DEFRAGMENTING SAULAT AJMAL’S FRAGMENTED MEMORIES
THE VORTEX OF SPINNING IDENTITY AND ISLAMIC CULTURE

A few days back Ms Saulat Ajmal walked in the premises of Chughtai Museum. We were expecting a visit of Ms Orianne Zehrah, and the confusion was natural and got corrected in a short time. I was invited to download her thesis from VCU and I did. Every mind is a complex entity and words are not enough to transfer thoughts. Stray thoughts do sweep in, but correlating them as a whole is impossible. The said lady was born and lived in Lahore and then migrated to New York, and she spins the Identity of each place not as any crisis but as a vortex in the sea, enduring complexity.

The lady stands in a Peters place in New York, performing a rhythm, and nobody notices her actions. If she performs the same in Bhatti Gate, Lahore, the crowd would crash on her. Her purpose to unravel actually leads her to unequal fragments.

To talk of American Identity and Pakistani Identity, or more specific New York Identity with Lahore Identity may be easy but it detracts from an essential truth. In all cultures, human beings react to their environment and the ecological factors determine their nature. I have always spoken in terms of throwing a stone anywhere on Planet Earth, and the stone will acquire the ecological conditions as natural to their own. Human organism being most complex also reacts to same cues. But the Islamic Identity goes far above the distillation process. The Islamic organism is not an empty one, but full of ideas of its own. These ideas are a result of Divine intervention and interpretation. These Divine filters in organism make reaction to environments conditional with acceptance and rejection. For example before the Ten Commandments, those ten forbidden as law were natural to human kind. A simple statement that THOU SHALL NOT STEAL. Certainly stealing was never considered a crime as it happened all the time. THOU SHALL NOT COVET ANOTHER MAN’S WOMAN. Certainly this enticing would certainly be there. Divine role enhanced the organism and it reacted to the environment in a different way than before.

But then DIVINE REVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION gave the organism the possibility of a choice. And then did not fix anything except the basics. Ijthehad was the key to change, to progress, to modernize according to changing times. The tuning of the organism remained perfect, till priesthood added the dilemma of DESTINY to the game. You make your own destiny, but for the priests everything was predetermined.

The Identity of the Human Organism where the same may be evolves and evolves differently in different environments and yet remains the same. The fraternity of humanity. One kind of Identity develops as healer, and with it adds a FRINGE IDENTITY which fragments itself. Defragmenting makes it new, otherwise it carries the weight of multiple identities. Will Saulat Ajmal mix in the pool of a civilization, or will she perish in the advancement of one culture super imposed on another. Only time will tell!