Silence Not Speech

By Dr. M. Maroof Shah - Greater Kashmir - Srinigar, India
Sunday, May 6, 2007

Let go thy Books and the Sound retain:
Let go Sound— thy mind still undestroyed:
Let go thy Mind, and be naught thygain—
Just a void, that melts, and lo the Void
(Lalla) *

Remembering Reshism and Sufism in the Postmodern Age (I)

Silence not speech is the medium by which or through which we can experience the Reality.

Postmodernism could be and in fact has been interpreted/appropriated/implicated in diverse and often contradictory ways. Its contours are indefinable by definition. It resists all categorising attempts. It stands for nothing and everything.

(...)

The question now is how Sufism and its Kashmiri adaptation Reshism become relevant to postmodern world. To start with we shall first focus on the term Reshi (more broadly a Sufi) so as to argue that Reshism as Sufism is trans-historical nonexclusive all inclusive consciousness. It is not an interpretation (in propositional, conceptual, representational ideological format) of truth or reality but very truth or reality itself. He doesn’t advocate any doconstructable linguistic construct or ideology or theology but lives in the supraformal truth of Unitarian nondualistic consciousness of the reality or God. Reshi transcends all ages, all divisive sectarian ideologies.

He being a Sufi is son of the Moment (ibnul waqt) He no age could afford to be incredulous towards the truth that he lives by. He has no metanarrative to tell but the truth of God who is above all signification, who is Real, the Infinite or Existence (Wajud in Ibn Arabi’s sense) in its totality, both transcendent and immanent.

A few remarks on Kashmir and Rishi follow that will later be subsumed under the broader term Sufi. Heaven is the abode of saints and the abode of saints can’t be but beautiful. If there is any land where the order of eternity and the order of time, the heaven and the earth, intersect and overlap, where celestial lights illumines everything it is Kashmir. Kashmir is the garden of Reshis and Reshis’ garden is the Edenic garden.

Human soul knows no chronology and the Sufi’s journey is from preeternity to posteternity. Reshi, the sage, the self –realized one, the inspired poet, is the image of primordial man, the Adam. He has no history because he transcends history. The Light of Muhammad was there before the heavens and the earth were there. And the first Reshi was Ahmad Reshi(SAW). And Ahmad, from metaphysico-mystical viewpoint is Logos, the Pole of Existence, the Principle of Manifestation. He brings into consciousness the archetype of God.

Thus the term Reshi should be seen as a “perspective, a standpoint, an archetype of certain dominant historical personalities and even dominant images, a way of looking at experience as a whole, a way of interpreting certain fundamental features of human existence.”

Shiekh-ul-Alam Shiekh Nuruddin (RA) has used the term Reshi in this universal transhistorical or metahistorical and transempirical sense. This is evident in his famous eulogiazation of the ‘legendry’ Reshis. He wants to convey something more valuable than an elementary historical definition of the term. Mystical quest is perennial. In this sense one could well argue that Reshi movement didn’t originate in the 14th century but has been always there. Consciousness has no beginning in time, rather it creates time and history. The Reshi is name of this consciousness.

Reshi lives in eternity, in timeless moment. The writer of this essay strongly disagrees with traditional historical approach to phenomenon of Reshism which belong more to metahistory than history and it is only metahistoric or transhistoric dimension of the Reshi movement that makes it perennially relevant. Origin and evolution of Reshi movement should be discussed in terms of its metahistorical archetypal image rather than in purely historical terms.

The Reshi lets his self go so that the Absolute speaks. He is not in time and sees from the perspective of eternity. He lives God not as a proposition of belief but as living consciousness.

In fact for a Sufi only God is; he is not (as a separate self, a subject). So Nietzsche’s infamous declaration of the death of God that is a defining feature of postmodern consciousness has no meaning for him. He is dead before God or Reality or Truth. And he finds ground of his freedom and life (that Nietzsche wanted to safeguard against exoteric dualist theology’s God) in Infinite Divine Spirit that is not his but that is in him.
(To be concluded)

* About Lalla (d. aft. 1353): http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/lalla.html