{"id":1049,"date":"2012-06-30T09:43:37","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T04:13:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2012-06-30T09:48:50","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T04:18:50","slug":"our-spirtual-legacy-hameedah-nayeem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/point-of-view\/kashmir-talk\/our-spirtual-legacy-hameedah-nayeem\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Spirtual Legacy- Hameedah Nayeem"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/fb:like>

\u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 <\/strong>
\nThe heart-rending\u00a0 and soul-stirring incident of\u00a0 the devastating\u00a0 fire of\u00a0 Dastageer Sahib mosque,\u00a0 the Shrine dedicated to Syed Abdul Qadir Jeelani, shocked and outraged the entire\u00a0 state\u00a0 both Muslims\u00a0 and non Muslims alike. This is yet another deep\u00a0 psychological\u00a0 blow\u00a0 that our collective consciousness has received in the past two<\/p>\n

decades\u00a0 of military rule which\u00a0 has wreaked\u00a0 havoc with\u00a0 the living symbols of our history, religion, culture, the sereneness of our\u00a0 environment , forests and health resorts, the harmony of our\u00a0 ecology, the health of our resources, not to talk of human lives and their habitat. It freshened the wounds of Charari Sharief, Khanqahi Muallah of Amir-e-Kabir at Tral, Baba Rishi\u2019s shrine at Tangmarg, adjacent mosque at Makhdoom Sahib\u2019s and many others.<\/p>\n

This shrine in particular\u00a0\u00a0 has served as a cradle of comfort and solace for the people of the valley in the most difficult times of their lives. I\u00a0 recall\u00a0 my\u00a0 meeting with\u00a0\u00a0 a\u00a0 psychoanalyst\u00a0 Shobna Sonpar\u00a0 in 2002 who\u00a0 was\u00a0\u00a0 invited\u00a0\u00a0 by\u00a0 an\u00a0\u00a0 NGO to\u00a0 counsel\u00a0 the victims of violence in the valley. After meeting many traumatic victims of violence, she was outraged by what Indian army, her own country\u2019s army has done to people here and shed real tears of both pain and sorrow in empathy with the sufferers but felt defeated by the people\u2019s resilience and their faith in God and the saints\u2019 power of intercession before God for them. She felt poor by the richness of their faith and power of endurance which the sufferers displayed.\u00a0 While explaining to her why people here do not\u00a0 need trauma centers\u00a0 despite\u00a0 colossal sufferings\u00a0 and miseries,\u00a0 I told her it is because Kashmir is dotted with the shrines and mosques where people go\u00a0 to cry to their God\u00a0 to find solace and comfort and therefore the secular armament of\u00a0\u00a0 trauma centers\u00a0 and counselors to deal with\u00a0 the situation is redundant in this milieu.<\/p>\n

The shrine dedicated to\u00a0\u00a0 Syed Abul Qadir Jeelani\u00a0 popularly known as\u00a0 Dastageer Sabun\u00a0 was in particular within easy reach both physically and symbolically to people\u00a0 and they would get comfort and\u00a0 consolation by visiting it and\u00a0 meditating there for hours, crying to their Lord\u00a0 and feeling lightened and purified. At the same time they would feel recharged to endure the fret and fume of life and the buffets of time.<\/p>\n

It stood\u00a0 as\u00a0 a rock of\u00a0 strength\u00a0 and inspiration\u00a0 especially for women\u00a0 who would sit there for long hours to\u00a0 get relief from pain and\u00a0 agony , the sense of loss of their dear ones to the violence raging here\u00a0\u00a0 changelessly, a sort of\u00a0 catharsis to bring about an equipoise in their psychic make up. It is this\u00a0\u00a0 peaceful sacred space which will be most missed by people particularly by women of all hues.<\/p>\n

In 2007, Michael Mubarak, an American and a disciple of Hazrat Inayat Khan, the saint who founded Sufism in the West in 1910, came to Kashmir to pay a visit to the shrines of saints. In his conversation with me, he made a particular reference to Dastageer Sahib\u2019s mosque that it is really an abode of saints. My own experience\u00a0 corroborated his in the sense that I have also felt\u00a0 a sense of peace and tranquility in its environs whenever\u00a0 I have\u00a0 been there\u00a0 perhaps also because \u2018dadiwallas\u2019 do not pester the visitors\u00a0 with begging\u00a0 which is so nauseating at\u00a0 Makhdoom Sahib\u2019s shrine.<\/p>\n

Dastageer Sabun has also served as a centre of political activism and a unifying symbol from early twentieth century for the people of Kashmir. It has been a symbol of its syncretic culture, a living monument of its history, a testimony of its spirituality and a symbol of Kashmir\u2019s dedication to the most elevated saint who achieved the highest pinnacle of closeness to God by following the Prophet of Islam in letter and spirit.<\/p>\n

Besides all these attributes, it was a finest feat of indigenous architecture, of pinjira kari, of unique khatamban, of papier machie of symphony of colors and arches and antique chandeliers. Its devastation once again underscores our plight, our powerlessness and the political quagmire in which we are caught and an intensified need to end it.
\nThe author\u00a0 teaches at Department of english,university of kashmir and\u00a0 can be mailed at <\/strong>hameedah.nayeem@gmail.com<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/fb:like><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0
\nThe heart-rending\u00a0 and soul-stirring incident of\u00a0 the devastating\u00a0 fire of\u00a0 Dastageer Sahib mosque,\u00a0 the Shrine dedicated to Syed Abdul Qadir Jeelani, shocked and outraged the entire\u00a0 state\u00a0 both Muslims\u00a0 and non Muslims alike. This is yet another deep\u00a0 psychological\u00a0 blow\u00a0 that our collective consciousness has received in the past two
\ndecades\u00a0 of military rule which\u00a0 has wreaked\u00a0 havoc with\u00a0 the living symbols of our history, religion, culture, the sereneness of our\u00a0 environment , forests and health resorts, the harmony of our\u00a0 ecology, the health of our resources, not to talk of human lives and their habitat. It freshened the wounds of Charari Sharief, Khanqahi Muallah of Amir-e-Kabir at Tral, Baba Rishi\u2019s shrine at Tangmarg, adjacent mosque at Makhdoom Sahib\u2019s and many others.
\nThis shrine in particular\u00a0\u00a0 has served as a cradle of comfort and solace for the people of the valley in the most difficult times of their lives. I\u00a0 recall\u00a0 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1054,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[28,5],"tags":[107,106,33],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-kashmir-talk","tag-dastageer","tag-hameedah-nayeem","tag-kashmir-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1053,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/1053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}