Rumi and the Itch - Prose of Ramadhan Part 44

73. Beauty

Without the Essence

There cannot be the Form.

Without the Light,

There cannot be the Veil.

A wise old man once said, “Everything is known by its opposites.” When you are walking the spiritual path of religion (which to many people is not the same thing), you will encounter many things that shall disturb you.

TERRORISM IS CAUSED BY AN ITCH. Rumi asks “How will your mirror be polished if you are irritated by every rub.” But old Rumi is already talking about the highest state of consciousness, the essence of Submission which by any other name is called Islam. But where most people are now, we are all irritated one way or the other. Otherwise the newspapers would not be so full of stories of crime, violence and terrorism. While waiting for Mikhail to get ready for school I made the mistake of turning to CNN, which informs me that there has been a spate of bombings in Afghanistan and also in Iraq where at least 75 people have died. Someone was very irritated when they decided to explode the bombs, or themselves often enough.

So we are not at Rumi’s level. But we are certainly also not at the level of those terrorists. The Talibans and al-Qaedas must have an itch that is driving them crazy… somewhere on their back where their hand cannot reach, an itch so maddening that they are gonna strap that C4 on their back to blow themselves and that itch to Kingdom Come. They are mad, bad and dangerous to know.

ALWAYS SOMEONE ELSE. And now Norway has sadly also experienced the same, with a ‘pseudo-Crusader’ bombing Oslo and killing children like it was a video game - he did it all that because he had this incredible itch which he cannot scratch and in his frustration, he killed more than 80 innocent people. The itch was called multiculturalism and Islamization of Europe, whatever that means. For the ‘neo-jihadis’ the terrible itch was called Western Imperialism or some other thing. It is always SOMEONE ELSE or SOMETHING ELSE that is the itch, never us. Typical.

TAKE A BATH, PLEASE. I think mankind should shed its filthy cloth of egoism, throw away that overused underwear of religious and ideological hubris, pick the lice of corporate greed, scrub away the dirt of consumerism, trim its nails of vanity, and wash away the muck of envy from the sole of their feet. Having done so, mankind should then have a collective shower of Mercy, Compassion, Understanding and Knowledge. I hope mankind will remember to use the Soap of Love, and the Toothpaste of Discretion. And in the tradition of human unity, I will scrub your back and you can scrub my back. That way maybe the itch will go away.

Have a clean day, sunshine.

Pax Taufiqa.