Brook had become as much a sacred cow as the "holy theatre" he once raged against. Everything he does is ­expected to be a milestone. "If Brook was to stand and fart for an hour on the stage of the National, you will have people queuing to tell you he is a ­genius. The myth has killed the man."

There is certainly a danger of ­forgetting what Brook has achieved. This is the man who, ­having made his name as a master of eye-popping ­spectacle, suddenly stripped stages bare and let audiences' imaginations do the work for them. In productions like Marat/Sade and The Ik, he pared theatre back to the human body itself; then, with Ted Hughes's Orghast, went one step further by dispensing with words altogether in the search for a universal language of grunts, cries and sighs. Always Brook seems to be searching for the shock of the simple, resurrecting the use of masks, mime and puppets from traditional ritual and performance, to show how little is needed to transport audiences. Yet his ideas, once so revolutionary, have now been so absorbed by the mainstream they have become obvious, even banal.

The Brook I find before me is ­somehow more himself, more ­reduced, more human, as if a balance has finally been found between the Monster and the Mystic. The ­octogenarian Brook is, if anything, more in a hurry than the fortysomething one who burned through the RSC, the West End and Broadway in a fever of ­invention, exhausting the ­possibilities of ­conventional theatre before ­disappearing literally into the desert with a band of actor-disciples including a young Helen Mirren, who got to dig the latrines.

Brook began to slip into exile in the late 1960s, shortly after writing The Empty Space, whose opening lines became the commandments on which modern theatre was built: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."

For the next three years, he tested his theories and the limits of his troupe in every fly-blown African village they threw their carpet down in. He worked and reworked Orghast, as well as his own adaptation of the Persian epic The ­Conference of the Birds, travelling from the Sahara to the Niger Delta and then to India, Afghanistan and Iran, seemingly oblivious to the threats of dysentery and defection. The ­results of these ­experiments changed theatre for ever and made Brook the father of fringe.

'Violence is the ultimate laziness'
Yet only now is Brook finishing the play that was one of the drivers of that journey. Eleven and Twelve has been stewing away in his head for nearly 50 years. Played out on an almost bare, sand-strewn stage with a cast drawn from all corners of the earth, it is the essence of Brook: spare, ­deceptively simple, profound and magical, ­throwing open a trapdoor into a world where its audiences would never ­otherwise have tumbled. The work, which comes to London next month, is based on the memoir of an obscure Malian Muslim mystic, Tierno Bokar, a leader who put an end to a bloody religious war by conceding that his opponents were right. He would have passed unnoticed outside west Africa had not one of his disciples, the writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, bumped into Brook in the 1950s.

On one level, this story of a dispute between sufis (who seek oneness with God and nature) over whether a prayer should be said 11 or 12 times is an ­allegory on fundamentalism. It also works as a critique of divide-and-rule colonialism, with Mali's French rulers turning one group against ­another as demands for ­independence mount before the second world war. But perhaps it is most ­powerful as a parable on the ­sacrifice that ­tolerance demands, as Bokar is ­eventually ­ostracised by his own people.

"To be violent is the ultimate ­laziness," Brook says. "War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way. And false non-violence is also an idol." To him, the tolerance practised by the UN – with its muddy ­compromises and horse trading, born of "old-fashioned English liberalism" – is not tolerance. "It is not taking the bull by the horns and saying from the start: whatever our differences, nothing is going to be the cause of violence between our tribes. That is the most difficult choice of all, and it is one that Tierno makes, knowing, like Martin Luther King, that he will have to pay for it."

Brook has already taken one bite at the story of Bokar four years ago, but typically he wasn't ­satisfied (he ­reworked The ­Mahabharata for 20 years before letting go). The ­perfectionism and endless ­experimentation come from his ­scientist parents. In his ­memoir, Threads of Time, he tells how his father, a man with a quotation for every occasion, would return home to find his wife conducting experiments in the kitchen rather than cooking ­dinner. Brook senior, who invented the laxative that was to bear the family's name and secure its fortune, believed everything could be improved, and never left home without a pencil and paper to prove the point.

"As a young man, I experimented with everything," he says. Men, women, ideas, drugs. "LSD opened me to perceptions I did not know were there, though I only tried it once."

An epiphany with Salvador Dalí
Eleven and Twelve's themes of ­letting go and the need to pass on wisdom chime with a man in the ­middle of his ninth decade. "One tries to leave a ­living trace with people, in which they can reflect on what they are ­doing. The thing that I have a horror of is ­ideological theatre – Shakespeare never told us how to think. I have great ­respect for Brecht, but his path is not mine."

The play keys into another ­side of Brook that journalists and ­biographers have shied away from, ­either out of fear or embarrassment: his lifelong search for a spiritual path, ­beyond the success and ­celebrity that came so early and ­easily. There is more than a little of the sufi in Brook. And in Bokar, he has found a hero of ­Shakespearean scope who matches his own ­spiritual master, the Russian-Armenian mystic George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, whose ­Meetings With ­Remarkable Men, a partly ­imagined ­account of his ­wanderings among the sufis of central Asia at the turn of the last century, Brook filmed in ­Afghanistan before the ­Russian invasion.

Gurdjieff's ideas on movement and proportion, strongly influenced by the dervishes he encountered in ­Istanbul in the dying days of the ­Ottoman empire, had a profound ­effect on the young Brook. "I couldn't believe that scientific thinking and religious ­thinking should be in ­opposition. There must be a link. When I saw that what we call beauty is not an aesthetic matter, but that there is an absolute law, the golden section, that relates to proportions and numbers, I knew at once it made sense." His first epiphany came while reading a book by the ­Romanian prince Matila Ghika while staying with Salvador Dalí in Spain. Classical art, it turned out, owed its harmony to its ­mathematical relationship to the human body. To a boy brought up on his father's ­maxims that everything becomes clear when reduced to numbers, this was powerful stuff.

Gurdjieff had died by the time Brook discovered him, but he still may have taught Brook a thing or two about ­being a guru. Artists don't so much work with him as join him on a journey. The sufi ­disciplines Gurdjieff adopted from the dervishes appear to have given a structure to Brook's restless, questing spirit – which saw its greatest flowering, up until now, in his sublime The Conference of the Birds. In it, the hoopoe bird leads all the birds of the earth towards their master. Only 30 last the course. Yet Brook is guarded, extraordinarily so, about Gurdjieff's influence. "This is something so rich that nothing would be more harmful than trying to ­encapsulate it in a few easy phrases." What would mysticism be, after all, without its mystery?

Yet it is to The Conference of the Birds, and an old sufi parable about butterflies and a candle, that Brook turns for the ­final image in Eleven and Twelve. All the ­butterflies wonder what the light on top of the candle is and what would ­happen if they entered it. The bravest throws himself into the flame and, as he ­disappears, the ­butterflies' master says: "This one has finally ­understood. And he is the only one who knows. And that is all."

Someone came to Brook the ­night I saw the play and told him that this meditation on the search for the truth and the price it demands could be taken as a justification for suicide bombing. Was the butterfly not blowing himself up for God? "I ­suppose," says Brook with heavy sarcasm, "this young person is rather pleased with himself, that he has discovered what all [Bokar's] talk of non-violence really hides – that it is to encourage suicide bombing?" For a fleeting second, there is anger in those cool, blue eyes.

For the past 70 years, Brook has been a butterfly throwing himself at a flame. His life, too, has been a search for answers to the big questions. But there will always be those who don't or won't get it. And, even at 84, you get the feeling that he will never quite understand why.

Eleven and Twelve
Barbican, London
Starts 5 February, until 27 February
(Featuring alongside a season of Peter Brook's films)
Box office: 0207 638 4141

• Peter Brook will give the inaugural Peter Brook lecture at the Barbican Pit on 6 February 2010 at 4pm. He will be in conversation on 9 February 2010.

Picture: Passing on wisdom … Brook in Paris. Photo by Graeme Robertson
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Monday, January 25, 2010

A Point Of Reference
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By SN Staff Writer, *World Food Program to pull out of Somalia* - Spero News
Saturday, January 16, 2010

Autonomous moderate Sufi Muslims appear to be making inroads in their fight against Muslim extremists: the Shabab militia.

"I am very concerned about the humanitarian situation in south-central Somalia, where 3 to 4 million people depend on international aid for their survival," according to Catholic Bishop Giorgio Bertin of Djibouti, who is also Apostolic Administrator at Mogadishu.

"Now that the World Food Program has decided to withdraw its personnel from the area, the situation of these people may become dramatic. I understand the motivations of the leadership of WFP, but we must find ways to continue to assist these people," said Bishop Bertin. In early January, the WFP decided to suspend operations in Somalia following an ultimatum by the fundamentalist Shabab militia, which had previously attacked and looted the humanitarian organization's facilities several times.

"Also, the Somali refugees in some facilities in Kenya are in difficulty because of the floods that hit the country in recent weeks," said Bishop Bertin. "Regarding the 10,000 Somali refugees in Djibouti, their situation is difficult, but overall stable. The Catholic Church has entered into an agreement with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for a program of help and support for these people."

On the political plane, there have been new developments: autonomous groups of moderate Muslims, Sufi-inspired, independent allies of the legitimate government, are defeating the fundamentalist Shabab militia.

"In Somalia, the Sufi confraternities, representing traditional Islam Somali, have lost much of their influence in comparison to over 30-40 years ago, but they are still a point of reference for part of the population," said Bishop Bertin. "The call to traditional Islam, using the Sufi confraternities, could be part of a strategy to use the religious sentiment against those movements, such as the Shabab, who use religion for political ends, a strategy promoted by foreign powers that have long been interfering in the affairs of Somalia.”

In the northern part of Somalia, Somaliland, a region that declared independence from the rest of the country in 1991 (though their independence is not recognized by the international community), the internal tensions related to the postponement of the elections are likely to cause an explosion of violence among different clans, which had so far, unlike the south of Somalia, secured a certain stability to the area.

"If this happens, the Shabab, which already has tried to penetrate the area, will take advantage," said Bishop Bertin. Somaliland is located opposite Yemen, where the government, which is facing two armed uprisings, is worried that the thousands of Somali refugees will take on extremist positions.
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People Do
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By ENS Staff Writer, *‘Sufism a panacea for all social evils’* - Indian Express - India

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Patiala: Sufism is a panacea for issues related to violence and hatred and an elixir for those who feel inclined to share and promote love, compassion and empathy among mankind for making this world a better place to live. It is the epitome of secularism and the basic premise of a pluralistic society.

These views were expressed by speakers during the valedictory function of a two-day national seminar on ‘Sufism and Sufi Literature’ that concluded at Punjabi University on Friday.

Syed Sarwar Chishti from Gaddi Nashin, Dargah Sharif in Ajmer and H K Dua, Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune were the guests of honour.

Talking of ‘Talibanisation of Islam’, Chishti said militants, who are bent upon destroying the pious fabric of the religion through their virulent and disruptive acts, were the outcome of false indoctrination coupled with ignorance.

“We have to remain vigilant and cautious against spilling over of extremism from across the border as these brutal forces won’t find scarcity of resources to help them in their dastardly mission,” Chishti said.

While assuring the Vice-Chancellor all support in establishing a Sufi Centre, he called upon the media to play a responsible role to help revive a peaceful and congenial atmosphere.

Dua, in his address, said that Sufism provides the most befitting answer to the theory of ‘Clash of Civilisations’.

Rating internal strifes as more dangerous than external aggressions, Dua said that various existing denominations have no remedies but people do have.

Vice-Chancellor Jaspal Singh reiterated that truthful living was the quintessence of Sufism.

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Sunday, January 24, 2010

A Sufi Muslim
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By Mading Ngor, *Profile - Yasir Said Arman: The altruistic freedom fighter * - The New Sudan Vision - Canada

Friday, January 15, 2010

On Friday, Yasir Said Arman was nominated as the presidential candidate to lead the SPLM to April’s elections. The profile has been modified to fit current events. It was conducted on August 15, 2007 while Arman was in the United States of America.

(Victoria, BC NSV) - Just from what angle does one begin to narrate the story of an audacious freedom fighter whose prime preoccupation has been a better Sudan for all without understating or overstating? The story of Yasir Said Arman is characterized by altruistic human values, freedom and dignity for all irrespective of race, religion or culture.

At the period when Sudan was undergoing political hardships and upheavals in the 70's and early 80's—at the time when the relative optimism ushered in by the 12 years of Adis Ababa was slowly being dusted by the ominous Shariah decrees of Jaafer Nimeri—Yasir Arman was a student nearing graduation. A son of a primary school teacher who loved taking the young Arman to different places in the north, Arman developed an avid interest in literature and children's books.

At the heydays of his youth, he was a consumer of leftist literature –focusing primarily on identity, ethnicity and ideology. Specifically, he was an admirer of the African National Congress (ANC) and its approach to the diversity question in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-racial country like South Africa at the time when the ANC was deemed a terrorist organization by the apartheid government. Perhaps Arman had Sudan in mind and was glancing outside to reconcile the internal policies and the approaches of subsequent Khartoum governments with the diversity question and settle for the best.

While Arman struggled to understand the myriad realities besetting harmony of Sudan from the South African experience, he not only turned internally to seek for answers but also to provide answers like a field researcher after years of field work. Arman used to have regular intense political discussions with fellow students and colleagues concerning the political makeup and realities of Sudan. One of those was Macur Thon Arok, who he speaks highly about, having partially been instrumental in inspiring Arman to rock the boat of the People's Movement, SPLM/SPLA. Aside from Macur, the SPLM Manifesto, SPLM Radio and Dr. John Garang's vision of New Sudan stirred Arman to the SPLM's direction.

"[Dr. Garang's call for] a Sudan that belongs to all its people struck me very much and I became interested in the political discourse of the SPLM," he says. Previously, Arman has been a student activist where he met those he calls "interesting personalities" at school. He and colleagues were absorbed by the “Southern question” and the first civil war that raged on from 1965 until the signing of the Adis Ababa Agreement between the Anya Nya and the government of Jaafer Nimeri in 1972.

Arman has reasons to subscribe to the vision of New Sudan. As a student he had witnessed firsthand rifts between student movements of divergent political persuasions, religions and ethnic groups. He developed very strong links with southern students both at the intermediate and the university levels. Of the southern students that he befriended in intermediate school were Macur Thon Arok, Chol Biar, Ador Deng Ador, David Bulen Alier, Jacob Bulen Alier and Santino Lado. Macur, who Arman says approached the “southern question” with caution and with whom he exchanged views on southern Sudan went on to become a captain in the Sudanese army. Sadly, as Arman explains, "Macur was killed in cold blood in 1992..." Chol Biar and Ador Deng are now senior SPLM commanders, Arman says, while he gives no mention of David Bulen Alier and Jacob Bulen Alier. Santino went on to become an artist but Arman doesn't know his whereabouts.

In university, his political activism sparked the ire of the authoritarian regime of Jaafer Nimeri. He was detained and locked up in jail together with Southern students he says helped shape his political worldview: Hoth Gor and John Luk of Anya Nya Two Movement and David da Kok. Undeterred, Arman and the three were defiant and unanimously condemned Nimeri's heavy-handed approach to the “southern question” and called for a democratic resolution of the civil war while in prison from 1984 to 1985. Out of prison, he says, "came the great call of the SPLM of Diktoor John Garang de Mabior for the New Sudan."

A Sudan of equality and tolerance that didn't discriminate its citizens based on religion and race was an attractive idea for Arman. Born in 1961 in Jezeera, about 180 kilometers from Khartoum, he traces his roots to diverse backgrounds and tribes in Sudan. His great, great parents migrated before the Mahdist revolution from Damael state near Shendi to Jezeera and Khartoum. A graduate of law, Arman studied at the Cairo University branch of Khartoum and joined the SPLM in the same year, 1986.

Although the SPLM embraces religion and diversity in its manifesto, as a new arrival in 1986, some individuals in the SPLM were ambivalent about him. He says he experienced subtle religious prejudice. Some thought he might have been sent by Khartoum to infiltrate and destabilize the Movement from within. In northern Sudan, he was portrayed as a betrayer and a disgrace to his people. Arman was not the only high-profile Muslim in the SPLM. There were many influential SPLM officers like the late Yousif Kuwo Mekki who believed in the Islamic faith who might have faced religious intolerance at the initial phase.

"As time went on, we managed to overcome those [barriers]. We managed to build confidence with people with whom we were working in the SPLM and we became part of the SPLM hardcore," he says.

"We were building a new society to overcome religion. That helped to overcome whatever happened." A Sufi Muslim, Arman calls his faith traditional Islam integrated with African cultures and traditions as opposed to a militant and political Islam. During the war, it was not lost on Arman that to be a liberator comes with a price tag.

Unlike in other marginalized peripheries where Arman was extolled as a hero, some of his immediate family members looked at him from lenses filtered through the eyes of Khartoum and was to those, a villain. However, he enjoyed wide backing from most of his lineage members, he says. "All my family were very supportive to me. They were proud of what I did and am proud of that too."

Meanwhile, the National Islamic Front would routinely round up and interrogate Arman's brothers to discourage him from his conviction and belief that Sudan must be new and inclusive. However, Arman and family didn’t capitulate to the oppressive regime and stayed true to the cause up to the end of the war. "It's part of the struggle," he says.

Marriage

"This has nothing to do with politics," he says about his marriage to Awuor Deng Kuol. The future husband and wife first run into each other in Adis Ababa when Arman used to work for SPLM information secretariat in 1989.

"We liked each other from that time and now and for the time in the future to come," he declares. A man of principles, Arman has pursued an inspirational revolutionary path. He is an independent thinker. He follows his heart and ideals as his participation in the SPLM demonstrates and his marriage to a Ngok Dinka – an apparent break with tradition for love -- all a revolution and a worthy one, he says.

"For me it wasn't a difficult decision to like my wife and to decide to marry her. That was a decision any person reaches at a time when he decides it's the right time to marry."
He gives his marriage a clean bill of health but cautions, "There are always people here and there who will see it positively or negatively. But the most important thing is; it's me and my wife." A father of two, their marriage is blessed with two daughters, Shanaa 18, born in December 1992, and Wafaa (honesty), 13, born in January 1997. Arman says he is indebted to his wife and lauds her bold efforts for taking care of the young girls as Arman was often away for the SPLA war of liberation. He commends the sacrifices of Awuor Deng Kuol who gave up school, family and education for the SPLM.

A member of the famous Katipa Banaat (Girls Battalion), Awuor, like Arman aspired for a better life for all regardless of differences in humans. The couple saw SPLM as the rightful channel for achieving equity and just peace.

"I am indebted to [my wife] who shared the strength, and herself she is a freedom fighter," he says. "She really contributed a lot in encouraging me and we stood with each other throughout the last fifteen years." Understanding equals love. The marriage of Arman to Awuor was exemplary. Both traditional African ceremonies and Muslim rituals were honoured and observed. They tied their knot in the historical town of Torit, notwithstanding the threats of bombs and guns emanating from Kor Ingiliiz when the NIF regime was trying vainly to make a comeback.

The marriage might have been cross-cultural to many but to Arman, "It was a basic human being wedding."

Politics

"Things will never be changed in Juba, this is the experience of the SPLM. Without changing things in Khartoum you cannot even reach the self-determination," he reechoes the prophetic words of Dr. John Garang that a fish rots from the head and not from the tail. Traditionally, Khartoum has been the head and Arman argues there will not be a quick rear door entrance to south's independence before there is any democratic restructuring of power in Khartoum.

"The self-determination and separation of south Sudan is theoretically in the books, it's a long way to go," he says. His observations are familiar. Khartoum has abrogated several agreements in the past and there is no reason to doubt history may repeat itself as CPA is largely on the verge of collapse. By far the obvious way forward and with many southerners' eyes fixed on separation, he says he has nothing against south Sudan if it opts for secession and warns celebrating separation now is premature.

"To reach the separation of south Sudan, you need the unity of the SPLM. You need those who fought the war with you. People from the Nuba Mountains and South Blue Nile and all over Sudan. Dr. Garang's vision is a great vision which can bring unity on a new basis or separation," he says. Even when south Sudan does separate and form its own independent state, he goes on, New Sudan Vision will still be relevant whether in Darfur or anywhere else.

"The vision of New Sudan is important even if south Sudan separated. How do you rule south Sudan because it is also diverse? There are different tribes, cultures and religions.
"So you need the vision of New Sudan to bring these commonalities together,” he says. Arman urges south Sudanese to rally behind SPLM, saying it's the only organized, diverse and inclusive party in Sudan. "Southern Sudanese, themselves, until the end of Anya Anya didn't have real organizations. There was Anya Nya of Bhar el Ghazal, the Anya Nya of Upper Nile and the Anya Nya of Equatoria.'"

Says Arman: "The SPLM for me is not a political party or political movement or political institution; the SPLM for me is more. It's part of the national building and formation because in the SPLM you get people from different nationalities, ethnic and religious backgrounds together." As a leading figure in SPLM Nothern Sector (now SPLM national presidential candidate), he engaged in rallies in 49 cities in the west, east and the center in post-CPA period.

He says he found thousands who uphold the vision of New Sudan. This compels him to say, "I believe the vision of Dr. Garang is very much alive more than any time before.
"The New Sudan Vision cannot die because if you're talking about it dying with Garang that means Dr. Garang is really dead but Dr. Garang is not dead and as a result his vision is alive." Arman says his proudest moment in life was not when he was carried on the shoulders upon returning to Khartoum with SPLM delegation for the first time in more than 20 years. His proudest day was "When Dr. Garang was received by millions in Khartoum. That was a clear message from all over the Sudanese society that the Sudanese people appreciate the vision and the leadership of the SPLM," he says.

Garang's triumphant return to Khartoum, Arman reasons, suggests the "people in the north and in the center in particular appreciate what we did and they see the reality of the situation and that our involvement with the SPLM is important for the national building and liberation of societies from all prejudices and building a new society to overcome [religious differences]."

He says that by the end of the day, "I believe in the capabilities of our people, whether they are from the north, the south or the west or the east or the center." Arman's relationship with the late Dr. John Garang was that of “comradeship.” He touts Garang as "the best politician Sudan has ever had in more than 100 years." In the 19th century, Arman says, the Mahdist revolution’s front man, Mohamed Ahmed Al Mahdi was the other colorful politician matchable only by Garang's charisma.
“The real question”
At any rate, Arman is an altruistic freedom fighter. His unselfish toils for a new Sudan, he once told Iowa State Newspaper, "Not the Sudan of today, a Sudan of misery and wars and human rights violations. My dream is of a new Sudan, which respects human rights, in which every citizen feels he belongs to that country."

If the question itches you too—don't' worry it's not the real one. What happens to Yasir Arman and Mansour Khalid to name but a few when south Sudan separates? “It's not the real question,” he says. The real question—he says with the vigour in which he took up arms 20 years ago—"The real question is the fate of Sudan, not the fate of individual.

"I never ask myself this question because am not going to live forever but Sudan will live forever. It is the fate of the south Sudan, the fate of the west, the fate of the north, and the fate of central Sudan that's the one concerning me. It's not about the individual because the individual can die or relocate."

After more than 21 years of bush life and the struggle that is ongoing with the challenges facing the CPA, Arman maintains, "I think that it [joining the SPLM] was one of the greatest decisions in my life. I am proud that I made that decision and I thank all the people and everybody who contributed to what I did 21 years ago.

"I am touched by the hundreds of people whom I knew very well. Our martyrs who lost their lives are the ones who made the SPLM: those who are not there."

As it emerges that the SPLM has nominated Arman to be its presidential candidate, it remains to be seen whether this great freedom fighter will be the next president of the Republic of Sudan in April’s elections.
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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Reverence To The Soul
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By Sampurn Media, *Tabla Maestro Sovon Hazra pays tribute to Dr. Anand* - Planet Radio City - India
Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Sometimes there are such promising people who can create new levels of excellence in various fields of life which is not a cake walk for many and Sovon Hazra is one of them.

The Tabla Maestro, Sovon is a well known tabla player who is on an aim to create magical nights for ardent music lovers.

Recently on the occasion of Dr. Mulk Raj Anand’s 105th birth anniversary, Sovon Hazra along with Suhail Yusuf Khan (Grandson of Ustad Sabri Khan) on Sarangi gave a mesmerizing performance to offer reverence to the soul of Mulk Raj in Delhi.

Sovon Hazra had also performed last year on the same occasion with the famous Sufi singer Hans Raj Hans which is still fresh in the minds of the audience.
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Behind The Music
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By Staff Writer, *Oscar winner plays for peace* - The Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney, Australia

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Amid tension over attacks on Indian students, a musical superstar wants to help, writes Matt Wade.

Can Bollywood rhythms help soothe international tensions? A.R. Rahman, the superstar of contemporary Indian music who created the Oscar-winning soundtrack for the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire, thinks they can.

As fury grows on the subcontinent over attacks on Indians in Australia, Rahman will stage a free concert in Sydney's Parramatta Park on Saturday to "build a bridge of understanding". Rahman suggested the show as a gesture of goodwill.

"This concert is a statement of friendship, peace and love," he says before leaving for Australia.
Rahman's desire to stage the concert underscores how deeply the attacks have been felt across India. He considers it his "duty" as a musician to help promote understanding between both countries.

"The show is to celebrate … music and friendship. I feel a concert is a very spiritual gathering where people from many different backgrounds can come together doing the same thing. It's a great way to make a statement of love and peace."

Rahman's show, which is part of the Sydney Festival, was announced last August after a series of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney. The assaults received blanket media coverage in India and damaged Australia's reputation as a safe destination for students.
Tension has flared again in the past fortnight after the violent deaths of two Indians in Australia, including the stabbing murder in Melbourne of former student Nitin Garg. These incidents have made Rahman's visit more poignant.

He hopes the Parramatta show will help break down cultural misunderstandings and boost the morale of tens of thousands of Indians studying in Australia.
"It's not just the music, it is what's behind the music," he says. "I really hope we get a positive response in Australia."

The celebrated score for Slumdog Millionaire won Rahman two Oscars, a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe last year and introduced him to a global audience. The film's uplifting anthem, Jai Ho, became an international hit, topping the charts in several countries including Australia.
"There is now more recognition for my work," Rahman says. "I can walk into any studio and talk to any artist … I have the freedom to be more choosy and to express what I want to express in my music."

Rahman has achieved hero status in India and his success is symbolic of a new, more internationally oriented and globally influential India. He has fond memories of playing to packed crowds in Sydney and Melbourne in 2005. "They were some of my best audiences," he says. "There was great hospitality … There was a lot of encouragement and a lot of love so that's what forced us to come back again."

Rahman says about 80 people will be involved in Saturday's high-energy concert, which is expected to be one of the highlights of this year's festival.

"It's a showcase of all the stuff I've done for 18 years … It will be packed with lots of exciting things like video, lights and dance. There are a lot of positive things coming together for this and I hope it's a great success."

Even before last year's international triumph, Rahman had experienced huge success in his homeland where film and pop music merge. He started as a session musician and composed jingles for commercials in his home town of Chennai, formerly Madras. Rahman launched his career as a film composer in the thriving South Indian movie industry which produces hundreds of films each year in languages such as Tamil and Telugu.

In 1992 he gained critical acclaim for his score for the film Roja and was soon writing music for Bollywood and beyond. He has written more than 100 film scores, typically churning out five or six a year.

Rahman's film scores and soundtracks have reportedly achieved sales of more than 300 million, making him one of the best-selling recording artists in the world.

A Time magazine critic described him as the ''Mozart of Madras'' and the magazine included Rahman in its list of the world's most influential 100 people last year.

The 44-year-old's personal story reflects India's religious diversity. Rahman's father, a composer, was a Hindu and his mother a Muslim. He was given the Hindu-sounding name - A.S. Dileep Kumar - but converted to Sufism, a mystical and lyrical form of Islam, in the late 1980s and changed his name to Allah Rakha Rahman.

His music has been deeply influenced by his religious experience and Rahman attributes his achievements to divine blessing. "My whole journey in music … has had a spiritual guidance," he says.

Despite his national and international success, Rahman is still based in Chennai and continues to work on South Indian films. He says that working in the Indian film industry has given him great freedom to experiment. ''I often tell directors I want to do this and they say, 'Yeah, go ahead and we'll make sure it works in the movie.' ''

His tens of millions of Indian fans have now come to expect innovation. "The people of India constantly push me to the edge, asking 'What are you going to do next?', so their interest has pushed me to work harder."

Rahman says Indian classical music has provided a base for his composition but he borrows from an eclectic range of styles including pop, folk, rock and hip hop. "I don't like to get typecast," he says.

Rahman believes the success of Slumdog Millionaire has created a bridge between Western and Indian audiences that could lead more people to explore Indian music. The international success of Jai Ho showed that contemporary Indian music can attract an international audience.

"Indian music has potential to have a bigger impact on the world," he says.

A.R. Rahman plays at Parramatta Park on Saturday from 7.30pm. Gates open at noon, and the venue will be closed when it is full.
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Friday, January 22, 2010

No Less A Sufi
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By Sweta Dutta, *After a lifetime loving India, historian Digby breathes his last: in Delhi* - Indian Express - India
Tuesday, January 18, 2010

It was only appropriate that he breathed his last just 500 metres away from the graves of Amir Khusrau and Nizamuddin Auliya, for Prof Simon Digby was no less a Sufi.

A noted scholar of medieval Indian history, Prof Digby lost his brief battle with pancreatic cancer on Sunday. He passed away on Sunday at his rented flat in Nizamuddin West — he was 79.

Even in his last days, Digby did not let go of his scholarly pursuits. Despite having nothing to do with a young 30-something scholar’s research paper on Kashmir, he painstaking leafed through the study.

For Digby, this was yet another winter in India; that part of the year when he deserted his Jersey (UK) home to live, travel, study and photograph India.

Born in 1932 in Jabalpur, Digby’s association with India can be traced to his lineage: his grandfather William Digby was with the Indian Civil Services and, together with R C Dutt, critiqued the new economic policies in the late 19th Century.

Even after his father migrated to England, Digby kept returning, living briefly in Delhi University and travelling across the country, picking up languages, coins, manuscripts and an array of sources that could tell him anything about the mystery of Medieval India.

“He never held a proper academic position. In fact, he did not want to,” historian Prof Shahid Amin said. “Even at 75, he would come to Delhi in September, ask his driver to pull out his Ambassador and drive down to Lhasa. That year, he called me from Kulu during Dussehra, then decided to travel to Diu, and after a month I heard from him while he was in Kushinagar and then in Gorakhpur, collecting manuscripts.

“He knew Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Nepali well.’

Martand Singh, chairman of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH)-UK, told Newsline, “According to his will, he wished to be cremated and his ashes immersed in running water. We are waiting for his close friend Richard Harris to arrive before the last rites are performed.”

Amin said it would be appropriate if the cremation is held in Lodhi crematorium, close to the tombs of Khusrau and Nizamuddin Auliya, as a tribute to the Sufi scholar.

Salman Haider, India’s former High Commissioner to UK, recalled: “I got to know Simon through my daughter, who did her DPhil thesis under him. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on December 28. When I called him a week ago, he was quite unsentimental: he said, ‘I am dying’.
“He had no close relatives, but a chosen group of friends.”

A former fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and former assistant keeper in the Department of Eastern Art, Ashmolean Museum, Digby was the foremost British scholar of pre-Mughal India, who wrote several foundational essays on Indo-Persian Sufism and contributed to The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1.

His books, War-horse and elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: a study of military supplies, Wonder Tales in India and papers Sufis and soldiers in Aurangzeb’s Deccan and Qalandars and Related Groups are considered path-breaking.

Digby was invited on behalf of INTACH (UK) to deliver a lecture on “The Runaway Mughal Prince” at the India International Centre next month.

[Picture: Nizamuddin Dargah Complex, Delhi. Photo: Wiki]
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Thursday, January 21, 2010

A Binding Force
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By Saadia Khalid, *Lok Virsa promoting ‘sufism’ in unique way* - The News International - Pakistan
Monday, January 11, 2010

Islamabad: Sufi saints have contributed a lot towards creating a message of love, peace and harmony in the subcontinent. Now there is a need to project their message effectively to acquaint the younger generation with their valuable contributions in the real sense.

This was stated by Lok Virsa Executive Director Khalid Javaid while talking to ‘The News’. He said that the sayings of the sages and the time-old customs, which express the true genius of the people of Pakistan, are major subjects of the Lok Virsa’s mandate.

In this context, Lok Virsa has dedicated a spacious hall, named as the ‘Hall of Sufis & Shrines,’ within its popular living cultural museum — the Heritage Museum at Shakarparian — to depict and portray contributions and messages of the great sufi saints. The display offers beautiful architecture with extremely artistic intricate mirrorwork alongside a pigeons’ landmark, which looks as real as one can see at the shrines.

In the part representing the land of the sufi saints — the province of Sindh — there are life-size statues of musicians in performing postures, singing renditions of sufi saints like Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Sachal Sarmast. Outstanding Sindhi folk artiste and performer Allan Faqir is also among them.

On the other side, the province of Punjab describes pictures of the shrines of Hazrat Data Gunj Bakhsh, Shah Rukne Alam and Sheikh Bahauddin Zakaria. Malangs and faqirs, who form an integral part of shrines, are also seen, paying rich tributes to the sufi saints.

‘Dali’, an ornamented boat-like monument specially created to express tributes to the famous saint belonging to the capital territory known as Hazrat Barri Imam by his spiritual followers during the annual ‘urs’ celebrations, is also depicted in the display.

The display also throws light on the four basic pillars of sufism, which includes ‘Sharia’ (Islamic lifestyle), ‘Irfaan-e-Haqeqat’ (journey towards the embodiment of God), ‘Maarfat’ (journey towards the introduction to Allah) and ‘Tareeqat’ (Acting upon real teachings of Islam).

Besides establishing this display, Lok Virsa has already published a series of books on the works of sufi poets and saints such as Sultan Bahu, Baba Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Waris Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, etc, the Lok Virsa executive director further explained.

The word ‘sufi’ is derived from Arabic word ‘safa’ meaning purity.

Sufism is a mystic tradition encompassing a diverse range of beliefs and practices. This mystic sufi tradition has existed in all parts of Pakistan and is a binding force that brings people of diverse cultures together.

The saints whose shrines dot the landscape are the meeting place of the masses — the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled — serve as a humanising force in society at both cultural and spiritual levels. The sufi saints who came to the subcontinent in large numbers played the most important part in spreading Islam all over the region, preserving the religion’s inner spirit and converting a large mass into Muslims.

They were indeed the men of high moral characters, who stood side by side with the poor masses in all trails and tribulations of time. The concept of equality and brotherhood of mankind preached by the sufis attracted a large number of poor people.

Like other Islamic movements, sufism traces its origin to the Holy Qur’aan and the Hadith.

In order to keep sufism within the discipline of Islam, the sufis organised themselves into ‘silsilas’ or orders. The most important and well known among them are ‘Qadriah’, founded by Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani; ‘Naqshbandiah’, called after Khawaja Bahauddin Naqshbandi; ‘Chishtiah’, founded by Khawaja Abul Ishaq Shami; and ‘Soharwardiah’, founded by Sheikh Bahauddin Zakaria.

[Picture: Lok Virsa Museum, Ancient Carved Door. Photo: Wiki.]
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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

For Peace, Progress And Prosperity
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PT Wire Service, *Fehmida offers Fateha at Mazar of Khawaja Gharib Nawaz [RA] Pakistan* Pakistan Times - Pakistan

Sunday, January 10, 2010

New Delhi: Fehmida Mirza, Speaker National Assembly of Pakistan visited the shrine of the great Sufi saint and spiritualist for all times Hazrat Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti (ra) at Ajmer Sharif on Friday.

She offered Fateha and laid Chaddar on the Mazar of Hazrat Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti (ra) – popularly known as Hazrat Khawaja Gharib Nawaz (ra) on Friday night.

While paying due respects to the great saint – Hazrat Khawaja Gharib Nawaz (ra) who is the founder of Chistitia dynasty – the Speaker offered special prayers for peace, progress and prosperity of Pakistan.

The Speaker, who is in India connection with Commonwealth Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers offered special prayers for peace and prosperity of Muslim Ummah.

She also visited Jaipur along with other delegates of the conference.

[Picture: Nizam Gate. Mir Osman Ali Khan, The Nizam of Hyderabad Deccan,erected the main gate of the Dargah Sharif in 1911 A.D. Photo from http://khwajagharibnawaz.com/default.htm]
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

"International Conference on Sufism and Peace" held in Pakistan
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By Staff Reporter*Moot on Sufism from 14th* - Daily Times - Pakistan
Sunday, January 10, 2010

Islamabad: Pakistan Academy of Letters (PAL) is holding a three-day international conference on Sufism and peace that will be inaugurated by President Asif Ali Zardari on Jan 14.

The PAL chairman, Fakhar Zaman, said this in a press release issued here on Saturday. He said the main purpose of the conference was to highlight the soft image of Pakistan and promote the Sufi poets’ message of love, peace and brotherhood.

Zaman said that the slain PPP chairwoman Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto had announced the holding of such a conference in 1995. He said the academy had organised this conference last year, which was a very successful event.
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Monday, January 18, 2010

Zawiyah : A New Publication on Sufism

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Introducing a quarterly journal published by Shems Friedlander, renown Sufi author and graphic designer. (A zawiyah or zawiya is a word in Arabic commonly used to refer to a Sufi center.) Click on the picture in order to enlarge it so that the text can be read.

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The Laughing Sufi
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By Staff Writer, *Gus Dur* - The Economist - UK

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur), intellectual and president of Indonesia, died on December 30th, aged 69

Whatever the time or place, Abdurrahman Wahid—Gus Dur, as everyone fondly called him—had a joke to tell. About his predecessors as Indonesia’s president: “Sukarno was mad about sex, Suharto was mad about money, Habibie was mad about technology, but me? I’m just mad!”

About his removal from the presidency in 2001, when he was almost blind: “I need help to step up, let alone step down.”

About losing power: “It’s nothing. I regret more that I lost 27 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

Visiting Tokyo, he was delighted when the prime minister congratulated him on his “erection”. For a Muslim ulama, or priest-scholar, his appetite for smut was remarkable. He had naughty jokes on his website, and was once reported to the police by conservative clerics for emphasising the raunchier bits of the Koran.

Joking was essential, he said, for a healthy mind. Villagers in Jombang in East Java remembered him, as a boy, tied to the flagpole in the front yard for some jest that had gone too far. Visitors to the house would find their shoelaces surreptitiously knotted together. Later on, it was sometimes hard to tell whether he was larking round or serious: as a narcoleptic, he would often lull journalists into a snooze and then snap to, razor-sharp, with the answer to their questions.

Joking got him through the rigours of pesantren, rural Muslim boarding school, and certainly through the turmoil of his 21 months as president from 1999 to 2001. At the end, when his aides tried to restrain him, “It has affected me,” he complained. “Starting tomorrow, I will start telling jokes again.”

The drunken master

His eccentricity could be infuriating. But it usually hid a serious purpose. In sprawling Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, cramped under authoritarian rule for most of its existence, Mr Wahid was committed to pluralism, liberalism, democracy and tolerance.

He promoted these principles in his columns in Prisma, Tempo and Kompas. More remarkably, he believed that they were also fundamental to his religion. “All too many Muslims”, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2005, “fail to grasp Islam.” “Right Islam” was not fanatical. It was tolerant, open and fair.

To some of his co-religionists, he went too far. But Mr Wahid had imbibed the gentle, Hindu-flavoured Islam of Java and the café-table cut-and-thrust of Baghdad’s student circles, as well as the doctrinaire rote-learning of al-Azhar University in Cairo, and had plumped for free expression every time. He had also been brought up in a house that was both devout and cosmopolitan: encouraged to read European magazines, to devour Dickens and Dostoyevsky, to listen to Mozart and Janis Joplin, as well as to get involved in Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the world’s largest Muslim organisation, heavily rural and steeped in animist Javanese tradition, which his grandfather had founded and his father had run.

In time the NU, with its 40m members, became his own power base. He reformed it, as well as removing it, in 1984, from party politics, in order to focus its energies on raising the pesantren to the level of secular schools.

Though a deep believer in mysticism and the spirit world, secularism never offended him. Selamat pagi, “Good morning”, did as well for him as the believer’s assalamu alaykum; both, as he pointed out, meant “Peace be to you”. He accepted the constitution’s doctrine of pancasila —national unity and social justice with freedom of religion— as a useful creed for fissiparous Indonesia. More surprisingly, he kept on cordial terms with Suharto, despite pushing against the strongman both as the hugely popular head of the NU and, from 1998, as leader of his own non-sectarian National Awakening party.

In 1999, in Indonesia’s first (indirect) presidential election, Mr Wahid comprehensively outmanoeuvred Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had in fact done better than he had at the polls. Though hobbled by strokes and blindness, he now grinned from ear to ear at the prospect of power. In short order, he invited outlawed dissidents and communists to see him at the palace; removed the ban against Chinese culture and language; talked to, and tried to make peace with, Aceh and West Papua, as part of a devolution of power away from “corrupt” Jakarta; dismantled Suharto’s press-curbing Ministry of Information, and the extortionist Ministry of Welfare; sacked General Wiranto, who had overseen atrocities in East Timor, and apologised to the East Timorese. He did not manage to control the army or set up diplomatic relations with Israel, but made it clear he wanted to.

The result was chaos. Mr Wahid, out of his depth and surrounded by enemies, soon lost control, and parliament removed him. But he had at least set standards for government accountability and openness in Indonesia, which helped democracy to grow. Even more valuably, he had shown the world a thoughtful, tolerant form of Islam.

He saw himself as many characters: as Semar, the wise demigod-turned-jester of Javanese shadow-theatre, and as the “drunken master” of kung-fu films, expertly waddling in, in his cheap batik shirts, to bang heads together.

But he was also the laughing Sufi of Islam’s mystical tradition, mad—or wise—before the undiscriminating inclusiveness of God.

Photo by Getty Images/The Economist
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The Inspiration He Gave
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By Achmad Munjid, *Gus Dur’s immortal legacy* - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta, Indonesia

Friday, January 8, 2010

Philadelphia: For most people involved with Islamic boarding schools, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) is not just an organization. NU is a genuine version of ahl sunnah wa al-jama’ah (or aswaja, which means the People of the Prophet’s Traditions and Community, the Sunni).

In this setting, Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid can be categorized as a wali (saint).

A wali in Sufi tradition is a friend of God’s, a moral guardian and protector of other creatures. In our time, what can be more articulate for the true meaning of a wali than Gus Dur’s life?
His life was an extraordinary example of the tireless struggle for freedom, equality and justice for all, deeply rooted in his Islamic faith.

His being literally accessible for everyone made him almost like a crystal to whom every type of group and individual might voice their hope and be assured of human solidarity: human rights activists, politicians, philosophers, clerics, interfaith thinkers, feminists, intellectuals, artists, students, spiritualists, peasants, religious and ethnic minorities, authors, international leaders — you name it.

His simple life was a rare example for more than 30 million NU members, most of them at the grass roots. In 1987, as the NU chairman, Gus Dur still lived in a rented house and frequently used crowded public transportation to get around the city. For years he toiled in his office in the stifling Jakarta heat, with no air conditioning or even an electric fan.

In almost every aspect, Gus Dur was a giant: social class, intellectual capacity, political talent, religious piety. What made him even more unusual was his tireless schedule traveling around the country for silaturahmi (maintaining and improving social relations), to meet people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to share support and wisdom. He kept doing this even after becoming president, even after suffering for years from strokes, blindness, kidney failure, diabetes, etc., until the last days of his life.

Thanks to this intensive silaturahmi, not only did Gus Dur keep in touch with so many real people and their actual problems around the country, or bring great charismatic clerics such as Abdullah Faqih of Langitan to national attention, but he also gave due recognition and introduced local leaders of remote villages previously unknown, people like Shaikh Mas’ud of Cilacap — a collector of rare books written by classical Indonesian Muslim scholars.

Many other local leaders, values and wisdom from the Islamic boarding schools he discovered for the wider public.

His most frequent practice was probably the ziarah kubur (grave visit), which was also the most misunderstood both by modernist Muslims and secular groups. Regardless of how you may want to understand “the unseen world” — a key principle in Islamic faith — visiting a grave, especially to those of saints, is a very well-known practice of spiritual exercise in Sufism throughout Islamic history. By performing this exercise properly and sufficiently, the human spirit will be purified and sensitized. It is this purity and sensitivity that enables a Muslim to translate Islamic faith beyond mere orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

By way of ziarah — praying, chanting, dzikir, learning the lessons of the saints, deeply contemplating in the right time and psychological mood — one may get spiritual enlightenment that will draw one closer to God and human beings. That is why haul (death anniversary) is a popular part of Islamic boarding school tradition. Haul is not so much about remembering death as it is a celebration of life and its meaning in relation to the spiritual world.

Gus Dur may never remember my name. But I am among the tens of thousands of young NU people from remote Indonesian areas who have traveled to far-off countries to explore new horizons of ideas and realities, thanks to the inspiration he gave and the difficult path he walked with sincerity and courage.

I am part of the Islamic boarding school generation, millions in number, born and raised during the Soeharto era. We were an ignored generation under Soeharto. Our attitude toward relations between Islam and modernity was very ambiguous. With no access, we were jealous about the many fascinations of modernity as displayed by Soeharto’s high modernism and development projects. On the other hand, we were so proud of Islamic learning and tradition that was branded backward and irrational, an obstacle to national development and even a potential enemy of the state.

We knew the government was corrupt, unjust and anti-Islamic, but it went unchallenged. We knew Islamic boarding schools were rich and had so much to offer, but we did not know how to unpack it.

We were so powerless and lost.

Thanks to Gus Dur, we learned that students of these schools did have an equally valuable heritage to offer the modern world, and we learned how to present it meaningfully. That Islam is completely compatible with the principles of modernity. That in order for Islam to be rahmatan lil ‘alamin (God’s mercy for the Universe), Muslims should be in sincere dialogue and total engagement with others regardless of their ethnicity, culture, worldview and faith.

At time when most people grow pessimistic about NU, Gus Dur became the loudspeaker who assuaged our optimism. He had unconditional and abundant love for his country, especially NU and more specifically young people.

“No single Muslim organization on Earth has as much potential as NU,” he said repeatedly and confidently to everybody.

The writer is the president of the NU community in North America and a PhD student in religious studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, US.

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