I want to start by thanking Cecil and from love for inviting me and for Claire, for making sure I got here.
And I've learnt so much in this past day and a half.
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.
What does it mean to live in the neighbourhood of madness, to borrow stuff? And also the streets?
Can we understand such proximity as anything other than mental disorder?
Can we imagine ethics existing in such a place? I asked this question after having spent a year intensely hanging out to be methodologically
precise with Muslims in urban north India during the first term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
a period throughout which, through lynching social media means media bullying and state terror.
Indian Muslims are being subjected to racialized othering, humiliation and terror,
stood into them second class citizens and to ensure Hindu upper caste domination of the Indian nation state.
This continues to be the case. What are the mental health effects of exposure to constant harassment, othering and existential threat?
And illustrative anecdote from Sealable, a highly industrialised, densely populated and predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in East Delhi.
As I sat in a friend's unani and old Vedic medicine shop, he showed me a bottle of a syrup called Newton.
The package said it was a cure for insomnia, nose irritability, tension and anxiety neurosis.
Sales have gone up a lot. He said, like, honestly,
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,
including a broken arm.
From conversations with psychiatrists and psychotherapists in Delhi and Lucknow who work with a significant number of Muslim clients,
it is also clear that anxiety disorders have spiked amongst Muslims in those cities.
Yet I also found this to be a time of incredible creativity, especially amongst young Muslims.
The popular revival of Urdu poetry is just one of several incredible aesthetic and ethical potentials that have been activated in the cellar.
Indian Muslims are exploring new ways of imagining politics and collective life, as well as developing new ways of speaking of the self.
I believe these phenomena are not unrelated. The relation between ordeal ordeal, which pushes you to the edge of madness and creativity,
is in fact well elaborated in the Islamic tradition, particularly if you follow the poetic aspects of the tradition.
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.
The vessel carries the connotations of uncovering it, of unkindness of animals, of frenzy and violence.
Urdu poets consider it a state that comes just before madness, general.
Where it is is a hall or a state greatly elaborated in with poetry, as in most of our lives,
which go in any way shape, you see, but almost completely absent from everyday speech except as a negative.
Rachel Vashi there in that frenzied carnival in Urdu poetry, however,
where it is often celebrated as a state of radical freedom, a generative state of potentiality.
The younger the word occupy sobbing in a conversation characterised adjudicating contemporary Urdu poetry.
With these five deeply resonant key words as it were rocks where genuine Junoon desh, the Nevada Sanjeev dance frenzy madness.
Desert wandering binding chains. Which, of course, you find in Bergen, Stuart.
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.
What does it mean for genuine invasion madness in the stage that comes in for
madness to be part of the defining vocabulary of today's will do portraying India,
particularly given that Urdu side is understood by its own practitioners as
the court word for it as us and the room about the newspaper of interiority.
What can the life of Urdu poetry in contemporary India tell us about ethical life at the edge of madness?
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.
The Hancock Casimir Andrea in a small Casbah reserve in town about 30 kilometres outside of Lucknow.
I visited Kasab in April 2018, a child at a sahab has a clean shaven moustache,
and as long as you can see in the picture, a clean shaven moustache and a long white beard.
And I've always seen him in a white kurta pyjama and traditional top.
In other words, is the picture we could see of Islamic orthodoxy, or,
to be more precise, a particular stringency of following the scent of the prophet.
I was there with a dozen or so men and women from Calgary and surrounding areas with ailments and complaints.
He was treating with a mix of firm common sense advice and writing out Koranic Barbies or talismanic amulets.
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.
People must come to you. I said there must be my use despondent, hopeless, desperate.
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.
Look at Syria, he said. He talked about his own experiences of travelling in Iraq,
where the government wouldn't give them permission to travel from Baghdad to Samarra because it was too dangerous,
where despite all precautions, the car was shot at and where someone in the car ahead of theirs in a convoy had died.
And that's why you see despair, he said. You see to carbon, despair is an affliction.
Look out there and look uncle flooded. People come to us and we give them courage.
All of the said it was said while many other of his morning visitors were still sitting in his bed.
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.
We have the present and the future. The present is golden and the future is golden.
And things, he reiterated, are still relatively better in India than in most other places in the world.
He then quoted the point about Jackie must pay him.
But what the [INAUDIBLE] am jihad is in the economy?
And yet Madonna isn't cheating firm conviction, continuous striving, world conquering love in the struggle of life.
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.
I'm a lucky when the heat comes from, we are the servants of God.
He then recited the [INAUDIBLE], which he said was my Jerusalem stand, please. Would seek a judge of religion.
What he Lahiya must have to be will Dilip balky subgroup here the religion.
The Gabriel of madness. Gabriel, in Islamic tradition, is the angel who revealed the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad.
A translation of this year would be, I mean, I've tried to indicate the different senses of mother.
The Gabriel of Madness said to me, the stew is a divine revelation. Religion is just the way of the heart.
All else is going a straight. Zaslav then said the Molby zealous Jabril Amin, coach of religion in Yokohama.
Why has he called the faithful Gabriel as the Archangel is usually referred to in the Islamic tradition, the Gabriel of madness?
But you know, Becky in the hot shots with madness is the extreme limit of love.
He talked then about the Hindus who come regularly to this 200 year old Durga
and who contributed and continue to contribute to its building and maintenance. As I left,
he gave me a newspaper article about the celebration of the Spring Festival at the
shrine and the Krishna devotion that is also tied up to the life of the Durga.
This year stuck with me for several months after the encounter, which I thought I would watch again and again on YouTube,
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.
I would find myself thinking about it at odd moments wrestling with religion when invited to speak in public,
as sometimes happens when your professional identity is that of a professor who teaches at an American university.
I would somehow find myself quoting the shill, as I am doing to all of you. I did this, for instance,
at a joint Shia-Sunni fight or communal fast breaking meal on the rooftop of a hotel in Alderley with a
grand view of the dorms and courtyard of the historically and politically significant gentlemen was.
So the Shia-Sunni if that was held in June 2018 during the month of Ramadan,
in response to a news story that had been given much air by TV channels, think,
as it turns out, in which a stamped handwritten fatwa from the Battle of Melbourne was shown,
which opined that it was not advisable for Sunni Muslims to eat with Shias.
A day or two after the story broke on a Sunday, a joint Shia-Sunni of Kifah had been announced,
organised by a coalition of Muslim journalists and media professionals and Muslim community leaders and social
activists with it was said the tacit approval of the Shi'ite imam of the gentleman was added to the mix because,
after all, he owns the hotel. If that was hosted, many people spoke, including Islam.
The chair of the Delhi Minorities Commission could finally senior journalist and prominent
member of the Illegal Muslim University All-boys Association and run us off we,
a popular historian and cultural blogger. When my turn to speak came at five minutes notice,
I decided to end my brief words with the chair because it felt very much in keeping with the spirit of the gathering,
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.
Most of the rumours be delivered boxes of Gujarati. There were many words of appreciation from the audience, and one person loudly explained.
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.
And but she hasn't seen displayed behind him. Women and men pray together.
So Manilla is a hard place to render into English, as it means something like God is free of any imperfections.
It is not a lightly used exclamation in everyday speech,
usually indicating a high degree of amazement in Musharraf's, for example, word to gatherings.
It is used only for a share of certain excellence and also happiness,
a win which it captures and perhaps gives new meaning to the collective mood of the audience.
Which is to say that the share I had recited had been judged to be appropriate for the moment.
This recognition of openness from an audience deeply invested in Islam and literate in the conventions of Urdu,
poetry suggests to me a particular meaning of genuine on madness, as it is understood within the tradition.
Madness in this meaning is what allows one to break through the boundaries of social and
religious convention and makes possible newness novelty madness can does have a positive value.
This should not be surprising, given the centrality of money in the paradigm, I think the good of the madman,
the Muslim self-expression and the vast majority in political corpus of the Balkans to bring all complex of Muslim societies.
Official government puts it probably the most widely influential and exemplary figure in Islamic
history after the Prophet Muhammad and the imams Ali bin RB Talib and Al Hussein bin Ali,
for what they call the formation of moral cells, is the fictional person of marginal material in the experience of Muslims.
There should be a question mark, there are Hulk and a figure of madness, an exemplar for the formation of mortal selves.
To understand us, we need to place ourselves in a different conception, conceptual history from the one fuko narrates and madness and civilisation,
a history in which madness and madman were institutionally confined in Enlightenment Europe because of the scandal of unreason.
For as Michael Gold points out in his magisterial work on Monday noon, the madman in mediaeval Islamic society,
the madman was by and large accommodated by society so that he was not a pariah, an outcast or a scapegoat.
The social fact points us towards a different set of conceptual approaches to madness
than the medicalized paradigm of madness is disease that we now largely inhabit,
even though much known is called Majnu, a term that can be translated as one who is possessed by genes.
It is Richard that is the state that is most associated with him in order to protect tradition.
Perhaps because unlike possession where the question of the self itself becomes somewhat moot,
where it has the sense of an internal condition generated by the trials, by our pillar of love and the injustices of society,
whether in the neighbourhood of madness is a state that, unlike possession, most people are somewhat familiar with,
and it is a state which, along with its uncanny and malady, is a state of enormous freedom, artistic and otherwise.
For example, in these lives, you see an how much you know, to a love letter to New Jersey.
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?
But you knew then what you knew in the frenzy of his wish that there was a strange, still or ignorant one.
Why should this get this much? Good God, if God needs me, let him become Leola and come to me.
I heard these lines being sung in Cavalli,
a song sung in a devotional context recorded in rural Punjab in late 2016 or early 2017 in the state of Ashdod,
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,
and reaches an unprecedented freedom and daring in his communication with God.
If God wishes to speak to me, he needs to come what he does.
Leola, the freedom of much springing from his wretched estate to his exile from the social world, his embrace of wilderness and immorality.
Majnu is often depicted in the tradition, as in this picture, as a semi-naked ascetic at home with the animals in the wild.
Here in the field of imagination and his embodiment of vision,
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
there's a direct connexion between divine trial invention and kindness frenzy and any malady in the neighbourhood of madness.
It is a pilot trial which generates the whole the state of frenzy and an malady adjacent to madness.
This is a state which is not only abject in the larger Islamic tradition,
but like much news mention also an exalted state of potentiality of radical freedom from social structures and obligations,
even in one's relation to the divine.
Reshet and its feelings of savagery, wildness and frenzy are not marginal, but quite central to the Indian Muslim experience today.
A filmmaker friend of mine recorded a solo theatrical performance with Zeeshan has an actor called Go Pick Up a Thinking Technique,
which explores the experience of growing up as Muslim with the memory of communal riots
and curfews that characterised urban Muslim experience in the late 80s and early 90s.
And then having to live through the ceaseless Islamophobia of public discourse in politics since 2013.
After witnessing this performance, which I was also present at, she wrote this on her Facebook timeline.
Watching Zeeshan descend into intricately detailed and almost tactile memories that
he has not lived or actually doesn't remember was a deeply personal experience.
The weight of this collective experience weighing us down, slowly cracking us up like dry, arid land.
In a really morbid manner, this visit feels like homecoming.
It is reconciling with the darkness we have carried within us long after we have left our homes and the histories,
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.
It feels like we can no longer forsake that, which we thought was not ours, but the burden of our parents and their parents.
Every word in that post is an English expression. We're sure that feels like home coming.
In so many conversations I've had in Delhi in 2018, the public rhetoric and performance of anti-Muslim hate,
along with more personal and intimate betrayals, has led to a feeling of worship of frenzy needing to violently act out.
And yet somehow that feeling is contained, internalised just out there.
And when people speak of what measured and not acting on this mission,
it is as if they are standing by beside themselves amidst Harun in a state of hatred,
the window for being able to tolerate all of this and to not explode.
But the trial by ordeal, which produces the summation this frenzy on the edge of madness is also producing incredible ethical and aesthetic responses.
New ways of imagining politics and collective life. New modes of speaking the self.
Drawing on pre-colonial grammars of being and belonging. Reshet has set many Muslims free, for example,
to bridge the divide between Shia and Sunni that has long divided Muslims in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
Is this in part because the poetic tradition as a medium of expressing what I call the political
theology of selfhood makes possible the elaboration and embodiment of a different history of madness?
And that's the question that I.