Mystical Vision in Rashid Nazki’s Wahrat

By Dr. M. Maroof Shah - GreaterKashmir - Srinigar,India
Thursday, November 2, 2006

There is a realm beyond the one we see, hear and touch, the realm of silence with a meaning and message of its own.

Kashmir is the only land that is identified by mysticism. There is no other pir-waer and there is no comparable paradise in the world. Here we breathe God. We don’t talk about God but talk God. Here everyone is a mystic, to a little or greater extent.

We have a got a great tradition of mystical poetry. Here hardly any poet has lived or could afford to live outside the mystical tradition. But it is indeed saddening to note that we seem to have stopped producing Hubbies and Shams Faqeers. After Ahad Zargar there is no major mystical voice on the horizon.

Prof. Nazki is unique in being not only a mystic of ordinary stature but also a poet and a poet who knows the art of poetry as well as science of mysticism. Our great mystic poets have generally suffered for being illiterate and theologically not quite on the safe ground. They have not mastered the art of poetry and from a purely literary viewpoint their value is not unquestionable. We have produced very few if any metaphysicians. Mystical rather than metaphysical realization (and it is the latter that constitutes the real knowledge of Universal Principles or Truth) could be attributed to many representative mystical poets. Our Sufis’ appropriations of the Qur’an and other scriptures/religious traditions sometimes betray their inadequate knowledge/comprehension of them.
In the face of all this and in the context of modernistic/secularist/progressivist orientation of modern Kashmiri literature Prof. Rashid Nazki’s voice is indeed unique. He is a poet, a mystic, a good scholar of religion. Mystic vision informs almost his whole poetic corpus and that is what gives him distinct voice. He has written a beautiful introduction to mysticism and mysticism in Kashmir. His is perhaps the best scholarly work on Kashmiri mystical poetry. He is widely read in mystical traditions of the world and their respective metaphysical worldviews. He has first hand knowledge of Sufism and as far as I know has been travelling on the Sufi path and has been bestowed with certain mystical and even metaphysical realization as well. He could well qualify as a worthy successor of Ahad Zargar and more fortunate than him in many respects.

We will focus on one of his vacchuns in his award winning poetry collection Wahrat. This vachuun reflects and echoes the whole mystical tradition, its diverse currents from Zen, Taois, Kabbalastic and Sufistic tradituions. One can hardly doubt the genuineness of mystical experience of the poet. Poet is celebrating his experience of transcendence of time or vision of Eternity. This experience is the culmination of mystical path. It is another name of baqa, or subsistence in God.

Victory over time is the victory over the world, the realm of impermanence and suffering. Heaven is a place where there is no time, as Prophet Jesus AA said. One just needs to transcend the illusion of ego or self to pass beyond the domain of time. Then alone is one beyond day and night or the realm of time. His description of this experience echoes classical description of it in mystical and in Sufi literature. Back home Shams Faqeer and Ahad Zargar seem to be speaking in this vachun. Indeed mystics of all ages and all traditions have spoken the same language, the same wordless word (kaith raus Kaith). They have experienced a similar state in which speech comes without words. They have all harped on the string less string (tarri rous-yaktar) and produced the same celestial music. They have all been suffering the same pain, a pain that is not produced by any phenomenal cause (zarbirous zarbich dag). They all need to cross the dark night of the soul as their empirical self needs to be dissolved and nothingess at the heart of being or the emptiness within, the voidness of all things including the empirical self needs to be squarely encountered.

After this excruciatingly painful discipline (ragiragi pherki wan parud choovum one becomes the lord of the world and transcends all the dualities including the duality of day and night. Our poet describes the mystical power of world or Divine Names that need to be assimilated to reach the empyreal spheres. It isn’t the repetition of certain names or words that ensures deliverance by attempting to reach the primordial silence that was before the Word and that was punctured by the primordial speech. The timeless, the infinite is revealed only in silence, when the mind is stilled when no cloud of passions befogs the pure intellect (Jibril in Sufi metaphysics is another name of pure Intellect that is identical with the Universal Intellect). No vain speech or forced silence but the hallowed invocation of yafatahu and yahu will penetrate the veil that separates essence from existence, God from self.

To be with God (ma’al lah) the key (fatah) to unlock the word (harfich hangin) has to be found. That ism-i-azam is inscribed deep in our hearts and one needs to read that divine script to unveil the Beloved’s face. One needs to be superconsciously aware and always alert and on guard against the distractions of the senses and the mind. The dream (chal-win-khaab) world, the world of maya, the world of memories must be left behind to access lawhi-mahfooz. God communicates with the chosen ones not through the words that we all know but through “meaningless” words, through the words that uninitiated can’t make sense of. Such are the words called haroof-i- muqati’aat is understood non-conceptually, at supralinguistic plane through immediate intellectual intuition (wijdan). These words indicate the need to transcend the realm of language, the doconstructable realm of signs and concepts altogether. That is one explanation of “meaningless” huroofi mukata’at that Sufism seems to be adopting and our mystic poet seems to hint at. Yes mystic’s sensory faculties are radically reoriented when he encounters the divine. Heart sees and eyes listen (chasmobozum ti dili wuchouvm) in this state.

Glimpses of this phenomenon are sometimes available to non-mystics as psychologists tell us. The book of God is the book of Love and not mere words. One needs to love to see God who is Love for the lover’s way to God is made easy. This is what Ibn Arabi argues for in his Interpreter of Desires (Tarjumanul Ishwaq). To be in love means to transcend ego, to surrender ego before the beloved that is why it may lead to transcendence if it is not slave to passions.

When one reads the book of love (loal-i-kitab) the meaning of Elysian mysteries is revealed. There are many reports that mystics have talked without talking. That heart to heart discourse occurs when one transcends the realm of talk, of argument, or the trap of signs altogether. Then we understand the meaning of talkless talk (kath-rous kath). Subject-object duality, the duality of knower and known, knowing and being – all are transcended in mystic experience. One becomes what one knows. Truth and being become one so how could one talk? God is too deep a mystery to be filterable in the net of language. He is impossibility of all signification – quote some treasury. Our subjecthood must be gone in the experience of fana or mirror the Object or Beloved. Mind divides and it creates categories of the dualistic thought. But in the Unitarian Tawhidic Weltanschauung all divisions must be noughted.

Only God is from the Sufistic perspective. The relative in itself has no existence but only a derived existence. God ultimately is the witness when man reads shahadah. He is the only Subject and the only Object. All becomes one (there is no reality but Reality is metaphysical Sufistic translation of Islamic shahada) in the mystical vision. Then every thing becomes living as God ultimately is synonymous with Life. That is why the Qur’an calls God Haiy.

Our mystic indeed sees the real meaning of kulu shayian haiy. Our poet alludes to his perception of the truths of traditional cosmological in the verse Qatrul hafkhani yeili michroom, satvient sudran go milchar) God as manifest Truth is present in a drop of water. The whole universe is contained in an atom. Microcosmos mirrors macrocosmos. One holds infinity in the palm and sees eternity in an hour. Mystic after realizing the Truth of ‘to know one’s self is to know God ‘appropriates the whole universe in himself. As his hands becomes God’s hands and his will becomes God’s will as the separative principle of ego is gone by its surrender to or annihilation before God’s will is complete) he can well declare subhan-ma-azama shani. He can well assert with Gousul Azam RA (though he, his “I” has really passed away and it is the divine “I” that is asserting this) that sun seeks his permission each morning whether to rise or not. Hoor-o-ferasthe become his captives as Iqbal says. Jibril is his zaboon-saidi.

Ibn Arabi once declared that all the angels are under his command as they are his own developed faculties. Sheikh Ahmad Sirhandi could assert that he is Qayoom. Perfect Man is indeed the masjood of the universe. Angels have prostrated before man. Our mystic thus can’t to be disbelieved when he claims to read lawhi-mahfooz and that the starry heaven is under his cloak (tarkh nab jorum damans) and he plays with the rising sun and tosses it here and there (khastwun aaftabi kas pilnovvum). Yes when time isn’t the whole universe vanishes away. Anything that exists in time and is subject to change is naughted in the “Eternal Now”. Before eternity time doesn’t exists. For the objectless consciousness (turiya) no objects exist. Then prophet (SAW) demanded tamashai-zat.

This is the garden of the Essence of which the Sufi speak. God has again returned to his pure Essence, the unmanifested consciousness. Objects of the phenomenal world exist as long as mind exists or Subject-object duality is there. But all is nought save the Face of God. Kulu man alayha faan. Existence is soundless or we can say its sound in soundless. Amen of to which Om is considered to be related is the primordial sound of the universe and it can be heard by following the mystical discipline. Similarly when mystic becomes one with the universe everything speaks yahu with him. The whole world becomes “gulnar:. Lightning too could be talked to as beasts could be rided. Not only lightning and the birds or beasts everything communicates with the mystic. Thus from the start of the path that demands intense discipline and techniques of meditation to its culmination in the experience of the Timeless or Infinite so that man appropriates divine akhlaqwe see complete description of mystical experience or what is another name of Mumin’s ascension (m’iraj).

This vacchun is a key to understandnng his another little appreciated masterpiece of mystical poetry in modern Kashmiri literature”Asra”. In fact Prof Nazki has done much to resurrect the genre of traditional Sufi poetry in contemporary idiom that could be understood by modern man. Kashmiri literary critics have yet to unveil sublime depths and heights and treasures of mystical vision of Prof Nazki.