Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

Bakhtiyar Ali

letter affirmed this belief. It contained the long story of the mullah’s life, and was full of details about the mullah’s past, his childhood, his falling in love and his old age. Evidently, Mullah Hajar had formed every letter of everywordwiththeutmost conviction. After years of hesitation, deep in his soul, he had come round to the view that he ought to reveal everything, to keep nothing hidden. Every line of the letter gave off great awareness of fatherhood. He wrote of how he had once been a lover; every part of it exuded the strong scent of death, and a colour particular to the ishraq 3 , the illumination, 3 Ishraq, often translated as ‘il- lumination’, is a key term in Sufism. The A to Z of Sufism explains it as ‘a way of describing how God works in the hearts of the spirituality

at the end of life. Mullah Hajar appeared to have had great difficulty getting to the point of his story, and to his final words. It was, however, clear that in some places the mullah’s concern was that of a man who wanted not to hurt his own son, but to reveal to him a secret in a calm and composed manner, a secret that could change his life and make him a completely different person. Mullah Hajar used the language of someone who had loved words in the 1930s and ’40s, someone who had pondered the secret of rhetoric. In the rhetoric of that time, he advanced, and the name given to a school of Persian Muslim philosophy associated with Shihab-ad-Din Ya- hya Ah-Shurawardi “Maqtul”.’ (John Renard, The A to Z to Sufism, p. 165, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2005.)

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