Be Careful, Never to Hurt a Human heart!

Whispers of the Beloved

 

I cannot sleep in your prescence.
In your absence, tears prevent me.
You watch me My Beloved
On each sleepless night and
Only You see the difference

Looking at my life
I see that only Love
Has been my soul’s companion
From deep inside
My soul cries out:
Do not wait, surrender
For the sake of Love.

If you can’t smell the fragrance
Don’t come into the garden of Love.
If you’re unwilling to undress
Don’t enter into the stream of Truth.
Stay where you are.
Don’t come our way.

All year round the lover is mad,
Unkempt, lovesick and in disgrace.
Without love there is nothing but grief.
In love… what else matters?

Love is our Mother and
The way of our Prophet.
Yet it is in our nature
To fight with Love.
We can’t see you, mother,
Hidden behind dark veils
Woven by ourselves.

Do you want to enter paradise?
To walk the path of Truth
You need the grace of God.
We all face death in the end.
But on the way, be careful
Never to hurt a human heart!

Do you know what the music is saying?
“Come follow me and you will find the way.
Your mistakes can also lead you to the Truth.
When you ask, the answer will be given.”

 

The Master who’s full of sweetness
Is so drunk with love, he’s oblivious.
“Will you give me
some of your sweetness?”
“I have none,” he says,
unaware of his richness.

 

You know what love is?
It is all kindness, generosity.
Disharmony prevails when
You confuse lust with love, while
The distance between the two
Is endless.

 

 

This Love is a King
But his banner is hidden.
The Koran speaks the Truth
But its miracle is concealed.
Love has pierced with its arrow
The heart of every lover.
Blood flows but the wound is invisible.

by Rumi

 

 After repeated pleas from Avaaz organization along with many letters received on the matter, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is finally making a diplomatic attempt to save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani .Ahmet Davutoğlu is starting the diplomatic process on trying to save this woman.

 

 

Brazilian President Lula’s prior attempt resulted with no luck. Iran seems so dedicated to kill this woman, that her crime changed from fornication to attempt to murder her husband. They made her confess to this new crime. Somehow they must have felt that this will justify their cruelty against Sakineh. The rest of the world is going to say

“Oh wait! She was a murderer but has been in jail for the crime of fornication, waiting for the last five years, to be stoned to dead for the wrong crime.”

The misunderstanding that could not be realized for the last five years somehow became clear by her sudden confession and bad mouthing her lawyer for making an attempt to save her life. Yeah right! The rest of the world buys that story!

Accordingly she says:

 

*”Why has he taken my case to the TV? Why has he disgraced me?”

It is interesting that Iran bothers convincing the rest of the world that her punishment is well deserved.

*Another of Ms Ashtiani’s lawyers has said that she was tortured for two days in prison to force her to make her televised confession on Wednesday.

Her lawyer is seeking asylum in Norway. So far the world’s compassion towards Sakineh has not triggered the least bit of compassion in Iran. We are hoping that Turkey’s efforts will save her life. He lawyer risked his own life, by letting the world know about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s unfair trial. While the world is holding their breath for Sakineh’s life, a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa, have been stoned to death in Afghanistan just like that. According to the New York Times article the young couple’s crime was to be in love. Siddiqua had been promised to another man .She eloped to be Khayyam’s second wife, which is legally fine as men are allowed to take up to four wives, nevertheless they were both stoned to death. Stoning to death is a Middle Eastern tradition that dates pre-Islam. Actually Jesus Christ saved Maria Magdalena from being stoned to death, so it was a regional tradition executed by Jews as well. Of course those were cruel times and man kind evolved.

Why these societies have not evolved is a mystery yet to be solved!

** After the Taliban proclaimed the sentence, Siddiqa, dressed in the head-to-toe Afghan burqa, and Khayyam, who had a wife and two young children, were encircled by the male-only crowd in the bazaar. Taliban activists began stoning them first, then villagers joined in until they killed first Siddiqa and then Khayyam, Mr. Khan said. No women were allowed to attend, he said. Mr. Khan estimated that about 200 villagers participated in the executions, including Khayyam’s father and brother, and Siddiqa’s brother, as well as other relatives, with a larger crowd of onlookers who did not take part.

“People were very happy seeing this,” Mr. Khan maintained, saying the crowd was festive and cheered during the stoning. The couple, he said, “did a bad thing.”

It makes one question once again, what kind of cruel people live in these villages? A society taking joy out of killing, people for being in love, is hard to understand.

Are they all sociopaths, hungry for blood?

According to the same article another woman was killed earlier for the crime of having sex.

**In northwestern Badghis Province on Aug. 8, a 41-year-old widow, who was made pregnant by a man she said promised to marry her, was convicted of fornication by a Taliban court. She was given 200 lashes with a whip and then shot to death, according to Col. Abdul Jabar, a provincial police official, who said the killing was ordered by the local Taliban commander, Mullah Yousef, in Qadis district.

These people have no problem killing a pregnant woman along with her unborn child and they have to make sure that she suffers the agony of 200 lashes before she finally gets shot!

Surely none of this cruelty can be justified by Islam or any other form of religion. These people enjoy torturing and hurting others. This is a sociological matter that probably needs in depth analysis. This part of the world seems to be filled with blood thirsty individuals. The first thing that comes to mind to bring out the compassion in people is through spirituality but these people are using religion as an excuse for their cruelty so that is clearly not an option. My mere assessment of the situation is as below:

• These people need to relax about sex! It seems to be the biggest crime ever that deserves the worst punishment.
• These people need some other forms of entertainment. Cheering over killing a young couple and calling a festivity is just barbaric.

How? That is a difficult question to answer but open minded, compassionate spiritual leaders might help them learn the basics of spirituality.

Love and Compassion.

I realize this sounds naïve but I cannot imagine how else this cruelty can be cured. I am not sure that the west can help this problem as the dynamics of cruelty under the name of Islam involve dealing with in depth knowledge on misconceptions, justifications and religious ignorance. These people in their twisted mindsets believe that God is on their side while they execute God’s creatures in the worst possible ways.

As expressed in an article in the New York Times.

***The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.

Rumi was a famous Sufi. His every message is of love and peace.

****Jalaluddin Rumi was born in 1207 C.E. ( i.e. Common Era aligned with A.D.) in Balkh. This city was then in the Persian province of Khorasan but is now in Afghanistan. The family travelled to Baghdad, to Mecca on pilgrimage, and to Damascus and eventually settled at Karaman near Konya in what is now western Turkey.
Following this move to Konya, then the capital of the western Seljuk Turks Jalaluddin’s father was busy as an Islamic theologian, teacher and preacher. Jalaluddin followed in this tradition and, upon his father’s demise in 1231 C.E. succeeded to his post as a prominent religious teacher.

He was Persian and was born in the land that is now Afghanistan. His father had been invited as a very well respected scholar, by the Seljuk Turk ruler of the time. When his father died, Rumi was invited to take his father’s place, then at the age of 25. Most of his work was created living on Turkish territory, as a very well respected Scholar, protected under Turkish ruling, where he was very free and very much encouraged by the Turks to spread his philosophy.  Although he was Afghani born, Persian it was the Turks that provided him the comfortable environment to flourish his philosophy.

Almost eight hundred years after his time, the Persian and the Afghani seem to be demonstrating the cruelest actions ever. Turks are somehow called into the equation to help save lives. I hope that values such as love and compassion can somehow be reminded to these people. Saudi’s finally are able to laugh at themselves for the terrible double standard that is going on in their culture. A comedy show that creates a performance where the central character takes four husbands, explaining herself using the conventional arguments Saudi men use to exercise their legal and religious privilege of marrying four times. Although some were angry with the show, humor might help them emphasize with women which is a bigger step than it might look like. Empathy is an essential step on the way to open-mindedness.

I hope that broad minded Scholars, from within Islam take the necessary steps to dissolve this absolute cruelty that is being performed, in Muslim regions under the name of Islam and manage to resolve the sociological problems, for the sake of humanity.

 Follow me on Twitter@banugokyar

Sources:

*http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10949629 **http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/asia/17stoning.html?_r=1

***http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/opinion/17dalrymple.html

****http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/sources/rumi_biography.html

*****http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/7950200/Role-reversal-Saudi-comedy-provokes-anger-among-male-population.html

http://www.haberturk.com/gundem/haber/543318-erdogan-sakine-icin-devrede

http://www.haberturk.com/dunya/haber/539830-sakinenin-hayati-sizin-elinizde

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/save_sakinehs_life/?fp