Karachi, on Eid

Karachi is an interesting place today. The streets are empty and hallow. Few shops are open. Perhaps you find, as I did, a cafe has opened, and perhaps you enter it. Immediately, you are bathed in a sense of life and renewal: it is a celebratory environment. You cannot help but notice the vibrant colors and fabrics adorning these smiling bodies.

Last evening, the heat and sand of this earth, and the bodies, after a month of fasting, looked afar toward the changing moon. The moon is a sign. It is a sign that cannot be reached with the body unless one opts to pass through the Western scientific discourse. Incidentally, no Muslim country has ever made this pass and it remains a topic for debate among Islamic scholars: is it permissible to land on the moon?

This non-rapport of the heat and sand, of the body, with the moon is also the very basis for the vibrancy of a life renewed. I witness it here, today, in this cafe. The smiling bodies eat, not eagerly but with joy and thankfulness — with humility and quiet fortitude.

The moon is a sign that is separated from the body. This separation, against the scientific discourse, is what offers them a bounty. Food tastes like a fair reward after a period of trial. Only by accepting this closure of the scientific discourse, this distance from its overflowing real, does one find the gratitude of a life renewed here, in the sand and the heat, with this body that you seem to have. You can eat, this is a festival of life.

The goal of taqwa is realized not without some relation to the body, a process intertwined with the fact of “reading.” When the prophet was directed to “read,” he was reported to have responded: “I cannot read!” What does it mean to read for one who is illiterate? At first, there will be resistance. One believes that one reads what has an obvious and established meaning. Yet, if one is illiterate and one is commanded to read, then it is not in the naive sense of “literacy.” To no longer suffer from ill-literacy is also one of the core tenants of psychoanalysis: one reads beyond what has meaning. One can clearly read the signs.

And it was in this first Surah that one discovers the emergence of the body from a clot.