“The Human Heart Of Sacred Art” By Kenan Malik

A great article by Kenan Malik, who has atheist belief, argues that art is sacred and  writes beautifully how one can enjoy a great work of art regardless whether it depicts secular or religious thoughts. Some excerpts from the article;

“There is a passage in Marilynne Robison’s novel Gilead in which the main character John Ames, a pastor, is walking to his church, and comes across a young couple ahead of him in the street:

The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it.

It is a wonderful, luminous passage, typical of Robinson’s ability to discover the poetic even in the most mundane. Robinson is a Christian, indeed a Calvinist (though, improbably, she tends to see John Calvin more as a kind of Erasmus-like humanist than as the firebrand preacher who railed against the human race as constituting a ‘teeming horde of infamies’), whose life and writing is suffused with religious faith. Robinson’s fiction possess an austere beauty, ‘a Protestant bareness’ as the critic James Wood has put it,  that recalls both the English poet George Herbert and ‘the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville.’

There is in Robinson’s writing a spiritual force that clearly springs from her religious faith. It is nevertheless a spiritual force that transcends the merely religious. ‘There is a grandeur in this vision of life’, Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, expressing his awe at nature’s creation of ‘endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’. The springs of Robinson’s awe are different from those of Darwin’s. And yet she too finds grandeur in all that she touches, whether in the simple details of everyday life or in the great moral dilemmas of human existence. Robinson would probably describe it as the uncovering of a divine presence in the world. But it is also the uncovering of something very human, a celebration of our ability to find the poetic and the transcendent, not through invoking the divine, but as a replacement for the divine.

One does not, of course, have to be religious to appreciate religiously inspired art. One can, as a non-believer, listen to Mozrat’s Requiem or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwli, look upon Michaelangelo’s Adam or the patterns of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan in Iran, read Dante’s Divine Comedy or Lao Zi’s Daode Jing, and be drawn into a world of awe and wonder. Many believers may question whether non-believers can truly comprehend the meaning of religiously-insipred art. We can, however, turn this round and ask a different question. What is it that is ‘sacred’ about sacred art? For religious believers, the sacred, whether in art or otherwise,  is clearly that which is associated with the holy and the divine. The composer John Tavener, who died at the end of last year, was one of the great modern creators of sacred music. A profoundly religious man – he was a convert to Russian Orthodoxy – Tavener’s faith and sense of mysticism suffused much of his music. Historically, and in the minds of most people today, the sacred in art is, as it was with Tavener, inextricably linked with religious faith.”

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/the-human-heart-of-sacred-art/

Posted by F. Sheikh

 

Dealing With The Talibans: Finally some sort of negotiations or what the Government of Pakistan thinks are negotiations have started with the Talibans. Watching GEO News the killings continue. Here is some detailed take forwarded by Zafar Khizer:

Dancing to TTP’s tunes

Intikhab Amir

— File photo

Updated at
2014-03-03 22:48:54

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PESHAWAR: The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) holds the centre stage, changing directions of the game every now and then. In short, it is TTP’s sweet will that is holding the sway.

When it decides to hit and kill us, we bow our heads and get killed. When it decides to talk and kill us as well, we oblige: we fly our helicopter to North Waziristan to facilitate its emissaries to meet their bosses and at the same time we keep collecting corpses from Peshawar to Karachi.

And now when the state’s fighter jets and helicopters have conducted surgical air strikes targeting TTP’s sanctuaries, the terrorists announced ceasefire and we feel happy to oblige and live peacefully with them for the next one month.

Think the one month period in terms of the possibility: no bomb blasts and IED attacks. This has not happened for the past so many years. So we should be happy!

What is more interesting is the fact that the day TTP was about to make the ceasefire public in the evening, its operatives attacked polio vaccinators in Khyber Agency in the morning.

Question remains what will happen to families of thousands of civilians and soldiers killed at the hands of Taliban?

If the TTP bosses were giving serious thoughts to the idea of giving peace a chance, they should have postponed the Saturday morning attack in Khyber Agency.

But who cares? Ceasefire is the buzzword. The other catchphrase these days is ‘on the same page’.

Earlier, doubts were being spewed whether the civil administration and the military leaders were on the same page or not. Now, at least, the TTP bosses are on the same page with the government. We should feel happy. We are moving to the next page!

How many pages of this untitled book written with the blood of thousands of civilians and soldiers are left? No one knows.

What is more interesting is the fact that we are hurling praises on TTP for its commanders’ kindness to bestow us with a month long ceasefire. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Minister for Information Shah Farman was all in praise for the outlawed TTP for the generosity it showed.

He wants the federal government to reciprocate the terrorists’ seriousness by holding serious and sincere talks.

It seems he does not know that, on its part, the federal government is not likely to disappoint him.

But what would happen to the families of the 55,000 civilians and thousands of soldiers killed at the hands of TTP? This argument seems to be a spoiler. It would surely be portrayed by the PTI leadership and its cyber brigade as ‘negativity’ and an attempt to sabotage the prospects of peace.

But, this forms a legitimate concern for the families, who suffered human losses and have every right to see TTP acted against by the military and the judiciary.

Do we think we have paid them ample amount of money in compensation sufficient to shut their mouths and do not look down on us for playing ceasefire and peace with TTP’s murderers?

Our memory is deficient and objectives suffer from short sightedness.

We have forgotten that TTP killed 55,000 innocent Pakistanis and thousands of our soldiers.

We have also forgotten that TTP caused us $80 billion losses. It made us hostages in our own cities and towns by unleashing a campaign of fear and mayhem. It destroyed our children’s schools to keep us living with ignorance and illiteracy.

It bombed our mosques to deny us our right to pray and preach. It deepened the sectarian divide in the country by targeting and killing people belonging to the religious school of thoughts not of their liking.

They denied us our playing fields and made us to host cricket teams from other countries at London, Sharjah, and Dubai.

They sent us chilling videos of their hooligans playing footballs with the heads of our slain soldiers. They targeted our military assets and caused us billions of losses in dollars, destroying our expensive military hardware.

After TTP made public the killing of FC men kidnapped in 2010, prime minister and his cabinet colleagues gave impression that the peace talks and terrorist attacks could not go hand in hand.

And now, we are being bombarded with TV reports that contacts between the negotiators of the two sides continued during the period when there was a general perception that talks had been stalled to take the fight to TTP’s bastion.

Well, those drumbeating and hurling praises on TTP for announcing the ceasefire should not forget that there is an important but voiceless segment of the society that is unrepresented in the peace process.

These voiceless people happen to be the families, who lost their near and dear ones to TTP’s brutalities. We have no right to make deals with TTP at the cost of the victims’ families, denying them their right to seek justice and get their victims honoured by bringing those, who killed their sisters, mothers, fathers and children to the book.

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For those who yearn for negotiations to resolve world issues attached is a video courtesy Mr. Nasik

Dear Nasik –
This morning a powerful conservative lobby group is kicking off its annual convention in D.C. Already rumors have emerged that they’re trying to revive the Menendez sanctions bill or introduce a new anti-diplomacy resolution. All with the intention to tie the President’s hands during the negotiations with Iran and lead us down the path to another senseless war in the Middle East.
They’ll get a bunch of attention this week, but our movement for peace and diplomacy is winning right now. We helped create the political space for President Obama to have a phone call with Iran’s President and get a temporary agreement signed. Our phone calls and actions helped put the Menendez bill on ice.  We know our voices and stories are powerful. We need to make sure we continue to be part of this debate, especially in the upcoming days.
That’s why we created a video highlighting the stories of everyday Americans who support diplomacy with Iran. Will you share the video far and wide so we can expand our movement and show politicians that, despite the noise in DC this week, the majority of us don’t want to see another war?




Yes – I’ll watch and share the video.

There are still a lot of people who don’t know what to think about this issue. This week, as they read about prospects for diplomacy with Iran, let’s make sure they hear the pro-diplomacy voices loud and clear.
When you post the video on social media or share it via email, you create an opening for your family and friends to talk about peace and avoiding another war. More importantly, you’ll show them that so many Americans from all walks of life are standing up for diplomacy. That’s the most effective way for us to cut through the noise.
Yours with hope –
Sara Haghdoosti and Roshanak Ameli-Tehrani on behalf of berim.org
PS – Don’t use social media? Spread the word about this video by forwarding this email to your friends and family.