"Have you taken leave of your senses?" asked the Mad Hatter of a bewildered and bewildering Alice just back from a journey to the land of the Cymorgh. "No," she replied, " My senses have taken leave of me."

The events that are shaping the world on the eve of the millenium are unfolding against a cultural Angst of an unprecedented scale. No layer of the modern consciousness is immune to the refractions of an anguished culture. Just as no corner of the globe can be taken as a 'safe haven' from the ravages of the new world dysorder. Estrangement is the order of the times and perversion sets the tone for its precepts and practices. Alongside the search for new alignments in the regional and global economies, a pervasive search for identity occupies individuals and communities at all levels, setting the pace for an anguished ecology of the soul as Zeitgeist. In the psycho-dynamics or the 'psychedelics' of the nineties, the fragility of both the human psyche and moral matrix engendering the global order is exposed. We shall take this psychedelic beyond its youthful and somewhat parochial provenance in the drug culture of the Western world of the sixties to bring it down to the phenomenal resurfacing of the fractured consciousness of a lost generation in the present global megapolis. This generation is not confined to any particular historical or conventional culture, 'ethnically', gender-wise, or as an age-group. It owes its pedigree to the disorienting and homogenizing culture of modernity that has effaced distinctions of a 'generic' kind and recreated the world in the fractural and enlightened images of a virtual reality. Its consciousness is the embodiment of a disenfranchised globality.

It is not just physical distances that are now collapsed into a new time frame, but the chain of human evolution itself has been sundered and rendered obsolete with the swift succession from baboons to bionics, through anthropoids and robotics. The memory of a primordial man atrophies in the backyard of an avantgarde feminist anthropology diligently excavating the classic sites of bygone androgynous beings and surfing the cybernet in search of their new age incarnations in the super-wired nerds. In the old imagination it was the blurring distinctions between science and fiction that made possible the perfection of a brave new world finely tuned to the technologies in which it was conceived. In the new imagination, the receding margins of a conventional rationality are erasing with them the threadbare lines of a conventional morality and undermining the foundations for any imaginable human order. In the very process of its shaping, the global order is perpetually on the brink of dissolution, torn between the virtual horizons of untold opportunity and the crushing realities of foreclosed options.

To the contingents of rational enthusiasts and calculating optimists who had bartered away their souls in a Faustian bid for a future that was perceived to constitute their culture, their identity, and their heritage the outcome of this rift between promise and delusion was anguish. There are no bounds to anguish. The reason that founds and grounds the critical consciousness is ultimately a reason that also bounds and binds. The disembodied consciousness engendered by the derailment of a global project once tenaciously, albeit so vicariously internalised to modulate a psyche, must now vent its frustrations and give rein to its boundless anguish through a medium which transcends reason. This medium is sought and found in the nederworld of the imagination. The realm of the imagination knows no bounds. It is a fit realm for expressing all kinds of frustrations; in its own exuberant mode and furnishings, it affords fair vent to all kinds of experiential excess and excesses experienced, even though the way we experience our world is often the function of the culture we imbibe.

Imagination offers a realm that is as tolerant and hospitable to all types of culture and can be as varied and variable as the culture it sustains. the ultimate refuge and abode to all states of mind. Just as cultures vary and states of mind fluctuate from one mood to another, as from one personality type to another and one culture-type to the next, so too not all imaginings are the same. There is the imagination of happier times and climes which expressed the soaring flights of a spirited "winged fancy" such as those which have given the world some of the most beautiful poetry both in the East and the West. The poetry of Rabe'a al adawiya, Jalaluddin Rumi, Fariduddin al Attar, Saadi and closer to our century, Muhammad Iqbal are testimonies to the kind of cosmic plenitude and infinite bliss experienced in this type of imagination. Just as the landscape of the western imagination is variably dotted down the centuries with its saints and mystics of the Hildegard von Bingen and the Francis Assisi variety through the alternating sobrieties and romantic flights of the 17th and 19th century masters until another breed of imaginings comes to take over. This happens at an epochal turn in the European Mind where the imagination succumbs to the Nietzschean temptation and thenceforth is condemned to the futility of a cosmic void of its own making. From then on we encounter the variants of a stalled imagination, Kafkaesque, Promethean, Oedipul, Sysiphean and the welter of heroic existentialisms. The "Distorted Imagination" is one such variant in the modern fractured consciousness. it is symptomatic of the perversion and pervasiveness of the secular culture of modernity; it is also an important landmark in its globalizing trajectory.

"The Satanic Verses" carries the dubious merit of being the primer for initiating the Muslim mind into the dark crevices and murky fjords of the underworld of the distorted imagination. Its author may have simply overplayed his hand at a game others have played before and since. It is a game that sustains a fascination with the occult and is currently practised with relative impunity in the guise of professional hybrids of sociology, psychology, semiotic anthropologies and new age theologies. While it has had its loyal adepts and practitioners in the Arabic speaking Muslim world of literary representation since the early fifties whether in the form of the play, the short story, or the novel, its most consummate players at present would seem to come from the rank of leading Muslim feminists. Speculating on the natural affinities of a Muslim feminist consciousness for things devilish wicked would have pricked the vulnerable ego of the hypertensed feminine in every Muslim woman. In fact, those who have been irrevocably branded for their blatant mysogynism have built their reputations on such travesties. However, matters are not always as they might appear, for it is a feminist's privilege to change tactics as often as she might change her mind. ( Notwithstanding the overtones of a conventional piece of (patriarchal?) wisdom). It is not what is said about the female estate that counts, as much as who says it, how it is said, and in what context. Feminist discourse started out by being a discourse on mode and intent rather than content and substance. It was a discourse conceived at the burning stake of perceived oppressions and ubiquitous gendered injustice, and its prime concern for the purity of the struggle was to ensure a certain tone and posture: the anger and the defiance, the rage and the revolt. Everything else was peripheral and bore bargaining and negotiating and even a rethinking that went beyond semiotics. As long as the battle continued, its adepts could work out their agendas as they redeployed their platoons. Muslim feminists were no different. Even if they went so far as to reappropriate the devil and recruit him for their cause.

This is what one of the latest avant garde novels Gannat wa Iblis is about. The Innocence of the Devil , as its English version goes, inscribes a new theological space in the secular feminist imagination. In fact, compared to other works by the same author, in its essential plot and literary stratagems, it can hardly be considered new; its originality lies more in its affinity with an analogous tradition or genre in the Muslim legacy that has typically played advocate of the devil. This is the Talbis Iblis literature to which Ibn al Qayyim al Jawzi, Ibn Taymiyya's brilliant student, dedicated a tome. In the novel at hand, the rehabilitation of the devil and ultimately his release is the mirror process of women touching base with their real identities and their liberation. And even though the proclamation of the innocence of the devil comes too late, the novel ends on a typically postmodernist verve confirmed in its nihilism as the aporia or denouement comes with the penultimate dissolution of all boundaries between good and evil; the deity and the devil, indissolubly bound through an original contract, exit the stage together. The spirit of Ganat, the incarcerated heroine in the story, prevails. The walls of the asylum, that veteran disciplinary institution that had tormented all the female bodies of the story, miraculously fade away into the black of night under the luminous gaze of Zahra/ Venus (the 'fallen' star ) and Gannat /Paradise is realized on earth.

"Imagination .... the locus of subversion" , in the words of another of our authors, is the key to unveiling the secrets of the craft of the modern doctors.

A New Feminist Theology: On what grounds? Give examples of the internalization and retrojection of the modern secular materialist mindset... and how this leads to a new lexicon and history of 'women in Islam' .....

[M.A.F.]

It is in the area of the politics and consciousness of gender that the workings of the distorted imagination may best come into focus. The distorted imagination is symptomatic of the cultural angst. a vintage product, manifestation, instrument of the secular culture. This is another theme I will be weaving through my account.