First man of the new age

Farahi was born on border. Behind him was the old world of Muslims; shrunk, and gone. Before him an entirely  new world, enormous, ever expanding; but not his own. All the greats born on this border faced a disruption, from Jamal-ud-Afghani to Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi. The psychological trauma was insufferable. Persons, Parties, Movements, Institutions, Plans, Proposals – the idea of recovery took a million forms. But in each form the subliminal anguish resided like a DNA. As the response grew, DNA in the core manifested.

The unstoppable turbulences in our politics kept this DNA of grief replicate. It reinforced the emotive responses, eclipsing the intellectual glimmers that flared in the beginning. Partition of the sub-continent, dismemberment of the Middle East, wounds like Kashmir and Palestine, finally Russian invasion into Afghanistan, and consequent armed movements; all this sucked us into a bottomless inferno of crisis.  The fall continues; more we go down, more we generate speed to go further down.

The architects of a modern response to these modern crisis, Syed Maududi, Syed Qutb and others, didn’t live to witness the fallout of their ideas and efforts. Intellectual disagreement apart, none can deny them what they were; men with quality of head and heart. But the dust is now so high and thick that even the original character of Maududi and Qutb is lost. We are now ruthlessly driven by a runaway craving; an imagined glory of a lost world. Put simply, political power. Put more openly, Islamic State – Khilafat. It’s a desire-driven throwback to the olden times of Muslim empire. Not a bad wish, but where is the merit. If wishes were horses, Muslims would rule!

Looking back, in the face of the present crisis, an idea tickles. Did we walk into the new world bodily while mentally ensconced in the old. We are here, but not here. We, and the rest of the world, are two separate mental zones. We view everyone in this world – Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, godless communists, atheists, and those unmindful of such identity – as constituting single unified mass of hostility. Then we behave in ways that others – Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, godless communists, atheists, and those unmindful of such identity  – consider us a single sedimented lump of trouble.

Ya Ilahi ye majira kya hai

God!  What has befallen us

November is the month Farahi was born, Iqbal too. Both were deep minds. Both witnessed the same crisis. Iqbal wrestled with the problems of the time from a close quarter. He drunk deep from the Western spring, and was equally drenched in his own waters. Farahi was no less. Both were conscious of the remnants of our world, physical as well as intellectual. We have instances where both these great minds seem so tied to even the ordinary symbols of our tradition, reflecting intense belonging. Iqbal expressed his passion of proximity through poetry. It caught the popular imagination and Iqbal was a rage. But Farahi remained a man unknown. He carried the weight of this passion with him, all by himself, all to the end.

But Iqbal, and Farahi, were not just about restless hearts. They were committed and tireless minds. Both of them looked at the emerging world as a challenge to the Muslim intellectual tradition that can be countered neither by a meek surrender to the western knowledge, nor a touchy fixation to the medieval Muslim thinking.

Don’t be scared of the emerging ( Aine Nav Sai Darna), don’t balk at the gone ( Tarze Kuhan Pai Adna); to Iqbal this was hard (Kathin). Iqbal’s poetry is replete with this idea, but poetry has a problem. It stirs emotion, and then emotion stir blood. In the stirred up bloodstream Iqbal was injected like a devastating drug. It blinded us to his prose. His prose clearly marked the future shocks, but it remained unattended. No one took seriously what Iqbal meant by Reconstruction.  In the din of Islamisation, and Islam-as-a-system waiting imposition we forgot the task.

The political situation Iqbal lived through, and wrestled with, eclipsed his core intellectual search. It was, and is, a head swivelling situation. Muslim collective is still on a high, dreaming day and night. We reside in present, live in past. Long lived the past. A long dead past.

Farahi laid the foundation of a new beginning. What Einstein is to Physics, Farahi is to the Muslim intellectual tradition. To a beginner, this is enough introduction to Farahi. With him starts our own brave new world. He breaks like a dawn, drenched in the brilliance of a living Quran, “to warn those who are alive” –  Li Yunzire Mann Kaane Hayyan.. 

Our minds are held hostage to an accumulated collective desire. Our ideas of revolution have fomented debilitating mental turbulences. And then an actual mayhem in our collective condition disables us to do some plain-talk. We are the hostages fallen in love with an ignominious captivity. Any light from outside is a pain. But we badly need some unkind mental shaking. We are no chosen people destined to rule the world for all times to come. It’s not our world of desire, it’s God’s universe of purpose, and principle. We need freedom from a self imposed bondage.

Farahi opened the door. He took the first, and the most firm, steps. A giant, and a giant’s leap forward. We know when the man walked on moon, but we hardly know when the man, called Farahi, walked in not so far a place called Phreha. A small hamlet in UP’s Azamgarh district. Sir Syed’s Aligarh, Shibli’s Lucknow, and Nanatwi’s Deoband are all in the neighbourhood. Who knows when this “Muslimised”-Hindu changes the names! But here too Farahi throws up a surprise. He was laid to rest in the dust of Mathura; Krishna’s abode.

Syed Suliaman Nadvi grieved Farahi’s departure with this telling remark: “We are mourning the death of our first intellectual of the new age. He came, and left. The world didn’t realise who came, and who left.”

Do we realise after a century who came, and who left. Thank you Amin Ahsan for handing over the treasure called Farahi so honestly to us. And thank you to your student Ghamidi, to take us, the laity, closer to the Master. The journey on a reconstructed path looks like begun. But this journey can be undertaken only by those whose search for truth is not tied to any name, not even Farahi’s.

We are in  a new age, and Amin Ahsan says “It’s his age.”

Whose?

Farahi’s.

mrvaid@greaterkashmir.com