Al Gromer Khan
- A letter to Yusuf Islam -

Dear Yusuf,

one feels drawn to old souls whose smile contains something familiar, persons with certain preferences: rose oil from old flasks, or certain sounds..., and the sky on "open sky days" -

One tries to make spiritual sense of the extraordinary cultural setting one finds oneself in.
One draws inspiration from the East - ah, but the East is more than ready to sell out.

One is emotionally attached to certain periods of artistic and spiritual expression in Islam -
intoxicated by the intricasies of design, the colour shades of Moroccan and Persian tiles.

One is irresistibly drawn to the sufis - the heretics of Islam.
One longs for the inner heart to
start rejoicing and giggling gayly from the sound behind the sound of Al-hamdulillah

One wonders why four male family members of the Prophet: Ali, Hussain, Omar and Othman - correct me if I am mistaken - where slain by other family members in bloodthirsty wars for successorship.
And one doesn´t want anything to do with the sacrificial slaughterings of innocent animals, circumcision, kebab sticks through navels and vidio cameras as rear view mirrors...

Since you were famous it was not difficult for me to follow - on the outside - more or less what you did in the thirty-odd years since we last met.
There was never any envy on my part. I believe that being a pop star is curse rather than a blessing - I mean when there is no one around to criticise you...

What did I do in the last thirty years? At a certain point one has stopped looking for solutions in the outside world,
begun to shed baggage, begun to move things onto a smaller scale, begun to rely on small rituals and practice.
In Music I did lenghty, careful and extended research in order to translate to a more subtle, more exquisite plane.
The formula I found consists of fragments of trance-states
that I found in Indian music which I then tried to put into a contemporary and futuristic context.

As far es religion is concerned, it was the Will of Allah that - as institutions - the great religions of the world are
past their best use before dates.
It has always been the task of those with their intuition intact to cut through traditions in order to get to the truth.
One tried to set a spiritual reality against the mercyless materialism of today - a spiritual reality that took into account the total love of God that was called for by the sufis - and one tried not to feel like a total hypocrite.

The first thing they ask you when visiting an ancient mosque,
or one the the dargahs of famous Muslim holy men in India:
"Are you a Muslim?"
You are not asked:
"Are you irresistibly drawn to the God-Intoxicated?"
No, they usually ask you:
"Are you a Muslim?"

What does this mean?

The idea of confirmation through membership - the confirmation
of religious reality through sheer amounts of members -
rings out and resounds.
This has annoyed me everytime I was confronted with it in all kinds of religious societies and sects in India and elswhere.
If they can´t win you over and recruit you, if your refuse to confirm their style of worship, their rituals and customs,
they lose interest in you.

I have always reacted sensitively
when I was treated as a "member" rather than an individual,
even when subsequently certain social favours were denied me.
I even reacted sensitively when my Jewish friends extended social preference over me to persons because they were Jewish,
not because they were necessarily nicer persons than me...

The great sufi saints, the masts, the majoobs
make this kind of distinction look hilarious.
Political power - this I have learned - comes from the ability do adapt. Only young souls can do that.
Therefore, first sufis - say about 1200 years ago - were rebels:
Islam had become bureaucratic and profane in their eyes...
Their objective: to lend spiritual meaning to religion again.
But their quest did not necessarely consist of travelling far,
joining the right brotherhood, attending discourses or embracing a new religion without being ready to reprogram
the Beholder in the first place.

Should the Beholder, on the other hand, undergo even a slight change, then Beauty would reveal Itself automatically,
making "membership" with another faith unnecessary.

It took me many years to realize that the moment
you start changing circumstances rather than yourself,
religion turns into the opposite,
that, to me, is the true meaning of satan.

What do I mean by circumstance? Certainly everything to do with tribes, traditions and religious circles.
Nowadays, it appears, joining another faith,
however ancient, however lofty, on a society level,
seems rather inconductive to ones spiritual forthcoming.

In Istanbul they proudly announced:
"Last week the famous pop star Cat Stevens was here
and chanted at the Blue Mosque".
The same I heard from people who´d been to Baghdad,
or Cairo, or Fez.
"We are extremely proud to be Muslims, when even famous pop stars embrace our religion..."
Where does "proud" come into it?

Anyway the great religions of the world -
including Buddhism, yes, Buddhism! -
have had up to 2000 years to prove
that they are always good for a bout of bloodshed,
war und every kind of
perversion and cruelty.
Of which male circumcision, which I personally regard as one of the more ridiculous ones, is probably one of the more harmless.
would say that all traditions have outmoded themselves properly as useless for the requirements of the spirit.

What I never understood about Islam
is that everybody seems to be judged by the same standards,
that everyone seems to have only one chance,
and on judgement day you get rewarded or punished.
But people of different dispositions have different capacities,
different people have come to this world with different tasks,
to make different kinds of experiences, learn different lessons.

Some of us need to dive into illusion to a more or less greater degree in order for their longing for God to become so intense
as to develop a strong wish to turn around
and make their way back to the Source.
Only then the love of Allah which the sufis talk about will be based on genuine feelings and not of the tribal nonsense
that I seem to find everywhere.

Only once these genuine feelings are established the intense,
yet humble poetry of longing will somehow guide them
while transcending traditions and conventions,
culture, colour of skin and other kinds of outer differences.
And once the persons intuitive mind has been sharpened enough
one can speak to God directly -
not necessarily in Arabic
(God is intelligent enough to understand any language).

Everybody blames religion for all the bloody wars
that have been and are still going on -
but, you see, it is not religion at all that is the problem:
It is that tribal "us and them"-nonsense that causes it.
And I am very sorry to say that,
although you are now pronouncing peace
and brotherhood of men in public again,
it all starts when you start
dressing differently (turban etc.)
to accentuate your membership with another tribe
instead of worshipping God directly and discreetly in private.

I can´t see why anyone should embrace another faith -
on the Shariat-level -
except to participate in politics,
for that is what religion on that level is about.
I know these are harsh words,
but that is the way I see it.

So, what to do?
After all these years should I be telling you
such cruel words after you drove me all the way to Croydon in your white Mercedes convertible, in order to pick up my hippie sitar,
on a Tuesday afternoon in early spring 1970...

Anyway, when thinking of the great saints of India,
like Jhipra Baba of Nasirabad, Meher Baba, Swami Samarth,
Nityananda of Ganeshpuri, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Nizam-ud-din Auliya
(the latter a vegetarian who bought fish in the market
and released them in the pond),
one never begins to think of their respective original religion?
How many of these giants of spirituality, would you say, were Muslims? Does it matter?
I don´t think so.

Have any great mystics or God-mad poets come out of Islam
in the last fifty years or so, or only these Kalashnikov-Wallahs?
We don´t know. Genuine saints are slow news.
But what about environmental issues,
overpopulation of the planet,
cruelty to animals, in Islam?
Where is the passionate outcry in the Islamic community
when it comes to the sellout of Allah`s creation
in genetic engineering?

Circumcision and mutton kebab are part of the tradition,
because when you lived in the desert at the time of
Prophet Mohammad, sand may have got under your foreskin
and cause an irritation, also in the desert there grew no fruit and vegetables, so when food became scarce their animals had to be slaughtered to keep people from starving.
So far so good.

But does this mean we should eat the meat of goat and cow today when every other food is available,
just because it is written somewhere - (in the Hadith?).

Besides, my extended research has shown that animal protein as food has a disastrous effect on the human psyche (worse than alcohol even); to be precise it promotes identification with the outer mind and identification with tribe, nation and race, apart from causing inferiority complexes and all kinds of physical disorders.

And then there is this obsession with money
almost as bad as in the USA.
My friend Abdullah, carpet merchant in Istanbul who has his sufi wisdom ready:
"You should have money in your pocket, not in your heart".
Absolutely.

But that was when the "Sufi" inside me spoke:
Those who have money in their pockets
usually have it in their hearts as well...
But I didn´t tell him that.

Moin-ud-din Chishti, one of the greatest sufis of India, said that
"The God-illumined man is an enemy
of the world and a friend of Allah".
A God-given truth tends to appear long-winded,
irrational, awkward and often vague to one
working with the outer mind.
And those who think that sufism consists of dances
in weekend seminars should be reminded
that goals in religion are infinitely more difficult to realize than intellectual or career-oriented ones.

But just to annoy Frau Professor Schimmel (Harvard and Bonn)
who sadly passed away a few days ago
(peace be upon her soul),
let me pronounce sufism a state of being
rather than a traditional phenomenon of Islam.

Personally I like all things fastidious and irrational in religion.

"...doing the work of God and make things better for Him"
someone once sang out in glorious rebellion:
a woollen coat and an Arabic name
does not make you a better person.

Please don´t get me wrong.
I sincerely believe that Muslims all over the world are getting a bad
deal in the material, the political world
and I am heartbroken by this.
But when the soul becomes older it starts out on a painful journey back to The Source.
This has happened to many persons
that I personally hold in high regard.
This appears to be happening to Islam now on a very large scale. Mecca, as it were, is being translated via a painful operation from a geographical place to a place
in the biology of the human body of the individual:
Mecca is in your heart.

I am interested in those persons who have realized that -
God works through them in mysterious ways.
Everything such a person does
is somehow interesting and beautiful.
Besides that,
God provides in every age a different,
new and adequat path for the soul,
while the previous path are led mercylessly into oblivion,
just like young people find their own style
and ignore their elders way ruthlessly.

Islams amazing cultural and spiritual greatness is unquestioned -
but the Alewids, the Saffawids, the Mughals, the Othmans have gone and with them the sultans, the Kalifs, the Khan-Sahibs and the sufis who are so dear to ones heart.
One particular instance:
Vilayat Khan, the sitarplayer who happens to be still alive,
but there is no one left to appreciate the finer points of his art.
I often think what mankind has produced in terms of science, technology and art is incredible,
but nothing compares - for me - to the music of Vilayat Khan -
it is another dimension,
it makes every-thing
appear in a different colour.

And God´s creation - in terms of art - is the amazing thing.
Take the colours, for example:
how He organized everything:
red for blood, grey for semen, blue for the sky,
green for the plants, brown for earth, white for snow,
and transparent-clear for the water -
how intelligent, how beautiful,
the Great Common Denominator of Beauty, Power and Intelligence.

Aha! And the politicians, the scientists and the merchants are busy fucking it up day by day.
I am that idiot who feels that every motorcar
that starts up its engine
insults and poisons
the delicate biology of the atmosphere.

My life has not been very easy either.
I have practiced Indian music every day in the last 32 years,
except when travelling or when I was ill.
After twenty years or so my music began to make sense
and it helped putting me in a different state.
Imrat Khan, who was my sitar teacher,
taught me a very important lesson:
He uttered Subhana Allah
whenever he experienced something very satisfying
or uplifting (often his lunch).
But somehow that was a lesson I never forgot:
There seemed to be nothing beyond Subhana Allah
to perceive, nothing more to look for in tradition and Shariat,
nothing in discourses, mosques or geographical places.

Some question the existence of God - they are children.
Some question their own mind and try to improve it
by different means. Some realize that we are here to make experiences and to learn lessons -
often painful ones.
Extremely few -
say, one in twenty million -
realize that we are here for only one purpose:
to worship.
And that is only step one,
where one begins to see one´s own stupidity.
Then worship seizes to be for a purpose -
it becomes the purpose.
But here the work has not even begun.
God bless you, my friend.

Salaam!

AGK


^^^