Necessary Silence

     Leadership today is solely equivalent with social dominance and extroversion, but it's leadership in solitude that has historically led to the greatest inventions and revolutionary ideas.
     Solitude becomes necessary for rearranging any existing field of knowledge or creating new field of thought. Contemporary society is based on group think, while most creatives and inventors find solitude necessary for optimal performance
      I support the open source culture and crowdsourcing platforms, but these platforms require the work of introverts to truly make it flourish. The rules of the game that apply online don't translate so neatly into real life. The same people thriving on these platforms of open source culture, if grouped in a single room would fail to create anything revolutionary. Group think is not always the solution for every circumstance. 

Richard Sennett on the Fall of Public Man

"The best things in Western cultural tradition, in Sennett's view, derive from the conventions that once regulated impersonal relations in public. These conventions, now condemned as constricting, artificial, and deadening to emotional spontaneity, formerly established civilized boundaries between people, set limits on public display of feeling, and promoted cosmopolitanism, and civility. In eighteenth-century London or Paris, sociability did not depend on intimacy. "Strangers meeting in the parks or on the streets might without embarrassment speak to each other." They shared a common fund of signs which enabled people of unequal rank to conduct a civilized conversation and to cooperate in public projects without feeling called upon to expose their innermost secrets. In the nineteenth century, however, reticence broke down, and people came to believe that public actions revealed the inner personality of the actor. The romantic cult of sincerity and authenticity tore away the masks that people had worn in public and eroded the boundary between public and private life. As the public world came to be seen as a mirror of the self, people lost the capacity of detachment and hence playful encounter, which presupposes a certain distance from the self.
       In our time, according to Sennett, relations in public, conceived as a form of self-revelation, have become deadly serious. Conversation takes on the quality of confession. Class consciousness declines; people perceive their social position as a reflection of their own abilities and blame themselves for the injustice inflicted on them. Politics degenerates into a struggle not for social change but for self-realization."

Narcissism in Contemporary Society

In a narcissistic society- a society that gives increasingly prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits- the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist's inner life. A society that has made "nostalgia" a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion life in the past was in any important way better than the life today. Having trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present. Current critical dogma equates every such reference to the past as itself an expression of nostalgia. As Albert Parr has observed, this kind of reasoning "rules out entirely any insights gained, and any values arrived at by personal experience, since such experiences are always located in the past, and therefore in the precincts of nostalgia.
                                                                             - Christopher Lasch

How to Break a People

To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn't. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you can press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You can use caprice to fracture a people's faith in ancient things-earth, forest, water, air.
   Once that is done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you're all they have. They will love you even when they despise you. They will trust you even they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They will have to. What else can they do? There's no higher court to redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the world. You are God.
    Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.
    This cold, contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic sounding constitution. It's wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, or despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilization has had access to weapons like these.
   Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb-almost without knowing it-we are being broken.
    Big Dams are to a nation's "development" what nuclear bomb are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link-the understanding-between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.
   Can we unscramble it?
   Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways...
                                                                               -The Cost of living, Arundhati Roy

Defining Identity

Native American oral poetry and stories should be part of the great stack of building blocks in what we call our “identity”, our “history”, our “story”. Why should our ground works come from Greece and Rome and the Bible and European sagas, and not also from the places where we actually live.As Bringhurst says, “isn't it just possible that if we listened to the stories and the voices native to the place, we’d be a bit less eager to strip mine it, clearcut it, pave it, and pollute it in the name of making money?”

 -Margaret Artwood

Origins of Fundamentalism

         "The term Fundamentalist originated in the context of late-19th and early-20th-centuary Christianity. As many Christians endeavored to adapt traditional beliefs to the new academic and scientific understandings of the world, others recoiled in the face of modernism and sought to defend Christian doctrines against such heresies. This segment of the Christian community focused on what they described as “the fundamentals,” including belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. For fundamentalists, the Bible offers an accurate description of science and history as well as clear guidance on morality and religious life. Their belief in the perfection of the Bible led them to reject a good deal of modern scientific thinking, most notably the theory of evolution. They maintained that a literal reading of Genesis mean the world was less than 10,000 years old. the clash between “fundamentalists” and “modernists” was dramatically played out during the famous 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee, but it continues to live on today in places such as the Creation Museum in Kentucky.

       Most fundamentalists in the 19th centaury and today embrace the doctrines of premillennial dispensationalism, an interpretive framework that dissects Bible literally, premillennialists find all kinds of hidden meanings, hints, clues, messages that unlock prophetic secrets not readily obvious to uninitiated. This framework is constructed by selecting verses from various parts of the Bible-Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and the book of Revelation, most notably- and patching the verses together for a detailed map of the end of times. According to this view, we are now very close to the end of history as we know it. Soon, Jesus will return and “rapture”the faithful up into the heavens. The Tribulation, a nightmarish period of seven years, will follow the Rapture. During this time, Satan’s agent, the Antichrist, will reign supreme and large segments of the population will be decimated. At the end of seven years, Jesus will return to defeat the Antichrist at he Battle of Armageddon in northern Israel. Jesus will then establish a thousand-year reign of peace on the earth, where Isaiah’s vision of swords made into plough shares and the lion lying down with the lamb become reality.

          In the late 1970s and 1980s, when multiple religiously inspired and powerful political movements emerged globally, journalists and some academics referred to them as “fundamentalists,” even though the specifically Christian context that defines the term poses problems when it is applied loosely in a cross-cultural way. What does it mean to talk of Islamic or Jewish fundamentalists? Is a belief in scriptural inerrancy defining component of Jews and Muslims as it is for Christian fundamentalists? the pieces don’t fit neatly. In one sense, virtually every practicing Muslim affirms the Quran as the literal, inerrant Word of God. As is true with Jwes and Christians, the diversity of interpretations of sacred scriptures within Islam is enormous. Various theological, legal, and mystical schools share this affirmation about the Quran, but come to radically different conclusions about what it teaches and what their faith requires. Further, all Muslims acknowledge that passages in the Quran can convey both a straightforward literal meaning and mystical, hidden meaning, simultaneously."

-Charles Kimball

Non-muslims in Muslim lands

       "There is little indication that non-Muslim people in the conquered territories were expected to embrace Islam. A range of factors contributed to some non-Muslims shifting allegiance to Islam, among them the compelling message of Islam, intermarriage, and the desire to share in the military, political, and economic success this movement enjoyed. For the most part, however, non-Muslims were largely free to function within their own communities, so long as they paid a specified tax (called jizya) to the ruling Muslim authorities. Numerous stories form this period attest to Umar’s generous attitude towards Jews and Christians.

        Contrary to the 21st-century view promulgated by some highly visible Christian and Muslim leaders, Islam does not teach its followers to label Jews and Christians as infidels and then seek to kill them. Quranic affirmation of the People of the Book and the attitudes and actions of Umar and other caliphs help explain how large numbers of Jews were able to live in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, and elsewhere for more than 1,400 years. Similarly, the presence of 15 million- 17 million indigenous Arabic speaking Christians in the Middle East today indicates a long history of accommodation and cooperation rather than constant military assault or forced conversion by the overwhelming Muslim majority.”

-Charles Kimball

Interpreting Sacred Texts

      "It is common-extremely common-to find people in all religious communities who read their sacred texts selectively. When one lifts a line here or two sentences there from the page, one can make a sacred text support literally any position or theology imaginable. The world of the 21st centruy is awash with religious leaders and obedient belivers who use sacred texts in this way. The consequence of such selective narrowness and the zealotry it reinforces is often deadly. The righteous slaughter by Christian crusaders and inquisitors as well as massacre carried out by the Baruch Goldstein at Abrahan's tomb are chilling examples.

      Muslims, like Jews and Christians, who claim asacred text face the challenges of understanding and interpreting the whole text. The ceaseless production of numerous, mulivolume commentaries on the Bible and Quran right up to this day illustrates that this process of interpretation in ongoing. It is easy enough to declare the "truth" and then find sacred texts to support the claim; it is far more daunting to wrestle with the entire text and seek to discern the meaning and contemporary application of the truths one believes are contained therein."

-Charles Kimball

My Experience in Mecca

I shall never forget the time I stood infront of the Kaaba. I can still feel it's magnetic pull, the awe and wonder it inspired. The Kaaba, a simple black cube with golden lettering, was the pivot around which millions circumvented, like drones around a queen bee. It was the heart that pumped fresh blood, rejuvinated it's worshippers, brought back to life every voice that called for oneness of God. I felt my soul at bliss, losing myself in the river of voices. Each cell in my body praised God, each testified to His Oneness.

A Lesson In Painting.

Paint what you see, not what you know
See the abstractions that exist in nature, in realism,
the worlds contained within worlds,
of mystery and fantasy,
of illusions and distortions.
It becomes a matter of perception
Opening doors to universes.

Paint what you see, and learn the
language of nature, of Art,
immersed in millions of textures, shades,
colors and lines.
It becomes a matter of composition
of learning the many songs of nature

Paint what you see, and define your
own tools, ways that meet your own temperment
there are no rules, no laws
Paint because you feel,  and think, and cry and love.

HAPPY EID EVERYONE :)))

New Painting- Hues of Love

                                                   Hues of love

                                                    Acrylics, 36"x40"

                                                        Fatima Rizvi

Recent landscape painting

Leonardo Da Vinci Anatomy studies