Gujarat, Madrasas and Other Things

Sabah Zaidi (not her real name) is a beautiful, articulate and religious Rhodes scholar from Pakistan. When I was introduced to her, the first thing she told me was, “How come you (a Muslim from India) got a scholarship to study abroad?” I still remember that cold winter night when I felt something inside me stir deeply. The rest of the night was spent with me telling Sabah and other Pakistanis that I had never been discriminated in India, that my closest friend in Law college, Ernakulam had been a Hindu man and how all of us Hindus, Christians and Muslims had got along well even though some of us were deeply religious. As the night progressed I felt the discomfiture of some of the Pakistanis present and I have to confess, felt secretly happy. Hadn’t I just disproved, albeit in a very small way, the thesis behind Pakistan, that Muslims and Hindus are two nations and can never live together?

So, post-Gujarat how do I feel? Was I completely wrong? Gujarat has led me (and I am sure a lot of other Muslims, Hindus and others) to do a lot of soul-searching. I consider myself to be secular-religious and this is not an oxymoron. This is also not a nice public/private divide, i.e. secular at school and religious at home. In my conception, a secular Muslim would fast during Ramzan and still attend school with Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists.

It is said that talking helps. Post-Gujarat, I talked a lot with non-Muslim friends about India, ‘Muslimness’ etc. Something that a Kashmiri Hindu friend said with a lot of sadness will remain in my mind for the rest of my life. “My dad’s family suffered a lot during partition and they moved to Srinagar (the capital of Kashmir) from Lahore (a city in Pakistan). We virtually rebuilt our lives from scratch only to have our house burned down by Islamic fundamentalists. I do not have anything against Muslims or Islam in particular. But tell me, how should people like us react?” I for one would not be surprised if she supported the BJP. But to her credit and to that of a lot of people like her, she remains secular. If I had to draw categories, the line I would draw would clearly demarcate two communities in India— the innocent victims of communal carnages, be they Kashmiri Hindus, the passengers in the train that was burnt down at Godhra or the Muslim victims of the retaliatory pogrom in Gujarat in one category and in the other, the perpetrators of violence whatever be the brand of fundamentalism they espouse.

It has been said over and over again by different people that what is happening in Gujarat and what is happening in Jammu and Kashmir to the Hindus and Sikhs does not represent Hinduism or Islam. This is a message that should be spread, and spread in imaginative and creative ways. How effective has been the secular opposition to the Sangh Parivar’s (2) brand of Hindutva? Scholarly articles (at times with a lot of jargon) in respected journals in India and abroad, seminars and conferences in Universities and think-tanks serve a purpose in demonstrating the theoretical unsoundness of the various campaigns of the Sangh Parivar. But surely, should we also not fight them on their terrain? For instance, look at this slogan: “Babur ke aulad Pakistan jao” (Babur’s children should go to Pakistan). Subtle and arresting, it is an example of copywriting genius. Several messages underlie this unfortunate but catchy slogan. Indian history is neatly divided into a pre-Babur (golden) and post-Babur (decline) phase. All the Muslims (including the Muslims of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where traders from Arab countries spread Islam) are lumped together as one homogenous entity and all of us are somehow organically linked to this Mughal ruler who supposedly inaugurated the ‘foreign’ rule. All Indian Muslims are also associated with Pakistan, the creation of which was steadfastly opposed by some Muslims including the scholars of the religious seminary at Deoband. The secular camp unfortunately has not caught popular imagination. I am not suggesting, even for a moment, that all the academics and scholars who have been writing on this issue should henceforth give up teaching and research and start popular campaigns. I am just thinking aloud about the pressing need for organisations like the Delhi-based SAHMAT and magazines like Communalism Combat whose campaigns on issues of communal violence have filtered downwards to the grass-root level. We ought to have several such organisations and campaigns throughout India.

I do not have any quick fix solutions but I feel that it is absolutely important to displace religious stereotyping from popular imagination. The average non-Muslim who does not have much contact with Muslims has the image of a polygamous Muslim male who will divorce his wife if meat curry is not good enough and the secluded and docile purdah-wearing Muslim woman who is doomed to be servile to him. Is it credible that the 100 million odd Muslims of such a huge and diverse country will invariably conform to this stereotype? Is it credible that they would have remained somehow warped in time, unaffected by the internet revolution, increasing consumerism and the pan-Indian passions, Bollywood movies and Cricket? Yet mainstream media often perpetrates this image.

One issue that concerns several people nowadays is the Muslim schools of religious education, the Madrasas. Some of the worries are that Madrasas spew venom against Kafirs, focus on the pan-Islamic ummah to the exclusion of other affiliations that Indian Muslims have and are hunting grounds of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence organisation. I have not conducted any empirical research on this and therefore I am not in a position to say whether this is indeed true or not. But I have a comment to make about the solution that is often suggested, that Madrasas must teach science. As a kid, I had to juggle Madrasa education with secular school education in Ernakulam for around one and half years. So, I learnt about Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Munshi in the history class and recited the poetry of the great Malayalam poets, Ashan and Vallathol and listened to the school choir sing ‘sare jahan se accha’ almost everyday. In the evening at the Madrasa, my Ustad would tell us that the first word of the holy Quran to be revealed was ‘Read!’ and go on to teach us to read the holy text and explained the perfection in the character of the Prophet (Peace be upon him)-his sense of justice and tolerance- was an example for us to emulate in our daily lives. Did I ever have trouble mediating between these two worlds? Emphatically No. Also, most of my classmates were children from the nearby slum. Upper class Muslims who lived nearby would give the mosque alms but would never send their children to this Madrasa. If the government were to ban all Madrasas, I believe that the people who would be most badly hit would be poor Muslims who cannot afford to engage Maulavis to impart religious education to children at home. If Madrasas usurp the place of regular schools by teaching history and science, Muslim children will be denied a great cultural opportunity-classes, assemblies, pranks on teachers, cultural competitions and farewell parties with children of other faiths. Instead, what can be done is to encourage Muslim children to combine secular education with Madrasa education. Every human being is intelligent enough to work out how different identities should be mediated.

Until recently, I thought I had only five identities - Malayali, non-resident Keralite, Indian, Woman and Muslim - and that all these were equally important to me. In fact, all of us have several identities that are just waiting to be discovered. Recently, a North Indian Muslim woman who had lived in Madras asked me, “Why do you South Indians always use talcum powder on your face?” I strongly suspect that she knew the answer. (You dark (read ugly) South Indians use powder to appear more fair (read beautiful)!). I was thus stamped with a pan-South Indian identity that I shared with all the dark South Indians in Andhra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, of which I was not aware of until then! The point is just this, we in India are constantly translating existence between different identities, known and unknown, naturally and unconsciously. And so, we can safely attribute to children who undergo both secular education and religious education, often in the same day, the dignity and expertise to negotiate between their different values.

It may appear to us that the Hindu-Muslim divide is almost unbridgeable after all that has happened. Rationales focussing on the intersection between caste, class and religion and the angst of the marginalized poor people have been put forward. While all this may be true, there is also an apparently simple explanation behind human conflict. Most human beings need something to feel superior about and have a tendency to dominate other human beings. Some of us are able to transcend this instinct and others channelise it in constructive ways. But there are occasions when this is manifested in the most destructive and gruesome of ways. So, religion is used today. It could well be that something else is used tomorrow. Imagine this: Suppose every single Muslim had moved to Pakistan in 1947, would there be no group conflict in India? Surely not, there would be caste wars and other kinds of conflict in India and even more bloody and violent Shia-Sunni and Mohajir-Indigenous riots in Pakistan.

I am not a philosopher or a political theorist but I have a humble suggestion to make. Even as Indian Muslims retain ‘Muslim’ names, grow the beard, wear the hejab or the skull cap, pray regularly and fast during Ramzan, and celebrate Eid with gusto, they must reach out to Hindus, Christians, Parsis, Sikhs and Jews and others around them. While this will be difficult in places like Gujarat where communal polarisation has occurred, I believe that all is not lost.

Yes, unspeakable atrocities have been committed in Gujarat. By wallowing in self-pity we are only shirking our own responsibility for the sorry state of affairs confronting Islam in India and much of the world. We must take pride in the manner in which much of civil society and media, including right leaning magazines have come together on this issue. Muslims must take serious note of the fact that several decent Hindus and other people (be they religious, atheist or agnostic) are simply scared of Islam. While there are historical reasons for this, the jehadi attacks both in India and elsewhere in the world have not exactly endeared Islam to the average non-Muslim. Saying ‘Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance’ does not help because a profound truth when repeated ad nauseum loses its meaning.

Those Muslims who have had the benefit of secular education have an important role here. Little is to be gained in adopting a so-called apolitical stand towards issues such as Islamic fundamentalism, the ‘communal’ nature of Muslims and so on. I believe that these Muslims owe it to India, Islam and the Indian Muslim community to open channels of dialogue with others. With due respect, this dialogue is not to be confused with the official dialogue sponsored by the National minorities commission between the RSS leaders and the leaders of the minority communities. The dialogue, I am talking of includes both conversation with other Indians (who may belong to different faiths or who may be non-religious) and symbolic yet meaningful ways in which human beings touch the lives of other human beings.

A reasonable question then is, how are we to find these others? Indian Muslims are also members of several other communities. This could range from the more permanent and obvious one such as the workplace to the more temporary and therefore less obvious one such as supporters of the Brazilian football team. I suggest that these other affiliations that Muslims posses, whether it be your University, your local football club or your moot court team ought to be relied on to open arenas of dialogue with other people. Muslims ought to remember what the civil rights activist Mr. Bandukwala said eloquently, Allah is rabbil alameen (God of all), Allah is not rabbil muslimeen (God of Muslims). I salute the likes of Mr.Bandukwala.

Tailpiece: During the difficult times when politicians and even respected writers were holding forth on the innately communal nature of Muslims, I devised a talisman. Each time I read such a statement or heard about the horrendous violence in Gujarat, I thought of the countless acts of kindness several Hindu friends, teachers and colleagues had shown to me over the years. Needless to say, the balance was always heavier on the latter side. It is a talisman, which works very well.