Words of wise men can reveal shadowed truths, as sudden lighting on a dark, starless sky, to a person wading through the deep waters of life in difficult times.
Written two centuries back, about a tumultuous event in Europe, the French Revolution, these words of Dickens: “…we had everything
before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way,” can resonate
familiarly in Pakistan.
Moral zealots, imbued with the radical interpretation of Islam, which they acquired and practiced in the rocky, mountainous battlefields and austere frontier war madrassahs, are eager to obliterate obscenity and vice in this pure land. The moral brigand has a quick-fix recipe to deal with transgressions of morality .Shut and veil women. Burn CD shops. Bomb girls’ schools.
Protecting honor and dignity of women has always been a foremost agenda of religious fanatics. But the overzealous band of propagators of virtue and eliminators of vice has gradually increased the items on their list of immorality. Women. Kite-flying. Barber shops. Music Their fierce opposition to all varieties of music flusters and pains me.
My agitated mind conjures up frightening scenarios, if our weak democratic country, is turned into a khilafat, led by an Ameer-ul-Momineen, and ruled with rigid interpretations of Shariah.
Imagine a scenario where religious zealots manage to force their way into power. They might issue an edict that all women must cover
themselves from head to toe. Ok. I will let go all fashionable outfits. They might also proclaim an ecclesiastical ban on wearing of
make up in public. Ok. I will throw away Clinique and L’oreal lipsticks. But the issuance of proclamation against music mortifies
me.
A music-lover, like me ,and bearded, turbaned religious, radicals agree on one point: God is the mighty Creator. But our confluence of
views begins here and ends here. Believing that God is the Creator of all animate and inanimate phenomena, I consider that creative artists mimic sounds and images of Creation of God. A musical composer, struck with the beauty of nature, imitates sounds around him through musical instruments. Maurice Jarre, the musician, who composed scores for the movie The Message, spent some time in the desert to understand the sounds of desert. He combined sounds of melancholic stillness of desert, broken by sounds of gentle breeze and thunderous hoof beats, to compose background music, played at the time of conquest of Mecca.
A religious fanatic looks upon musical instruments as Satan’s weapons used for creating products of vice. His extremist vision
deprives him of the ability to perceive beauty of God manifested in His multifarious creation and invoke it in his everyday life. His
salvation lies in seeing world through binary notation of vice and virtue, good and bad and moral and immoral.
This different worldview creates wide chasm of understanding between music lovers and religious diehards on the origin and uses of music. To religious extremists music gives only hedonistic sensory pleasure. But to a music fan, melody and rhythm are not just a sensory delight: it stirs his soul, loosens his temporal fetters and urges him to seek the greater reality of God. The success of Coke studio, with it’s blending of sufi poetry, folk vocals, and western musical instruments, shows that music is not a paltry auditory experience. Strong, plaintive vocals, mystical verses and heavy beats, played in the Studio, transport devotional listeners to a supernal world.
Experiencing music is like experiencing different patterns and textures of life. It has taken me years to understand that my desire
for different musical compositions was rooted in my changing moods. Picking different sounds from his environment, a musician blends the myriad sounds with different moods of a man and pipes them out as musical compositions. Music becomes a fusion of emotion and sound and carries seeds of truth for a contemplative mind and of beauty for a feeling heart.
While listening to pensive strains of sufi music, my soul takes a small whirl. As the rhythmic cadence increases, it breaks out of
physical limbs and pirouettes on an invisible foot. Melodies set to sufi poetry initiate a rhythmic journey to God.
I tremble with fear when I imagine that prohibition on music will deprive me of spiritual raptures and lilting swings of my heart.
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