BY ZEHRA CYCLEWALA
Zehra Cyclewala is a leading figure in the reformist
movement against the tyranny of Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin, the high
priest (dai al-mutlaq) of the Dawoodi Bohra Ismaili Shia sect.
Here, in a conversation with Yoginder Sikand, she relates the
story of her decades-long personal struggle against priestly tyranny. As
the syedna turned 100 in March, massive celebrations were organised by
his followers across the world to project him as a popular and pious
leader. But Zehra’s life tells a different story.
My name is Zehra Cyclewala. I am 55 years old and have
lived in Surat for most of my life. I was born into an orthodox
lower-middle-class Dawoodi Bohra family. My parents had five children
and I was the youngest child. In the mid-1980s, soon after I completed
my education – I did my graduation in commerce – I joined the Saif
Cooperative Society in Surat, a bank established in the 1960s by a group
of Bohra traders. It was inaugurated by the Bohra high priest, Syedna
Burhanuddin himself, and enjoyed his blessings. I started work there as
a clerk and gradually rose to become its manager.
From the very beginning, the Saif Cooperative Society
gave and took interest. The syedna obviously knew of this and had no
problem with it although some Muslims believe that even bank interest is
forbidden, or haram, in Islam. However, two years after I joined the
bank, the syedna issued a fatwa claiming that bank interest was
forbidden and demanded that the Bohras working at our bank leave their
jobs at once. All the staff of the bank were Bohras at that time.
Because the Bohras believe the word of the syedna to be akin to divine
law, they hurriedly complied with his order and quit their jobs. I was
the only one to refuse. After all, I thought, the bank had been giving
and taking interest from the time it was established up until the time
this fatwa was issued so the syedna knew about this all along; why had
he suddenly decided or realised that such interest was haram? The syedna
himself had inaugurated the bank and when he did so, he had no problem
with it dealing in interest. I thought there was something fishy about
this fatwa.
Despite enormous pressure on me to give up my job, I
refused. I lived with my mother, Fuliben Taherali, in Surat and was her
sole source of support because my father had died when I was 20. I
simply could not do without this job. So in spite of the syedna’s order,
I stuck on. The District Cooperative Society Board appointed a non-Bohra
administrator – a man called Mr Daru – to run the bank and I worked
under him. The Bohras of Surat were not pleased by my defiance of the
syedna’s orders and soon complaints about me reached the syedna’s
religious establishment – the kothar.
The syedna’s eldest son, Qaid Johar, came to Surat and
met with me; he insisted that I must resign. “Why should I?” I asked. I
told him that a branch of the Bank of Baroda functioned in a building
built on a plot of land owned by some Bohras in Surat and that this bank
also dealt in interest. The bank paid rent to the Bohra owners who in
turn parted with some of it to enrich the syedna’s establishment through
the syedna’s local amil, or representative. “Why don’t you stop
taking rent from the Bank of Baroda?” I asked him. Qaid Johar was
shocked by what he regarded as my impudence. He told me that I asked too
many questions and said that this was improper.
As I said earlier, by this time there was enormous
pressure on me to quit my job. The Bohras believe that the syedna is a
divinely appointed man. To displease him, they believe, is a sure way to
land in hell: To refuse his orders is to disobey and revolt against god.
This is what the syedna has made them believe. Hence they believed that
my refusal to quit my job was no ordinary revolt – it was open defiance
of the divine will. And so a campaign was launched in Surat to
excommunicate me. My house is located in the middle of Saifi Mohalla, a
Bohra locality, hardly five minutes walk from the Jamia Saifia, the
principal Bohra madrassa. All my neighbours were fellow Bohras. Soon
after I was excommunicated, they all stopped speaking to me. Even my
relatives were forbidden to interact with me – even over the telephone.
Yet even in the face of this ostracism, my mother
insisted that I must not give up. “Don’t you quit your job,” she said.
“You have to stand on your own feet. Your community is not going to help
you when you need it.” I did as she said. After all, I was no longer
young and it was not easy for me to get another job. If I had quit my
job, who would feed us?
The syedna has a powerful weapon that he readily deploys
to shut up anyone who dares protest against his oppression. Anyone who
speaks out against his crass corruption (on the basis of which he and
his vast family have become enormously rich by levying all sorts of
taxes on the Bohras) or dares to criticise his dictatorship is at once
excommunicated. This is called baraat. A Bohra who is thrown out
of the community’s fold by the syedna can have no social relations at
all with any other Bohra, not even with his or her own family. Numerous
spouses have been forcibly divorced because one of them dared to differ
with or raise his or her voice against the oppression and corruption of
the syedna and his henchmen.
And so I too was declared a mudai, or
apostate, and was subjected to baraat. Even my closest relatives,
barring, of course, my mother, with whom I lived, stopped talking to me.
When my mother and I walked on the streets, fellow Bohras spat at us;
many of them hurled abuses and cursed us. I refused to take this lying
down. After all, I was always assertive, even as a child, and could not
tolerate nonsense. I filed a case against almost 20 Bohras who used to
torment me and my mother in this vulgar manner. This was in 1989. I won
the case and my tormentors came to me asking for forgiveness.
Meanwhile, the syedna’s men continued to try to force me
out of my job. They entreated Mr Daru, the newly appointed administrator
of the bank, to throw me out but he refused because I was good at my
work. When I discovered that several rich Surti Bohras, including some
who had been office-bearers of the bank, had taken loans but had
defaulted on payments, I took them to court and the court forced them to
return the money that they owed. This greatly incensed these men and,
using the enormous political influence that the syedna wields, they
pressurised the government of Gujarat, which was then led by the
Congress, to remove the bank administrator and appoint someone else in
his place, someone who, they hoped, would do their bidding. They managed
to do so and Mr Daru was replaced. Mr Daru’s only ‘fault’ was that he
had refused to agree to their demand to expel me from my job.
Once the syedna’s men had succeeded in forcing Mr Daru
out of the bank and since the new administrator was a pro-syedna man, I
believed my own job was under threat. So I sent letters to top
officials, including the chief minister of Gujarat, informing them about
what was going on. Thereupon, at the instigation of the syedna’s men, I
was suddenly demoted to the post of accountant. I approached the court
in protest and the court issued a stay order, declaring that I should
not be removed from the post of manager. And though the new bank
administrator pursued the case in the high court, the high court upheld
the stay order in my favour.
However, because the majority of shareholders of our
bank were Bohras who believed that the word of the syedna was divine
law, they voted to suspend me despite the high court’s stay order. This
was tantamount to contempt of court. And so for three years, from 1989
to 1991, I could not go to work. It was at this time that I began
meeting with other women – Hindus, Sunni Muslims and Christians – who
had also suffered in their own way and were trying to speak out against
their oppression. We formed a support group and tried to help each other
cope with our difficult situations. It was these women who inspired me
to persist in the struggle so that I did not let the bank’s board of
directors off the hook. After all, by voting to suspend me they had
violated the court’s orders. So I filed a contempt of court case against
them which dragged on for two years but in the end the court ruled in my
favour. The directors of the bank begged the court for mercy and I was
reinstated as manager while 15 Bohra men were suspended from the bank’s
board of directors. Until then, the bank had been in the hands of the
syedna’s cronies. To stabilise the bank and to make it more broad-based,
I appointed several Hindus, Sunni Muslims and reformist Bohras as
members of the society and so it became much more cosmopolitan.
Throughout this time I refused to relent although the
syedna’s men kept sending me messages urging me to ‘repent and you will
be forgiven’. But what did I need to repent? It was not me, but they,
who had done wrong. They should have repented, not me. I refused to
tender any apology although I had to face, and still continue to face,
brutal social ostracism. After all, my struggle was not for myself alone
but for the many Bohras who live under the cruel tyranny of the
religious establishment. It was a struggle for truth and justice.
In 1991 my mother fell sick but no relatives could come
to see her for fear of being excommunicated. She too had been
excommunicated by the syedna because she lived with me and refused to
accede to his orders that no Bohra should have anything to do with me.
She knew that having been excommunicated, she would not be buried in a
Bohra graveyard. Still, even on her deathbed, she stood like a rock
behind me, insisting that I must never surrender to injustice. Shortly
after that, she passed away. No Bohra came for her funeral – not even
her other children, my siblings. The Bohras of Surat refused to bury her
in the community’s burial ground. I insisted that she should be buried
there and nowhere else because I was a Bohra and I had my rights and my
mother had been a Bohra too. The Sunni Muslims of Surat offered to let
her be buried in their cemetery. I thanked them but declined, saying
that if I accepted their offer, it would be conceding defeat in the
struggle against the syedna’s religiously sanctioned tyranny.
News about my mother’s body being thrown out of the
Bohra mosque soon spread throughout the town and so, in the dark hours
of the morning, and under police protection, a crowd of some 10,000
Sunnis and Hindus collected at the Bohra graveyard and ensured that my
mother’s body was laid to rest there. Not a single Bohra attended the
funeral.
Sometime in the 1990s a local Bohra leader, Yusuf Badri,
who was then secretary of the Bohra Jamaat of Surat and a close
confidante of the syedna, had taken a loan from our bank but because he
had not repaid the loan, interest on it had mounted and he owed the bank
almost double the principal. He refused to pay us back on time and I was
compelled to take him to court. The court issued a warrant authorising
the seizure of the property of his guarantor, a Bohra industrialist
called Haider Hazur. Accompanied by some policemen, I went to
Haiderbhai’s house with the court order. When he saw me there, he said:
“How dare you come here? You are an apostate!” I told him that he had to
repay the money otherwise the court would take action against him.
Scared of what might happen, he asked for three days to pay up.
Just as I left his house, some Bohras began screaming
like madmen, alleging that I had abused the syedna. They began hollering
to the Bohras around to come out and beat me up. Soon a huge crowd,
including many Bohra women, had collected and surrounded me. Somehow I
managed to escape. I ran to the nearby Mahidharpura police station but
the crowd of Bohra men and women, more than 5,000 strong, had followed
me there. They started raising slogans, crying: “Give us Zehra Cyclewala!
We will kill her!” The Bohra amil of Surat, Syed ul-Khair,
son-in-law of the syedna, was leading the crowd. “Come out and we’ll
hammer you!” he shouted.
Inspector Khan of the Mahidharpura police station said
to me: “Ask them for mercy and they will let you go or else they might
kill you. Why create a fuss about refusing to say just two words in
apology?” But I refused: “I would rather die but I shall never ask them
for mercy. After all, what have I done wrong?” The policemen did nothing
to control the crowd or stop them baying for my blood. Instead of
beating them with lathis or tear gassing them or even registering a case
against them, they lent them their support. Such is the enormous power
of the Bohra establishment.
Although I was perfectly innocent and the crowd was at
fault, a false case was registered against me, claiming that I had
abused them! I tried to register a formal complaint at the police
station but I was not allowed to do so; instead, I was put into the
police lock-up where I had to spend the entire night. The next afternoon
I was taken to the court. A huge crowd of Bohra women had gathered
there. They demanded that I be sent to jail. But the magistrate refused,
saying that it was a bailable case, and so I was released on bail.
Because it was no longer safe for me to stay in the
Bohra locality where I lived, I shifted to a Hindu locality for a couple
of days. The Bohras had spread all sorts of falsehoods about me,
claiming that I had caused a disturbance by abusing the syedna, so I
went to the offices of leading newspapers in Surat to tell them the
truth. I told them that they had been fed with propaganda and had
published false stories about me without any investigation. Now they had
to publish my version of events or else I would go on hunger strike and
lodge a complaint with the Press Council. The journalists heard me out
and the next day they published my story.
Because the police had sided with the Bohra mob instead
of supporting me, as soon as I was let off by the court, I along with
several of my women friends from the Surat District Mahila Sangh, a
women’s group of which I was a founder, went to meet the police
commissioner and told him how badly the policemen had treated me. I
don’t know what I would have done without the help of these women
colleagues, most of whom were Hindus and Sunni Muslims. With the help of
the police commissioner, a case was registered against a group of Bohras
who had attacked my house while I was in the police lock-up and eight of
them were arrested. But I was not satisfied with this measure and filed
a writ petition in the high court against the policemen as well as the
Bohras who had assaulted me. I complained about how the police had
refused to register a case of rioting against the Bohras and instead had
kept me locked up in jail. Some policemen came to me and asked me to
forgive them but I refused. If I relented, I thought, how would these
people, who are paid to help the victims of those who violate the law,
learn that they cannot refuse to abide by their duty?
Soon my case was heard in the high court, which ruled in
my favour and came down heavily on the Bohra rioters and the police. By
now things had become so tense that I was afraid some enraged Bohra
could easily kill me. So the court ordered that I be given police
protection 24 hours a day. Two armed policemen were assigned to protect
me and they accompanied me wherever I went. This continued until 2006.
Meanwhile, in 1998 the Rotary Club of Surat decided to
hold a function to honour me for my struggle against the tyrannical
Bohra establishment, an event that was announced in the press. As soon
as the Bohras of Surat heard about it, they arrived in a huge horde
outside the Rotary Club and began shouting slogans against me and the
club’s decision to honour me. On seeing them, the men who ran the club
got scared and just a day before the event was to be held, they told me
that they had called it off. When my colleagues in the Surat District
Mahila Sangh heard of this, they were enraged. They went to the club and
told the men there that they had dishonoured and insulted me when they
went back on their decision to felicitate me. The next day this was
splashed all over the papers. But we didn’t stop at that. We sent a
legal notice to the Rotary Club stating that if they did not apologise
within three days, we would file a defamation case against them. The
club folks got nervous and asked me to forgive them, promising never to
do this sort of thing with any woman again. I told them that we accepted
their apology but that they must also issue an advertisement in the
press to this effect, including the fact that the orthodox Bohras had
forced them to cancel the programme.
The advertisement was published in three newspapers – it
must have cost the club a lot of money! – but we women were glad. After
all, we did this not so that I could salvage my reputation but so that
organisations like the Rotary Club would learn not to cave in under
pressure from reactionaries and that they would stand up for justice,
which they claim they are committed to.
Because I had taken on the syedna’s henchmen, the police
and influential organisations like the Rotary Club for siding with the
tyrannical Bohra establishment, several newspapers carried reports about
me. This further incensed the syedna’s blind supporters and one of them,
a certain Mustafa Dodia, tried to trap me. It was later discovered that
he had been paid by the syedna’s men to do this. Dodia lodged a false
police complaint against me, claiming that I had tried to kill him. He
got together a group of Bohras who went on hunger strike outside the
police station, demanding my arrest and removal of the police protection
that the court had granted me. I was not one to take this lying down, of
course. I responded by filing a counter-complaint against Dodia,
alleging that he had demanded the removal of my police protection so
that he could kill me. His demand, I added, was tantamount to contempt
of court, for the court had ordered that I should receive police
protection. Finally, Dodia was forced to withdraw his false complaint.
The crime branch investigated his complaints against me and found them
to be completely concocted.
Initially, I was the only Bohra in Surat to speak out
against the tyranny of the syedna and his men. I had no idea that there
were other Bohras – in other cities, and even in other countries, who
were fed up of the extortion and the corrupt dictatorship of the syedna
and his family in the name of Islam – who were agitating against all of
this. Gradually, I came into contact with these reformists. News of my
struggle reached them and they contacted me. They were inspired by my
lone battle and believed that I had something to tell other Bohras, to
teach them that standing up for truth, for values, for principles, was
true surrender to god and that the supine surrender to a corrupt
priesthood, which the syedna insists on in the name of Islam, was its
complete contradiction.
In 2001 a group of reformist Bohras invited me to Canada
to speak on my life and to help galvanise the Bohra reformist movement
in the West where a number of Bohras live. In 2005, I was invited to an
international convention of reformist Bohras in Birmingham, England,
where my biography titled One Against All, written by the noted
Bohra reformist Yunus Baluwala, was released. In the same year I
insisted that the reformist Bohras of India organise a convention in
Surat where the major Bohra madrassa is located. Some people were scared
to do this in the very den of the syedna, as it were, fearing that they
would be attacked by the syedna’s cronies, but we went ahead and it was
quite a success.
I began my struggle and my public life in the Saif
Cooperative Society in Surat and I still work there, now as its manager.
Our business has expanded considerably over the years. And I must say
that despite the torrent of hatred that has been directed against me all
these years, many Bohras who refuse to countenance any criticism of the
syedna now come to me with requests for loans. Although I am still
officially excommunicated from the Bohra fold, many Bohras come to my
office to see me. They cannot invite me to their homes or family
functions, of course, because of the syedna’s orders. My brothers and
sisters too cannot meet me. If they dare to, they stand the risk of
being excommunicated themselves.
I attend reformist Bohra conferences wherever they are
held. I am also invited to speak at meetings held by secular women’s
groups and in this way I have had the chance to travel to various parts
of India. Hindu and Sunni Muslim groups also invite me to their meetings
and I am grateful to them for their support. Wherever I go, I talk of
the central role of women in promoting reform and resisting tyranny in
the name of religion, which is an affront to true spirituality. I also
stress the need for communal harmony. From my own personal experiences,
not from reading fat books, I know how deeply interrelated patriarchy,
communalism, violence and priestly tyranny are.
I owe a lot to my mother who stood firmly by me when I
was excommunicated. For that she was thrown out of the community herself
but she refused to budge. “Zehra! Never cave in to tyranny,” she always
insisted. “Keep your head high. This is what god wants.” Some Bohras
from Surat, blind followers of the syedna, offered me 50 lakh rupees if
I issued an ‘apology’ to the syedna, even suggesting that this would
enable me to rejoin the Bohra fold. Recalling what my mother always told
me, I said to them: “I will never do that, no matter how much money you
offer as a bribe. I know that by offering me money you want me to shut
my mouth, to stop me from speaking out against the tyranny of the
priests, to stop the Bohra reform movement.” Had I accepted their offer,
my reputation as someone who has always stood for certain principles
would have been in tatters and people would then say Zehra has sold
herself for money. But since I have never been cowed by their threats
and blandishments, I can, as my mother always told me to, hold my head
high. And thus after I leave this world, people can say: “There was a
Bohra girl called Zehra who shook the Bohra community and dared to
challenge the tyrants within it.”
In memory of my brave mother, and as a small token of
appreciation for all that she stood for, I have recently set up a
charitable trust in her name. The trust, which has five trustees – a
Hindu, a Sunni and three reformist Bohras – offers modest financial
assistance to the needy. We dream of doing many things in the future,
one of them being to establish a common graveyard for people of all
religions and communities so that people who are tormented and oppressed
by their religious leaders, as my mother was, can find a final resting
place there.
Sometimes people ask me why, if the syedna and his
henchmen are such tyrants, we reformist Bohras do not convert to another
religion or to another Muslim sect. Why do we insist on remaining
Dawoodi Bohras? I have a simple answer: This is precisely what the
syedna wants. If we reformists quit the Bohra fold, he will be able to
rule just as he pleases and without any opposition whatsoever. That is
why I insist we must remain within the Bohra fold and continue to
struggle for our rights, for true internal democracy. I think Islam, if
correctly understood, tells us that this is precisely what we should do.
I have lived a long life of struggle. I have had to face
terrible odds. All through this struggle it was not desire for personal
revenge or power that goaded me to take on the Bohra establishment but
an irrepressible commitment to justice. That is something basic, or
ought to be, to all human beings. I simply cannot compromise on this.
Some people may say that I was too obstinate or even vindictive, that I
should have compromised instead of taking people to court, staging
demonstrations and lodging police complaints. But I tell them: “If we
keep quiet and cave in, tyrants will continue to play with our lives.
Speaking up against tyranny is surely a fundamental duty and right, is
it not? Surely this is what Islam, properly understood, should inspire
us to do.”
And this is what the Bohra reformist movement is doing.
The reformists are appealing to the world to see the trickery behind the
‘pious’ exterior of the syedna and his cronies who misuse and
misinterpret religion to extort money from the Bohras and enforce a
stultifying form of slavery on them, on their bodies and minds, all in
the hallowed name of Islam. This is how the syedna and his family have
become among the richest in all of India. Anyone who dares to speak out
against this tyranny is automatically thrown out of the community.
I appeal to the government, political parties,
intellectuals and social activists and to people in general to see
through this charade of the syedna and his cronies who have been
twisting Islam in order to promote their own interests. I ask them to
stop supporting and patronising these men. The syedna turns 100 this
year and hectic activities are underway to celebrate his centenary. A
lot of public functions will be held to project him as a truly ‘pious’
man and a ‘popular’ religious leader. I appeal to people to listen to my
voice, to the voice of a Bohra woman who has seen through and struggled
against the tyranny of the Bohra establishment for decades, not to fall
prey to this nefarious propaganda.
(Yoginder Sikand works with the Centre for the Study of
Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at the National Law School,
Bangalore.)