His Humbleness
Hazarte Yang Burz Home
Aka M.A.Hussain
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I do not know. Who am I? I took birth nameless. You called me by several names, to separate me from the rest of the people. I adopted these names as if these were mine. In fact, the personal identity is imposed by society on individual to over- emphasis his separateness from the other, from the rest of fellow human beings. The people are not interested in my specie being, in my being as a person, in my oneness and sameness with humanity, but they are more interested in how I am different from the rest of them.
I understand that to be different is what makes me what I am. However, it should not lead to alienation and isolation from the other by juxtaposing my being and my social being.
Since infancy, I strive to become, we, seeking my roots and trying to relate to others authentically. Up to this time, I failed in my endeavour. I opened my windows to the world, but no one allowed me entry inside his/her world. I offered myself for a handshake, but no one gave me his or her hand. I remained lonely like a stranger in a crowd. Every time, I build foot bridges for others I was betrayed. I was taken for a ride. I sought help from others to become aware of my imperfections, but they used my openness to degrade me.
No one has any knowledge about me. I can tell you thus I am who I am. I am beyond all descriptions. I elude all definitions. Soon, you try to describe me or give me a name. I do not remain what I am.
I exist in three modes: I, Me and we. I am nameless and cannot be given a name. There is nothing like me. I am not like anything. Thus, no name, no sign signifies me. You may treat me to be an object of your perception, but I am not.
I am inaccessible. When you talk about me, you talk about my cerebral self who is your own creation. I was impelled to choose my mother tongue to break my silence and to become accessible to my parents and to make myself known to them, to reveal myself to rest of the world. However, it was not so easy to assign similar meaning to the words as my parents did, often they used to laugh at my naivety, and I would also laugh at their ignorance, not knowing that the language is a social construct not as a product of nature.
One has to go beyond language to know who I am. As my girlfriend does, she does not speak yet she talks to me. I read in her eyes striving for physical union. She is joyfully aware of my growth process. My girlfriend knows me who I am. I speak to her with my lips. She says I am a great mystery, full of manifoldness and multiplicity. Every time, she meets me. She discovers something new, adorable and beautiful in me, which was not yet known to her. She says I am center of her universe, the most important person walking on the earth and beyond all descriptions. In her presence, I really feel so. Her universe is not Newtonian universe but one in which cause and effect embrace each other and become a unity, twhid, gestalt, such that these can no more be differentiated from each other. However, you have no reason to believe her. I am putting here my profile for public consumption:
- My name Mohammad Ashfaq Hussain I write under pen name M.A.Hussain
- rechristened my name as Yang Burz Home in the year 1997 to escape structural violence rampant in India against religious and ethnic minorities
- born on 3rd February in 1953 in orthodox Sunni family and brought up in Srinagar Kashmir state of India
- got early education in modern Madrasa Islamia High School Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir
- renounced Islam in 1973 turned to atheism and secular humanist philosophies including Marxism for political ideas and the world view
- wrote a book in Urdu on psychology insani nafseyat in 1976 which is unpublished till date
- strife torn social milieu of Kashmir valley led me to migrate to Delhi in 1988 since then I am living there
- my deep rooted aversion against intellectualism, statism, absolutism and authoritarianism prevented me joining any communist party
- wrote a political novel Fitnah on Kashmir in the year 1994 (get a mp3 audio file of the one segment of the novel here)
- launched an Urdu fortnightly ijtihad in 1996 that was discontinued due to paucity of funds(scanned image of the fortnightly is here)
- Launched a website against Pak sponsored separatist movement in Kashmir, http:.//savekashmirmovent.org
- launched several websites to protest against American aggression on Iraq
P.S:
I got several emails asking me why I renounced Islam. I am not inclined to write about this in detail right now. However, I will tell you a little about it.
As I left Islam, it opened a new amazing world of science for me. Everything looked different from leaf of a tree to flapping of wings of a butter fly. It is not that I did not read science books earlier; I read a lot of books on physical, biological and behavioral sciences during my college days. Nevertheless, I read these uncritically like any other religious believer will do, separating science and religion in one’s life, not mixing the two and not connecting the scientific knowledge to one’s experiences; not relating scientific practice with one’s faith by denying one’s experiences and living an unauthentic life like Muslim students of science do. The core of my self changed fundamentally.
The avalanche of rationality that engulfed me was triggered by four great scientists: psychologist B.F.Skinner, cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov and ethnologist Konrad Lorenz.
I was overwhelmed by the avalanche and got carried away with it. I lost my social anchor, my identity and the world of readymade things I was living in. The world totally looked unusual, as if I had not seen it before. I became a stranger to the people near me, and they looked like different persons. No dialogue was possible with them as they were anti-dialogue.
In the beginning, it resulted in a numbing loss of my social identity and a paralyzing despair. A later in tremendous joy and happiness which cannot be expressed in words.
I had three such peak experiences( a concept propounded by Maslow) in my intellectual development. My first peak experience turned me to atheism and I embraced positivism, scientism, scientific materialism (turning human history as a science) and Newtonian mechanics as my world view. It turned me mad with joy and wonder.
My second peak experience was rejecting positivism, scientism and historicism as one-sided view of reality. My readings of game theory, wave mechanics, cybernetics, existentialism(particularly existential sociology), chaos theory and humanistic psychology gave me a new meaning of life, world view and man’s place in nature. However, this saddened me as I saw myself entangled in a web of power relations, and I became aware how insignificant, impudent and powerless I was before tall power pyramids. I could not see any solution to problems of human existence of the present-day man. I turned pessimist and inactive politically.
Third recent peak experience is going on; it gave me a new sense of self and the historical mission I must fulfill. I got the solution to my problems of existence, life and death. That is love, which means a human relation which does not turn into a power relation, even if there is a great power differential as in mother-child relation. A condition under which deviance is not dealt with social exclusion or considered as a disease and criminalized. When there is mutual recognition of autonomy and identity.
That condition is love not merely as a human impulse but as a relation too.
This has once again radicalized me after a long time. A new concept is blossoming in my mind; I have given it a name. I call it womenism. I have not worked out its details yet. However, in short, it means that the woman is the center of the movements of social change and world revolution. She has the key to the survival of the human race, its culture, and its continuity.
