Amir Khusrow (1253-1325 CE)

کافر عشقم، مسلمانی مرا در کار نیست
رگ من تار گشته، حاجت زُنار نیست
از سر بالین من برخیز ای نادان طبیب
دردمند عشق را دارو به جز دیدار نیست
ناخدا بر کشتی ما گر نباشد، گو مباش!
ما خدا داریم ما ناخدا در کار نیست
خلق می‌گوید که خسرو بت‌پرستی می‌کند
آری! آری! می‌کنم! با خلق ما را کار نیست

I am a pagan (worshiper) of love: the creed (of Muslims) I do not need;
Every vein of mine has become (taut like a) wire; the (Hindu) girdle I do not need.
Leave from my bedside, you innocent physician!
The only cure for the patient of love is the sight of his beloved –
other than this no medicine does he need.
If there be no pilot on our ship, let there be none:
We have God in our midst: the pilot we do not need.
The people of the world say that Khusrau worships idols.
So I do, so I do; the people I do not need,
the world I do not need.

– Amir Khusrow

“Religion” — What’s in a word?

Islam vs. West

What starts off as a beautiful idea, with a hope of mollifying pains of the bewildered mankind, soon degenerates into a rotting mass of rituals that beget but trend followers. These rituals then play into the hands of what Quran calls zalimin – the people who exercise their repressive stranglehold over the unsuspecting, wishful “believers”. Throughout history we come across Toynbee’s observations and Orwellian[1] interpretations. Is Islam a mere idea, lying moribund in the reminiscences of Cordova, Istanbul and Delhi architectures, or does it have a different identity? In the present undertaking I will endeavor to answer this question. I will draw upon Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s classic ‘The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam’, in this attempt. I would also allude to Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ to establish the fact that the whole view of the Islam-West dichotomy is a farce. This view is but a criminal intervention on part of “western intellectuals” into what would (or should) have been a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Western Civilization

Briffault, in his ‘Making of Humanity’ credits Roger Bacon as the harbinger of western civilization. The scientific method of investigation, which ushered the age of enlightenment and paved way for renaissance in Europe, was introduced

watch where the news come from!!

Manufacturing Consent

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

The book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media“ endeavours to take apart the well-entrenched power structures of United States of America. This critique on mass media, as incisive as it is audacious, could have been warded off as mere insinuations had it not been substantiated by extensive research carried out by the authors. First published in 1988 and adapted into a documentary picture in 1992, the book presents a radically different way to interpret what we see and hear as “news” in our daily lives. It explains why the media promotes a value system based on capitalist aspirations; why the news on Afghan-Soviet war is depicted as an example of unrestrained human savagery but those on the US invasion of the same country as recourse to “eliminating evil ideologies”; how the authoritarian regimes use media, without any overt official intervention, to advance goals of the select few of the policy