The
Muslim cause
Pran Chopra
It is wrong to take a distorted view of Islam
or of Muslims. Or of any religion or community. To do so
deliberately is vile, and an invitation to trouble.
Unfortunately, this happens most when it is most important to
avoid it. That is, in times of tension and anxiety, when the
broad brush of prejudice is most often used to paint those we
disagree with. When the issue is big, prejudice gets a bigger
brush.
The prejudices of some then become the prism
through which whole communities begin to see other communities.
But before adding another word, I must
express solid sympathy with Amar Farooqui’s complaint about the
media in his article Clash of stereotypes (HT, October 30). With
him I fear that many a media room is cluttered with
misperceptions or worse. Professional values fly out of the
window when figures of revenue and circulation come in by the
door.
But the issue here is not why ‘someone’
should be ‘stereotyped’ merely because, as Farooqui’s article
implies, he “adhere(s) to religious rituals fanatically”. The
issue is whether most people in a community agree that all
religions have the right to their rituals in a multi-religious
and multi-cultural world (or country). If some agree but many
don’t then the rational few get stereotyped along with the
dominant trend. Farooqui shares this failing.
He speaks of “the real precursors of the
Taliban State” and among them he names “Mussolini’s Italy,
Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Tojo’s Japan, Ian Smith’s
Rhodesia, the apartheid State of South Africa, and above all
Hitler’s Germany”. All of them are blots on history books. But
in all of them the rational spoke out loud and clear until they
were silenced, and spoke out again when they could.
But can it be claimed that at least in the
countries they rule and where they have the trumpet voice of the
majority, Muslims have spoken out against “the Taliban State”?
He has rightly said the Taliban are “as ruthless and
undemocratic in their pursuit of absolute power as the Nazis
were”. True. But from how many Muslim platforms in Muslim
majority countries have the Taliban been denounced as such? From
how many has Pakistan been cautioned against building them up,
or Saudi Arabia against financing their training grounds?
It was a well-publicised fact that Pakistan
was rearing the Taliban behind the shield of Islam as the future
sword of its imperial ambition. Yet, so little was said against
that by recognised platforms of the faith that the Taliban
became a stereotype of the faithful.
This collective silence has become a towering
prism through which the collectivity is seen by others despite
the many Muslims who, like Farooqui, “have dedicated themselves
to combating communal politics…” The dominant trend, attitudinal
or “on a specific issue”, becomes the rule in the eyes of the
observer and the exceptions get identified with the rule. Those
on the other side of the prism return the compliment, and
misperceptions multiply. That is why the Taliban, and what they
have done to Afghanistan, to some other countries also, and
threaten to do to still others, figure so much in the current
debate in many countries, and also in Farooqui’s response to the
article by Vir Sanghvi ( HT, October 14).
Farooqui is right in deploring that a wrong
view of Muslims is spreading among non-Muslims. But this ailment
has its causes. They should be faced and cured, not brushed
under a carpet of side-issues and definitions. The main cause is
the process by which a dominant trend becomes the prism of
perception.
The dark events enacted on September 11 are a
good illustration. No responsible person has accused any Muslim
community or country of condoning those events, because most of
the authentic Muslim voices have condemned them. A positive
image of the Muslim has thus stood out clearly on that issue.
But his pre-September 11 image was far from clear and positive,
because he was ambivalent about the image of the Taliban as the
ugly Muslim.
If a “wrong view of Muslims” has grown — and
it certainly has — then the main reason is that on the whole
they are generally seen to have condoned the Taliban phenomenon
and many are seen to have even idealised it.
Individual Muslims have spoken, with courage
and eloquence, even about the role being played by the Imam of
Jama Masjid, to whom Farooqui also refers, and he must have seen
historian Mushirul Hassan’s open letter to the Imam.
But are they candles in the wind or “a
broad-based political campaign” which Farooqui says “liberal
Muslims” are waging in “the cause of secularism”? Or are they
more like footnotes written in fine print, which can elucidate
or qualify a point in the thesis to which they are appended but
which cannot replace the thesis?
As for example the scholarly annotations
which seek to explain the Quranic meaning of Islam or of jehad.
That meaning is wonderful. But the Taliban rejects the
footnotes. The real life jehadi does not even read them. “The
campaign” is worthy of support, and must be continued despite
the mirrors of the media failing to reflect it. But can it
demolish the deceiving prism? The answer is negative yet. Hence
the danger of the ‘Hindu backlash’ in Vir Sanghvi’s article.
What can make the answer less negative? In
the reality of mass politics, images are made by momentous
issues, and these should not be left to the mercy of “the rabble
rousers” who, as Farooqui rightly laments, “make it to the
headlines”. Such issues constitute occasions when
“articles/rejoinders” strike a cord and the media cannot but
“care to have a look”. The world would have paid attention if
the distortions of Islam which were being manufactured in
Afghanistan with Pakistani technology had been exposed in time
in and by the countries which profess truer Islam. That
opportunity is now slipping.
Some years ago, someone approached me in the
respected name of ‘Ali Mian’ (the late Maulana Abul Hasan Ali
Nadwi) to support and join an organisation, Muslim by name and
predominantly so by composition, in a campaign for secular
solutions to the Babri masjid and Kashmir issues. I joined it,
both in public appearances and private discussions, but soon
found myself running into a devious game. What was accepted in
private discussion was frustrated in public debate.
In private the organisers accepted my plea
that while many Hindus, like me, questioned the wisdom of New
Delhi’s approaches on many Kashmir related issues, they rejected
the argument heard from Pakistan that since the Kashmir Valley
had a Muslim majority, it belonged to Pakistan because India had
been partitioned on the basis of religion. The organisers agreed
that Pakistan was falsifying history, and that it could have
dangerous consequences. But they always suffocated a public
debate on that issue, while I believed that such a public
position by a noted Muslim organisation on such an urgent issue
would help to remove misperceptions about the stand taken on it
by Indian Muslims.
This difference persisted, and I left the
organisation. But this is only a minor illustration of a major
phenomenon: that just as misperceptions get forged in the public
mind in a heated debate, as since September 11, they are best
removed when clear stands are taken on matters of urgent
concern. An Islamic plea on behalf of Kashmir can sharpen the
profile of the faith in the mind of the faithful, and perhaps
make some of them more fanatical. But it will do little good to
the cause of Kashmir or the cause of Islam. Or to the Muslim
cause, which Farooqui rightly describes as the cause of “the
vast majority of ordinary Muslims who go about their daily
business”, however fanatically they may “adhere to their
religious rituals.”
In happier times, the procession of events
would have gone differently. The fair face of Islam would have
reflected well on the Muslims of both India and Pakistan, shown
the bonds of affinity between them in much better light to
India’s non-Muslims, enhanced the glory of India’s ‘Muslim
period’, and in the process would have eased relations between
the two countries.
But when Pakistan clamped the mask of the
Taliban on the face of Islam, its shadow fell on the relations
between the two countries, and also, alas, on relations between
the two communities in India.
