musaafir-e dasht

Exams and electricity blues go hand in hand. I took this picture last night while reading Kant's aesthetics in candlelight! Sigh! Thanks to KESC that gives us an opportunity to relate ourselves to our forefathers: this is exactly how they must have studied in their times. And believe me, this thought is so consoling that you can actually forgive KESC for giving you a chance to relive an experience of the past in your present. :) Although I was reading Kant but images that flickered through my mind were those of Ghalib and Meer who would have composed their verses in the darkness of the night and in the light of a candle - a sham'a. I also thought of how our spiritual predecessors must have composed those magnanimous works of classical Arabic, Urdu and Persian. Yester-night was an imaginative journey into the past [and how amazingly dwarfed in spiritual and intellectual life I felt when I thought of these great men of tradition!] :) ... and for once, I...

... that we must long for, and that is evident in the following poem of Iqbal. source ہسپانیہ ہسپانیہ تو خون مسلماں کا امیں ہے  مانند حرم پاک تو ہے میری نظر میں پوشیدہ تیری خاک میں سجدوں کے نشان ہیں خاموش اذانیں ہیں تیری باد سحر میں  روشن تھیں ستاروں کی طرح ان کی سنانیں خیمے تھے کبھی جن کے تیرے کوہ و کمر میں  پھر تیرے حسینوں کو ضرورت ہے حنا کی؟  باقی ہے ابھی رنگ میرے خون جگر میں! کیونکر خس و خاشاک سے دب جاۓ مسلمان مانا وہ  تب و تاب و نہیں اس کے شرر میں! غرناطہ بھی دیکھا میری آنکھوں نے و لیکن تسکین مسافر نہ سفر میں حضر میں دیکھا بھی دکھایا  بھی سنایا بھی سنا بھی ہے دل کی تسلّی نہ نظر میں نہ خبر میں -اقبال 

Life is too exacting at times! Or probably I am feeling that way at the moment. Exams are looming large over my head and there is so much to write that I just don't understand how to manage my time and complete all the daunting (at least they appear so at the moment) tasks before their respective deadlines. I am just praying to Allah Ta'ala to help me manage my time in the most effective manner. And yes, I am not complaining about too much work - how can I when it is something which adds to the wholesomeness in my life, alhamdulillah.  Life, indeed, is too short for all that you want to do. The verse resonating in my head is the one by Iqbal in javaab e shikva,  which reads as follows: وقت فرصت ہے کہاں کام ابھی باقی ہے نور   توحید  کا   اتمام   ابھی  باقی  ہے

On the current suicides and suicidal attempts by our fellow country men. People who are just like us... Orya Maqbool Jan's harf e raaz

"عشرت قطرہ ہے دریا میں فنا ہو جانا..." Was just going through some very old emails and found the following quotation by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad , sent to me by Muhammad Umer Toor . Worth sharing on my blog! When we take on the Sunna, and reject flawed patterns of behaviour which have been shaped and guided by the ego and by fantasies of self-imagining, we declare to our Creator that we accept and revere the profound revelation of human flourishing exampled by the Best of Creation. Every act of the Sunna which we may successfully emulate declares that our role model is the man who had no ego, and to whom Allah had given a definitive victory over the forces of darkness. Modernity holds out lifestyle options centred on the self, and on the lower, agitated possibilities of the human condition. Every word of every magazine now breathes the message of the nafs: explore yourself, free yourself, be yourself. Buy a Porsche to express your identity; dress in a Cacharel suit to make...

The verse that is constantly resonating in my mind for quite some time now is: آج کچھ درد میرے دل میں سوا ہوتا ہے

On Wednesday, at the end of our Postcolonial Studies class, our teacher, Mr Tayyab Zaidi, asked all of us as to how exactly we "faced the book." A unique way of putting it, indeed. The question was followed by a brief discussion as to what did we do in response to the entire facebook episode. The teacher then remained quiet for sometime while we - the students - indulged in a brief conversation about various issues such as the advantage or uselessness of forwarding text messages about the issue etc. The discussion ended when I rephrased a statement given by a religious scholar when the Danish cartoons were published. I won't repeat what I said, but will copy here what he actually said before I write down the response of my teacher. So here goes, Our beloved shaykh (DB) mentioned about 5 years ago when the Denmark issue occurred, “When the world wants to boycott this country or these products for their wrongs, then that is in its own place.  However, if you really want to ...