I Doubt, Therefore I Am': Revisiting Mirza Ghalib’s Poetry https://thewire.in/books/i-doubt-therefore-i-am-revisiting-mirza-ghalibs-poetry 'Thinking with Ghalib' by Anjum Altaf and Amit Basole reinterprets 30 of Ghalib’s couplets. Its essential purpose is to make the reader think with Ghalib. And the very soul of Ghalib’s poetry is doubt.
Questioning from within is what makes him an uncompromising rebel. His questioning is rarely a frontal negation of the “truth” with a “counter truth”; he would rather draw a circle of suspicion around it. He seldom gives an answer to the question he has raised and lead the reader to an answer he might have in mind...
What could perhaps be perceived as an alarming equation of the sanctity of the most sacred spaces like the masjid, the madrasā and the khanqah with the tavern and might invite fatwās sanctioning his lynching in our times still mercifully left him unharmed, indeed enjoying the reputation of a master poet in his own time and for ever. One wonders whether the progress of “democracy” since the nineteenth century has made us more tolerant of dissent or less. ..
Tauhῑd, as an organizing principle of religion and society came to India on a substantial scale with Islam. Its conceptualisation of the single God and the single form of worship contrasted sharply with the innumerable Hindu gods and goddesses and equally numberless forms of worship. The two concepts visualised God as two rival, competing entities, Allah and Ishwar, competition that did not remain mere difference of opinion among their followers and did involve tension and violence. It was the Sufi-Bhakti traditions that sought out an extraordinary conceptual alternative to it and Kabir stands tall among the creators of this concept. He dissolves the rivalry between Allah and Ishwar by breaking down the Islamic wall around tauhῑd and conceptualising one universal God.
Comment: Whether the Marxist "opium", overides the spiritual or even the capacity to doubt!! The reaction to Woke or political correctness, does make us pause and doubt our notion of "false counsiousness" or 'opium" of the masses.