Shared by Tahir Mahmood

This article is from Daily Dawn

Anwar Iqbal | 3rd November, 2012

He is gone, disappeared among the waves. And I am looking for him. Has he disappeared though? He may have gone to another beach, perhaps on the West Coast, away from Hurricane Sandy.

Moving from one place to another was never a problem for him. He lived out of his suitcase, rather a large bag that he carried with him. He ate little, morsels of bread with coffee in the morning and some bread, with coffee and cheese at night. And he carried these with him too.

I met him at Ocean City, Maryland, where I also watched him playing his guitar. He played well. So when the session ended, he collected about $30, put his guitar back in its case and said: “Enough for the dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast. Now I will go back to the waves, they are calling me.”

His name was Johnnie, Johnnie what, he never told me but he did tell me that he was a Vietnam veteran. I met him on the beach when one of my sons wandered away. He saw him far from us, brought him back and said: “You are from India, right? I know you people, you believe this country is crime free, so you let your children wander away. Let me tell you, it is not crime free. He can be kidnapped from anywhere.”

I told him I was from Pakistan, not India, thanked him and offered him a sandwich. He accepted the offer but put two sandwiches in his bag and said “This means less work and more time for the waves.”

He then said he only works to make enough for breakfast and dinner and never eats lunch. “And who pays your bills?” I asked. “No bills, I do not own or rent anything.”

He said he had a friend in Ocean City, and was living in his basement. But there are places where he does not have a friend and in such places, he has to work a little more to pay for sleeping somewhere. For him working a little more is playing his guitar a little more.

We became friends when I told him I was a war correspondent. “In Vietnam?” he asked. “No, in Afghanistan, during the Soviet occupation,” I said. “Do you sing?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Then what do you do? Those who have seen wars always do something other than what they do for a living, like singing, painting, writing poetry,” he explained.

I said I love poetry. Although I am not a poet, I do sometimes write a little poem. He asked me to read a poem about my war experience. I said I did not have one with me but I had one about terrorism in my cellphone and could read it out for him. He agreed.

“No, no, this is not how it happens, when crops of pain are reaped. Nobody beats drums, when village youths return home in body bags. Women do not dance, people mourn, they do not rejoice,” I read the poem.

“Their coffins are brought home, drenched in tears. No, no, this is not how it happens. You cannot sow seeds of hate and hope for flowers. When a storm lands, when a fire rages, homes burn, people cry. They do not rejoice, cities of pain do not thrive, flowers do not grow in fields of hate. No, no, this is not how it happens,” I finished.

He asked me if I wrote it in English. I said no, in my language, Urdu. He copied the English version in his diary and then asked me to recite some lines in Urdu. I did. He noted them too.

“You gave me a lot of work,” he said and disappeared.

He came the next evening and asked me to accompany him and tell him if I liked his composition of my poem.

He used only one Urdu line, istarah naheen hota, istarah naheen hota (No, this is not how it happens). It sounded funny but somehow people liked that particular line, although nobody knew what it meant.

That evening he earned $50 because he told them he had to share the money with the poet. When he finished, he asked me if I wanted my share and when I said no, he pocketed the money and disappeared.

The next morning, I returned to Washington and forgot all about him. But more than month after this performance, he phoned me and said he was in Washington and wanted to meet me.

He was here to attend a gathering of Vietnam veterans. He had come with his girlfriend, Alice. In the evening I took them to a Pakistani restaurant. They loved the food. We discussed Urdu poetry and they asked me if Urdu poets also wrote about the Vietnam War.

I said they did but I did not remember any. I promised to send them some Internet links. Instead, I sent them some Vietnam poems in an e-mail. He loved them and forwarded them to his friends, all Vietnam veterans like him.

We never met again. But he did call me whenever he visited a new place.

One day, Alice called and said: “Johnnie died.” I was shocked. I asked how and she said: “Very peacefully, he had a few drinks and a joint in the evening and passed away in his sleep.”

I asked where, she said: “San Francisco, near the Half Moon beach.”

It was brief conversation. She promised to call again, said goodbye and hung up. She never called.

But this morning, while watching a video about the destruction Hurricane Sandy caused in Ocean City, I thought about Johnnie and recalled what he used to say about the sea.

“It is alive, more alive than we are,” he would say. “It is a peaceful creature but gets upset when we take it for granted. And that’s when it shows its wrath.”

“And what makes it upset?” I asked.

“Our disrespect for the environment,” he said.

“No surprise, Johnnie,” I said. “You are a Vietnam veteran. You sing and compose poems. You fit the profile of a typical environmentalist.”

Then I said some environmentalists were alarmists too. They exaggerate the damage we are causing to the environment.

“You will see one day, we are not alarmists,” he replied. “But I would not like to be around when the sea shows its wrath.”

I asked where he would like to be and he said: “I would surrender myself to the sea, in a peaceful manner, like a child returning to a mother.”

He did as he said and now I am writing about him. I don’t know why. I don’t even know if people like reading about such people. I don’t know if people like us – loonies, living on the fringes of the society, without making any useful contribution – matter.

Perhaps we are loonies and that’s why I sometimes miss that guitar player with the crazy hair and sad, sad eyes.

Peace, Johnnie, peace. Salaam. Shalom. Shanti.

The author is a correspondent for Dawn, based in Washington, DC.

Dear Editors,
                     Hajj Mubarik to all the Muslim members of the Forum.May Allah give us more passion for sacrifice in all segments of our lives (Ameen).
Sincerely,
Tahir Mahmood

Islam has often been viewed by the Westerners as a militant and dangerous faith. In present times the world is obsessed with Islam as a hub of terrorism. Certain Qur’anic verses are seen as sufficiently ferocious to justify atrocities by its believers. Islam seems to be behind a broad range of international disorders: suicide attacks, car bombings, military oppressions, riots, fatawas, jihads, guerrilla warfare, threatening videos, and September 11 itself. Why are these things taking place? ‘Islam’ seems to offer an instant and uncomplicated analytical touchstone, enabling us to make sense of today’s convulsive world. Though this image of a violent Islam is not new, it is now more readily conveyed because of the dilapidated condition of the states where Muslims live and rule today. However, if scriptures are to be considered responsible for justifying violence, then there is far more violence in the Bible than in the Qur’an.

Many Western writers have deeply probed the bitter struggle in the Muslim world between the forces of religion and law and those of violence and lawlessness. Noah Feldman has viewed in his book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State that, “When empires fall, they tend to stay dead. The same is true of government system. … The fall of the Soviet bloc dealt a deathblow to communism; now no one expects Marx to make a comeback. … Today, there are, however, two prominent examples of governing systems re-emerging after that had apparently ceased to exist. One is democracy, a form of government that had some limited success in a small Greek city-state for a couple of hundred years, disappeared, and then resurrected some two thousand years later. … The other [trying to emerge] is the Islamic State.” Islam’s political and religious conceptions remain active within the precept of Islam din wa dawla. Within this concept, Islam in its past, exclusively paid attention to things and matters that appear to be of this world and is thus recognized to be more of a socially and politically world-based religion. Its concept of divine sovereignty, akin to the sovereignty of the natural law, and man as the conductor of politics—a Khalifa, or viceroy of God—makes it easy for different cultures and traditions to accept. For the West the Islamic political system (not religion) must be stamped out just as communism; and this is the core of current conflict between the world of Islam from Marrakesh to Indonesia and the Western democratic idealism. Addressing the Security Council, Michael Gorbachov said that in the new world order there is no place for ideologies, and the Western powers not only seconded his call, but jumped into arena declaring that Shari’ah law of political Islam in the modern Muslim world is a serious threat to democracy.

Protagonists of democracy and for many modern readers, it may seem strange to include religion in the subject of political science. But Muslims believe that for more than thirteen centuries political Islam has significantly remained dominant in the world with its own logic. Islamic governments ruled states—though separated in time and divided in boundaries and size—through a common political concept founded according to God’s law revealed in the Qur’an as Shari’ah and interpreted by the precepts of the Prophet of Islam as his Sunnah. In the present time there is a major concern that some of the ways in which political Islam manifests itself are anti-Western, anti-secular, anti-modern, and undemocratic. Modern democracy, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, is considered to be accelerating the process of globalization and bringing nations into a common economic and political ground. On the other hand for the Muslim world this new phenomenon is a challenge to its concept of universal Islam. Muslims are striving to justify—within the framework of the Qur’an and Shari’ah—how universal Islam can blur the line between Islamic and Western principles regarding certain key concepts pertaining to globalization, particularly, in the context of a responsible government, political accountability, equal citizenship, freedom of choice, quick and fair justice, and right of equal say.

Although the Islamic world today is in a dilapidated state, Islam is still that remarkable culture and civilization which is proud of its past and hopes for a brilliant future.  Unfortunately, like many other human activities, religion has often been abused by religious as well as political leaders. In Islam, religion and politics are linked together, and any politically motivated violent step taken by Muslims is considered an act inspired by their religion. Acts of violence or terrorism committed by some Muslim groups, instead of being interpreted as Islamic terrorism, need to be first assessed in a political perspective. But it is also true that secularism has surpassed religion in the gravity of violence in the past as well as in present times. What are the reasons then for the current trend that portrays Islam and its teachings as instigating terrorism, war, and anti-West feelings, whereas secular nations’ terrorist acts are being ignored?

War and conflict are geopolitical rather than exclusively religious phenomena. Warfare antedates religion and is as old as man himself.  Thus there has been a continuum of prescriptural tension between the peoples of the European and Middle Eastern regions. It is not a hidden fact that, ever since the Crusades, the people of Western Christendom developed a stereotypical and distorted image of Islam, which they regarded as the enemy of decent civilization and Islam was described by the scholar-monks of Europe as an inherently violent and intolerant faith. The myth of the supposed fanatical intolerance of Islam has become one of the received ideas of the West.Now terrorism is being challenged as war, and efforts are being made to eliminate terrorists by force. The use of force is escalating the situation, however, and it is perceived that the terrorists are multiplying rather than decreasing in number. Therefore, as long as the actual strategic logic of the terrorists is not understood, it seems a difficult “war” to win. In Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, John Esposito wrote, “The Muslim world is no longer ‘out there.’ Muslims are our neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens, and their religion, like Judaism and Christianity, rejects terrorism…. All of us are challenged to move beyond stereotypes, historic grievances, and religious differences, to recognize our shared values as well as interests, and to move collectively to build our common future.”

What went wrong with Islamic civilization, whose compelling religious idea gave birth to a system of beliefs and morals, to a political and social order that has withstood the test of more than a millennium of history across vast regions, cultures, languages, and peoples from Central Asia to Central Africa and Morocco to Indonesia? What then is Shari’ah, why it is cherished by the Muslims even today, and why it is a danger to the modern democracies? Can the Islamic political system succeed today? Even Western scholars of Political Islam like Martin Kramer, Noah Feldman, Graham Fuller, Antony Black, Hans King and many more, reveal that the classical Islamic constitution governed through almost thirteen centuries was legitimated by law. Executive powers were balanced by the Islamic scholars who interpreted and administrated the Shari’ah and interpreted it to be compatible with every period, changing time, and evolving societies of the different regions where Islam ruled. But Islamic political system was overrun by the European colonists. After the independence of Muslim states, this balance of power was totally destroyed by the tragically incomplete reforms of modern era. Consequently, today, unchecked executive dominance distorting politics in many of the independent Muslim states has destroyed the justice system and thus the absence of law and order. For some moderate Muslims if new institutions emerge and Muslim scholars help restore constitutional balance of power, a modern Islamic state can provide political and legal justice within its concept of  din wa dawla.

Today the Arab world and other Muslim countries are politically barren. Political Islam of the past is powerlessly dormant and the believers are in pursuit of a political ideology that should be compatible with their religion as well as present time. Human beings instinctively long for an ideology that can command their allegiance for which they should be able to progress, and whenever required, to lay down their life. For the Muslims with no ideology the only hope is their religion with its glorious past and a hope of its great future. Consequently, the madrasahs have become their educational institutions; mosques have become arenas of their political debates—places that cannot be banned in Muslim societies. Thus, one great cause of the rise of radical Islam and sponsorship of terrorism is the lack, failure, or poor performance of genuine political institutions and absence of modern education in their madrasahs all over the Muslim world. For the Western world any ideology yearning to rejuvenate and rise against or even parallel to Western democracy is unacceptable and an Islamic political system and its Shari’ah Law is a danger much bigger than communism. For the Muslims Islamic political thought is a significant part of their religion and their history. It comprises a coherent, ongoing tradition with logic of its own, conspicuously separate from the Western political system.

Western civilization succeeded in turning the course of history in its favor by politically dividing the Muslim world into small states. The doctrine of dar al-Islam suffered a big blow from this division, but the ideology of universal Islam remained firmly rooted in the heart of every Muslim. However, it is still a question; will it ever be possible again for the Muslim countries to develop as an independent centre of political, economic, and cultural power? Or will it continue, as much of it does now, to nurse old wounds and curse the new world order? But old wounds of failure and victimization are psychobiological complexes that haunt nations for generations. Nations that are oppressed and find themselves hard-pressed under the heels of economic and military power resort to revolts against the oppressors. Those that do not possess the logistics for adequate warfare or enough power to face a much stronger oppressor either persevere or express their resentment through terrorism.