Look Into His Eyes

By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam 22 November 2024 The Commander of the Occupation troops said to the mountain village: We know you're hiding a traitor. Unless you give him up to us, we shall harass your people by every means in our power." The village was, indeed, hiding a man who was evidently innocent. But what could the mayor do now that the welfare of the village was at stake? Days of discussions in the Village Council led to no conclusion. So, the Mayor took the matter up with the priest. Priest and Mayor spent a whole night searching the scriptures and finally came up with a text that said," It's better that one man die to save the nation." So, the Mayor handed over the fugitive, whose screams echoed through the village as he was tortured and finally executed by dismembering his limbs. Twenty years later a prophet came to that village, went right up to that Mayor and said, "How could you have done this? That man was sent by god to be the saviour of this country. And you handed him over to be tortured and killed." "But, where did I go wrong?" the Mayor pleaded. "The priest and I looked at the scripture and did what they commanded." "That's where you went wrong," said the prophet. "You looked at the scriptures. You should have looked into his eyes." Mankind is a scripture-driven flock of religious brutes and spiritual imbeciles. We've let our hoary-old scriptures guide us. The perceived divinity, attached to the scriptures, has befuddled mankind in such an overwhelming manner that even for a futuristic solution, we go back to regressive and rustic references in our BOOKS. What all the scriptures enjoin cannot and shouldn't be taken as unimpeachable truths. "Yoked to our past, stuck to our scriptures/ We're helplessly hapless creatures." Indeed, we're. We still rely on Bronze and Stone Age books written by our ancestors. It's time to script a new moral code to usher in a fresh dawn of collective awakening, which will be in sync with the issues of contemporary relevance. We need no outside agency to guide ourselves and others. Nature has already endowed us with the power of intellect and no scripture can hold a candle to it. Be religious, be spiritual but never be scriptural. Jalaluddin Rumi didn't leave Islam. He may have been a Muslim, he actually remained a mystic; to be precise, a Sufi till he breathed his last in Konya in Turkey. His Masnavi (six volumes) is any day better than all the scriptures of Islam put together. It is a classical series of six books written in Pahlavi or New Persian language containing 26, 660 couplets or 53, 320 lines distributed nearly uniformly in all the six volumes. Masnavi is a beautiful amalgam of works of Sufism, Persian language and literature. On the front cover page of the Mathnavi are written the words, ‘Masnavi Maulvi Maunavi-Hast Quran Dar Zubane Pahlavi’ which means Quran in Pahlavi language. Unless one's a hardcore Muslim unable to think beyond the Quran and Hadees, reading just one volume of Masnavis can enlighten you. But try to read it in Persian and never the weak English translations of Coleman Barks who knows no Persian and translates from already available translations. Even the great Persian scholars like Reynold A Nicholson, A J Arberry and Willam Chittick couldn't fully capture the essence of Rumi's Masnavi. ---- A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian. URL: https://www.newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/rumi-sufi-masnavi/d/133782 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism