Karen Armstrong does Karachi

Is it prescriptively weak for a historical analysis to posit the discovery of compassion within oneself as the engineering marvel of inter-faith issues? I haven’t read enough of Armstrong to know the finer points of her narrative, but putting forward compassion as the sine qua non of religion was muddling because all I could think of was how exactly one brought about, for example, a compassionate foreign policy. The nearest term to compassion in mainstream understanding is tolerance and that seems largely contextualized within a multicultural social discourse. Tolerance when shored up next to compassion draws a picture of an uneasily jostling crowd of people bearing placards of their respective religions, some unobtrusively elbowing others to makes space and others standing cautiously on tip toes to make room. It just does not imply the expansiveness of “compassion”. The Danish cartoons and the hair tearing over the veil in France has been noted by many as an indication that tolerance in the hegemonic discourse largely means “if you take on our colors, THEN we will absorb you.” (Tangentially, at times when I get sick of people whining about security checks at airports, the most obvious solution seems to me to be not to go there. If you are aware this is what they’re doing by law then once you enter that country you agree to placing yourself under that law’s jurisdiction so the room for whining doesn’t really exist anymore, if one has chosen to go despite finding the third degree treatment obnoxious and unfair.) I don’t disagree with the points Armstrong made in her lecture, notably, that all religions essentially were about dispensing with the ego, I think at some point she brought in yoga but at that point of the speech I was blizzarded with gusts of sleep so…so much for that. Most of my confusion as to the direction Armstrong was taking I think stemmed from the de-emphasis on the construction feat required to link the secularists with people who practiced different faiths. Secularism to the extent that Turkey took it- laicism- is a dogma on its own and in the Venn diagram of civilizations, I got the feeling Karen was treating the secularists as people outside the set, which seems largely impracticable because even if most of the world’s population subscribes to one form of personal faith or the other, the bruises are likely to rise not because “my religion is better than yours” but “religion is not a part of this discussion” on discussions of political economy etcetera. Reductionist as it may sound, in the public space I consider religion little more than a political resource. Karen was wont to reinforce her lecture throughout with the sentence “What the world needs now…” and the Care Bears in my head would sway tipsily from side to side PTV style and chorus is “LUV is-sweet LUV” while poor Karen finished off with the inevitable “compassion”. There are too many people in my head, looking for myself is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Also I think the fact that the auditorium (I have no idea about the composition of the auditoriums who received the lecture through screening) audience comprised mostly of women, heavily make up ones at that. At some point in between all the perfumed saliva they were pasting on each others cheeks I felt a great urge to dance an Indian number on stage so they would get their Klein and Prada’s worth of entertainment. And they were all kitty party aunties I will insist, a fact that clearly came across in the Q&A session where I was habitually cringing as people asked questions the poor woman had already answered in her lecture. There were very few men (unless you count the ones who had less hair on their head than I have teeth), which just goes to show there are no eligible men in Karachi who are motivated by the fact that for once, there is a talk instead of a coffee shop opening in the city. S (sitting next to me) said they had all flown to the States. Am more determined than ever to follow suit for Masters and achieve matrimony in the U.S of A. Found it extremely entertaining that people were getting pirated copies of Karen’s book autographed by her, she was signing books she would never get a royalty for, tis a cruel cruel world.

Karen said something interesting about Greek theologians whose claim was that any statement concerning God, should be a) paradoxical (should resist human definition) and b) it should lead to silence. Now as I write this, I have an uncontrollable urge to laugh because when M gets drunk, that’s exactly how he behaves. He talks about God, says paradoxical things and then inevitably falls silent. I’ve completely sidetracked from the thought stream the Greek theologians tumbled into. O vell, will put it in comments section when I remember.

I am now known as Mrs. Hamza at work because almost-two-year old boy of one of our colleagues has a heart warming crush on me. I love wandering around with him in my lap to meetings and Fascist sprees, he lends an anchor to my agitations that keeps them from spiraling out of control, which are careering into a new twilight given the fact that Khamba and I are both dealing with two consultancies at one time where the research core is something the firms cannot decide on. Also have not mentioned new addition in my life- tis Historian (hehe Heman the Historian:P) Khamba who I am eternally grateful for that hand on the shoulder that enables me to maintain a professional smile.