Jika Satu Hari...

اگه روزی بری سفر
Age roozi beri safar
If one day you go to a trip

بری ز پیش من بی*خبر
Beri az pish-e man bi khabar
Leave me without notice

اسیر رؤیاها میشم
Asir-e rooyaahaa mishem
I will be held captive by dreams

دوباره تنها میشم
Dobaare tanhaa mishem
I will become again alone

به شب میگم پیشم بمونی
Be shab migam pisham bemooni
I will tell the night that you should stay with me
*(for purposes of rhyme and rhythm, he has used the present subjunctive bemuni
instead of imperative bemun leaving a little ambiguity)

به باد میگم تا صبح بخونی
Be baad migam taa sobh bekhooni
I will tell the wind that you should sing until the morning
(again note usage of bekhuni instead of bekhun)

بخون ز اون دیار یاری
Bekhoon az oon diyaar-e yaari
Sing of that clime of the friend/companion
diyār-e yāri ke (with stressed -i means 'clime of companionship which...)
diyār-e yāri ke (with unstressed -i means 'clime of the companion who...) بخون ز اون دیار یاری

که توش منو تنها نذاری
Ke toosh tanhaa nazaari
That would not leave me alone in it

اگر فراموشم کنی
Ager faraamoosham koni
If you forget me

ترک آغوشم کنی
Tark-e aaghoosham koni
(If) you leave my embrace

پرندهٔ دریا میشم
Parandeye deryaa misham
I will become the bird of the sea

تو چنگ موج رها میشم
Too chang-e mooj ra haa misham
I will be left in the clutches of the wave

به دل میگم ساکت بمونی
Be del migam saakat bemooni
I will tell Heart that you be quiet
(present subjunctive bemuni instead of
imperative bemun for purposes of rhyme and rhythm)

به باد میگم تا صبح بخونی
Be baad migam taa sobh bekhooni
I will tell the wind that you should sing until the morning
(again note usage of bekhuni instead of bekhun)

بخون ز اون دیار یاری
Bekhoon az oon diyaar-e yaari
Sing of that clime of the friend/companion

که توش منو تنها نذاری
Ke toosh mano tanhaa nazari
Who would not leave me alone in it که توش منو تنها نذاری

اگر یه روزی نوم تو
Ager ye roozi noom-e to
If one day your name

تو گوش من صدا کنه
To goosh-e man sedaa koneh
Should sound in my ear

دوباره باز غمت بیاد
Dobaare baaz ghamat biyad
yet again your sorrow (sorrow for you) should come

که منو مبتلا کنه
Ke mano mobtalaa koneh
That would make me afflicted

به دل میگم کاریش نباشه
Be del migam kaarish nabaashe
I will tell Heart that it should not have any business
(the -sh of kāri-sh refers to del, a colloquial usage)

بذاره درد تو دوا شه
Bezaareh dard-e to davashe
(That it should) let your pain/pain for you become medicine

بره تو تمام جونم
Bereh tooye tamoom-e joonam
(That it should) go in all my soul

که باز برات آواز بخونم
Ke baaz baraat aavaaz bekhoonam
That again, I should sing for you.

اگر بازم دلت می*خواد
Ager bozam delet mikhad
If again your heart should want

یار یکدیگر باشیم
Yaar-e yekdigar baashim
That we be the friend of one another

مثل ایوم قدیم بنشینیم و سحر پاشیم
Mesl-e ayoom-e ghadim beshinim o sahar paashim
Like the old days, we sit (together) and stand (and part) at dawn

باید دلت رنگی بگیره
Baayad delet rangi begire
Your heart should take on some color

دوباره آهنگی بگیره
Dobaare ahangi begire
It should take on a melody again

بگیره رنگ اون دیاری
Begire rang-e oon diyari
It should take on the color of that clime

که توش منو تنها نذاری
Ke toosh mano tanhaa nazaari
That would not leave me alone in it

اگر میخوای پیشم بمونی
Ager mikhay pisham bemooni
If you want to stay with me

بیا تا باقی جوونی
Bia taa baaghiye javooni
Come for the rest of youth

بیا تا پوست به استخونه
Bia taa posht be ostokhoone
Come, as long as there is skin on [our] bones

نذار دلم تنها بمونه
Nazar delam tanhaa bemoone
Don’t let my heart remain alone

بذار شبم رنگی بگیره
Bezar shabam rangi begire
Let my night take on some color

دوباره آهنگی بگیره
Dobaare ahangi begire
(Let it) again take on a melody

بگیره رنگ اون دیاری
Begire rang-e oon diyaari
(Let it) take on the color of that clime

که توش منو تنها نذاری
Ke toosh mano tanhaa nazaari
That would not leave me alone in it.

اگر روزی نوم تو
Ager roozi noom-e to
If one day your name

تو گوش من صدا کنه
Too goosh-e man sedaa koneh
Should sound in my ear

غمت دوباره باز منو مبتلا کنه
Ghamat dobare baaz mano mobtalaa koneh
(If) your sorrow/sorrow for you again should make me afflicted

به دل می*گم کاریش نباشه
Be del migam kaarish nabashe
I will tell Heart that it should not have any business

بذاره درد تو دوا شه
Bezaare dard-e to davashe
(It should) let your pain/pain for you become medicine

بره تو تمام جونم
Bereh tooye tamoom-e joonam
(That it should) go in all my soul

که باز برات آواز بخونم
Ke baaz baraat aavaaz bekhoonam
That again, I sing for you.

// http://sartre2.byu.edu/persian/songs/ageYeRuz.html

Nimeh-ye Penhan

Bashu

Anarkis

Apakah semua mahasiswa sepatutnya menjadi anarkis? "Ya, mahasiswa sepatutnya mencabar kekuasaan-kekuasaan dan terlibat dalam sebuah tradisi panjang anarkis". Tapi, apakah maknanya menjadi seorang anarkis? "Anarkis itu cuba mengenalpasti struktur-struktur kuasa. Mereka-lah yang mendesak agar kalangan penguasa menjustifikasikan diri sendiri," sambung Noam Chomksy sewaktu diwawancara Zeit Campus.

Berseh

Berseh, adalah sebuah ketakpatuhan warga (civil disobedience). Dalam amalan demokrasi, ini adalah batas kepada sebuah kesabaran warga, juga jawapan kepada sebuah kedegilan pemerintah. Tanpa ketakpatuhan warga, fasisme akan diam-diam bertapak. Arkanum pun jadi kelaziman. Kita harus bersikap. Katakan saja "tidak!", --pada semua yang berbau fasisme!

Legenhausen & Makna Shi'i

Beritahu Aku

به من بفهمون
کجای سرنوشتم
دارم میرم جهنم یا راهی بهشتم
از این دو راهی دل خوشی ندارم
یا می خورم به پائیز یا مرسه بهارم
مثل ابرا همش تبعید می شم
با هیچ کوهی سر سازش ندارم
یه موجم که با دریا قهر کرده
بدون تو من آرامش ندارم
گمت کردم ولی غافل از اینکه
خدا با این بزرگی گم نمی شه
مواظب بودی از دستت نیفتم
هوامو داری یا داشتی همیشه
دارم نابود می شم، دود می شم
بذار آتیش این دوری تمام شه
خودم دیدم همین نزدیکیا یی
نذار عمرم با جون کندن حروم شه

Tolong beritahu aku
Di manakah kelak nasibku
Di Neraka atau Surga
Aku sebenarnya tak suka dua pilihan ini
Aku bakal menjumpai musim gugur atau semi
Aku terasing bak awan
Yang tak pernah cocok dengan gunung
Aku bak riak gelombang yang benci akan laut
Tanpa-Mu aku tak pernah merasa tenang
Aku kehilangan-Mu, tapi aku lupa...
Allah Yang Maha Besar tidak pernah hilang
Engkau menjaga-Ku agar tak jauh dari-Mu
Engkau senantiasa memperhatikanku
Aku bakal binasa, menjadi asap
Biarkan api keterasingan ini berakhir
Aku melihat-Mu berada di dekatku
Jangan biarkan umurku lenyap begitu saja

//diterjemahkan oleh Saleh Lapadi

Iran e Ziba

Age Ye Rooz (If One Day...) / Faramarz Aslani

Adorno (1)

"Religion is on sale, as it were. It is cheaply marketed in order to provide one more so-called irrational stimulus among many others by which the members of a calculating society are calculatingly made to forget the calculation under which they suffer." — Theodor Adorno, Theses upon Art and Religion Today, 1945

Muktamar

Marcuse (1)

For Marx, as for Hegel, the dialectic takes note of the fact that the negation inherent in reality is ‘the moving and creative principle’. The dialectic is the ‘dialectic of negativity’. Every fact is more than a mere fact; it is a negation and restriction of real possibilities. Wage labor is a fact, but at the same time it is a restraint on free work that might satisfy human needs. Private property is a fact, but at the same time it is a negation of man’s collective appropriation of nature. - Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p 282.

Horkheimer (2)

Anyone who does not wish to talk about capitalism, however, should also keep quiet on the subject of fascism. - Max Horkheimer, Die Juden und Europa (The Jews in Europe), ZfS Vol. 8, No. 1/2 (1939), p. 115

Horkheimer (1)

A 'rational society' can only emerge in 'the struggle for the future', and "the struggle against 'the world of capital' (early Horkheimer) and 'the domination of technical rationality in all its forms' (later Horkheimer). - David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, p. 196

The Footsteps of Water

I am a native of Kashan

My days are not so bad.
I own a loaf of bread, a bit of intelligence, a tiny bit of taste.
I possess a mother better than the leaves of trees.
Friends, better than the water of a running brook.

And a God who is this near:
Within these gillyflowers, beneath that tall pine tree,
Hovering above the awareness of water, above the Law of Foliage.

I am Muslim.
My Qiblah is a red rose.
My praying spot is a spring, my prayer stone is light.
Plains are my praying mat.
I make ablution with the heartbeat of windows.
In my prayer flows the Moon, flow the colors of the spectrum.
Stones are visible from behind my prayer:
Crystallized are all the particles of my prayer.
I do my prayer when,
Its Athan wind, from a cypress tree’s minaret, has sung.
I do my prayer to grass's saying "God is the Greatest"
To the "Iqama" of waves.

My Kabaa is by the lip of the brook,
My Kabaa is under the acacias.
My Kabaa like the breeze, blows from garden to garden, from town to town.

My Black Stone is the brilliance of the garden.

I’m a native of Kashan.
My craft is painting:
Now and then I build a cage with paint, sell it to you
So that with the song of poppies that is imprisoned in it
The heart of your loneliness may cheer up.
What a dream, what a dream...I know
My canvas is lifeless.
I know well, my painting basin contains no fishes.

I’m a native of Kashan.
My descent perhaps goes back
To a plant in India, to an earthen vase from the soil of 'Sialk'.
My descent perhaps goes back to a prostitute in the city of Bukhara.

My father behind two migrations of swallows, behind two snowfalls,
My father behind twice sleeping in the veranda,
My father behind eras has died.
My father died when, the sky was blue,
My mother jumped from sleep unaware, my sister became beautiful.
My father died when, the policemen were all poets.
The grocer man asked me: How many melons do you want?
I asked him :How much is the price of a happy heart?

My father used to paint.
He used to make tars, played the tar too.
He also had a nice handwriting.

Our garden stood on the side of the shadow of wisdom.
Our garden was the interweaving place of feeling and plants,
Our garden was the meeting point of a glance, a cage and a mirror .
Our garden was perhaps, an arc of the green circle of happiness.
The unripe fruit of God on that day, I used to chew in sleep.
Water I used to drink without philosophy
Berries, I used to pick without knowledge.
As soon as a pomegranate used to crack, hands turned to fountains of desire.
As soon as a cello used to sing, the chest burnt from a longing to hear.
Sometimes loneliness used to stick its face to the windowpane.
Passion used to come, and put its arms around the neck of sense.
The mind, used to play.
Life was something, like a rainfall during Eid, like a plane tree full of starlings.
Life at that time, was a line up of light and dolls,
It was an armful of liberty.
Life at that time, was a music basin.

The child, slowly, walked away along the alley of dragonflies.
I packed my things, went out of the city of carefree fancies
With my heart filled with homesickness for dragonflies.

I went to the party thrown by the world:
I, to the field of grief,
I, to the garden of mysticism,
I, to the illuminated veranda of knowledge went.
I climbed up the stairs of religion.
To the end of the alleyway of doubt,
To the cool air of self-sufficiency,
To the wet night of love and affection.
I went to see someone who was at the other side of love.
I went, I went until women,
Until the lantern of pleasure,
Until the silence of desire,
Until the flapping sound of the wings of loneliness

I saw things on the face of Earth:
I saw a child, who was smelling the Moon.
I saw a door-less cage in which, brilliance was flapping its wings.
I saw a ladder on which, love ascended to the roof of heaven.
I saw a woman, who was pounding light in a mortar.
Lunch on their table was bread, was vegetables, was the distance of dew, was the hot bowl of affection.

I saw a beggar, who was walking door to door begging for the song of a lark
And a sweeper who was praying to the rind of a melon.

I saw a lamb, that was eating a kite.
I saw a donkey, which understood hay.
In the meadow of 'advice' I saw a cow, satiated.

I saw a poet who, when he talked, he addressed a lily as "Your Highness."

I saw a book, its words all of the make of crystal.
I saw a sheet of paper, of the make of spring,
I saw a museum faraway from grass,
A mosque faraway from water.
Above the bed of a hopeless scholar, I saw a vase, overflowing with questions

I saw a mule whose load was 'essays'
I saw a camel whose load was the empty basket of 'proverbs'.
I saw a mystic whose load was 'tanana ha ya hoo'.

I saw a train, that was carrying brilliance.
I saw a train, that was carrying knowledge and so torrential it went.
I saw a train, that was carrying politics (and so empty it went.)
I saw a train, that was carrying seeds of lotus and the song of canaries.
And an air plane, which on that height of thousands of feet,
the soil through its windows was visible:
the topknot of hoopoes,
The spots of a butterfly's wings,
The reflection of a frog in a pond
And the passage of a fly from the alleyway of loneliness.
The clear desire of a sparrow, when from a plane tree it comes toward the ground.
And the maturation of the Sun.
And the beautiful love making of a doll with the morning.

Stairs that ascended to the greenhouse of lust.
Stairs that descended to the cellar of alcohol.
Stairs that ran to the Law of Corruption of Red Roses
And toward the understanding of Mathematics of Life,
Stairs that ran to the roof of enlightenment,
stairs that ran to the platform of manifestation.

My mother down there
was washing the cups in the stream's memory.

The city was visible:
The geometrical growth of cement, steel, stones.
The pigeon-less roofs of hundreds of buses.
A florist was putting up his flowers for sale.
Between two jasmine trees, a poet was hanging a swing.
A boy was throwing stones at the wall of school.
A child was spitting plum stones upon dad's faded praying mat.
And a goat was drinking water from the Caspian Sea of a geographical map.

A laundry-line was visible, a restless brassiere.

The wheel of a cart longing for the horse to become weary,
The horse longing for the carter to sleep,
The carter longing for death.

Love was visible, waves were visible,
snow was visible, friendship was visible.
Words were visible.
Water was visible, and the reflection of things in the water.
The cool shade of cells in the heat of blood.
The moist side of life,
The east of sorrow in the human heart.
The season of drifting in the alley of women.
The scent of solitude in the alley of seasons.

A fan was visible in the hand of summer.

The seed’s journey to flowering.
The ivy’s journey from this house to that house.
The moon’s journey into the pond.
The eruption of flowers of regret from the soil.
The falling of young vine from the wall.
The raining of dewdrops on the bridge of sleep.
The leaping of joy from the ditch of death.
The passing of events behind words.

The battle of a hole with the light's desire.
The battle of a stair with the long leg of the Sun.
The battle of solitude with a melody.
The beautiful battle of pears with the emptiness of a basket.
The bloody battle of pomegranates with jaws.
The battle of 'Nazi'’s with branches of delicacy.
The battle of a parrot and eloquence.
The battle of the forehead with the coldness of prayer-stones.

The attack of the mosque tiles on prostration.
The attack of wind on the ascension of soap bubbles.
The attack of the army of butterflies on the program of 'Pest Control'.
The attack of dragonflies on the row of plumbers.
The attack of reed pens on leaden letters.
The attack of a word on a poet’s jaw.

The opening of a century by a poem.
The opening of a garden by a starling.
The opening of an alley by an exchange of greetings.
The opening of a town on the hands of three or four wooden horsemen.
The opening of a New Year by two dolls, one ball.

The murder of a ratchet on the mattress in the afternoon.
The murder of a story at the entrance of the alley of sleep.
The murder of a worry by the instruction of songs.
The murder of moonlight by the command of neon lights.
The murder of an oak tree by the hands of "government".
The murder of a depressed poet by a chimonanthus.

All was visible on the surface of the earth:
Order was walking in the alley of Greece.
An owl was howling in the 'Hanging Gardens'.
The wind was blowing a sheaf of history’s straws on Khaybar Pass towards the east
On the serene lake of Neghin, a boat was carrying flowers.
In Banares, at the entrance of each alley an eternal lamp was burning.

Peoples I saw.
Towns I saw.
Plains, mountains I saw.
Water I saw, soil I saw.
Light and darkness I saw.
And plants in light and plants in darkness I saw.
Creatures in light, creatures in darkness I saw.
And humans in light, and humans in darkness I saw.

I’m a native of Kashan, but
My city is not Kashan.
My city is lost.
I, with endurance. I, with fever,
Have built a house on the other side of nighttime.
In this home I am close to the humid anonymity of grass.
I hear the sound of the breath of the garden.
And the sound of darkness, when it drops from a leaf.
And the sound of brightness, coughing, from behind a tree,
The sneezing of water from every crack of rock,
The dripping of swallows from the ceiling of spring.
And the clear sound of opening and closing of the window of loneliness
And the pure sound of the mysterious casting off of the skin of love,
The concentration of the passion for soaring in the wings (of a bird)
And the cracking of soul's self-restraint.
I hear the footsteps of longing
And the lawful footsteps of blood in veins,
The pulsing of the dawn of the pigeons' well,
The beating of the heart of Friday night,

The flowing of clove pink in thoughts,
The pure neigh of truth from afar.
I can hear the sound of the blowing of matter
And the sound of the shoe of faith in the alley of excitement.
And the sound of rainfall on the wet eyelids of love,
on the sad music of adolescence,
on the song of pomegranate orchards.
And the sound of the shattering of the bottle of joy at night,
the tearing of the paper of beauty,
And the filling and emptying of the cup of nostalgia, of wind.

I am close to the beginning of the earth.
I take the pulse of flowers.
I am familiar with the wet fate of water, the green habit of trees.

My soul is flowing towards the new direction of objects.
My soul is young.
My soul sometimes from excitement, gets a cough.
My soul is jobless:
Raindrops, the cracks in bricks, it counts.
My soul sometimes, is as real as a stone on the road.

I didn't see two poplars to be foes.
I didn't see a willow selling its shade to the ground.
For free it offers, willow its branch to the crow.
Wherever there is a leaf, my passion blossoms.
A poppy bush, has bathed me in the flowing of being.

Like the wings of insects I know the weight of dawn.
Like a vase, I listen to the music of growth.
Like a basketful of fruit, I have strong fever for ripening.
Like a tavern, I stand on the border of languor.
Like a building at the lip of the sea I am anxious about the high eternal waves

Sunshine as much as you want, union as much as you want, reproduction as much as you want.

I am content with an apple
And with smelling a chamomile bush.
I with a mirror -a pure connection- am content.
I don't laugh if a balloon bursts.
I won't laugh if a philosophy halves the Moon.
I know the sound of flapping of a quail’s wings,
the colors of a bustard’s belly, the footprints of a mountain goat.
I know well where rhubarbs grow,
When starlings come, when partridges sing, when falcons die,
What the Moon in the dream of a desert is,
Death in the stem of desire
And the raspberries of pleasure, in the jaws of love-making.

Life is a lovely ritual.
Life has wings as vast as death,
It has a leap the size of love.
Life is not something that, on the windowsill of habit to be left forgotten by you and me.
Life is the rapture of a hand that reaps.
Life is the first black fig, which is in the acrid mouth of summer.
Life is the dimensions of a tree from the eyes of an insect.
Life is the experience that a bat has in the dark.
Life is the homesickness that a migrating bird feels.
Life is the whistle of a train that turns through the dream of a bridge.
Life is observing a garden from the obstructed windows of an airplane.
It is the news of the launch of a rocket to space,
touching the loneliness of the Moon,
the notion of smelling a flower on another planet

Life is the washing of a plate

Life is finding a penny in the brook of the street.
Life is the 'square root' of a mirror.
Life is a flower 'to the power' of eternity,
Life is the Earth multiplied by our heartbeats,
Life is the simple and monotonous 'geometry' of breaths

Wherever I am, so let me be,
The sky is mine.
The window, thinking, air, love, the Earth is mine
What importance does it have then
Sometimes if they grow,
mushrooms of nostalgia?

I, don’t know
That why some say: horses are noble animals, pigeons are beautiful.
And why there is no vulture in any person's birdcage.
What do clovers lack have that red tulips have.
Eyes should be washed, in another way we should see.
Words should be washed.
A word in itself should be the wind, a word in itself should be the rain.

Umbrellas we should shut.
In the rain we should walk.
Thoughts, and recollections, should be carried in the rain.
With all the people of the town, in the rain we should walk.
A friend, in the rain we should call on.
Love, we should seek in the rain.
In the rain we should sleep with women.
In the rain we should play.
In the rain we should write things, speak, plant lotuses
Getting drenched from time to time,
swimming in the pond of 'right now', is what life is.

Let us undress:
Water is one foot away.

Let us taste brilliance.
Weigh the night of a village, the sleep of a deer.
Let us feel the warmth of a stork's nest,
tread not on the Law of Lawn,
loosen the knot of tasting in the vineyard.
And open our mouthes if the Moon emerges.
And not say that night is a bad thing.
And not say that the glowworm is unaware of a garden's perspicacity.

And Let us bring baskets.
Take all this red, all this green.

Let us have bread and cheese in the mornings.
And plant a sapling at every turn of a sentence.
And pour between two syllables the seed of silence.
Let us not read a book in which the wind doesn’t blow
And a book in which the surface of dew is not wet
and a book in which cells don't have dimensions.
Let us not wish the mosquito would fly off the fingertip of nature.
And not wish that the leopard would go out of the door of creation.
And let us understand that if worms didn't exist, life would have lacked something.
And if caterpillars didn't exist, the Law of Trees would have suffered a blow.
And if death didn't exist, our hands would have sought something.
And let us know if light didn't exist, the living logic of flying would have gone astray.
And let us know that before corals, there was a void in the thoughts of seas.

And let us not ask where we are,
Let us smell the fresh petunias of the hospital.

And let us not ask where the fountain of luck is.
And let us not ask why the heart of truth is blue.
And let us not ask what breezes, what nights the fathers of our fathers enjoyed.

Behind our backs there isn't a thriving space.
Behind our backs no bird sings.
Behind our backs no wind blows.
Behind our backs the green window of poplar is closed.
Behind our backs dust has settled over the whirligigs.
Behind our backs what there is is the weariness of history.
Behind our backs the memory of waves throw cold shells of silence on the coast.

let us go to the lip of the sea,
cast nets in the water
and catch freshness from the water.

Let’s pick up a pebble from the ground
and feel the weight of existence.

let us curse not the Moonlight if we have fever
(Sometimes I have seen in fever, the moon descends,
and hands reach the ceiling of heaven.
I have noticed, the goldfinch sings better.
Sometimes a wound that I have had under my feet
have taught me the ups and downs of the ground.
Sometimes in my sickbed the size of a flower has multiplied,
and increased it has, the diameter of an orange, the radius of a lantern.)
And let us not fear death
(Death is not the end of the pigeon.
Death is not a cricket’s inversion.
Death flows in the soul of acacias.
Death has a seat in the pleasant climate of thinking.
Death in the spirit of the village's night speaks of morning.
Death with a bunch of grapes comes into the mouth.
Death sings in the red larynx of the throat.
Death is responsible for the beauty of a butterfly’s wings.
Death sometimes picks basil.
Death sometimes drinks vodka.
Sometimes it is in the shade watching us.
and we all know
The lungs of pleasure, are full of the oxygen of death.)

Let us not shut the door on the alive speech of appreciation which we hear from behind the wattled twigs of sound.

Let us remove the curtain:
Let us allow 'feeling' to get some fresh air.
Let us allow adolescence to dwell under any bush it wishes.
Let us allow instinct to play.
To take off its shoes and following the seasons, leap on the flowers.
Let us allow solitude to sing.
To write things.
To go to the street.

Let us be simple.
Let us be simple whether at a teller's window or under a tree.

It is not our job, discovering the 'secret' of the red rose,
Our job maybe is
to, in the charm of the red rose, become swimmers.
To camp behind wisdom.
To wash hands in the rapture of a tree leaf before sitting at the dining table.
In the mornings when the sun, rises let us get born again.
Let us let our excitements fly.
Let us upon the perception of space, color, sound and the window sprinkle water .
Let the sky settle between two syllables of existence.
Let us fill and empty our lungs with eternity.
Take the load of knowledge off the shoulders of the swallow.
Let us reclaim the name from clouds,
from plane trees, from mosquitos, from summer.
On the wet feet of rain let us climb to the heights of compassion.
Let us open the door on mankind, light, plants and insects.

Our job maybe is
between the lotus flower and the century
to run after the song of the truth.

Sohrab Sepehri

Kashan, village of Chenar (plane tree), summer of 1343 (1964)
Translated by Ikram Kurdi, Slêmanî, Iraq, 2008.

Shaharir

1 Favardin 1390

Pada Mulanya Adalah Kesabaran

خداوندا به من آرامشی عطا کن که بپذیرم آنچه نمی‌توانم تغییر دهم و جراتی که تغییر دهم آنچه را که می‌توانم و علمی که تفاوت این دو را دریابم — علی شریعتي

Zaidabadi's Shariati

* Mina

With the anniversary of Dr. Ali Shariati’s death, many articles have appeared on various newspapers and sites. Since I never developed any feeling for him, I turned the page to the more interesting subjects. However, there were a few articles I couldn’t resist reading. Among them was Ahmad Zaidabadi’s Why I Praise Shariati. The fact that it had been recommended by Massoud Behnoud on strengthened my urge to read it.

While I generally agree with Zaidabadi, I could not disagree more on what he said about Shariati. Since he has decided not to answer those who make unfavorable comments about Shariati, I feel comfortable to pour my heart out on what I have been keeping pent up there for some thirty years.

I was in university when I become familiar with Shariati along with a few others who had lectures in the Hoseiniyeh Ershad about social and political Islam. I recall one by Hasheminejad titled Revolution and Counterrevolution in Imam Hosein’s Time. One can imagine what sort of crowd a lecture like this would gather. I did not go to any of them simply because I lacked belief not in the religion, but in political religion. Even if I accept that the original intent of most religions was political, still I refuse to give in to the idea that the institution of religion falls into such a depth.

Thought I participated in the demonstrations, and whatever else the intellectual atmosphere of Tehran would consider as oppositional at the time, I avoided certain activities which I simply could in no way bring myself to do, like listening to Soussan or Aghassi, who were very popular among everybody because they were “khalqi” (roughly, “populist”). Their music lacked whatever I needed music to stir in my soul, a sense of harmony and rhythm to balance me in the world I lived in. But with Shariati it was a different story. Not only did he make us more unbalance, as much as I gathered from his incomprehensible ideas, but I was always wary of those who form their deconstructionizing views of Islam in the Sorbonne, while Al-Azhar or Feiziyeh would have been a much suitable place for that kind of inspiration.

In his article, Zaidabadi tries to explain why he admires Shariati. After giving a general background on the Iran of his childhood, by which I think he means the seventies, how rough and corrupt society was in the poor neighborhoods in particular, he says there were two alternatives: one was Marxist materialism which would encourage class hatred. The other was Shariatism. Naturally he chose the latter. Then he argues that what Shariati advocated was the right cause or better, the right issue. He says, “Given the atmosphere of that time, if he would talk of liberalism, whom would he have attracted?” And I agree. This was one of the Shariati’s main problems: to attract. Mr. Zaidabadi probably won’t like to know that thinkers do not say something to attract. Thinkers talk out of conviction; they talk about liberalism because they believe in liberalism and not because there is a good market for liberalism. I agree with Zaidabadi, Shariati’s main attraction to Islam, very likely, was to have a unique commodity; first to write his dissertation on, second to bring back home as a new marketable hybrid.

And what was this hybrid? Bringing the much-delayed reform to the religion, just as was done in Christianity, just as the Calvinists did, for example. With a very good intention, however, he rushed into action. He returned to Iran and started preaching what he was not so sure of, and what he had not studied well. He found some “Abuzarr, who had a sword with which he could meet out love with one its side and death with the other.” He was right of course, he found the right commodity for the market. Kind, gentle, loving Iranians who were frustrated by what was going on would buy his product and many of them would pay dearly for such a weapon.

Somewhere else he says: “Shariati taught me to ask, to search and to have a critical view of life.” Does he mean that Saadi did not? Hafeza and Molavi did not? Kalileh va Demneh did not? Moosh o Gorbeh did not? Even the articles in the news paper and magazines of the time did not? Saedi did not? Mirzadeh Eshghi did not? Iraj Mirza did not? I do not mention the other poets and playwrights or all those foreign writers who were translated.

But above all did not Zaidabadi study physics and biology at school? And maybe a little calculus? Plato and Aristotle? What we know of social and political, psychological and other social and human science are all modeled after scientific laws and are just footnotes to those great old thinkers. That is where we all started to learn how to think, even if we were dismissed for being privileged with having a culture and a way of living which required thinking and encouraged thinking simply to manage our daily lives.

He claims, “Were it not for Shariati’s, I would have turned to violence rather than what I’m now: a liberal, and human right activists.” Mr. Zaidabadi falls into several fallacies in the way he portray his life. The either-or, reductionism, appealing to fear, and hasty generalization embedded in this statement is more akin to George Bush’s arguments before marching to Iraq than what I know of Zaidabadi’s. Many of us are quite decent and care for other human being and did grow up in the same Iran and went to same schools there, and did grow up well without owing any of it to Shariati. Moreover, Shariati’s writings fitted very well into the seventies’ appetite for violence and bloodshed. (See for example, the reference to Abuzarr’s sword.) Let's remember that Shariati's main political interest in France was Franz Fanon, whose chief message was the efficacy of revolutionary violence not so much for smashing an oppressive political system, but to validate the manhood of the oppressed.

Zaidabadi admits that “although Shariati had an exaggerated language and sometimes could lead his audience to idealism…, he makes the Iranian atmosphere gentler and more humane.” Exaggeration, bitterness, anger, sarcasm and worse of all depression, these were all Shariati’s trademarks. None of these traits would produce a healthy atmosphere, but a suffocating one, in which no one would survive. He himself, rest in peace, was its first casualty.

Finally, Zaidabadi writes, “Shariati was the best humanistic and spiritual alternative to the materialism advocated by left and others.” He holds that whatever was not Shariati was materialistic and therefore devoid of spirituality and humanity. I wish to know where he got this ridiculous idea. At best we may say that materialism contradicts idealism (with lots of compromise, of course), but materialism does not necessarily contradict spiritualism or humanism. Materialism advocated by many leftists in no way is a hindrance to the humanism or spirituality. The fact that some people consider poverty as an Omm ol-Khabaes (roughly, "root of evil"), is nothing unique to the leftist or the materialist. The first person who wisely saw the evil in poverty and encouraged his followers to avoid it was our good prophet Zaratoshtra who was the champion of humanity and spirituality. And if it is too ancient for Zaidabadi, I summon Voltaire and the dahri school as witnesses.

But if I may ask our friend Zaidabadi to do us all a favor, since he understood what Shariati said, please, in a language of his own which we all understand well, tell us what Shariati is saying which is so compelling. Here in New York University’s library we have twenty six volumes of Ali Shariati’s collected works. I have read only twelve of them but have looked through all of them. Aside from their being overwhelmingly repetitive, they all have the scattered quality of free association preaching. They do not read well and do not make sense. He bases his arguments on his own newly-minted concepts. And instead of reasoning he makes one assertion after another. Those of us who studied here have learned to read differently and as a result his writings sound either ambiguous or worse, meaningless. But if those who like him and understand him, instead of praising him, try to tell us what he said, they will have done a favor to him and to us as well. His turbulent soul would rest much peacefully.

* http://iranwrites.blogspot.com/2007/08/zaidabadis-shariati.html

In search of hidden dimensions

Geoff Brumfiel*

So far, string theory has defied experiments, but Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks he has found a way to put the idea to the test. Geoff Brumfiel finds out how.

Ask most theorists when they think their calculations will be tested experimentally and you'll be told "decades" or sometimes, more honestly, "never".

But ask Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at Harvard University, and he will give you a far closer date: 2008. That is when the first results from the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, are expected to be released by CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. And if Arkani-Hamed's predictions are correct, then that is when an experiment will detect the first evidence to support string theory — a vision of the cosmos that has never been verified experimentally. "The field is going to turn on what happens at the collider," he says.

Pacing his sparse Harvard office, the 32-year-old physicist drinks no less than six cups of espresso during our hour-and-a-half interview, as he tries to explain why he thinks string theory can now be tested.

String theory emerged in the 1980s as a way to answer questions that still baffle modern physics, such as why is gravity so much weaker than other fundamental forces? By imagining that everything is composed entirely of strings ten billion billion times smaller than atomic nuclei, theoretical physicists were able to create a model of the Universe that unified all fundamental forces into one, and described most of the particles we see today. Unfortunately, these strings are far too small to be detected by even the most powerful particle accelerators. And so, critics say, they are more philosophy than physics.

Arkani-Hamed's ideas have very little to do with strings themselves. Instead, he is hoping to detect the extra dimensions predicted by the theory, which, like the strings, are thought to be vanishingly small. But in 1998, Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues published calculations showing that some of these extra dimensions might be as large as a millimetre (N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos and G. Dvali Phys. Lett. B 429, 263–272; 1998). Such large dimensions, they argued, have escaped detection because everything we know — except for gravity — is confined to the three dimensions of space and one of time. But gravity, they think, might be able to seep into these extra dimensions. This would explain why it seems so weak to us. And, as a result, unexpected variations in gravity could allow researchers to detect the hidden dimensions.

Leaking away

"It was a watershed event in the field," recalls Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab near Chicago in Illinois. Suddenly, a theory that most thought could never be tested was within experimental reach. Some groups rushed to look for deviations in gravity at small scales. So far, they have nothing to report, but the hope created by Arkani-Hamed's work is enough to win him wide praise. "The word 'genius' is overused, but I think it is easily applicable in the case of Nima," says Savas Dimopoulos, a Stanford theorist and one of Arkani-Hamed's collaborators.

The son of two Iranian physicists, Arkani-Hamed was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in Boston. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, his family returned to their homeland, but as religious fundamentalists took over the government, his father was forced to go underground and the family eventually had to flee across the border to Turkey. By 1982, Nima was living in Toronto, Canada.

Recalling his early life, Arkani-Hamed says that his time in Iran was largely a positive experience. "The strange thing is that I have mostly wonderful memories," he says. If anything, he adds, it taught him to worry less about what others thought of him. "Given that so many aspects of my life have been unusual, I've never had a problem with feeling different or being different or doing different things."

As a child, Arkani-Hamed loved physics, but he initially disliked almost everything about string theory. "String theory just seemed like abstruse junk to me," he says. "What I really liked was physics that explained things about the world around me."

That changed when he began studying quantum field theory at the University of Toronto. At first, this complex theory — which underlies high-energy physics and much of string theory — seemed too arcane, but as he studied it more carefully, he found a level of order and explanation far beyond anything he had learned before. "Clearly, there was something very deep going on," he says.

It captivated him, and by the time he finished graduate school in 1997, he knew he wanted to try to make string theory experimentally verifiable. He found an ally and mentor in Dimopoulos, who has devoted his career to seeking testable versions of string theory. "We believe that the only way to make progress is to take an idea, and push its consequences to find observations," Dimopoulos says.

These days, in late-night phone calls and frequent e-mails, the two are thinking about what might emerge at the Large Hadron Collider. Their current calculations show that some of the energy created by particle collisions in the machine could escape into extra dimensions, carried off by leaking gravity, if those dimensions are large enough. The result would be an apparent violation of the conservation of energy — a dramatic sign that string theorists are on the right track.

Then again, they might not be. "You can spend ten years of your life and every idea you come up with can be wrong, and that's gratifying in its own way," Arkani-Hamed says. But, he adds, as he reaches his caffeine-fuelled conclusion: "If this thing turned out to be true, it could be the biggest discovery in science in, say, 300 years." // Nature 433, 10 (6 January 2005) | doi:10.1038/433010a; Published online 5 January 2005

* Geoff Brumfiel is Nature's Washington physical sciences correspondent.

Membaca Ali Shari'ati

Ali Shari’ati --yang lahir di Mashhad pada 1933-- adalah rowshanfekr yang kompleks. Betapa kompleksnya Shari’ati, terpapar menerusi wacana bersimpang-siur mengenainya pasca revolusi Islam Iran 1979. Dengan kompleksiti ini, maka bagaimanakah cara paling jerneh untuk kita memahami Shari’ati? “Dengan mencermati sistem pemikirannya,” kata Abdolhossein Panah, penyelidik Institute for Islamic Culture & Thought (IICT), Iran.

Khosropanah mengungkapkan hal ini sewaktu ditemubual di tempat tugasnya tersebut mengenai pemikir ‘Islam-Marxisme’ ini. Shari’ati, pada Ervand Abrahamian, adalah seorang “idealog revolusi Iran.” Sementara, pada Ali Rahnema, adalah seorang “guru, penceramah, dan pemberontak.” Tapi, Shari’ati di mata Khosropanah yang baru menerbitkan buku “Pathology of Contemporary Religious Research: Shari’ati, Bazargan and Soroush’s Theological Thoughts” ini mendapat nada kritis. Buku ini bukan calang-calang di Iran, lantaran terpilih sebagai antara buku terbaik ketika anugerah buku musim luruh tahun 2009. Selain itu, Khosropanah adalah agamawan-intelektual yang prolifik, dan mula mendapat tempat di panggung intelektualisme Iran.

Khosropanah --yang tak lekang dengan pakaian tradisi agamawan Shi’ah, jubah dan serban puteh-- memperoleh PhD di Institute of Imam Sadegh, dalam jurusan teologi. Selain menulis mengenai pemikir kontemporari Iran, Khosropanah juga menulis mengenai Philosophy of Morteza Motahhari, Epistemological System of Sadr-al-Motaallehin, Congnitive Philosophy, dll. Dengan penguasaan falsafah, serta latar hawzah yang ditempuhinya, Khosropanah punya asas penganalisaan tentang ragam pemikiran dalam Islam. Kupasannya mengenai Shari’ati, jelas mendapat sorotan yang sama sekali berbeza: sebuah kritik yang bertempat.

Sebelum berbicara rinci tentang patologi pemikiran Shari’ati, Khosropanah terlebih dahulu menghuraikan lingkungan yang mempengaruhi Shari’ati. Menurutnya, sekurangnya ada lima sosok yang paling ketara. Pertama, tentu sekali dari ayahnya, Muhammad-Taqi Shari’ati, yang sangat berjasa di awal pendidikan Shari’ati. Kedua, Shari’ati dipengaruhi Jean-Paul Sartre, filsuf eksistensialisme Perancis. Ini tercermin dalam gagasan Shari’ati mengenai empat penjara manusia (alam, sejarah, masyarakat, dan ego), yang termuat melalui buku, “Man and Islam.” Ketiga, pengaruh dari sosialisme Islam, yang di Iran ketika waktunya giat dikumandangkan kalangan gerakan kiri. Buku pertama Shari’ati, “And Once Again Abu Dharr,” adalah merupakan natijah dari pengaruh sosialistik ini.

Seterusnya, lanjut Khosropanah, Shari’ati yang mendapat pendidikan di Sorbonne, turut terpengaruh dengan Herbert Marcuse, yang salah satu tokoh dalam Mazhab Frankfurt generasi awal. Marcuse inilah yang diangkat ‘Nabi’ kepada kebangkitan mahasiswa, menerusi “One-Dimensional Man.” Dari kelompok teori kritis ini, Shari’ati belajar tentang kritisme. Dan, terakhir, kata Khosropanah lagi, adalah dari Ruhollah Khomeini, serta sahabat baiknya, Morteza Motahhari, yang masing-masing merupakan kelompok agamawan dinamik yang turut mempengaruhi Shari’ati.

Lewat lingkungan pengaruh ini, Shari’ati cuba melakukan eklektisisme, sehingga memprakasai sebuah gerakan revolusioner. Hasilnya, jika dari kubu Khomeini, mereka dapat menarik agamawan tradisional untuk bertindak progresif, manakala dari kubu Shari’ati pulu dapat menarik kalangan Marxis untuk menekuni Islam. “Tapi,” hemat Khosropanah di sini, “tetap ada kesenjangan besar antara bentuk Islam dari Shari’ati berbanding Khomeini.” Beza besarnya, Shari’ati mengutarakan “Islam Idealogi.” Manakala Khomeini, mengutarakan “Idealogi dalam Islam.”

Untuk memahami kata “idealogi” ini, Khosropanah membahagikan tiga bentuk aliran dalam Islam yang popular di Iran ketika zaman Shari’ati. Pertama, Islam tradisional, yang mana kalangan ini kerap menjadi sasaran kritikan Shari’ati. Islam seperti ini adalah Islam ukhrawi semata, yang mengabaikan kepentingan duniawi, yakni mengabaikan dimensi kemanusiaan. Mithalnya Shari’ati mengkritik agamawan tersohor Shi’ah, Allama Majlisi. “Ini kerana,” himbau Khosropanah, “Shari’ati tak melihat kepentingan pemikiran Majlisi dalam usaha memangkin perubahan sosial.”

Lantas kedua, adalah Islam duniawi, yang hanya membatasi pada duniawi, atau aspek kemanusiaan semata. Islam bentuk ini, bagi Khosropanah, telah memutuskan kaitan duniawi-ukhrawi yang merupakan konsep penting dalam tasawwur Islam, sebagai sebuah ad-deen. Dan ketiga, aliran Islam ketika itu adalah kombinasi keduanya, duniawi-ukhrawi, yang citra ini ditemui dalam pemikiran Ruhollah Khomeini, dan murid-muridnya seperti Motahhari, Husayn Baheshti, Javad Bahonar, dll.

Dari tiga bentuk Islam ini, lalu di manakah Khosropanah meletakkan Shari’ati? Ternyata, Shari’ati jatuh pada Islam bentuk kedua, iaitu Islam keduniaan, yang hanya terbatas pada dimensi Islam sosial (Islam ejtemaii). Hujahnya, “kita tak menemui pemikiran Shari’ati yang cuba menjalinkan dua ranah agama, iaitu duniawi-ukhrawi,” tegas Khosropanah. Bagi Hojjatul Islam ini lagi, “yang kita saksikan ialah Shari’ati hanya memfokuskan Islam pada dimensi perubahan sosial semata, bukannya dalam kaitannya dengan konsep ukhrawi, yang menjadi ranah penting dalam Islam.”

Lantaran dimensi inilah, “Islam di tangan Shari’ati sering bernuansa revolusioner,” rumus Khosropanah. Semak saja konsep du’a, haji, mahdisme, dll, itu walhal adalah konsep yang punya keakraban dengan ukhrawi. Tapi, di tangan Shari’ati, konsep itu dijelmakan secara revolusioner dalam nada yang begitu manusiawi sekali. Bahkan, tawhid pun dibicarakan Shari’ati dalam percikan yang sama: kemanusiaan! “Justeru, kalau kita ingin membaca Shari’ati, maka seharusnya kita meletakkan Shari’ati pada tasawwur pemikiran Islam ejtemaii ini,” ujar Khosropanah. Namun, Islam pada Khomeini, adalah sebaleknya.

Khomeini hadhir mengkritik dua jenis Islam sebelumnya, termasuk bentuk aliran Islam yang melandasi pemikiran Shari’ati tersebut. Bagi Khomeini, Islam harus bersifat komprehensif, lengkap meliputi duniawi-ukhrawi. Di sini, Khosropanah menerangkan, Khomeini dapat membahagikan aliran ini kerana dibantu kaedah ijtihadi, yang merupakan asas dalam pendidikan hawzah di Iran. Dan, kaedah inilah yang tak ditempuhi oleh Shari’ati. “Jadi dengan kaedah ijtihadi, itu memudahkan kita menganalisa Shari’ati dengan lebih tajam, dan lebih tepat,” petik filsuf muda ini. Malahan bukan saja Shari’ati, kita juga dapat mengetahui sistem pemikiran para pemikir lain.

Demikian pula, kritik lainnya ialah Shari’ati sering meminjam pendekatan-pendekatan dari luar Islam, dalam memecahkan persoalan Islam. Shari’ati, sebagai contohnya, mencari jawapan dari perspektif barat, timur, atau tradisi-tradisi lain. Ini berbeza dengan Khomeini, atau lebih nyata lagi pada Motahhari, yang mencari permasalahan di luar Islam, tapi menyelesaikannya menerusi perspektif Islam. Hal inilah yang kemudiannya jadi patologi yang tersendiri kepada Shari’ati, akibat kegagalannya untuk meletakkan Islam sebagai sebuah kesempurnaan, dan juga sebuah keaslian.

Shahdan, perbezaan ini tak seharusnya menafikan jiwa besar Shari’ati itu sendiri. Sebab, Shari’ati maseh menyanjung kewibawaan Khomeini. “Barangkali,” tebak Khosropanah, “Khomeini bukannya seperti Allama Majlisi yang menulis Bihar al-Anwar tersebut.” Khomeini, meski cita-citanya adalah ukhrawi, tapi tetap ada keseimbangan dengan duniawi. Malah, di kalangan agamawan Iran, Khomeini pada zamannya lebih progresif berbanding Boroujerdi, Khoei, dll. Islam, pada pemikiran Khomeini, berubah sebagai sebuah agama yang ragam-fungsi. Bukan sekadar “islam idealogi” atau “Islam ukhrawi” semata.

Hatta, Shari’ati pernah memberi apreasiasi kepada Ali Khamenei, yang juga teman dekatnya. Kini, Khamenei, merupakan rahbar (pemimpin) Republik Islam Iran, yang mewarisi legasi Khomeini. Kedekatan Shari’ati pada kalangan agamawan ini tentu tak lepas dari pendekatan agamawan Iran yang merakyat, yang menyegarkan, yang mencerahkan. Agamawan yang baik, itu sebetulnya, adalah agamawan tak leka dengan hablu minallah (vertical) saja. Sebaleknya, turut seimbang dengan hablu minannas (horizontal).

Jadi, Islam, memang bukan idealogi semata. Ini akan lebih kita insafi saat menekuni Ideologiekritik dari Juergen Habermas. Ini kerana, Islam sebagai sebuah agama, mesti dibezakan dengan idealogi-idealogi lain. Islam, dalam dirinya, adalah sebuah keseluruhan. Sebab itu, tatkala ada kaedah yang cuba menafikan dimensi komprehensif Islam, itu selalu berdepan kesulitan dalam menafsirkan Islam sebagai sebuah keseluruhan. “Persoalannya,” ungkap Khosropanah, “jika Islam dibenarkan dibina dari kaedah yang bukan-Islami, maka itu menunjukkan Islam gagal membangun sebagai sebuah agama.” Islam, jika benar-benar unggul, harus mampu melampaui tandingannya, dan tampil terbaik.

Walau bagaimanapun, kita turut menyedari bahawa Shari’ati tak seperti banyak pemikir muslim dewasa ini. “Shari’ati, sekurangnya dapat kita bezakan dengan pemikir muslim sekular yang lain, seperti Mojtahed-Shabestari, Nasr Abu Zayd, Abid al-Jabiri, dll,” akui Khosropanah. Tradisi hermeneutika kritis dari Hans-Georg Gadamer yang menjadi muara bagi kelangan pemikir muslim sekular, itu cenderung membangkitkan keraguan dan historisme dalam Islam. “Sebetulnya,” sambung Khosropanah lagi, “kalangan ini ini mirip dengan Islam tradisional, yang konon dikritik mereka. Padahal, masing-masing serupa dalam memisahkan ranah duniawi-ukhrawi.”

Di samping itu, kalangan ini juga percaya pada kenisbian: musnahnya cerita-cerita besar (grand narratives). Menerusi gagasan kenisbian ini, kalangan ini menafikan kriteria dalam memahami kedudukan antara benar-salah. Namun, bagi Khosropanah, “sekiranya seseorang menafikan sebarang kriteria dalam menentukur kebenaran, maka itu secara tabii telahpun menafikan dirinya sendiri.” Sanggahannya mudah: “bagaimana mereka mengesahkan bahawa pandangan kenisbian itu adalah sebuah kebenaran?” tanya Khosropanah yang juga merupakan pengarah jabatan falsafah di IICT. Dan, Shari’ati, sebagai pemikir dialektis tak terperangkap dengan kenaifan seperti ini.

Ringkasnya, Shariati adalah pemikir yang bitara, biarpun kompleks. Dengan rencam pengetahuan-barat yang ditekuninya, itu tak pernah seinci pun mengikis cintanya pada pengetahuan-lokal; pada Nubuwwah, Imamah, Karbala, Abu Dharr, Molavi, Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani, dll. Betapapun kritik kita padanya, Shari’ati seraya membuktikan dirinya sebagai “seorang workaholic, gigih membangunkan zamannya. Lebih dari itu, Shari’ati terus-menerus berfikir, belajar dari semua sumber, serta punya cabaran dalam fikirannya. Tujuannya hanya satu: melakukan pencerahan,” jelas Khosropanah yang mengingatkan agar kita saksama dalam bersikap mengenai Shari’ati.

Maka, dari petikan akhir Khosropanah ini, kita belajar sesuatu. Dari Shari’ati ini, setidaknya kita belajar bagaimana untuk menjadi “manusia”; sebuah kata ringan, tapi amanahnya berat. Sebab, kemuncak manusia adalah pada shahadah, yang menurut arkitek revolusi ini, “merupakan jantung bagi seluruh kemanusiaan.” Dan, inilah yang kemudiannya telah dipersembahkan oleh Ali Shari’ati sendiri, yang shahid pada 1977. [Kabar]

From an Existentialist to a Muslim

By Muhammad Legenhausen

I've been asked too many times to explain how I became a Muslim. Nearly every time, I come up with something different. I don't make anything up, but the acceptance of a religion is complicated. It involves emotions, personal history, politics, theology and philosophy and much else, too. So although here I'm focusing on the philosophical factors, don't get the wrong impression that I arrived at Islam as a result of purely philosophical reflection.

I read my first book in philosophy when I was about eleven years old, in around 1964. It was William E Hocking's The Types of Philosophy , which I still think is good. After reading it, I decided right then and there that I wanted to study philosophy. I was brought up a Catholic, and consternation over the teachings of the Church drove me to philosophy as much as anything did. Hocking's idealism and mysticism seemed an appealing way to bring together faith and reason.

In high school, I became an avid reader of Søren Kierkegaard. For my sixteenth birthday, my friends gave me six or seven paperback editions of his works. I also started reading Camus and Sartre, and by the time I graduated, I considered myself to be an existentialist. Tolstoy was another hero, and I filed for conscientious objector status with my draft board as a Catholic pacifist.

Within a year after entering the State University of New York at Albany, I had switched from religious to atheistic existentialism. Sartre and Nietzsche began to loom larger than Kierkegaard. I was disappointed with the lack of a strong opposition to the Vietnam War from the Church leadership, and came to see religious belief as bad faith and an opiate for the masses. I read a bit of Marx, but found Proudhon and Kropotkin more to my liking.

During my last year as a philosophy major at Albany, I took a course on the problem of free will and determinism with Ken Stern, who had studied at Oxford and took an analytic approach to philosophy. The crisp logic and emphasis on clear thinking seemed like a breath of fresh air. I started to read everything I could find by WVO Quine, whether or not I could understand it. At the same time, I found my atheism challenged by TS Eliot. Was his religiosity just another case of bad faith? Not likely, given the profound way he faced up to what we had become in The Wasteland . I tried to keep my head clear by focusing on logic.

I began graduate study in philosophy at Rice University in 1976. When informed in my second year that there would be no graduate courses on modal logic, I invited fellow graduate students to a semester of seminars in which I would discuss the philosophical foundations of modal logic, using articles by Carnap, Church, Scott, Thomason, and others. My interest in philosophical logic motivated the writing of my PhD thesis, Matters of Substance .

I had also become interested in Aristotelian ethics, stimulated by reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue . MacIntyre's critique of liberal modernism came at the same time that I had begun studying Islam, sparked by curiosity about the revolution in Iran, and by a number of Muslim students I encountered at Texas Southern University, where I taught philosophy from 1979 to 1989. It seemed to me that MacIntyre's arguments could be used to make a better case for Islam than for Catholicism. MacIntyre was arguing that ethics could only make sense in the context of a tradition that would give substantive content to moral ideals and even to the standards of rationality. Catholicism, however, seemed in a state of perpetual retreat ever since the first onslaughts of modernity; and all too often, the Church seemed to be supporting vestiges of the aristocracy. Islam, on the other hand, seemed vibrant and imbued with an electrifying spirituality, and to be on the side of the oppressed.

My Iranian students introduced me to the work of Allamah Tabataba'i, Shahid Mutahhari, Ali Shari‘ati, and others, but I ran across the works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr in a used bookstore. Although I would not agree to the traditionalism advocated by Nasr, his introduction to the philosophical and mystical traditions in the Islamic world fascinated me. In esoteric Islam, I found that there was not only a variety of philosophical tendencies, such as Illuminationism, Peripateticism, and something called Hikmat al-Muta‘aliyah (transcendental wisdom), but also poetry, art, political ideas, various kinds of rational mysticism, some of which merge into the philosophical tendencies, and criticism of the superficial limitation of Islam to details of rituals and rules.

The features of esoteric Islam I found attractive were particularly prominent among Shi‘ites and Sufis. The Shi‘ites also seemed to have a long history of intense interest in social justice. The source for all these ideas turned out to be ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and first Shi‘ite Imam, (may the peace and blessings of Allah be with Muhammad and with his progeny).

So, I thought that if ever I were to become a Muslim, I should most certainly be a Shi‘ite, as the devotees of Imam ‘Ali are called. My only problem was that I didn't believe in God. I decided to teach a course on the philosophy of religion at TSU in which I would review the claims of the major religions and at the same time, re-examine the arguments for and against the existence of God. This review of the world's religions only intensified my interest in Islam. It seemed to harmonise themes from Judaism and Christianity with attitudes in its mysticism more commonly found in Hindu and Buddhist thought. But the philosophical evaluation of the arguments for the existence of God left me as convinced as ever that none of them were sound.

As for the arguments against the existence of God, it certainly seemed to me beyond credibility that the world should contain any sort of giant mind without a body. Then it occurred to me that the way I was thinking of God was much too limited. What I was rejecting with my atheism was not God but an idol. The Muslim philosophers and Sufis said that God was not a mind, not even a substance, but just pure unadulterated being. Even if I couldn't prove that in addition to the beings of the world there is also Being, I couldn't find any knock down argument against it, either. Why not? William James and the “will to believe” also gave me encouragement.

The character of Imam ‘Ali was a relentless inspiration. He was a persistent defender of the weak and oppressed, a poet, a treasury of practical wisdom, a theologian, a statesman, a paradigm of virtue, courageous, insightful, humble, faithful, patient, and he had a sense of humour. How could he have been wrong about the existence of God? I might make a jumble of the arguments, but he seemed to see the matter with such clarity as to leave no room for doubt. Certainly emulation of such a person would be a noble thing, but such emulation would be far less than noble if there were no god, and so, God must be! These are the sorts of thoughts that occupied me until somehow the “Why not?” of doubt – of thinking that in some sense maybe it could be true that God exists – became “OK, that can be taken as true”, and then “Indeed, God is!” Then, when some American Muslims asked if I were a Muslim after Friday prayers at a mosque in Houston, I recited the Muslim confession of faith: “ Ashhaddu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa ashhaddu an Muhammadan rasul Allah .” (I bear witness that there is no god but Allah and I bear witness that Muhammad is the apostle of Allah.)

I still like the logic chopping of analytic philosophy, and its clever ways of dealing with paradoxes and quandaries. Too often, however, it seems to suffer from a lack of spirit, a lack of profundity, a lack of faith. Of course, there are exceptions; but as a rule, analytic philosophy seems to share many of the vices that pervade contemporary post-industrial society: over-reliance on technical expertise and over-specialisation, over-confidence that science can answer all the questions worth asking.

But I didn't become a Muslim because I converted from analytic to Islamic philosophy, although I did become interested in Islamic philosophy around the time of my conversion. What seems most valuable to me in Islamic philosophy is its spirit, its retention of the idea of the philosopher as the wise man searching for truth and leading a simple life. Islam has its own special, very intense flavour of love that is especially prominent in its ‘ifran (mysticism, gnosis); and if philosophy is love of wisdom, then Islamic philosophy is the expression of this intense mystical love in its yearning for wisdom and direct understanding.

I came to Iran in 1990 and started teaching Western philosophy of religion in the analytic tradition but from my own budding new Muslim's perspective. The first lectures I gave in Tehran have been published in the international journal published in Qom, Al-Tawåíd , starting in 1993. I began with thinkers like Plantinga and Alston for whom religious experience plays an important role. Against them, I argued that religious beliefs are neither properly basic nor justified on the basis of religious experience, and that the rationality of religious belief requires us to provide reasons for belief. At the same time, I argued that the traditional arguments don't work in the present intellectual atmosphere, and that what could be taken at one time as self-evident premises cannot be so taken any longer. Any satisfactory reasons that can be given to justify religious belief today must rely upon rational insight and conscience. These are sufficient to provide certainty for the believer, but they won't convince the unbeliever who stubbornly refuses to admit the need for religious explanations where no other are available. Hence, the rationality of one's faith is to be established not by proving its content by a logical demonstration, but by making plausible the view to which religion invites us.

Currently, I've been studying the writings of William Hocking, again, and finding that they still contain valuable insights that often seem to work better for Islamic than Catholic theology.

Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen is associate professor of philosophy at the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qom, Iran, and author of Islam and Religious Pluralism (Al-Hoda).

Habermas Terlalu Idealistik

Kita tak pernah membayangkan, di saat gentingnya hubungan antara Amerika Sharikat dengan Iran, terdapat warga Amerika Sharikat yang bertugas di pusat keagamaan Shi’ah di Kota Qom, Iran. Namanya MUHAMMAD LEGENHAUSEN, yang mendapat kedoktoran di Rice University (1983). Tesisnya mengenai, “Matters of Substance”. Sebenarnya, hubungan Iran dengan Amerika Sharikat, di peringkat masharakat adalah begitu baik sekali, kecuali dalam dasar politik. Bahkan, Amerika Sharikat merupakan minat utama rakyat Iran untuk mendapatkan pendidikan. Malah, ada mahasiswa agama di Qom yang menyimpan cita-cita demikian. Tapi, Legenhausen ini adalah kasus sebaleknya. Dengan keselesaan di Amerika Sharikat, filsuf yang menulis buku “Islam and Religious Pluralism” ini memilih untuk bertugas di Muasaseh Amozesh va Pazyuhesh Imam Khomeini (Institut Pendidikan dan Penyelidikan Imam Khomeini), di bawah pimpinan Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah Yazdi. Kerana kebetulan di Qom, AQIL FITHRI telah berkesempatan untuk menemubualnya secara santai, serta mendapatkan beberapa pandangannya. Bukan saja pandangan Legenhausen mengenai falsafah. Namun juga tentang hal-hal yang peribadi yang tak kalah menariknya.

Kenapa anda tak aktif lagi dalam Facebook (FB)?

Saya kira banyak membuang waktu di FB. Kebetulan di Iran, FB juga disekat. Kemudian diambil masa terlalu lama untuk memasang anti-filter, dan memahami sistem-sistem operasinya. Lalu, ada yang mengundang saya untuk menyertai kumpulan-kumpulan dalam FB, dan semua aktiviti di FB ini turut disalinkan kepada e-mel saya. Jadi, banyak juga waktu saya terbuang untuk semua urusan yang tak perlu ini.

Apakah anda pernah ada pengalaman dengan Juergen Habermas, yang kini mungkin dianggap filsuf barat paling berbahaya di Iran?

Habermas pernah ke Iran, pada 2002. Ketika di Iran tersebut, saya ada bertemu dan melakukan perbincangan dengannya. Habermas berkata bahawa pemikiran saya datang dari zaman pertengahan (ketawa). Buatnya, pemikiran agama mesti dipindahkan terlebih dahulu kepada bahasa sekular. Saya memberitahu Habermas, saya sukakan puisi-puisi Jerman. Tapi, saya juga membaca terjemahan puisi-puisi tersebut dalam English. Namun, setelah membaca dalam versi English, saya akan kembali kepada Bahasa Jerman. Jadi, saya katakan kepada Habermas, “apakah anda fikir setelah mereka membaca dalam bahasa terjemahan, mereka takkan kembali pada bahasa asal mereka?” Lalu, setelah itu Habermas berkata pada saya, “pemikiran anda dari zaman pertengahan.”

Tapi, bukankah idea utama dari Habermas adalah intersubjektiviti? Mithalnya, gagasan ruang awam, itu di mana ‘kebenaran’ ditentukan dari wacana semua pehak yang terlibat.

Bagi saya, itu adalah pandangan yang terlalu idealistik. Anda tahu, bahawa ruang awam itu berkecenderungan untuk dimanipulasi oleh modal dan kalangan yang berkepentingan. Dalam gagasan Habermas tersebut, ruang awam adalah setara, terbuka, semua dapat berperanan, dan kononnya tiada pengaruh politik serta ekonomi. Namun, malangnya, ini tak berlaku. Maka, saya fikir Habermas terlalu mengidealisasikan, dan ternyata tak begitu dalam realiti.

Falsafah Habermas lebih berasaskan dari falafah etika. Sebagai filsuf dari tradisi Kantian, Habermas turut menguniversalisasikan etika, sepertimana Kant dalam kategori imperatif-nya. Apakah etika dapat diuniversalisasikan? Kemudian, bukankah Habermas juga melihat kepentingan agama, terutamanya setelah debatnya dengan Joseph Ratzinger?

Saya tak bersetuju dengan hal universalisasi etika tersebut. Etika mesti diasaskan kepada sesuatu tradisi, yang ada nilai-nilainya. Manakala, perubahan sikap Habermas terhadap agama tak mengubah fikiran saya terhadap projek intelektualnya. Mungkin kalau berubah sekalipun, hanya dari “terlalu teruk” kepada “tak terlalu teruk.”

Kebetulan latar anda dalam falsafah barat di Amerika Sharikat, dan kini di Iran, serta terlibat pula dalam bidang falsafah Islam. Jadi menarik untuk tahu pandangan anda mengenai Sayyed Hossein Nasr?

Saya pernah membaca beberapa buku dari Nasr, namun hanya sekali saja bertemu secara peribadi dengannya. Ketika itu, musim panas, sewaktu saya kembali sementara ke Amerika Sharikat. Nasr dan Frithjof Schuon ada beberapa kesamaan idea. Namun, saya tak bersetuju dengan beberapa asas dari idea Schuon. Di samping itu, memang Nasr adalah antara yang terawal mengutarakan mengenai gagasan “pengislaman.” Berbanding Nasr, sebetulnya saya lebih gemarkan pemikiran Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, dari Malaysia.

Menarik. Mengapa al-Attas?

Bagi saya, pemikiran al-Attas lebih dekat dengan saya. Sebab, pemikiran Nasr (sebagai neo-tradisionalis) merujuk kepada pemikiran sains dari barat itu sebagai anti-tradisional. Tapi, al-Attas menyeru kita kembali kepada unsur-unsur asas, atau kembali kepeada pandangan-alam secara menyeluruh. Dan, kemudian, baru membangunkan sains secara tersendiri, dengan premis-premis yang tersendiri juga. Tentu saja, kadang-kala Nasr berbicara hal yang serupa. Tapi, kadang-kala tak begitu. Mithalnya, Nasr ada merumuskan konflik sains dalam dunia muslim ini. Bagi Nasr, ini ekoran dari pertembungan terhadap prinsip-prinsip tradisional. Maka kerana itu, Nasr berfikiran bahawa sains mestilah diasaskan dari prinsip-prinsip tradisional. Bagi saya pula, bukan sains moden saja yang harus kita berhati-hati, malah kita juga harus berhati-hati dengan dakwaan “prinsip-prinsip tradisional” tersebut.

Tapi, bagaimana untuk mengintegrasikan antara sains tradisi dengan sains moden?

Sebagai contohnya, mari kita lihat ke China. Kita lihat bagaimana perubahan China (Akupunktur) dapat diintegrasikan dalam perubatan moden. Kalau kita ke hospital di China, mereka ada dua alternatif: tradisional dan moden. Kini, hospital di Tehran, saya difahamkan mereka juga mahu membangunkan sesuatu yang sama.

Sebagai rakyat Amerika Sharikat, mengapa anda berminat untuk bertugas di Iran, malah di Qom pula?

Saya selesa di sini. Mudahnya, masharakat di sini terlalu baik kepada saya. [Kabar]

Pour Azghandi tentang Motahhari-Shariati

TEHRAN, (SCIB): “When Shahid Motahari came to know Dr. Shariati in a trip to Mashad, he immediately realized that the youth need his ideas” Dr. Rahim Pour Azghadi told Shahed in an exclusive interview."

"Shahid Motahari was in the heart of disputes over religious intellectualism. He practiced religious intellectualism; however, he never overlooked a pathology of this kind of approach. In fact, he would never totally accept of refute religious intellectualism; but he would examine arguments for and against this approach and was not fearful of speaking out his mind.”

Dr. Pour Azghandi said. “ Master Motahhari would study the benefits of approaching Islam from a religious intellectualist point of view; at the same time he conducted a thorough pathological study of this approach.”

Pour Azghadi was then asked to comment on the relation between Martyr Motahhari and Dr. Shariati.

“The two characters had never had a discussion before Dr. Shariati came to Tehran on an invitation from Master Motahhari.” “ Motahari, however, had been introduced to the thoughts of Shariati during a visit to Mashad. He then invited the Ferdowsi university professor to deliver a lecture in Tehran’s Hosseinieh Ershad. This was when many young Iranians got familiarized with Shariati’s ideas and started reading his books.”

“There were many at that time, who weren’t happy with the way Shariati would dress and appear in public. He would wear a tie and constantly keep his face shaven. There were even attempts a couple of times to stop Shariati from entering the Hosseinieh. But Imam Khumeini knew from Ayyatollah Motahhari that these people’s claims were not true.”

“Hosseinieh Ershad is a historical site for the Islamic revolution. It bears the revolutionary spirit which takes it beyond a simple building,” the university professor commented.

"Martyr Motahhari neither embraced the Islamic clerical school’s extremist point of view concerning Islam, nor did he accept anti-religious intellectual’s approach. What he favored was a moderate point of view. In fact he always called the moderate class, one of the most important social classes. Martyr Motahhari believed in the power of the clergy, Azghandi told Shahed reporter.“

"He was eager to settle the differences people might have had with the clergy. He would always warn clerics against falling into the trap of self-righteousness. He believed the clergy do possess the power to convey an Islamic worldview to people.”

"Motahhari was one to listen to all voices from all groups of people and thinkers and would engage in discussion with all of them, where necessary. He would never suffice to listen to one argument without considering its counter-argument. He was at the same time a religious clergy and a religious intellectual.” Azghandi concluded.

انسان و اسلام / ۳۴

خدا یک مفهوم مشترک در ذهن همه است. یک عده با آن مخالفیم و یک عده آن معتقد. - علی شریعتی، انسان و اسلام / ۳۴

Shi’ah, Malaysia, Habermas

Apa yang membezakan kedudukan warga minoriti dalam teori wacana Jürgen Habermas berbanding dengan tradisi liberal? Hak-hak minoriti dijamin oleh sistem (negara): tiada hukum negara yang final.

Namun, perkembangan mutakhir memaparkan Malaysia maseh jauh dari cita-cita tersebut. Sistem kita tergusur dari negara-hukum yang mendukung demokrasi deliberatif. Hal ini dapat disemak menerusi hak-hak minoriti Malaysia yang lekas dimamah homogenisasi, lebih-lebih lagi saat berkaitan dengan soal agama, khususnya Islam. Walhal, dalam sistem politik gagasan generasi kedua Mazhab Frankfurt tersebut, hak-hak minoriti sentiasa mendapat tempat khusus.

Mengapa hal ini berlaku di Malaysia? Barangkali akibat berbibitnya konflik antara tradisi-modeniti. Agama pada barisan tradisi, manakala sistem pada barisan modeniti. Kita bermasalah pada kedua-duanya: tradisi dan modeniti, dan gagal menguruskan pertembungan tersebut.

Agama, dalam sejarahnya, tak pernah kaku. Di sana, kebudayaan memainkan peranan bermakna, yang sentiasa menyegarkan. Walau bagaimanapun, kebudayaan pula tak pernah satu, sebaleknya beragam, serta sentiasa boleh berubah. Dalam kebudayaan ini, termasuklah juga agama. Menerusi modeniti, agama kemudiannya mendapat dampak yang paling drastik. Lantaran itu, banyak penganut agama berada di persimpangan. Dan, muslim di Malaysia memang tersentak dengan arus modeniti yang tak terbendung ini. Bagaimana hal ini boleh dijelaskan?

Modeniti, sebetulnya, agak lewat hadhir ke Malaysia. Negara kita mithalnya, paling ketara berdepan modeniti hanya setelah merdeka. Sebelumnya, negara maseh terbelenggu dengan kolonialisme. Sewaktu modeniti bersemi-- dengan nilai-nilai yang diusungnya -- maka unsur-unsur dalam kategorisasi besar mula tergugat. Mudahnya, Islam di Malaysia yang mafhum sebagai sebuah kategorisasi besar, mula dicabar a priori-nya, dan dipermasalahkan. Sebelumnya tidak. Ini kerana, sebelumnya sudah ada kategorisasi besar seperti imperialisme, feudalisme, agamawan, dll.

Lantas, serbuan modeniti ini menyerlahkan kerumitan (complexity) baru. Keadaan ini rupanya secara perlahan telah mengugurkan beberapa kespontanan yang sekian lama diamalkan masharakat.

Kespontanan (budaya) ini adalah ciri masharakat tradisional. Sementara, keteraturan (hukum) adalah ciri masharakat moden. Tatkala adanya keteraturan, maka unsur-unsur tradisi, termasuk kategorisasi besar, itu akan mula mengalami kecairan. Satu demi satu, nilai-nilai tradisi dipertikaikan. Sementara, masharakat -- kian terbuka -- akan mula mencari wadah naungan yang lebih autentik, serta lebih rasional. Di Malaysia, dengan fungsi negara sebagai hub pendidikan, hiburan, beli-belah, perlancungan, rumah kedua, dll, maka negara kita melesat ke arah kosmopolitanisme.

Tapi, kosmopolitan kita tanpa falsafah. Sistem, dan masharakat kita sepertinya belum siap untuk berdepan dengan kosmopolitanisme ini. Mental terlalu lemah. Ini dapat dilihat tatkala kita sering kehilangan pedoman tentang bagaimana untuk menebak krisis-krisis mendatang. Kegagalan ini berpunca dari rumusan dasar-dasar negara yang mentah. Bercambahnya kalangan minoriti, jelas merupakan gejala modeniti, yang mengungkapkan kegagalan kita dalam memapankan sistem. Kasus kalangan Shi’ah yang ditahan di Gombak baru-baru ini merupakan contoh terbaik.

Dalam kasus Shi’ah tersebut, kita mudah melenting tatkala ada warganegara yang keluar dari kategorisasi besar. Tapi, aneh juga, mereka bukan dinyatakan sesat dari Islam/agama. Sebaleknya, sekadar dinyatakan sesat dari Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah? Mengapa tak dinyatakan mereka sesat dari Islam? Adakah Islam itu tak warna-warni? Ketempangan nalar kita ini merupakan sebuah paradox. Kita berselindung di belakang andaian tertentu demi mengistimewakan kekuasaan eksklusif tertentu (mazhab) ke atas inklusif semua (agama). Padahal, di sisi sistem dalam masharakat majmuk, berpaut semata pada eksklusivisme tertentu cukup lemah kerasionalannya.

Arakian, fenomena yang kita alami ini telah lama dianalisis Habermas (juga Max Weber) menerusi kesan-kesan modeniti terhadap tradisi di Eropah. Kini, kebingungan sama yang pernah melanda tradisi (bermakna juga, agama dan budaya) di Eropah, seraya mengulangi dirinya di Malaysia. Cuma, objeknya berbeza. Kali ini, muslim di Malaysia pula keliru bagaimana untuk hadapi benturan sengit ini. Kasus penindasan minoriti Shi’ah adalah sebuah ujian mengenai sejauh mana hak-hak minoriti di Malaysia. Hasilnya, kita gagal. Tapi, untungnya konflik ini belum (atau, tak) sampai pada tingkat perang 30 tahun (1618–1648) antara katolik-protestan.

Walau bagaimanapun, tindakan pemerintah (menerusi aparatus negara) yang menghukum Shi’ah sebagai ‘parasit’ masharakat itu mencemar kerukunan sistem. Sebab, itu jelas sekali melampaui hak-hak minoriti dalam perspektif demokrasi deliberatif. Menurut Habermas, bentuk negara-hukum moden mestilah ditentukan dari wacana, bukannya dari lingkaran kekuasaan. Bahkan, tindakan dangkal ini turut bercanggah dengan cita-cita Islam yang universal.

Soal universalisasi dari agama ini menarik. Di sini, Habermas ada maksud yang lebih rinci. Filsuf Jerman ini -- termasuk juga Carl Schmitt yang merupakan lawannya – telah lama bergelut antara dikotomi penting dalam sistem: perundangan dan keabsahan. Menariknya adalah, lewat teori wacana-nya ini, Habermas tak menolak fungsi agama dalam ruang awam. Dalam gagasan pasca-sekularnya, Habermas menukik bahawa agama berupaya memangkin kebersamaan dalam sesebuah masharakat. Sharatnya, agama tersebut mestilah melakukan proses universalisasi atas faham-nya.

Sungguhpun demikian, tindakan melarang faham Shi’ah, dan minoriti-minoriti Islam lain di Malaysia, telah menghambat mereka untuk melakukan universalisasi faham-nya. Kekangan pada mereka ini sekaligus mencitrakan Malaysia yang tak betah menerima penalaran awam sebagai saringan buat keabsahan negara-hukum. Kita takut pada kelainan. Takut pada pertentangan. Takut pada pembaharuan. Semua yang berbeza, mudah saja dikelompokkan sebagai, “mengugat keselamatan negara.” Sedangkan, hal yang barangkali cuba disorokkan adalah lebih dari itu.

Shi’ah di Malaysia ibaratnya berada pada titik nadir. Kalangan minoriti ini menderita kerana iman. Sudahlah dinafikan ruang peribadi, malahan turut dinafikan ruang awam. Apakah ruang peribadi mereka yang hilang? Hak eksklusif untuk memiliki keimanan. Dan, apakah ruang awam mereka yang hilang? Hak universal untuk mewacanakan keimanannya. Kedua-duanya menjadi daerah terlarang buat mereka, dan di negara mereka sendiri. Lalu, apa lagi ruang yang tersisa untuk mereka bernafas? Nihil.

Dalam soal ruang peribadi dan ruang awam ini, Habermas dalam “Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?” menunjukkan keterkaitannya. Padanya, “ketika autonomi individu dijamin dalam konteks kewarganegaraan, maka itu saja akan membebaskan autonomi politiknya. Saling kaitan antara perlembagaan dan demokrasi hanya bermakna setelah adanya kombinasi antara autonomi peribadi dan autonomi warga: dan, setiap darinya memperoleh sumber sesamanya.”

Kemelut minoriti yang terhakis autonomi individunya ini sangat memprihatinkan. Ini kerana, kasus yang menimpa kalangan Shi’ah ini sudah masuk kepada soal diskriminasi. Dan lebih memilukan lagi, diskriminasi terhadap Shi’ah ini dilakukan oleh aparatus kerajaan, dengan restu pemerintah. Bukannya bermula dari gugatan kewacanaan yang terdapat dalam masharakat yang majmuk.

Maka, seluruh negara, dirundung duka. Kita lebih memilih langkah selamat, sepi saja menyaksikan kezaliman pada minoriti. Lihatlah, betapa miskinnya faham demokrasi kita. Tiada deliberatif. Demokrasi yang kita fahami rupanya milik mutlak majoriti, dan minoriti tiada hak-haknya. Demokrasi mengkal kita bukannya kebebasan wacana. Bukannya kebebasan media. Malah, bukannya kebebasan iman sekalipun. Dengan semangat ‘sosialis’ yang paling ekstrim ini, negara mahu memilik-negarakan iman setiap muslim di Malaysia. Lalu, apakah negara seperti ini dapat mensejahterakan kita?

Dan, ada yang lebih mencelakakan lagi. Pembangkang juga sekongkol sama, persis seperti pemerintah! Pembangkang langsung tak tergoda untuk mempertahankan hak-hak minoriti Shi’ah ini. Mereka seiringan hanyut, dan bermain selamat. Di sini, pemerintah dan pembangkang bersekutu melakukan kezaliman. Dendam politik mereka boleh redam dalam soal kelestarian kategorisasi besar. Malangnya, kategorisasi besar itu bukannya berlabuh pada hukum yang terwacana, sebaleknya pada tataran subjektiviti tertentu. Walhal, apa yang menimpa kalangan Shi’ah ini adalah soal keadilan, tema terpenting dalam Islam, juga dalam kemanusiaan.

Persoalannya ialah: apakah tema seberat ini belum cukup untuk mencelikkan kita? Lalu, goncangan apakah lagi yang mahu kita tunggu -- jika prinsip keadilan pun boleh dientengkan? Ketika hak-hak minoriti tak dapat pembelaan sewajarnya, maka itu bererti negara kita telah hilang maruahnya. Sebab, membela minoriti adalah neraca sesebuah negara-hukum. Bukan saja pada minoriti Shi’ah, sebaleknya juga pada minoriti-minoriti lain juga. Mereka punya hak dalam melakukan universalisasi dan rasionalisasi atas faham mereka.

Kini segalanya monolog. Tiada dialog. Sistem, hukum, serta dasar, hanya berkaca pada satu saluran semata: kata pemerintah. Dalam sistem yang tak mengorganisasi-dirinya ini, masharakat tak berperanan. Pembangkang tak berperanan. Minoriti tak berperanan. Yang tersisa, hanyalah kata kekuasaan tak komunikatif saja. Justeru, sekiranya kalangan minoriti ditindas, hatta ditindas oleh pemerintah sekalipun, lalu kepada siapa lagi untuk minoriti mengadu? Apakah mahu kembali kepada sistem yang telah menindas mereka? Mustahil.

Negara kita, dengan pemerintahnya, itu sendiri sebetulnya adalah ancaman kepada keluhuran hukum. Pemerintah kita gagal mengesan di mana batasnya kesahihan hukum-negara. Sebaleknya, hemat Habermas pula, negara yang baik adalah negara yang sentiasa tega untuk meralat dirinya. Setidaknya, negara itu sedar bahawa setiap hukum negara dalam negara-hukum itu tak pernah ada yang final, termasuk perlembagaan sekalipun. Hukum mestilah bersifat dari wacana intersubjektiviti dari masharakat. Bukannya dari sebuah suara tunggal pemerintah.

Meskipun begitu, untuk disalahkan pemain politik secara seluruhnya, tak benar juga. Masharakat, juga memikul dosanya. Masharakat (termasuk khalayak akademik!) kita tampaknya tak terdidik untuk kritis, dan pemerintah pula (sama seperti penjajah!) cenderung memupuk masharakat jadi sebegitu. Saat masharakat tak kritis, maka senanglah pemerintah (sesiapa yang memerintah pun!) untuk menggalang perintah. Shahdan, tragedi minoriti Shi’ah adalah bukti mutakhir yang mewarnai ketak-kritisan masharakat kita ini.

Ternyata, kalangan Shi’ah ini dihukum hanya kerana secupak iman. Dan, nilai iman mereka itu rupanya telah diseka dengan sebuah tanahair yang terpasung martabatnya. [Kabar]

اسلام شناسی / ۷۲

ای خدای بزرگ! تو چه باشی و چه نباش، من اکنون سخت به تو نیازمندم. تنها به این نیازمندم که تو باشی - علی شریعتی، اسلام شناسی، ۷۲

Muharram di Qom

Dalam kedinginan 10°C, anak kecil itu dijulang ke udara. Di tengah kerumunan massa, ia tak menangis. Sembari dibaluti kain puteh, seperti kain kafan, dengan wajah yang terdedah pada similir angin, manakala pada dahinya pula terdapat lilitan hijau yang tertulis “ya Ali Asghar,” di mana Ali Asghar adalah shahid termuda di Karbala, hanya 6 bulan. Demikian salah satu dari sejumlah panorama ketika dinihari 10 Muharram 1432H, di maqam Fatima Masoumeh, di Qom, di Iran.

Hari itu, adalah hari kemuncak Azadari, yang bermula sejak 1 Muharram dan berterusan sampai Arbain, 40 hari setelah kemuncak tersebut. Ini adalah hari yang terkenal sebagai Ashura. Setelah ribuan tahun, sejak 61H, Imam Husayn shahid dengan cemerlang di Karbala. Dengan 72 jiwa yang shahid, dan 128 jiwa yang terlibat, hanya semata-mata atas apa yang mereka namakan sebagai, “kebangkitan kembali agama.” Kata ini seperti berlebihan. Kita, dengan nalar yang ada, tentu takkan mudah menerimanya, dan takkan berpuas hati menerima kata tanpa makna.

Lantaran itu, barangkali akan ada yang bertanyakan, “apakah perlu agama dibangkitkan kembali setelah risalah dari Nubuwwah?” Secara fenomenologi, kaedah menarik dari Husserl ini boleh jadi penyelamat. Kita mesti menulis tentang Ashura dari tubuh Ashura itu sendiri. Dari sejarahnya, dari falsafahnya, dari sumbernya; zurück zu den Sachen selbst. Setidaknya, dari mereka yang terlibat. Bukan dari mereka yang hanya mendengar jauh-jauh tentangnya.

Ashura, memang untuk Husayn, yang lengkap pada kalangan Shi’ah dikenali sebagai “Imam Husayn.” Mereka, “takkan pernah melupakan Karbala,” demikian salah satu kata yang berkumandang dalam kerumunan tersebut. Di medan bersejarah Fatima Masoumeh itulah, silih berganti para kumpulan mementaskan himbauan mengenai Karbala. “Terdapat ribuan kumpulan ini di Qom,” kata Shahriyar Shojaeipour, yang kini bertugas di Islamic Research Institute for Culture and Thought, Qom. Setiap kumpulan dengan cara masing-masing. Lalu, dengan tradisi puisi Parsi yang tinggi, maka setiap bait menghimpit dinding medan, serta mengamit hadhirin.

Ini ditambah lagi dengan paluan Tabl (seperti gendang), gemincing Senj (seperti piring), hatta ada juga tiupan Vuvuzela, yang semuanya bersatu suara memecah kedinginan. Ini, memang sebuah festival. Ashura, yang hari sebelumnya adalah Tasua, ternyata, adalah sebuah festival, meski bermula dari sebuah kenestapaan. Tapi bukanlah sebuah kenestapaan yang mahu mereka ratapi. Mereka sekadar ingin menunjukkan bahawa pesan ilahiyyah tak pernah berakhir pada Nubuwwah. Kerana itu, nama Husayn tak lekang. Soalnya, mengapa Husayn? Dan, kenapa tak Muhammad?

Mereka juga punya jawapannya. Kerana mereka berpegang erat pada sebuah sabda: “Husayn mini wa ana min Husayn.” Buat kalangan Shi’ah, mengenang, malah meneruskan risalahnya, adalah sebuah warisan perjuangan yang tak selesai dari Nubuwwah itu sendiri. Ini yang sering diabaikan. Jadi, ketika muslim berpencar pada saat Karbala, tapi saat itulah juga menjadi garis furqan buat mereka, yang dalam bahasa Hegel dikenal sebagai dialektika – pertempuran antara tesis dan anti-tesis. Fikiran dan tindakan, dari Karbala, tiada selain dari itu, bersatu dalam sejarah mereka. Menyebut Husayn, sama seperti menyebut Muhammad: “Husayn dariku dan aku dari Husayn.”

Namun, dialektika Karbala ini mencabar GWF Hegel. Karbala, pada Shi’ah, adalah kritiknya buat Hegel. Sekiranya Hagel percaya akan kemunculan sintesis, yakni pada setiap pertarungan tesis dan anti-tesis, sebaleknya Karbala tidak! Pada Morteza Motahhari, Islam sama sekali tak mendukung sintesis. Tiada intersubjektiviti dalam kebenaran. Buat filsuf revolusioner ini, hanya ada dua pilihan; benar atau salah. Yang benar boleh saja bercampur dengan yang salah. Tapi, salah dan benar tetap dari dua ranah yang berbeza.

Bahkan, Ali Shariati, yang biarpun ada selisih dengan Motahhari dalam soal Marxisme Islam, juga percaya demikian. Kita mungkin dapat mengingatkan kembali sebuah ucapan yang mengegarkan dari Shariati di Husayniyyah Irshad pada 1970-an yang tertera dalam buku Shahadah-nya: sama ada bersama Yazid, atau besama Husayn yang shahid di mana Zaynab yang terus gigih melanjutkan risalahnya. Ternyata, masharakat Shi’ah bergulir dalam arus dialektika ini, yang juga dalam bahasa Hegel berhujung pada Sittlichkeit -- pertemuan antara tradisi dan hukum. Inilah tentuisme sejarah.

Maka, jika dikata Ashura adalah ritual budaya, itu benar. Dan, jika dikata lagi Ashura adalah ritual agama, itu juga benar. Keduanya adalah sama, lestari dalam sejarah yang satu.

Ashura, di Qom, tersimpan prestijnya. Malam-malam, selama 10 hari pertama Muharram, sama ada rumah, madrasah, dll, kota agama ini dipenuhi dengan acara yang dikenal sebagai Rozeh -- ceramah dan bacaan narasi tentang Imam Husayn dan Karbala. Dan, acara belangsungkawa inilah, seperti kata Annemarie Schimmel dalam Karbala and the Imam Husayn in Persian and Indo-Muslim literature menjadi tradisi Muharram yang merebak seluruh penjuru Islam, termasuk sampai ke Pariaman, Sumatera. Di sana, ada Tabut, juga sebuah ingatan buat Imam Husayn.

Memang, ketika Rozeh, ada tangisan yang melimpah. Aneh mungkin, mengapa mereka dengan mudah menangis tatkala diungkapkan mengenai Karbala? Tidakkah mereka penat dengan ulangan cerita yang sama? Ini adalah pertanyaan yang wajar. Mereka menangis seolah Husayn baru saja shahid kelmarin. Tapi kita barangkali takkan aneh, kalau melihat ada yang menangis ketika menonton Winter Sonata. Tapi, Iran, Karbala, Shi’ah, itu berbeza. “Kita takkan pernah memahami Iran, selagi kita belum menjadi Shi’ah,” demikian kata Hashemi Rafsajani yang pernah dikutip Hooman Majd dalam The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.

Tentu, menjadi Shi’ah seperti mereka, buat kita, adalah tak mungkin. Kita dilahirkan berbeza, dari daerah berbeza, dari budaya berbeza. Islam yang kita terima, yang berbaur dengan budaya setempat, menjadikan kita lain. Tapi, bukanlah sebuah larangan untuk saling-belajar, dan saling-memahami. Justeru, kalau hanya seruan untuk mencintai Nabi dan keluarganya, itu sama sekali bukanlah keberatan. Malah, kita senang. Namun, apakah tenang hidup ini dengan mencintai Nabi dengan keluarganya? Apakah dengan melakukan hal seperti itu, bererti kita telah melengkapi Islam?

Dalam sejarah, yang membezakan dua tradisi besar Islam -- Shi’ah dan Sunni -- adalah Imamah. Motahhari sekali lagi, secara mudah mengungkapkan pemisah antara Shi’ah dan Sunni, “dengan menerima Ali sebagai warisan kepimpinan dari Nabi, itu memadai untuk menjadikan seseorang itu Shi’ah.” Semudah itu. Tapi, mengapa harus Ali? Sukar untuk kita menerima kepimpinan Ali hanya atas dasar darah. Hanya atas dasar keluarga. Kita dengan akal sehat, pasti akan menolaknya. Hanya itukah hakikat dari Shi’ah? Hanya pada darah, dan keluarga? Melihat kepada falsafahnya, ternyata bukan demikian.

Iran, juga Shi’ah, dari ke hari membuktikan dirinya adalah ranah yang amat seni. Mereka menerima imamah Ali dan penerusnya, bukan kerana darah. Tapi, kerana karisma. Kerana kewibawaan. Kerana kecekapan. Ali adalah Ali. Sama seperti kata Shariati, “Fatima adalah Fatima.” Masing-masing menjadi diri sendiri. Tanpa kelebihan kepimpinan, maka setitis garisan darah Nabi pun tak berguna. Betapa banyak kita lihat, mereka yang mengaungkan garis dari leluhur Nabi, tapi miskin akhlaknya. Sebab itu, Shi’ah tak pernah bermula dengan aqidah. Yang penting pada mereka, adalah akhlak.

Mohsen Ghanbali, adalah salah seorang akademia di al-Mustafa International University. Wajahnya membayangkan kepada kita Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cekung pada matanya, tumis nipis, dan rendah. Tapi, ia sedikit berisi, berserban, dan berjubah. Di hadapan mahasiswanya di Qom, yang ada antaranya adalah Sunni, dibicarakannya tentang triniti penting dalam Islam: aqidah, ahkam, dan akhlak. Antara ketiga itu, buatnya, akhlak mendahului aqidah.” Soalnya, mengapa akhlak lebih utama dari aqidah? Di sini, Albert Camus dalam La peste ada jawapannya.

Camus, di situ berkisah tentang peristiwa luar biasa yang menghentam penduduk kota Oran, sebuah kota di barat Algeria. Filsuf Perancis itu menanyakan: mengapa anak kecil akhirnya menerima kesan dari wabak? Dan, “apakah dosa anak kecil ini?” Maka, belajar dari pencarian Camus ini, kita akan akui bahawa jadi baik boleh saja tanpa agama. Berapa ramai yang bukan-muslim, mithalnya, tetap dapat berlaku baik. Dan, berapa ramai yang Shi’ah (kalau mereka dikatakan bukan-Islam), tetap dapat berlaku baik pada Sunni. Di Qom sendiri, penuh dengan masharakat Sunni, dari belahan dunia. Mereka hadhir hanya kerana sebuah hasrat: mendepa ilmu. Tiada seruan pun bahawa darah Sunni adalah halal untuk dibunuh.

Sunni sejati seperti talabeh-talabeh lain di Qom. Mereka mencari ilmu bagai hikmah yang hilang, dan siap meredah daerah yang berbahaya, kalau benarlah Qom adalah sebuah daerah berbahaya untuk mereka. Kota ini menyambut mereka dengan ramah. Bak kata Nezami, pujangga besar Parsi:

Seluruh dunia adalah jasad, dan Iran adalah ruhnya
Kami semua tak malu-malu untuk mendakwanya
Lalu, sebagaimana Iran adalah ruh atas dunia, dan kekal demikian
Maka ruh juga lebih unggul atas jasad, dan itu adalah kepastian

Shahdan, ilmu itu tak kenal wilayah. Tak hanya di Qom. Hatta, seluruh alam. Namun, tetap akhirnya ilmu sujud pada akhlak, kerana itu adalah buahnya. Jika kita percaya kebaikan adalah manifestasi Tuhan, maka tentu saja akhlak juga adalah manifestasi rahmatan lil alamin. Ingatkah kita pada sebuah sabda, “Sesungguhnya aku diutus untuk menyempurnakan akhlak yang mulia?” Jika kita ingat itu, maka kita tahu bahawa ateisme juga punya aqidah. Maka, aqidah bukanlah pemisah pertama. Sebaleknya, adalah akhlak.

Di Qom, kota ini memang mengajar akhlak. Mendidik dengan kekhasannya pula. Sampai saja, kita akan sangat terkesan dengan cara taaruf masharakat Iran yang bitara, dengan tangan kanan yang meletak di dada, sambil kadang-kala tunduk tanda hurmat. Itu akhlak pertama mereka, dan menarik. Kesan dari Ashura. Kesan dari tafsiran Islam yang santun.

Di jalan Chaharmardan tak jauh dari maqam Fatima Mashoumeh, ketika 10 Muharam itu, penuh manusia berlatmiyah, persis seperti taaruf masharakat Iran tersebut. Manakala ada pula yang lain sambil berzanjir memukul diri. Tak sakit. Tak luka. Tak berdarah. Malah, boleh senyum. Di sekeliling bangunan yang penuh artistik dan klasik itu, tiada setitis pun darah yang ditemui. Setidaknya, hanya cat berwarna merah yang bergenang di jalan. Ali Khamenei sendiri, yang lebih dikenal sebagai Rahbar di sini, bahkan melarang sebarang perlukaan diri ketika Ashura.

Arakian, kita pula mudah jatuh kepada ketakmengertian mengenai Shi’ah. Untuk itu, kita harus bertasamuh, elak dari angkuh. Insaf, bahawa kita juga adalah manusia yang tohor. Kita tak tahu semua. Kita tak pernah menyelami dalam tubuh falsafah mereka, bahawa Husayn juga bahagian penting dari sejarah mereka. Sebab itu, usah kita hairan, dalam Rozeh, mereka bangun dan bertawassul secara berdiri. Mereka akan mengadap pada tiga arah. Satu, tentu pada Makkah, dua, pada maqam Fatima Mashomeh di Qom, dan ketiga, pada Mashhad, letaknya maqam Imam Reza, juga kekanda kepada Fatima Mashomeh.

Justeru, dengan sejarah yang tertanam kemas ini, maka apakah mungkin untuk kita hadhir dan berkata tepat ke muka mereka, “ini adalah sesat!” Sulit, bahkan ada sebuah anekdot yang menceritakan bahawa betapa Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat pernah akur, “sekiranya ambo dilahirkan di Iran, maka ambo juga akan jadi Shi’ah.” Tak tahu, adakah anekdot itu benar, atau salah. Tapi, logiknya tetap ada.

Jadi, masalah kita bukanlah pada Shi’ah. Masalah kita yang sebenar adalah kegagalan untuk menguruskan perbezaan. Selain itu, kegagalan untuk menjiwai pesan-pesan universal dari Nubuwwah. Jika masharakat Shi’ah terus utuh dengan sejarah mereka, kita juga boleh mengutip hikmah ini dari mereka. Menurut Ahmad Shalabi, sejarawan Mesir: jika Abbasiyyah, Andalusia, seluruh dinasti Islam telah runtuh mahkota keilmuannya, sebaleknya tradisi keilmuan masharakat Shi’ah terus berkembang, segar, ranum, dan itu tersemi di Najaf. Malah, sekarang bertambah lagi di Qom.

Lantas, apa yang kita belajar dari Muharram? Seperti yang telah Mahatma Gandhi belajar darinya, “Saya belajar dari Husayn bagaimana mencapai kemenangan meski dalam keadaan yang tertindas.” Inilah semangat untuk belajar sesama, serta terus-menerus mencungkil pesan-pesan universal darinya. Dalam bahasa Juergen Habermas, pesan-pesan universal ini mengusung penalarannya yang tersendiri. Setiap budaya, ada nalarnya. Usah mudah membuang Lebenswelt (dunia-kehidupan), demi untuk sebuah sistem yang subjektiviti.

Seperti juga Ludwig Wittgenstein, setiap bahasa (yang merupakan jiwa bangsa) ada hukumnya. Maka, terpulang pada kita sama ada untuk mengambil jalan singkat, atau jalan terhurmat. Jalan singkat, mudah melemparkan kesesatan. Jalan terhurmat, melakukan kritik atas sumbernya. Tanpa kritik, yang muncul adalah dogma. Namun, dogma Shi’ah, kekal bertahan dalam arus kritik, zaman-berzaman. Fahamnya jadi sebuah dogma yang aneh. Dogmanya melahirkan kebersamaan, yang kerana itu Habermas amat yakin, agama adalah harapan bagi projek pencerahan yang belum sudah. Dan, kalangan Shi’ah juga yakin, inilah rahsia kekuatan mereka selama ini.

Walau bagaimanapun, dalam kesedaran untuk belajar antara sesama, tiba-tiba ada di kalangan kita yang cuba memiliknegarakan iman. Walhal, iman bukanlah hak negara. Iman adalah ranah peribadi, yang tak siapa tahu apa dhamir-nya. Negara tak pernah mampu untuk menentukan imam para warga-nya. Selagi tak ada unsur diskriminasi dalam amalan faham, yang seperti saran Habermas lagi, maka negara (sistem) tak berhak menentukan segalanya. Negara bukan serba tahu. Yang tahu, adalah jiwa itu sendiri.

Sebab itu, Ashura adalah sebuah misteri yang merupakan jurang bagi sebuah ketaktahuan massa. Sama ada di Qom, atau di Gombak, keduanya menyimpan rantaian sejarah yang cuba menemukan dirinya dalam sebuah kesatuan. Justeru, apa sikap kita dengan raksasa sejarah ini? “Jika kita tak dapat mengungkapkan dengan baik, maka lebih baik diam,” demikian anjuran Wittgenstein. Saran filsuf matematik itu sesuai sebagai nasihat kepada kalangan agamawan kita yang tampaknya kemaruk untuk memikul kata mutlak.

Tapi, ternyata, dalam keghairahan agamawan untuk menunggalkan segala “yang lain” ini, ia rupanya telah terlupa ada sesuatu yang lebih besar. Ruhollah Khomeini benar, “memang mudah untuk jadi agamawan, tapi sulit untuk jadi manusia”. Muharram adalah saksinya, betapa ramai agamawan yang akhirnya kecundang dari menjadi manusia. [JalanTelawi, 20 Disember 2010]