You are there and so am I
We will not build a false heaven on earth
With self-indulgent romance
Beloved
We will not celebrate our union
With self-indulgent romance
Beloved
We will not celebrate our union
We will not break
We will not be defeated
We will not be frightened
Knowing
You are there and so am I
We will not build a false heaven on earth
We will honor our love on this treacherous journey of life
Embracing the challenges at unstoppable pace
Embracing the despair of difficult days
We will reject an imposed Utopia
We will not seek sympathy
If the ocean wrecks our ship and slashes the sails
If we die
We shall face Death
Knowing
You are there and so am I
Together we have perceived the world, at each other we have gazed
Across the blazing sands, we have travelled
Neither mirages charmed us, we remained unfazed
Nor have we soothed the mind with false platitudes ever
Throughout our life, we will walk with our head held high
May this phrase be exalted, Beloved
You are there and so am I
-Poem by Rabindranath Tagore, translation by Arundhuti Hom Chowdhury, Shivajee Chatterjee, Kausik Datta, Shireen Pasha
SoulIt is the 7th century BC, pre-Islam Arabia. A husband and wife decide to commit their lives to ending mass female infanticide, gross income inequality, predatory lending, a culture of greed, molecular warfare (black magic) that left a community suspicious instead of trusting, and factional fighting that prevented a long term outlook. Accepting fully well their fragile mortality, they deeply believed that they could take on the Goliath matrix of injustice, bringing about social change because they received a profound insight of Allah - the most forgiving, compassionate force of energy - beauty, pure love, the creator in the creation, that leaves one with the joy of being aware. The couple saw the chaos around them and knew fully well that if human beings could develop themselves in mind, body and soul, they would know Allah, transforming their environment from aspirations for a false heaven on Earth to a pragmatic abode of perennial renaissance.
We know a lot about the husband in this couple but who was the wife? Her name was Khadija bint Khuwaylid (Khadija meaning a girl child, who was born premature). She grew up in a house that was next door to the Ka'aba, so close that the branches of the tree in her courtyard touched it. Imagine playing on the branches of a tree that touched the House of God. Perhaps a nice dig in the libraries of Alexandria (Egypt) would reveal more about her childhood. From the childhood beneath the tree that touched the Ka'aba, she grows up to be a successful business woman (earning well, paying well, donating generously), having two marriages (both of which left her in widowhood with children) before she meets her Beloved Mohammad. Needless to say she had to be strong to negotiate life in an environment where female Goddesses were the dominant figures of worship, yet death was the usual verdict for girl children.
MindScholars speculate that of the three Goddesses (Al-lat or Saraswati / Athena, Al-Uzza or Durga / Aphrodite, Manat or Kali / Nemesis) revered in pre-Islam Arabia, Khadija focused on Al-Uzza (Durga / Parvati, or Aphrodite, the Mother Goddess of love and fertility). Perhaps Khadija believed in love and the transformative energy of the heart, which was then supplemented by her and her husband's insight of Allah. (Green being the colour of Islam may be no happen-stance. Mystics have always said green is the colour of the heart energy, the seat of consciousness. Now biophysicists say the thymus gland, where the heart is located, vibrates the color green. Once opened, the thymus gland enables one to become who one is meant to be.)
Khadija was the first to convert to Islam and accept Mohammad as a prophet (a seer of the will of God). For the next ten years after having accepted Islam, Khadija supported the Muslims' social justice movement for oneness and peace with her physical and metaphysical energy as well as her wealth (underwriting the new community when they were ostracised for refusing to participate in the old culture of greed and a life of duality in which one's actions were separated from one's faith in the oneness of Allah).
BodyWhere is the honour for Khadija, without whom Islam would not have survived? (You can be certain of that.)
My mother and I were travelling through Baridhara in Dhaka, the wealthiest neighborhood in the capital of Bangladesh. We wanted to offer our Maghrib prayers. We stopped at the DOHS Baridhara mosque. A few men were preparing to pray on the ground floor, while the top floor remained astoundingly empty. The attendee insisted that because of our gender, we could not pray inside the mosque. Why is it that at the Ka'aba men and women pray side by side and we cannot even pray on an empty floor of a mosque in Dhaka? What have we learned by wanting to be Muslims, when we cannot even have the clarity to correct this mistake of disallowing Muslim women from participating fully in Islamic life, which includes the movement and presence of women across time and space.
Can we achieve the full awareness of Allah? Can we develop ourselves to a point where we reduce gender disparity in all spheres of our lives, where we pray side by side despite our gender, where we honour not just beloved Mohammad but also beloved Khadija by living the ideals for which they reverently worked?