Hope Podcast: Featuring Jamail Khan, MTS '24
In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from Jamail Khan, a second-year MTS student at HDS. We discuss the importance of religious community for spiritual growth and the power of love and beauty in the face of hopelessness.
RILEY BROWN: Welcome to the Hope Podcast, a show about Harvard Divinity School students and how they find hope in difficult times. My name is Riley Brown, and I am a second year masters of Divinity candidate, a chaplain intern in the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life here at HDS, and I will be the host of today's conversation. I am joined by Jamal Khan, a second year MTS student who is graduating this spring, and he's made enough time to sit down here and have a conversation with me. So, Jamal, thank you and welcome to the show.
JAMAL KHAN: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It's an honor.
RILEY BROWN: Yeah, it's my honor to have you here.
JAMAL KHAN: No. Shut it.
RILEY BROWN: I want to begin with having you introduce yourself a little bit to our audience. Where are you from? Do you belong or follow a religious tradition? Do you not? Just kind of by way of introduction.
JAMAL KHAN: Sure. So I'm Jamal, as Riley said, a second year MTS. I am studying Islamic studies, and within that Islamic philosophy, Sufism, and literature, Persian and Urdu literature. I was born and raised in Pakistan, and I moved to a small town right outside of Philadelphia when I was 14, and I've been here since. And yeah, I do belong to the Islamic tradition. Practice regularly, and yeah, I was in undergrad studying religion, philosophy and literature. Took a gap year and then I came here.
RILEY BROWN: Very good. Very cool. Could you give us then a brief spiritual autobiography, how the role, your tradition-- the role that your tradition has played in your life, and how you have understood yourself relative to Islam?
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. Spiritual autobiography. So there was a big shift, I think, in my spiritual life that really anchored my decision to study religion, and that was-- I mean, I was born and raised a Muslim in a Muslim family. But a few years back in 2018 is when I met my spiritual master, my bead, as it is called in the Sufi tradition, Sheikh Raheem Mohammed Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who is a Sufi Saint from Jaffna, Sri Lanka.
And he came to the United States in 1971, and formed a fellowship, and was spreading what we normally call Sufi Islam, that's what it's known as. I'm mentioning that because the term Sufi kind of-- they're people who are often within the tradition, they don't like to take on that label because Sufism as a spiritual tradition is very suspicious of labels. But anyway, he was a Sufi master, and I came across him.
So he passed in 86 and he's buried in Philadelphia, in the outskirts, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. And so I came across him in 2018, and that really transformed me or reformed my spirituality. It opened up this entire new dimension of Islam that was kind of in the back of my head because in Pakistan, the culture is really influenced by Sufism, but I hadn't come into direct contact with its practices. And so here, I kind of came into direct contact with practices and with a community, and that's-- I was a sophomore in school at that time, discerning what I would declare my major to be because I studied the humanities.
I mean, there really was no discipline that I had left unexplored, but I didn't-- when it came to declaring a major, I didn't know where I was going, so I decided to go into religion and philosophy, and that is ultimately what brought me to HDS as well, and that's what sort of predominantly constitutes my spiritual practices today. Yeah.
RILEY BROWN: Very interesting. So I'm curious, you discovered this Sufi Saint through his writings, I'm assuming because you said he died in '86?
JAMAL KHAN: Yes, but also through the community. So there's a big community, and a lot of people in this community are his what my dad calls his first-generation followers in America. So I'm kind of his second generation like disciple. And with those people, I mean, Bawa lived, ate, breathed. He was there, so they lived with him. So it was both through his writings, but also a great deal from stories of people and hearing about anecdotes and things that Bawa gave to them as teachings, and things like this.
RILEY BROWN: Yeah, that's super interesting because I've never-- in my own tradition, I don't know. I mean, I think that might happen some. But to have the community aspect, not just solely discovering someone through their writings, but discovering someone through other people is so interesting and so cool because I'm sure it's no wonder it's such a deep connection you felt to him through this--
JAMAL KHAN: 100%. 100%. I think if it was purely through text versus through text and through a living community, it makes all the difference. It makes all the difference. I mean, both the saint and his teachings become so much more real and embodied.
RILEY BROWN: It's not just this abstract philosophy or something.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. The other thing is that, I think, if-- since freshman year of college, I kind of developed this really strong academic bent in my personality. And I think if I had encountered him simply through text, he would be tainted by that academic--
RILEY BROWN: That's such a good point.
JAMAL KHAN: --yeah, kind of way of approaching things and this kind of intellectualism. And so meeting him through the text as well as through the community kind of tamed that, put that in check. I'm not saying that's all bad. It's really good. You can do excellent. You can have excellent insights through intellectual reflection and the tools that you cultivate in academia, but when it comes to the domain of spirituality, it can be terribly limiting.
RILEY BROWN: It can be a burden.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah, it can be a burden. Exactly. Yeah.
RILEY BROWN: So I'm curious, you talk about this spiritual renewal or this something that happened to you and when you were in high school. Do you feel like-- because I feel a lot of people at HDS, or at least people like me, like Christians in the West, growing up in a predominantly Christian culture, and you said you grew up in Pakistan in a predominantly Muslim culture, and you come here. And what that experience was like combined also with do you feel as though coming to America where Islam is not a dominant religion, how that affected your Islam, and how that eventually affected your spiritual renewal?
JAMAL KHAN: Right. Yeah, so one thing, I think-- so in my particular journey, my academic journey is really intricately and deeply tied to this spiritual journey, and I'll tell you why. When I started studying in college my freshman year, I was part of this interdisciplinary program, this interdisciplinary academic program called the Honors Liberal Arts Program, in which we were studying art, history, sociology, philosophy, literature, and a class called interdisciplinary socratic seminar, and we were all studying this together.
So it was taught by a team of 10 professors who were from all these different departments. I was part of this program, and this program was really concerned with the question of how is knowledge created? And it was really pushing us very hard to engage in that act, and really reflect on interdisciplinarity of thought, and as such, it was the focus was really not on production.
So we would read 10 pages for a class, and we would debate one passage. 20 students in a class, one passage, and a professor for an hour. So this kind of really intellectual, rigorous training. One of the topics in the domain of which we did was religion, and that was a very disillusioning experience for me.
I mean, I was on-- really on the edge of faith. It made me question, I mean, everything about religion, my background, my childhood, and in Pakistan, the way that I had been raised, the things that I had been told to believe, and all of these things. And looking back, it was very much exacerbated by the fact that there was no community, or there was very little community. I mean, religion really was not in the atmosphere, so it wasn't being socially or psychologically reinforced like it was back in Pakistan.
So things are-- religiosity was something that was much easily dispensable here. And on top of that, when you add all that intellectual work that you're doing, that living, breathing mind that you have that's constantly being pushed, it's much easier to dispose of religiosity. And that was an experience that was really happening, and it was deeply existential. I mean, it really shook my core.
But when I met Bawa, my teacher, that was-- I mean, it was a very radical like-- in no way was it like a reverting because it was not a reverting. If anything, I mean, it pushed what I was being trained to think, or how I was being trained to the edge. It pushed it even further, but it really showed me a previously unexplored dimension of religion.
Before I had met him, I was kind of in conversation with mysticism in various traditions and mystical thought, but, again, I hadn't seen an embodied. So that really gave me a new orientation, and it gave me not just a new orientation in terms of a mental outlook or a spiritual outlook, but also, again, the community. So both things that I was missing, it kind of brought those two together. I don't know if that answers the question.
RILEY BROWN: I think it does. Yeah, so you were kind of teed up perfectly to discover your master, your teacher, your Bawa.
JAMAL KHAN: Bawa. Yeah.
RILEY BROWN: I think it's so important that communal aspect that you talk about because I relate to it so much, this lack of community, especially like where I grew up, it's so in the air. When religion is so dispersed you can almost lose community in it because it's just the air you breathe, and it doesn't-- so I relate to that, and that's a very cool story that you were kind of teed up perfectly for discovering this community.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. Really everything, it's all-- I mean, these are all things that happen by the grace of God, and there's no real, rational explanation for it. You can look back and give it the form of a story, and I think that we all do that because we can't not do that. Stories, I mean, a narrative, a story is really something that we need to maintain our sanity. But if you really start to parse things up like, how did one thing lead to another? And what's the meaning in all of it?
I mean, it's really hard to come up with a rational account, but what I can say is that, yeah, the mind, the heart, the soul, and the community, it was really set up perfectly for me to meet Bawa.
RILEY BROWN: Totally embodied.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. 100%.
RILEY BROWN: Yeah. Cool OK, so the central theme of this podcast is hope. But before we talk explicitly about what gives you hope, I was curious if you could talk about what I would call vehicles for hope or something that Carrie has told me, or a kind of illustration is that if hope is a seed, what are the tools that you're using to cultivate the soil that you plant it in? So this can be anything from insights or practices that you engage in regularly that give you strength.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. So this is a very funny question to ask to someone who is of a poetic disposition because I feel like poetry is really something that problematizes, at least, mainstream or cliched notions of hope, but--
RILEY BROWN: How does it do that then?
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah, so I'm a very avid reader, student, lover of Urdu poetry. And the way that I can-- if I can dare to talk about the element of hope in the Urdu poetic tradition, the idea is that existence by itself is a hopeless thing because we have all we are in a constant state of separation from our creator, and that is a very inherently hopeless thing.
But I think the predominant-- there's all kinds of subversions, but the predominant traditional view is that if there is a point of hope, if there is a source of hope in this state of existential hopelessness, it's love. So its love is the-- giving your life to love and the path of love, that is the point of hope is that relationship between the lover, and the beloved, and the dedication of a lover to his beloved.
Now, beloved, oftentimes we were here lover and beloved, and they think, oh, boyfriend and girlfriend, or guy and girl, or human beings, but that's not-- I mean, that's yeah, sure. I think that's the most primary thing, and it's important that we start there, but lover and beloved goes far beyond that. Your beloved can be anything. Your beloved is a point of devotion, is a receiver of devotion.
And I think this is something that gives me hope as well, is that at the end of the day, I mean, the tools for me-- to go back to the question, what are the tools that you use to cultivate the soil out of which-- in which the seed of hope is, or out of which the plant of hope emerges? The tools for me are really, I mean, remembrance, what we call zicker in the Islamic tradition. It just means remembrance.
Remembrance of God and Sufi masters, they give their disciples, they all give their disciples particulars, particular zika's. And they often are made up of names of God, and various other, if I can call them formulas in Arabic or recitation, pieces of recitations, so it's that because that is a very potent method, method of cleansing. Cleansing yourself, so that's huge.
And in general, I think, the other thing would be any and everything that beautifies life, I think, is for me very essential to how I cultivate hope and have hope. And within that, for me, poetry is huge, as I said, and music. These two things, I mean, I couldn't live without them. Anything that brings out that beauty that, I mean, it's pervading the universe. It's in you. It's in me. It's in this microphone. I mean, it's in our sounds. It's everywhere, so anything that works to bring that out.
And that act of bringing out, I don't think we talk enough about the importance of that because we are-- I mean, we are constantly being polluted by the viles of this world, and all kinds of bad things, and pollutants, and we are constantly-- our ears, our senses, our spirits, our hearts, our souls we are constantly being polluted. And so the act of bringing that out, of bringing beauty out, and showing. In other words, the job of an artist, whatever kind of artist you are.
It's so important because to that polluted ear, or to that polluted eye, it makes it fresh again. It's like it's an act of cleansing. It's an act of washing away that pollution and being like, here, see this. Do you see this? Do you hear this?
RILEY BROWN: It's like a way to retrain the eye to be able to see?
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. So anyone who's doing that, I'm gravitated toward. Anything that's doing that, I'm gravitated toward.
RILEY BROWN: OK. And you would say because you talk about this element of Urdu poetry. This pervasive kind of hopelessness, but that the path of love is where one finds hope. And would you say that each of these both not only gives you hope, but also helps you to stay strong on the path of love?
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah, I mean, that is something that's the path of love. I mean, it's useless to talk about it because it's all about doing it. It's all about-- it's funny talking about it on a podcast, but yeah. I think there is something about love, whatever experience of love that may be. Human, non-human, or whatever, is that it paradoxically-- the effect that it has on you is that paradoxically it makes you stop asking the question that you have just asked me because you're so immersed in the thing itself.
It's kind of like people often-- there's a very-- if I may say, stupid or useless question in philosophy. What is the meaning of life? I mean, I think it is just like it's an absurd question, but that's just-- we can talk about why that's an absurd question, but the point that I'm trying to make is, when you were a child, just blissed out in the playground or just so immersed in life, I mean, were you asking yourself that question? Or even as an adult, when you're completely blissed out, when you're living life to its fullest, does that question concern you? No, it doesn't. It doesn't concern you because you are so taken up with the joy, the beauty of life that it doesn't concern you, so it eats up that question.
And in that same way, the experience of love, I think, eats up that question what you are asking me. And so, I think, that is-- and that I think is ultimate hope.
RILEY BROWN: It eats up that hopeless. It eats up the hopelessness that you describe. The love overshadows it almost.
JAMAL KHAN: Right. Is that when you-- it's funny. When you are in that experience, when you're in lost in the song, or lost in the verse, these questions of existential reality kind of deconstruct themselves. They vanish. They disappear out of the sight. And it's only when we come out of it, when those questions start concerning us.
So the proof of that hope being real for you, the question of being meaningful-- the question of meaning being having any valence is the disappearance of it. When it disappears, that's when you know like it's happening, and it's only when you come out of it then you reflect, and you're like, oh, wow, that was the moment what I was seeking.
RILEY BROWN: Would you say that in these experiences you also lose yourself in a way too? The eye becomes less important, or do you maintain the sense of eye?
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. I mean, that I think really depends on the intensity of experiences that you have.
RILEY BROWN: But it's not a necessity? That does not-- that's not a precursor to have the experience?
JAMAL KHAN: Well, it often it comes unannounced. So you can't say like today, I will do this, and then you do it. So it comes unannounced, but Yes, I think, it's a marker. It's a marker of, yeah, this experience is really taking me in, or this is a real experience of the fullness of life, and really the embodied beauty and the grandeur of life.
And yeah, I mean, I think the greatest experience-- I'm only going to-- I can only talk about my own experience. The greatest experiences of ecstasy are when you for a second forget yourself, you give yourself fully to that experience, whatever that experience may be.
RILEY BROWN: I would say that's true for myself as well.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah.
RILEY BROWN: Wow. Well, thank you so much for sharing. There's so much wisdom, and yeah, just to be gleaned from all of that, both from the kind of importance of the community that you were talking about, which is so I'm fascinated by that and jealous that you have such a great community.
JAMAL KHAN: You're welcome to join anytime you like.
RILEY BROWN: But also this the idea that love eclipsing this hopelessness. Yeah, there's so much there. But before I let you go, I wanted to ask if you had any parting wisdom by way of a recommendation. Is there a practice, podcast, book, movie, or whatever else you might recommend to listeners who need a little hope?
JAMAL KHAN: Oh, man, that's a heavy-- well, first of all, I don't have any wisdom to offer. I have no wisdom to offer.
RILEY BROWN: I don't know about that.
JAMAL KHAN: A text, OK. Really, what came to mind right away was this book by my guru Bawa called The Choice, and you can find it on bmf.org or if you look up Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship Philadelphia. You can find it on their website. It's been a really transformative work for me because it gave me a lot of clarity. and it's I feel like we read too many texts that give you this superficial sense of reality, positivity, be positive.
Yeah. Well and great, but there's something deeper than that. I can't just say I'm going to be positive today and just be positive. There's cultivation. A lot of cultivation goes into that.
RILEY BROWN: It's the way you cultivate beauty.
JAMAL KHAN: And then you arrive at that thing that we were calling positivity or whatever have you. So this was a text that doesn't do that kind of superficial hope selling. It really is focused on giving you like cosmogonic vision, a cosmogonic vision of reality, and making you really understand the place of the human being.
And it's really like, yes, he's a Sufi master, but I mean, I think, a Hindu can read it and get out of it just as much as a Sufi Muslim, or one of the disciples of Bawa. So doctrinaire,--
RILEY BROWN: Doctrinal?
JAMAL KHAN: Doctrinairianism, is that a word? Yeah, it's not--
RILEY BROWN: It is now.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah. I mean, it's really not doctrinal and it's really not-- the purpose of it is really not to indoctrinate you and be like, this is a correct belief or correct faith or anything like that. It really rises to a level of wisdom where I think all of humanity can really benefit from it, so that comes to mind right away. And yeah, the other thing I would just say is if you have not explored Urdu poetry, there's a good amount of it that's been translated.
I would really recommend reading Urdu poetry. Ghalib is a really good place to start, G-H-A-L-I-B, the poetry of Ghalib. He's one of the greatest Urdu poets. He's in 18th century North India. And disclaimer, there's going to be a lot of hopelessness, but it's you have to look deeper, and--
RILEY BROWN: You got to dig deep.
JAMAL KHAN: You got to dig deep. And again, he's really-- he really embodies the essence of beautifying things, and bringing out really deep and profound points of human existence, so those two things come to mind right away.
RILEY BROWN: Awesome. Well, that's it. Thank you so much for joining me.
JAMAL KHAN: Thank you for having me.
RILEY BROWN: Yeah.
JAMAL KHAN: Thank you. All right.
RILEY BROWN: That's it. And the lights never went off.
JAMAL KHAN: Yeah, the night-- yeah, dude, that's dope.
RILEY BROWN: That was great.