During low tide, the sea recedes, exposing the land hitherto underneath it. From the wet sand, you can tell that the sea was there some while ago. If you have some knowledge about the high and low tides, you can also predict that this area of wet sand will be engulfed by the sea once again with the high tide (which comes when the moon is at its highest). But then there is this another type of recession--where the sea recedes never to come back (example, the Aral Sea). When you set foot on the land left behind by the sea, you find salt and other objects suggesting that once a body of water covered this land. Only very few people can pick up the clues and tell that this new land was not always a piece of land, in fact it was part of a sea once. The religion in societies acts more or less like the sea. There are high and low tides. One can tell from the wet sand, that is the decrease in religious fervor, that the sea has receded from the shoreline and the low tide has set in--soon the land will again be reclaimed and the zeal will return. But then there comes a time when the religion, like the sea, recedes from a society never to come back again. In that kind of a society, just like the salt and other objects left behind by the sea, you find very little that could suggest what it was like when religion actually used to be there. The essence of it is lost, the remnants are the only clues. The remnants of a religion in a society are usually those rituals which survive and outlive other aspects of the religion only because they have a greater tendency to become a part of the societys culture with time. It is far easier to make a society shed religion than making it lose its culture. Hence anything that successfully integrates itself into the culture of a society, survives. The reasons for this phenomenon are obvious: culture builds up over a huge span of time, at least the same (or nearly the same amount) is required to change/transform it completely; the comfort-seeking human nature relinquishes religion much easily than culture; and lastly, the culture is implemented/imposed by the whole of the society on a person, while no force as mighty as society at any given time is there to implement the religion. What Aral sea is for water, Pakistan is for Islam (no real water in Aral Sea, no real Islam in Pakistan). There are only remnants. The remnants are those things which have successfully clung to desi culture. These are usually religious symbolism blended with desi customs. Thats why you observe that when all kinds of profanities have been done in a wedding, the Quran is fetched and the bride is taken to the car under the shade of Quran. When a guy is dead, in a state that he detested religion all his life, his khatam shareef is planned forthwith. When Eid comes after Ramadan, people offer Eid prayers (some of whom have never offered any fard prayer in their life) and go on about making merry (in a cultural way, not anything specific to do with Islam--mostly even in violation of it). When someone says sea, we think of water. A sea which has no water anymore is not a sea in deed. But the Aral Sea is still Aral Sea. And Eid of an Islam-less society is still Eid. The symbolism lingers, because it takes time to remove all traces of past.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 15:34:10 +0000
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