Columnists
If You Wish a True Caliphate:
An Open Poem to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi
EK ONG KAAR KAUR
A 'caliphate' is an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader known as a caliph – i.e., "successor" – to Muhammad. The succession of Muslim empires that have existed in the Muslim world are usually described as "caliphates". Conceptually, a caliphate represents a sovereign state of the entire Muslim faithful, (the Ummah), ruled by a caliph under Islamic law (sharia). [Wikipedia]
The Caliphate of the Islamic State (also referred to in today's media as ISIS) seems to have frightened just about everyone else involved in Middle Eastern politics into a de facto geopolitical alliance. All of a sudden, we find Iran and the United States, the Kurds (both in Syria and Iraq) and Israel, Turkey and Bashar al-Assad's Syrian government, western Europe (Great Britain, France, and Germany) and Russia, all pursuing in different ways the same objective: stop the caliphate from expanding and consolidating. [Al Jazeera]
AN OPEN POEM TO ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI
If you wish a True Caliphate,
To create Heaven on earth
Then remember that Heaven
Has no religion or creed.
These are separations
Of our own human invention.
A Heaven on earth
Would open its arms
To men, women and children.
Muslim, Christian, and Jew
Buddhists and Hindus
Sikhs and Yazedis
And all the traditions
That have ever existed.
Different styles of roses
In one Master Garden
Tended with care and compassion.
The Creator has so many facets
Such vastness
No one religion can
Describe it all.
To create Heaven on earth,
Replicate that garden.
Embrace every rose.
Every scent.
Every color.
Side by side
In a riot of life.
Then Heaven would flourish
Under your care.
If you wish a True Caliphate
Where people surrender
To Divine Will
Islam
Then know the Divine
Lives within every heart.
There is no Divine Will
But what the heart whispers.
There is no Divine Will
Except where love leads.
Every person you meet,
See the Light in their eyes.
The secret in their Spirits
Is where Divine Will abides.
No man has the power,
The knowledge, or control
To instruct any other
In the Creator's Design.
The One True Master
Keeps His own counsel
And only gives each person
A piece of the Plan.
To spread the spirit of Divine surrender
Teach men and women
To honor themselves.
To find the Divine Light within their own being,
To follow that Light, even beyond death.
And to never ever surrender their sovereignty.
Then you will rule
A True Caliphate of lslam.
We know you
For so many lifetimes.
Your heart may chase God,
But your mind misunderstands.
Abdul Muzaffer Muhi-ud Din
Mohammad bin Aurangzeb
Took the same path you are walking.
But he was more terrible than you.
In the name of the Creator,
He tortured so many.
The worst kinds of tortures.
The worst kinds of death.
Just to twist people
To bow to his way.
Not bow to Allah or Mohammed,
But to his own shadow.
Aurangzeb cast a huge darkness
That blocked the Creator's Light in so many lives.
It took Guru Gobind Singh,
The Tenth Master of the Sikhs,
To break through that ego
And bring his mind back to sense.
Read your own history.
Study the past.
Aurangzeb died regretting
The pain he had caused.
There is no God, no matter what faith you follow,
Who approves when people brutalize each other.
Do not use the Divine as a shield for your actions.
The Creator stands with those who have died
And waits for you to realize
How far you have strayed.
I speak with the voice of my Father by Steel.
He stood up to you then.
We stand up to you now.
Not violence for violence.
Not blood for blood.
But a voice through the darkness
Calling you to love.
Calling you to remember
What Heaven is about.
Calling you to remember
The purpose of life.
We are all one family, no matter our roots.
When we live as one family,
Prosperity reigns.
There are those in the past who have done it -
The Sikhs.
There are those in the future
Who will do it again.
And when that day comes,
When pure human consciousness
Becomes our normal way of life,
Then we shall witness what it is like.
For Heaven to descend to earth.
For the True Caliphate to exist.
For Shambhala to be found.
For the Khalsa Raj to emerge.
That day is on its way.
You can join it,
Or you can remind us all
Of the shadow that the human race
Must leave behind.
August 18, 2014
Conversation about this article
1: Ajit Singh Batra (Pennsville, New Jersey, USA), August 18, 2014, 8:48 AM.
Beautifully explained by Ek Onkar ji in her poem. Guru Gobind Singh believed intensely in the philosophy of Love. He sacrificed all that was precious to him personally so that others could live. He advised Aurangzeb that blessed is the person who carries out the struggle in his/her heart against evil without forgetting the Lord. For such persons death cannot have any terror, as their belief is that it was death that gave them true life for a good cause. God approves of death for such brave persons.