Skip to main content

It is the system

Arriving at Jeddah airport is always an experience.

The first thing that strikes you is given that this is the entry point to Mecca and Medina, the most sacred sites in Islam, focus of the Hajj, you might imagine a state of the art facility to enable the pilgrims to pass through with alacrity and a taste of desert hospitality.  Alas, however, the airport is a fading monument to 70s utilitarianism with the systems and facilities to match.

This time the computer system decided to freeze over my eyes. It would not process the picture. I was sent back to wait with no idea how long this process would take. The immigration official was apologetic, shrugging and saying, 'It is the system' as if this explained anything and everything. There was no way to amend, correct or thwart the system. I needed to wait and I did for almost two hours before my dazzling or demonic eyes passed muster and I was waved through, wafted on my way on a wave of further apology.

I was struck by one more example of how we express our dependency on 'the system' as if it were not made by us, out of complex choices, but had materialised fully formed to be both our aid and stricture.

I was reminded of how we talk about the 'market' as if it were a deus ex machina grinding out its results as  they were facts of nature which cannot be contradicted when in reality it is an artefact created by human hands and can (and is) amended, moved and shaped by them.

It was, also, a reminder of how in such situations you are both the 'victim' and an irritant - a sign of failure. The immigration officer (possibly unusually for immigration officials) wanted to be a humane presence and he could not because trapped in 'the system' - made by us but not by him. He was so glad when I went away to sit down, and wait. He was so glad when the system delivered me up so he could see me through.

I had not realised how 'closed' Saudi Arabia is. My charming host at the Islamic Development Bank, a Bosnian, explained that though he could invite his parents to visit, he could not invite his brother (even though he was working for this important global institution initiated by Saudi Arabia).

I do not expect that 'closure' for any society truly serves its purposes - the letter of the law is served but not its spirit - the spirit that blows where its lists- is confined and constrained.

It occurs to me, by analogy, that our tendency to defer to the system, made by human hands interpreting the divine, is another form of dependency that displaces responsibility for finding a renewing vulnerability to the divine's presence.

We need to free to be human - and many systems deny us that.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more