Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

The Mad Philosopher

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The Mad Philosopher

Ghani Khan, also called the Mad Philosopher, was a mystic poet who attacked the strong symbols of status quo and left a legacy for distant prospective referencing. These attacks came at such crossroads in time when the seeds of religious extremism were still being sowed. He saw the future and rang the bells for us of the treacherous and bloody symphony being metered for socio-cultural breakdown. Of all the various diversions from his poetry, the attempts of reclaiming an enlightened society and a tolerable youth outstand as matchless ones in the history of Pashto literature. He was a man from the future and a philosopher who postulated predictive framework for nation building and resplendent social cleansing. Reading Ghani Khan today appears he forecasted the present day decades ago which makes him a futuristic classic from the antiquity. 
The religious hackneyed ideas were the lodged allegories he severely settled accounts with. The use of religion for the sake of cementing together and increasing the social might was rampant back then as much as it is prevalent these days. He was the first modernist to separate them and debated at length in understanding the political and tribal utilization of religion further shaping a social culture and habitat which manipulated the people and the society. The furtherance of religion unto the ends of piling up confusions in the society as regards the outreach to the creator and following the symbolic clergy deities were the center of his satire. His poetry therefore, until today, is discarded by the right wingers as being against the established religious norms and values whereas, through his works he created a grand awakening framework in comprehending the differences of the religion as a belief system and the multimode of its socio-cultural orientations. The socio-religious tradeoffs hyphenated by religion and culture were distinctively uncoupled to peoples expository.  
Religion for him was a matter of pure personal purification which revolved around the pivot of respecting the dignity of man, giving every man the social due he deserved, and social tolerance. The link between the creator and the creature, as extrapolated by him, was in the most intimately direct manner without the need of any intermediaries and arbitrators thereby disbranching the stakeholders who employed religion as means to certain personal, group or other facilitations. The breeding backyard in which his poetry grew teemed with bloody tribal enmities, long term massacres, socio-economic stratification, rise of modernism and the abysmal intensity of social intolerance. At odds with these, his poetry was a rebellion against the established symbols of status quo which had engrossed the society to the roots. 
This came hand in hand with the grand gist of social tolerance and openness to change with respecting the rights of every individual in the society and especially of women. The imageries employed in his poetry testify for his this reach out. The level that a human being could culminate to garnering his utmost potential relied upon in recognizing the rights of all the creatures living in the society with equity and equality. The providence and divine deity exploration began with searching the goodness within ourselves rather than finding for recourses in some other non-concrete and fictional tailored non tangible realizations. The conventional ownership of society through religious controllers was bashed out severely by the Mad Philosopher. His works speak volumes for human’s ability of going beyond the spheres of personal benefits, greed and jealousy. This further crafted his poetry and took it to the spiritual heights. The mystic part which rests in each one of us was autopsied in detail by him.
Literature is the physician of the society whose hand is always on the latter’s pulse. The literary representation and cleansing of the society is hatched in the deep richness of poets. Literature is universal and it cannot be restricted to language barriers and has a universal generalization and product value which attends and resolves the fundamental human issues of existence, co-existence and perpetual-existence. The relics of Ghani Khan’s works call for a society where everyone adds his constructive part and the mutual restitution of ideas and co-existence evolves. This could further orient a society which would be basing on social respect of each other not divisive on the religious and cultural stratifications and one independent of extremist approaches, means and methods. The scheme for adaptability for conceiving and accepting social change grants the society the agility to condense into healthy evolution. A society based on intolerance is pushed to intellectual suffocation where dissent of opinion is decided through bullets than ballots. The extremism in the society reaches to an inexcusable level where the first of all the things which is lost to nullity is the dignity of man followed by all other negative social fall outs. The messages of poets like Ghani Khan and the chest full of gems alike have to be spread out in missionary fathoms and fashions.

Muhammad Jahangir Kakar is Civil Servant based in Quetta, Balochistan. He could be reached at Jahangeer.kakar@gmail.com

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