ESSAY: Hijrah in reverse

Thoughts on hijrah in reverse

by Azly Rahman

I took time today to reflect upon the story of Prophet Muhammad's (Peace be upon Him) exodus/migration from Mekkah to Madinah in 622 AD, signifying the beginning /Year One of the Islamic calendar.

I posted notes on my Facebook page; a forum I utilise primarily as a tool for intellectual engagement, somewhat like a digital/electronic platonic cave or as a virtual salon of the French Revolutionary period, to discuss anything under the sun with view of deconstructing dominant ideas of the day.

Yes, "hijrah" is the beginning of the new year of the people of the Islamic faith but my questions were these: has the Islamic intellectual paradigm evolve since the 1900s? Has religion courted philosophy? What is still ailing the "Muslim mind" and what fundamental shifts need to be engineered?

These are questions that came to me spontaneously that asked to be posted for members of my Facebook forum I now call the Trishakti salon.

I posted a thought: perhaps the Quran is too personal and personalising of a text to be transformed into a hegemonising and universalising text for an "Islamic state"; perhaps an Islamic state exists in its impossibility, still an "imagined community" ruled by perfect people over perfect people they govern.

Perhaps the Quran is too vague of a grand narrative for political philosophy and that any interpretation of it as one, will run into the unresolvable problem of getting entangled into the complexity of praxis (ideology to practice) of the various "mazhabs/schools of thought", each competing with each other on what truth is.

And we have not yet talked about the nagging problems of the use and abuse of the sayings of the prophet (the hadiths)

Sense and meaning

I thought perhaps the Quran is meant only for personal reading, best done hermeneutically, in that as many as there are souls in this world, therein lies the number of possible ways to make sense and meaning of how one ought to live his/her life as a "Muslim" or a "person at peace" or have submitted to a life of peace and peace-making.

I don't know ... as Socrates would say ... the world of Islam is at best, politically messy, grounded in the triumph of the disabling influences of culture.

I thought, ala the Jeffersonian (American philosopher-statesman) ideal, had the Malaysian constitution clearly separated religion and the state, Malaysians would probably have a less complicated scenario of race-religious relations and class. Rather, race issues would predominate, making resolutions easier.

Countries claiming to be Islamic states are either ruled by dictators or despots, prone to perpetual revolutions due to its internal contradictions.

Like an evolving self and an evolving soul, liberal democracy may still be a useful political philosophy better than theocracy, as Man essentially are not born-sinners to be cleansed by the pepper spray of the state nor born to suffer to be robbed of his rights and be happy suffering,

Rather, I thought, man is neither - the sacred and the profane in him requires a gentle, evolving government that respects his natural rights as man; rights he has surrendered to the state, in place of his happiness perhaps living nobly in the forest or in the paradise he had refused to be banished from.

It is the lethal combination of state and religion that, in the course of history, made killing each other in the name of this or that god legitimate, in holy wars to ascertain who was "holier than thou" and masking the real interest of kings and warriors be they Charlemagne, Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka, or even Saladdin Ayyubi.

Still, the decade-old question circa 9/11 remains: which god would allow such atrocity as well as the bombing of millions of innocents in Iraq?

 Unfamiliar practices

I had another thought as well: in my lifetime i have seen and read about all too often "atrocities" committed in the name of Islam; a child beaten with a hard long cane for failing to memorise a chapter from the Quran, an Islamic religious teacher taking advantage of girls in a marhaban group, Islamic teachers telling students how dangerous the ideas of Socrates are, a band of Islamic teachers sabotaging the teaching of English language, syariah lawyers lying through their teeth and taking advantage of women, imams involved in get-rich-quick schemes, honor killings, female genital mutilation, the religious-criminalisation of rape victims,

Taliban with concubines, Tabligh wandering preachers spewing incomprehensibles where a little learning is dangerous, fatwa-making as frenzy and fiesta, the 5,000-strong Million Malay-Muslim rally, and of course men saluting the formation of the cult group Al Arqam's Obedient Wives Clubs.

Those I have mentioned above are practices of Islam not familiar to me and in fact more of these happenings are making the religion strange to what I know it ought to be.

Maybe it is a postmodern phenomena of the coming of age of a religion. Or maybe, this is a consequence of a failed marriage between religion and philosophy.

In all these, my heart still pays tribute to only the Islam brought by Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon Him). May Muslims in this age of high speed hyper-modernity and Arab Spring ideology, engineer their exodus wisely.

---

DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York city) doctorate in International Education Development and Master’s degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans Malaysia and the United States, over a wide range of subjects from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States.
 

Dawn

Dawn
by Azly Rahman

Dawn
break of day they say
of a new age
where i emerge
from a world without boundaries
formless
wandering
at times aimless
at times seeing apparations
of those long gone
those i love and those i have never even met
I woke up to the sound of reality i could touch
of the familiar
yet strange
Dawn
you are here
as i recomposed myself
into a creation of body and soul
again
and again
till i will no longer be ultimately
Dawn to Dusk you promised me
that I will meet you
I have not met you
but only once perhaps
in that dark corner of out illuminated selves
when we were still
in the memory of Love
that will never die
and when i woke from the wide awakeness
of our illuminated selves
you left me standing all alone
in my alonesness of this Maya
      of a reality you and I constructed
out of the ruins of the yesteryears of what hath failed you
you have seen destruction
           in the gift you have tenderly build for me
out of your longingness for me you have once said
you and i have promised
and i stand here alone
still watching
the tedious arguments
of the destructions of the ages of Man
          you have concealed from me
yet you professed a love undivided
from dawn tiil dusk i seek thee
you are no longer there
hidden
inbetween the changing light of dusk
as it leaves me standing alone
as it walks away into the night
and inbetween the tears
of the crossroads you banished me at
tears that hath become rain
that soothes and washes the pains
of yesteryears
of a once lush forest
of my subconscious
of a mind that never was alive yet
i cried for thee
as silent as the stillness of the night of rage
you and i too have created
in the screams of my unconsciousness
              i asked thee :
                        what have you given me in the name of love?

LYNAS ISSUE AGAIN: Malaysians learn from this video! Protes against the Kuantan Lynas Plant.

Occupy Dataran, too?

Occupy Dataran, too?

by Azly Rahman

"No bulls. No bears. Only pigs" - an Occupy Wall Street poster message.


My weekend was spent thinking about the whole idea of "occupying". I was preoccupied with it after spending a good three hours visiting the Wall Street protesters. I have been reading about this "global phenomena", and I read too about "Occupy Dataran", which I suppose is the idea of occupying Dataran Merdeka in Malaysia. Below are my brief thoughts that preoccupied me after my brief ethnographic trip down Wall Street in New York.

It was fun studying the language of modern day protests. I consider myself an ethnographer of post-modernism and a student of social revolutions, for my early papers during my undergraduate days were essentially about revolution, such as studying the anatomy of the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions of 1979.

I wrote about the Computer Revolution in the 1980s and my later work has been on cybernetics and existentialism (as in the title of my blog). My students in Cultural Perspectives were given an assignment to compare and contrast the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, so I wanted to make sure I know what they will be talking about, hence my three-hour visit to the "Occupy Wall Street" move.

I wanted to understand this global phenomena of a protest movement as well and to discern the purpose and the language of it and to analyse the "culture of it" as it becomes popularised. I found some interesting themes that brought me back to my undergraduate days, with my student day movements and my occasional involvement with Amnesty International, especially in the protest against apartheid.

There is an interesting observation I made there. Crude as it may seem, but with an element of "intellectual culture" being displayed, as if there is an "artistic and social" installation being displayed, consisting of the elements of the seeds of a revolution ideologically based on anarchism.

In there are tents with human beings that are 'nomadic', a makeshift library of anarchist literature, a food pantry, a kitchenette, a "mini stage" for speeches and street theatre and presentations for radical thinkers to drop by and lend support, anarchistic literature, a "think-tank tent", an outreach tent, bicycles, and crudely made protest posters .

All these I found to be interesting elements of the reaffirmation and perhaps rebirth of radical consciousness loosely orchestrated by youth wide awake enough to see their society being dominated and hegemonised by corporate culture.

The fact that it was a camp as such, right there on Wall Street, is a radical statement that is appealing enough to the youth of any city in the world and attractive enough a movement to be broadcasted by both the corporate-controlled as well as social and personalising media.

As I was feeling a sense of 'camaraderie' with the protesters, who will still be there in the freezing weather, I ask myself: "what do they wish to achieve" in a world in which everything is already structured by the ideology of the "magic of the marketplace" and the Berlin Wall has fallen"?

And when each and every part of our body, our consciousness, or cognitive excursions into the spaces of knowledge and power" and our very existence has been a location and a habitue of the exploitation of corporations and governments alike that have enslaved the mind and the body, and in which spirituality has also been hijacked by laissez faire to be turned into profitable human venture into understanding the divine?

I don't know. As a lifelong student of both philosophy and cultural anthropology I do not have the answer to the meaning of what we are seeing in Occupy Wall Street or even "Occupy Dataran", when essentially I still believe that radical changes can happen best through total change, cultural re-engineering, the dismantling of the corporate capitalist system and perhaps "re-villagisation" of human beings and to reorganise ourselves into "communes". I don't know.

America is America. And especially New Yorkers are a people of a strange planet. To us, this is just a protest, like any other - on gay rights, Palestinian rights, Israel's rights to exist, rights of animals, of the Tibetans, to eat super-sized McDonalds everyday, rights of the New York City's naked cowboy to sue his business rival , the naked cowgirl, etc. Life still goes on because arguments or discourse has been so relativised and post-modernised and debated of its pros and cons and its subjectivity that anything goes.

But back to the Malaysian scene. If Occupy Wall Street is about a statement made on corporate greed in America, what then is the message in Occupy Dataran? Which Malaysian corporations are the message for? Who is the one percent and which one is the 99 percent?

How have the corporations in Malaysia been instrumental in the project of alienating, marginalising, and plundering the "people" or the "rakyat"? How will the structure of control be exposed? What is the nature of political economic control? Who owns what, through what means?

These are the questions that interest me as we see Malaysia too undergoing what Chairman Mao would call "interesting times".

---

DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York) doctorate in International Education Development and Master's degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans Malaysia and the United States, over a wide range of subjects from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States.

eleven-eleven-eleven-eleven

eleven-eleven-eleven-eleven
by Azly Rahman

11-11-11-11
It was 11 in the morning,
on the 11th. day
on the 11th. month
on the eleventh year
... of 2000
numerologist we have become as human beings
fascinated by the seemingly mystical nature of
numbers
when we are now, in this age of numeral-literacy
where computational philosophy governs our everyday reality
we are numbers
numbers
binary
of zeros and ones
getting excited
when there are anomalies
as in today's much awaited little joy of cognitive excitability
11-11-11-11
today we are an anomaly
for a minute
we are not numbers
souls who believe in numerology
cogito ergo sum
i think therefore i exist
i doubt if i am existing
on this day
11-11-11-11
                      -- azly rahman, 11-11-11-11

 

far and near

far and near

by Azly Rahman

from up above
looking down below
i could see
so far yet so near
and at times
.so near yet so far
yet a deep blue sea we are
watching the waves
come back to the shore
till eternity the waves
come back to the shores
in tears wiped dry
by the blue ocean

in her eyes

in her eyes
by azly rahman

her eyes
dark like the beautiful silent night
piercing like a whisper of love across the blue horizon
deep like the deepest secrets of the boundlessness  of love
in her eyes
i could see
the sutras and the puranas of yesteryears
of the battles rage within
that hath washed the eros in her
in her still beautiful eyes
i could see
the glow of a million stars
each chanting
the name of the one her eyes
never a second blink
in her eyes
i enter
a window
into her
soul
where two chants
become one
two heartbeats
becomes a
sonnet
we once knew by heart

STATEMENT: On culture

culture is a complex construction of personal reality; we must be ready to make ours more meaningful by deconstructing its internal dynamic and make it more organic by destroying the elements and foundations that are disabling, leaving behind rites and rituals that have become meaningless, question core beliefs that have become anti-philosophical, destroy tools and toys that are found to be libidinal, challenge the meaning of respect for elders that have corrupted themselves in order to corrupt and bankrupt the young ... maybe by this we can become "culture-less" and lead a happier life always in sync with our existentialist and evolving self without being trapped in the historicism of the Master-Slave Narrative of some imagined community -- azly rahman (in a lecture to students of cultural studies)

Love-- not yet known

Love -- not yet known

by Azly Rahman


Come twilight when poetry no longer visits
No longer sent to knock at your door when night falls and the eerie silence of the wind that rustles with rage
When in the deepest dungeon of the wasteland of your soul sings the joys of living only you yourself will join in the serenade
When the image of you becomes what I have yearned to be in the night in which only mute souls mutter
When all is no longer poetry but a prose of a thousand parchments of sound bites of your emotions in hypocrisy yearning to become a michaelangelo of your madness
Come twilight when you and I are like molten steel inseparable yet in harmony with the spheres of eternal sound of joys of the clanking iron grids of our hearts telling each other stories we are yet to create
Come twilight when poetry will be as cold as a room of a gaddafi transitionary cemetery
Poetry-- you and I will conspire with Fate.

Come nightfall when I no longer will call your name etched in the meadows of my yet formless beingness
When you and I await Time to scream its first cry of infancy
When you looked at me a thousand years repeatedly and like a never-ending chants of serenity you professed a love that has neither name no sensibility
When the waves have not yet rush to the shores in their madness of a lover's delight..., persistent like a man beating his chest bloody in the ancient city of Karbala
Like drops of rain yearning to fall in the misty morning ocean of mercy you and I could see engulfing the souls of Man
You called my name
Across a sea of molten steel
Bubbles of love's labour lost
Come nightfall
Still-- meadows of my unborn soul etched with your name
The mantra and mourning of your silent cries of yearning for the self in you -- through me you will swim across the sea of molten steel
Come nightfall
Fate and I will conspire

Come nightfall
As I close my eyes wide open to the reality of the unreal
When eros becomes thanatos
When the catharsis of the infancy of my primodial soul becomes an ever growing mutating metamorphosis of memories of the beautiful things I shall not cherish but command poetry to be the scribe
When all these become the objects of desire of my dreams
... When you and I have become creators of this playground of a child's hope
A child neither born nor dies when age sinks her into the world not yet created
Come nightfall when you and I in dreamworlds parting in anger as a Nile river of yesteryear
Come nightfall when we shall whisper the koans of catharsis into our ears that no longer have a form -- only sounds like a Newtonian sphere exists
Only then
when night falls
we will
with Fate conspire
become one -- like eros and thanatos


I have looked at you with eyes closed
You sat on a throne of gold I crafted; all that glitters gathered from the finite world
For a thousand years
I called your name
Words not yet formed I whispered into you
Time not yet created I await you
I looked into your eyes


And when twilight comes
And when poetry no longer knocks at your door
I whispered your name
Flesh and blood you shall not become
But Love --- not yet known

We have become hyper-real

We have become hyper-real
by Azly Rahman

in this cybernetic world
we have become hyper-real
hypertextualized
hypercognitive
hypersensual
... hypnotized
hypertensed
heterogenous
harmonizing with the chakras of the digits that never stop computing
aliens we are
at the fringes of a new form of psychedelia we have arrived at
the crossroads
of thoughts so intense
to be or not to be digital
that is no longer the question
to be or not to be real
as real as reality is said to be
in a Descartian world of digital devotion
we are devotees in an ashram
built by pandits and popes and prophets
of Quantum quagmire
quacks we might one day become
what is real we ask?
how real is real we yearn to feel ...
hyper-real our karma is
we have swallowed the apple of mcintosh
and drank the snake oil of cybernetic sensuality
we are no longer us
because we never were
in this cybernetic world
Om ... said the sound of our despair
Amen ... said this world beyond repair
together-- we meditate on this happiness we create
silent i shall now be.

Malay is a fruitless language

Malay a fruitless language
by Azly Rahman

Lovely is the English language
More fruitful than that of the Malays
I could see the fruitfulness of it
And learn to appreciate juiciness when you bite into it
Unlike the dryness of that of the Malays

You can call someone an apple of your eye
And when you fall in love with that person you can go bananas
In Malay you can't call your date a rambutan
and be mistaken as an orangutan
you can be crazy in love but you can't say that I am going to be a pisang
no no no --  Malay is a fruitless language

Fruity is the English language
Better than that of the fruitless Malays

You can fall out of love and become a sour grape
When the apple of your eye left you for the Big Apple
You can see politicians become sour grapes
When they are no longer favoured in their Banana Republic
In the fruitless Malay language, when you become a sour grape
You can't call yourself a kedondong and sit under a tree like ikan temenong
You can't even call your ex-girlfriend a pulasan
          as you were the first to 'perasan' and became a sour grape

Ahh Tutti Frutti English Language
Ahhh no such things as ... buah muah ... in Malay langugae
    simply won't go as Malay is a fruitless language

English is in demand
as a fruity language Malaysians should have command
Americans can drive a 'lemon'
Can Malaysians drive a 'longan'?

Ahhh ... there there is an English fruit called 'squash'
One can even play the fruit and be good at squash
Can Malaysian be good at durians
And roll it down the bowling lane?
How fruitless is the Malay language

I have often wondered why traditional English parents love the fruit cantelope
They feed their girls that thing at an early age
Now that I am in love with the English language I know it means
     ... "can't elope" ... hah ... how fruity is the beauty of the language
But can you Malays come up with a fruit that "can't elope"
I bet you can't ... you fruitless language
   The best you can tell a girl is that she is a "jambu" but she will still elope.


When you are in love and with the apple of your eye
When you go bananas and saved from being a sour grape
When you go on a date in Strawberry Fields
Your heart will always be on Orange Alert
You will be cheery like wild cherry
No-- can the Malay language be as fruitful and fruity as this
No it can't
How could you call your girlfriend a lychee
And not expect her the smack you with her tai chi
And you go crazy over her like a Siamese mango without biji
And your heart beat fast like a magoesteen on 100-meter dash to eternity


Fruity is the English language
Darling are the clementines
Like in the song "Oh my darling ... clementine"
Try using that line via the fruitless Malay language
Trying saying "sayang ku ....  limau kasturi"
And you'll see Hang Lekir and Hang Lekiu
     running after you crying like a Portuguese fruit under a Melakka tree

English even have "pomegranade"
Of which the word grenade emanate
Fruitless language Malay don't have this
The closest is the sound of the popping of buah getah
As a child visiting grandma and grandpa in Penang I would wonder
   what the heck is that little C4s of a fruit's doing

Okay maybe there is one fruity word the Malays can be proud of
is when they call their love one "buah hati"
or "fruit of the heart"
now logically, do hearts have fruits?
or fruits have heart?
unless you talk about love that is coming to fruition
and the heart is cheery like a shaved rambutan
or a repented durian that finally bathe in perfume water
                made from a concoction of limau kasturi and fermented lychee

So-- what then must we worry
Fruitless it will be
Of which language is more fruity
When we all now know
which one is
the good .. the bad ... and the fruity ... !

OPINION: Are the Malay linguistic nationalists betraying our children?

Are the Malay linguistic nationalists betraying our children?
by Azly Rahman


Nationalists are nationalists. Some remain rooted in the language which shaped their personal reality, in a world of shifting views and multiple interpretations in which one become sub-texts of both Grand and Subaltern narrative.


Nationalist are nationalists. In a postmodern world, we sometimes do not know who the enemy of these nationalists are. Perhaps the enemy lies within. Fear of one’s own shadow?


Nationalists are nationalists. They can remain so. They need to evolve into globalists grounded in the love of many cultures, still.


Perhaps like many, I am a strong advocate of the critical importance of the English Language as, at this point in history, a language not only of commerce, the arts and humanities, but also an inspiration for revolutionary movements that challenges colonialism and imperialism as well. In order to understand the enemy, one must speak its language.  Stamford Raffles knew this well when he was sent to the Singapura to be its “founder”.


The enemy is corruption and social cancer wrought by casino capitalism, spoken in English globalized by high speed Internet, mutating the mind, body, and soul of natives and savages transforming them into neo-colonials. The enemy is the dimension of language that installs regimes and systems of oppression that leeches off blood sweat and tears of the natives transformed into indentured post-modern slaves. The English language of the modern imperialism system and the Gog and Magog of the maddening capitalist world is the enemy.
                                                                                            
Many a revolutionary writer opposed to colonialism wrote in the English Language – from Jonathan Swift to Joseph Conrad, from Eric Blair (George Orwell) to V. S. Naipaul, from Karl Marx to Raymond Williams.


Of course for Malaysian children we do not expect them to be passionate of the Greek mythology, the philosophy behind Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, The Chronicles of Narnia, or translation of Ramayana and Mahabharata, or even the Adventures of Asterix – we hope this will one day be a reality when we throw away our TV sets and ASTRO channels or our iPods or Blackberry.


Of course this is a long road for Malaysian children to be engaged in world literature in (English) translation and be a little be more learned and refined and to expunge any sense of racial superiority such as “ketuanan this or that”.

Long road to freedom. There is a reality at hand. When a Malay poet laureate and a chief of a language preservation bureau (I hope this is a close enough translation of ‘dewan bahasa dan pustaka’) and a hundred other Malay Language jihadists were pepper-sprayed for protesting against the English as a language of instruction, we have got a national problem.


What is the message? What is being symbolized? What is the signification? What is the issue? What is the non-issue? Where is the sensibility? Where is pride? Where is prejudice? Where are we taking this argument?


These are difficult questions.


Essentially, in my opinion, the value of teaching the applications aspects of Science and Maths in English is that hopefully the teachers will work harder with the students to master the lingua franca. Perhaps later, when there is mastery, teachers and learners themselves can explore the humanities and social scientific aspects of Maths and Science, and ultimately in their later years understand the philosophical and political--economic aspects of the two "subjects". One may then, in one's old age, read the biographies of Sir Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Henri Poincare, Paul Erdosh, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawkings, etc. Or even read translations of Hamzah Fansuri or Ibnu Arabi.
English Language is one important vehicle for such exploration.

My question is: what is the fate of linguistic nationalists in the age of globalization and deconstructionism? For whom will such nationalists continue to serve? But ultimately, why are the adults arguing for the next generation when the former should be allowing the latter to chart their own intellectual future?

Or-- could the answer be in the passion for teaching and the need for an entirely new pedagogy?
We are only beginning to peel the layers of complexity of the issue of teaching of Science and Maths in English.  We need to go beyond the data and conclusion presented mundanely passed as the ultimate truth why we need to teaching Science and Maths in the Malay Language.


We need to rise above the simplicity of concluding, the reductionism of our arguments, and the shallowness of our claim of the need to be ultra-nationalistic about the language to be used.


We need to look at how best can the children of Malaysia be served through multiple languages and through the importance of the English Language. We need to step back – many steps – and look at our philosophy of education, our paradigm of teaching and learning, our training of teachers, our caste and class system in our ‘information-overloaded’ educational system, our politician’s constant interference in schools and in controlling the minds of our children and our teachers, our destiny as a multicultural nation demanding us to master multilinguistic possibilities, and finally how we have built in successes and failures in ours school system


Daunting task for us. Requiring supra-nationalist thinking. But if, in Malaysia, linguistic nationalists are merely players in a world’s-a-stage of build by ‘tuans of this and that culture’ under the ideological direction of ‘ketuanan this and that,’ we must rewrite the script.


Language shapes reality. Or maybe language is reality. Or maybe, in the case of the nationalist, language confines reality.


In multicultural Malaysia, in a world past post- and hypermodernity, our language policy ought to make possible multiple realities, multiple worlds or knowing. So that our children may become world-wise Malaysians.

PLEASE SHARE THIS OPINION WITH THOSE WHO WISH TO SEE THEIR CHILDREN  EXCEL IN A WORLD IN WHICH ENGLISH IS STILL THE LINGUA FRANCA..

Only Love is the Absolute

Only Love is the Absolute
by Azly Rahman


The philosophy of the self
is the constant –
the Absolute –
from which
the Changing Concepts emanate.

From the Absolute
springs
existence,
eternity,
harmony,
oneness,
power,
destiny,
knowledge,
life, ....
and so on and so forth.

From the Absolute
springs
Creationism
within the Inner Self
that one must govern,

From the Absolute
emanates
Good and Evil,
Heaven and Hell
the opposites and the contradictions
that one needs to mediate
in one's lifetime,

From the Absolute
emanates
the knowledge of one's
Life,
Death,
and Resurrection
one  experiences daily,

From the Absolute
one sees
the history of the creation of the Universe within,
the Universe Outside, and
the parallel universes that are being created
outside of oneself,

From the Absolute
one finds The Love that Reigns Supreme,
that conquers all,
that evolves from Hate to Love
from the being trapped
in the love of oneself to
the love of humanity,
without boundaries

From the Absolute,
one commands the Guardian Angles
to bow down to oneself
and not to Kings, Sultans,
Despots, Tuns, Datuk Seris,
or the State,

From the Absolutism
of One's Rulership in one's kingdom,
one governs the armies of senses –
Sight, Hearing, Speech, Thoughts...

From the Absolute
one sees with the Inner Eye
the daily battles within and decide
who will be the winners and
who will be the losers,

From the Throne of Absolutism,
one speaks
with the ancient prophets and sages
and instruct them
to strengthen the authority and legitimation
of this Inner Kingdom one constructed
out of the realization
of an end of a journey
one is rewarded with,

The Absolute is Love,
never changing,
always travelling with this self
of flesh and bones
and consciousness
that one gets the chance to encounter
in one's lifetime...
if one searches for love.

Love is the Asolute
Only Love

Times like this

Times like this 

by Azly Rahman

times like this when night falls
when dawn hath long arrived
to become a canopy beneath the stars
to the soul inside of me that yearns to wander free
i see the beauty of the story of the night unfolding
... strange as the plot may seem
neither beginning nor end nor in-between
at times eros comes and offers its long-flowing robe for the wanderings
of the soul
at times thanatos cometh and spread its endless plots of battlefields
at times catharsis halts that wandering soul and speak of things to come
at times Time collapses
indeed Time persistently collapses
times like this the soul is free to wander as i would set it free to be
so that you and i could meet
in a distant time we once inhabit
when Time was neither persistent not perishing
like dawn and dusk
like day and night
we met
in the darkest and deepest night
i still know you
formless as you will forever be
Love -- you are
a soul that never wander