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I want to start by thanking Cecil and from love for inviting me and for Claire, for making sure I got here.

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And I've learnt so much in this past day and a half.

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So thank you, everyone. And I look forward to. This is very new work for me, so I look forward to everyone's critical engagement and learning more.

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What does it mean to live in the neighbourhood of madness, to borrow stuff? And also the streets?

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Can we understand such proximity as anything other than mental disorder?

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Can we imagine ethics existing in such a place? I asked this question after having spent a year intensely hanging out to be methodologically

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precise with Muslims in urban north India during the first term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,

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a period throughout which, through lynching social media means media bullying and state terror.

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Indian Muslims are being subjected to racialized othering, humiliation and terror,

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stood into them second class citizens and to ensure Hindu upper caste domination of the Indian nation state.

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This continues to be the case. What are the mental health effects of exposure to constant harassment, othering and existential threat?

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And illustrative anecdote from Sealable, a highly industrialised, densely populated and predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in East Delhi.

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As I sat in a friend's unani and old Vedic medicine shop, he showed me a bottle of a syrup called Newton.

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The package said it was a cure for insomnia, nose irritability, tension and anxiety neurosis.

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Sales have gone up a lot. He said, like, honestly,

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he himself was recovering from a beating which the police had refused to treat as a hate crime and which had left him with quite severe injuries,

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including a broken arm.

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From conversations with psychiatrists and psychotherapists in Delhi and Lucknow who work with a significant number of Muslim clients,

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it is also clear that anxiety disorders have spiked amongst Muslims in those cities.

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Yet I also found this to be a time of incredible creativity, especially amongst young Muslims.

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The popular revival of Urdu poetry is just one of several incredible aesthetic and ethical potentials that have been activated in the cellar.

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Indian Muslims are exploring new ways of imagining politics and collective life, as well as developing new ways of speaking of the self.

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I believe these phenomena are not unrelated. The relation between ordeal ordeal, which pushes you to the edge of madness and creativity,

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is in fact well elaborated in the Islamic tradition, particularly if you follow the poetic aspects of the tradition.

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The affective and mental state the hull are produced by a pilot or divine ordeal is understood as well-shot in Arabic and ventured in order.

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The vessel carries the connotations of uncovering it, of unkindness of animals, of frenzy and violence.

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Urdu poets consider it a state that comes just before madness, general.

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Where it is is a hall or a state greatly elaborated in with poetry, as in most of our lives,

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which go in any way shape, you see, but almost completely absent from everyday speech except as a negative.

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Rachel Vashi there in that frenzied carnival in Urdu poetry, however,

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where it is often celebrated as a state of radical freedom, a generative state of potentiality.

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The younger the word occupy sobbing in a conversation characterised adjudicating contemporary Urdu poetry.

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With these five deeply resonant key words as it were rocks where genuine Junoon desh, the Nevada Sanjeev dance frenzy madness.

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Desert wandering binding chains. Which, of course, you find in Bergen, Stuart.

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You will find all of this in today's poetry, Occupy said. If you look at the points of the generation before us, these words didn't show up in their.

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What does it mean for genuine invasion madness in the stage that comes in for

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madness to be part of the defining vocabulary of today's will do portraying India,

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particularly given that Urdu side is understood by its own practitioners as

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the court word for it as us and the room about the newspaper of interiority.

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What can the life of Urdu poetry in contemporary India tell us about ethical life at the edge of madness?

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A friend told me to go, speak to shot and head for the Sajjad Energy Authority to caretaker of the Kaikohe Sharif dugout Muslim sunshine.

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The Hancock Casimir Andrea in a small Casbah reserve in town about 30 kilometres outside of Lucknow.

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I visited Kasab in April 2018, a child at a sahab has a clean shaven moustache,

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and as long as you can see in the picture, a clean shaven moustache and a long white beard.

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And I've always seen him in a white kurta pyjama and traditional top.

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In other words, is the picture we could see of Islamic orthodoxy, or,

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to be more precise, a particular stringency of following the scent of the prophet.

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I was there with a dozen or so men and women from Calgary and surrounding areas with ailments and complaints.

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He was treating with a mix of firm common sense advice and writing out Koranic Barbies or talismanic amulets.

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When he asked why I was there, I explained that I was trying to understand how Muslims in India were responding to the Harlot conditions.

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People must come to you. I said there must be my use despondent, hopeless, desperate.

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In response, he said in the budget, that's a lot, but better things are still relatively better in India than in many other places.

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Look at Syria, he said. He talked about his own experiences of travelling in Iraq,

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where the government wouldn't give them permission to travel from Baghdad to Samarra because it was too dangerous,

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where despite all precautions, the car was shot at and where someone in the car ahead of theirs in a convoy had died.

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And that's why you see despair, he said. You see to carbon, despair is an affliction.

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Look out there and look uncle flooded. People come to us and we give them courage.

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All of the said it was said while many other of his morning visitors were still sitting in his bed.

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I was not the only addressee of Shahzad's speech. He went on to say, Marsico, billion a year, we should forget the past Hollywood and stock.

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We have the present and the future. The present is golden and the future is golden.

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And things, he reiterated, are still relatively better in India than in most other places in the world.

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He then quoted the point about Jackie must pay him.

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But what the [INAUDIBLE] am jihad is in the economy?

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And yet Madonna isn't cheating firm conviction, continuous striving, world conquering love in the struggle of life.

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These are the sorts of men. There are two things in the world, he said no threat on war, but hate and love now fractured anxiety.

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I'm a lucky when the heat comes from, we are the servants of God.

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He then recited the [INAUDIBLE], which he said was my Jerusalem stand, please. Would seek a judge of religion.

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What he Lahiya must have to be will Dilip balky subgroup here the religion.

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The Gabriel of madness. Gabriel, in Islamic tradition, is the angel who revealed the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad.

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A translation of this year would be, I mean, I've tried to indicate the different senses of mother.

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The Gabriel of Madness said to me, the stew is a divine revelation. Religion is just the way of the heart.

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All else is going a straight. Zaslav then said the Molby zealous Jabril Amin, coach of religion in Yokohama.

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Why has he called the faithful Gabriel as the Archangel is usually referred to in the Islamic tradition, the Gabriel of madness?

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But you know, Becky in the hot shots with madness is the extreme limit of love.

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He talked then about the Hindus who come regularly to this 200 year old Durga

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and who contributed and continue to contribute to its building and maintenance. As I left,

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he gave me a newspaper article about the celebration of the Spring Festival at the

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shrine and the Krishna devotion that is also tied up to the life of the Durga.

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This year stuck with me for several months after the encounter, which I thought I would watch again and again on YouTube,

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trying to decipher a date or venue to the YouTube clip of my reciting the shell, announcing it to the crowd as a new one.

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I would find myself thinking about it at odd moments wrestling with religion when invited to speak in public,

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as sometimes happens when your professional identity is that of a professor who teaches at an American university.

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I would somehow find myself quoting the shill, as I am doing to all of you. I did this, for instance,

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at a joint Shia-Sunni fight or communal fast breaking meal on the rooftop of a hotel in Alderley with a

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grand view of the dorms and courtyard of the historically and politically significant gentlemen was.

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So the Shia-Sunni if that was held in June 2018 during the month of Ramadan,

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in response to a news story that had been given much air by TV channels, think,

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as it turns out, in which a stamped handwritten fatwa from the Battle of Melbourne was shown,

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which opined that it was not advisable for Sunni Muslims to eat with Shias.

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A day or two after the story broke on a Sunday, a joint Shia-Sunni of Kifah had been announced,

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organised by a coalition of Muslim journalists and media professionals and Muslim community leaders and social

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activists with it was said the tacit approval of the Shi'ite imam of the gentleman was added to the mix because,

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after all, he owns the hotel. If that was hosted, many people spoke, including Islam.

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The chair of the Delhi Minorities Commission could finally senior journalist and prominent

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member of the Illegal Muslim University All-boys Association and run us off we,

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a popular historian and cultural blogger. When my turn to speak came at five minutes notice,

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I decided to end my brief words with the chair because it felt very much in keeping with the spirit of the gathering,

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which was called the register protest and send the message against a religiously divisive ruling which the god of religion give you what you like.

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Most of the rumours be delivered boxes of Gujarati. There were many words of appreciation from the audience, and one person loudly explained.

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Exclaimed Semanal. The llamas that followed the if not the press that followed the flight was led by a Shia cleric, as we saw in the photo.

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And but she hasn't seen displayed behind him. Women and men pray together.

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So Manilla is a hard place to render into English, as it means something like God is free of any imperfections.

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It is not a lightly used exclamation in everyday speech,

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usually indicating a high degree of amazement in Musharraf's, for example, word to gatherings.

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It is used only for a share of certain excellence and also happiness,

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a win which it captures and perhaps gives new meaning to the collective mood of the audience.

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Which is to say that the share I had recited had been judged to be appropriate for the moment.

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This recognition of openness from an audience deeply invested in Islam and literate in the conventions of Urdu,

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poetry suggests to me a particular meaning of genuine on madness, as it is understood within the tradition.

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Madness in this meaning is what allows one to break through the boundaries of social and

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religious convention and makes possible newness novelty madness can does have a positive value.

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This should not be surprising, given the centrality of money in the paradigm, I think the good of the madman,

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the Muslim self-expression and the vast majority in political corpus of the Balkans to bring all complex of Muslim societies.

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Official government puts it probably the most widely influential and exemplary figure in Islamic

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history after the Prophet Muhammad and the imams Ali bin RB Talib and Al Hussein bin Ali,

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for what they call the formation of moral cells, is the fictional person of marginal material in the experience of Muslims.

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There should be a question mark, there are Hulk and a figure of madness, an exemplar for the formation of mortal selves.

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To understand us, we need to place ourselves in a different conception, conceptual history from the one fuko narrates and madness and civilisation,

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a history in which madness and madman were institutionally confined in Enlightenment Europe because of the scandal of unreason.

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For as Michael Gold points out in his magisterial work on Monday noon, the madman in mediaeval Islamic society,

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the madman was by and large accommodated by society so that he was not a pariah, an outcast or a scapegoat.

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The social fact points us towards a different set of conceptual approaches to madness

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than the medicalized paradigm of madness is disease that we now largely inhabit,

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even though much known is called Majnu, a term that can be translated as one who is possessed by genes.

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It is Richard that is the state that is most associated with him in order to protect tradition.

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Perhaps because unlike possession where the question of the self itself becomes somewhat moot,

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where it has the sense of an internal condition generated by the trials, by our pillar of love and the injustices of society,

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whether in the neighbourhood of madness is a state that, unlike possession, most people are somewhat familiar with,

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and it is a state which, along with its uncanny and malady, is a state of enormous freedom, artistic and otherwise.

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For example, in these lives, you see an how much you know, to a love letter to New Jersey.

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It's also not that I and you guys a lucky passing by without regard to the rule that I could love, and someone went and said, You know?

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But you knew then what you knew in the frenzy of his wish that there was a strange, still or ignorant one.

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Why should this get this much? Good God, if God needs me, let him become Leola and come to me.

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I heard these lines being sung in Cavalli,

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a song sung in a devotional context recorded in rural Punjab in late 2016 or early 2017 in the state of Ashdod,

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brought about by his separation from his beloved Leola, a trial of the soul inflicted upon him by the unjust social order of his death Majnu,

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and reaches an unprecedented freedom and daring in his communication with God.

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If God wishes to speak to me, he needs to come what he does.

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Leola, the freedom of much springing from his wretched estate to his exile from the social world, his embrace of wilderness and immorality.

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Majnu is often depicted in the tradition, as in this picture, as a semi-naked ascetic at home with the animals in the wild.

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Here in the field of imagination and his embodiment of vision,

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we see an emerging team which can perhaps explain to us the morality of madness as defining of and also is what makes us see

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there's a direct connexion between divine trial invention and kindness frenzy and any malady in the neighbourhood of madness.

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It is a pilot trial which generates the whole the state of frenzy and an malady adjacent to madness.

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This is a state which is not only abject in the larger Islamic tradition,

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but like much news mention also an exalted state of potentiality of radical freedom from social structures and obligations,

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even in one's relation to the divine.

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Reshet and its feelings of savagery, wildness and frenzy are not marginal, but quite central to the Indian Muslim experience today.

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A filmmaker friend of mine recorded a solo theatrical performance with Zeeshan has an actor called Go Pick Up a Thinking Technique,

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which explores the experience of growing up as Muslim with the memory of communal riots

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and curfews that characterised urban Muslim experience in the late 80s and early 90s.

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And then having to live through the ceaseless Islamophobia of public discourse in politics since 2013.

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After witnessing this performance, which I was also present at, she wrote this on her Facebook timeline.

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Watching Zeeshan descend into intricately detailed and almost tactile memories that

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he has not lived or actually doesn't remember was a deeply personal experience.

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The weight of this collective experience weighing us down, slowly cracking us up like dry, arid land.

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In a really morbid manner, this visit feels like homecoming.

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It is reconciling with the darkness we have carried within us long after we have left our homes and the histories,

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we come back to them in search of ourselves. It feels like we can no longer hold on, hold out the veil that has been incubating in our chests.

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It feels like we can no longer forsake that, which we thought was not ours, but the burden of our parents and their parents.

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Every word in that post is an English expression. We're sure that feels like home coming.

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In so many conversations I've had in Delhi in 2018, the public rhetoric and performance of anti-Muslim hate,

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along with more personal and intimate betrayals, has led to a feeling of worship of frenzy needing to violently act out.

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And yet somehow that feeling is contained, internalised just out there.

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And when people speak of what measured and not acting on this mission,

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it is as if they are standing by beside themselves amidst Harun in a state of hatred,

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the window for being able to tolerate all of this and to not explode.

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But the trial by ordeal, which produces the summation this frenzy on the edge of madness is also producing incredible ethical and aesthetic responses.

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New ways of imagining politics and collective life. New modes of speaking the self.

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Drawing on pre-colonial grammars of being and belonging. Reshet has set many Muslims free, for example,

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to bridge the divide between Shia and Sunni that has long divided Muslims in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

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Is this in part because the poetic tradition as a medium of expressing what I call the political

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theology of selfhood makes possible the elaboration and embodiment of a different history of madness?

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And that's the question that I.