culture (Page 7)

Destination mind

Sometimes I wonder where is the real beauty is it inside me or outside? Swami Shantanand Swarasswati once came to my off in New York and talked about our mind and music. He said if our mind is inside us and all our thoughts springs from the mind then truly we live in our minds. Fine music is pure honey to nourish our minds. We were sitting in 87th floor of the Empire State Building on a deserted evening and swamiji said all roads leads to our mind where we meditate create and contemplate. The best place in our existence. Our nirvana is in the deep of our minds. So cultivate your mind and always travel into the deepest alleys of your mind. Your body is just a shadow, your real YOU is in your mind. This conversation came back into my mind while listening to Ravi Shankar and Anoushka�s following sitar duet. What a powerful music to collect our scattered existence back to our minds.

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A Complete Guide to Allah (Bismi Allah)

This small e-book painstakingly analyses Allah, the Islamic God. Allah is at the core of religion of Islam. Every act, every ritual, every Jihad, every Islamic incursion, every Islamic bloodshed, every Islamic law is designed for only one purpose—to please Allah. Who is this Allah? Where did He come from? Where does He live now? What are His daily activities? What is His temperament? What are His likes and dislikes? Does Allah have an Executive Office?—how does that office look like? Does Allah have a Throne? Does Allah have a physical body or is Allah just amorphous—without any corporeal existence –but only an invisible, incomprehensible, a never–to–be–understood entity? These are extremely blasphemous questions. None the less, these questions haunt every Muslim's mind from the moment he hears Allah's name to the moment of his last breath. But he never gets any satisfactory answers to these perennial questions. For eternity, Allah would like to remain an enigma to the Muslims. Islamists always advance this mysterious, elusive nature of Allah as the epitome of Islam—Allah has to remain obscure, recondite and ephemeral—this is what makes Islam great—the hide–and–seek game of Allah with His devotees. This essay is an attempt to remove this antediluvian, outdated and irrational method to understanding Allah. The most surprising result of this enquiry about Allah is that: Allah is not at all a mystery. He is just like any one of us—a living and breathing human being, so to speak! Allah is not esoteric; neither is He hiding from us. He lived, yes, with Muhammad, but did not die with Muhammad. Based on irrefutable evidences, this essay will tell the story of Allah and how Muhammad advanced Allah as a deity to be worshipped—just because he wanted to be worshipped—in the name of Allah, in the manner the Pagans worshipped Allah.

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(Re)Reading Taslima Nasrin

My essay, Woman Alone, on feminism, Taslima Nasrin and my development as a writer and as a woman is also in there. The article was previously published in Mukto-Mona.

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Bangladesh is not quite out of the woods from Islamists' attack!

~ A.H. Jaffor Ullah

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