Citizen India, Stand Up

bas ke dushwaar hai har kaam ka aasan honaa
aadmi ko bhii mayassar nahii insaan honaa.

-- Mirza Ghalib

How hard, how impossible
To do the things one can;
Ah that the mighty earthling
Is hardly ever a man.

(trans., in Raina’s Ghalib, Writer’sWorkshop, 
Calcutta, 1984).

It is once again time to speak straight to the point.

An act of the most grossly irreligious cowardice was on display at the PressClub in Hyderabad the other day.

Three elected members of the Andhra Pradesh Assembly belonging to the MIM (Majlis-e-IttahadulMuslimeen) party barged into the Club where Taslima Nasreen, the self-exiledBangladeshi writer, now living in India on six-monthly renewable visas, was torelease Telegu editions of her works.

On cue, these MLAs, led by Akbaruddin Owaisi, proceeded to pelt the guestauthor with books, flower pots and other sundry missiles. Televisionfootage of the barbarity clearly showed Ms.Nasreen being hit several times onthe head. But for some brave protection furnished by elderly hosts, realphysical injury might have been caused to Ms.Nasreen who has been critical ofIslamic orthodoxy on several counts, especially concerning Muslim women.As the world knows, umpteen fatwas are out requiring her to be beheaded.

After the event, Akbaruddin was heard to make two loud proclamations to hissupporting rabble and to India in general: one, that were Ms.Nasreen everto visit Hyderabad again, she would be killed as per injunctions of the fatwa;and, secondly, that he, Owaisi, was first a Muslim and only after an MLA.

Well, well; it is clearly time to speak a similarly plain language to Owaisiand those who think as he does.

II

For a start, our citizenship—and all the rights and obligation that flowthereof—do not accrue to us from anything written in the Gita, the Quran, theBible, the Granth Sahib, or any other scriptural text.

It accrues to us from the Constitution of the Republic of India as by lawestablished.

Thus, if on the one hand, the Constitution furnishes us the freedom topractice and propagate what religious faith we will, it expressly stipulatesthat whatever hurts or grievances, real or imagined, we may have on this scoremust be settled through the due processes of law. On no account does thecitizen have the right to usurp the prerogatives so stipulated where theyconcern the sphere of public conduct and controversy.

Those of us who have consistently critiqued and resisted attempts, especiallysince the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, at a majoritariantake-over of the State and its functions through vigilante mobilization andviolence have, Mr.Owaisi, no intention of making the least exception of you andyour cohorts just because you happen to belong to a religious minority.

And we say to you and your fellow MLAs that if indeed your religiousallegiance (if it truly be such, of which we have great doubt) precedesand supercedes your sworn allegiance to the Constitution of India, the least youcan do to prove your bona fides is to resign your membership of theAssembly, and then take up the work of liquidating infidels and dissenters inright earnest, unshackled by your secular oath.

And should such an honourable course not be forthcoming from the MLAs inquestion (as we do not think it will be), we call upon the Election Commissionto do the needful as per provisions of the People’s Representation Act.

Citizens of the country will also be interested watchers of whether or notthe law-enforcement agencies of the State take due cognizance of opendeclarations of the intent to murder Ms.Nasreen, with the all-important caveatthat these enforcement agencies do not, in the first place, replicate themurderous examples set by their professional colleagues in Gujarat andelsewhere. There is after all ample ground to the widespread publicdistrust of these agencies, and not for no reason are they seen to be often thesources of the grossest lawlessness, particularly in their dealings withunderlings of any definition.

III

To those unfortunate followers whom the Owaisis of this world are able tomislead and mobilize, we want to say that whereas we shall continue to struggleby their side towards the furtherance of their genuine material interests andrights, and against their alienation and exclusion from systems of sharingand of justice, we will reject their violent frenzies as decisively as those ofthe VHP or the Bajrang Dal.

We have consistently pleaded with them to learn the courage to assume withconviction their rights and privileges of equal citizenship that our seculardemocracy bestows upon us, and to join with the secular majority of the republicwho hold the Constitution to be the one indubitably holy book for all citizensof India.

We now wish to make the further suggestion that they learn, and without lossof time, to distinguish between those so-called Islamic voices that at bottomuse them as self-serving fodder, and those other learned Muslim voices who speakthe truth both about their faith and about citizenship.

Concerning Tslima Nasreen’s criticisms as available in her writings, recallwhat the holy Quran enjoins: "attack those who attack you AS they attackyou." This teaching would require that those who pretend to lead youinto the true ways of Islam engage with Ms.Nasreen in disputation and argument,not in unwarranted and unmanly physical attack or threats of murder. That theydo not do so tells us that the Owaisis of this world may after all have anegligible knowledge of the faith on whose behalf they commit illiterate andheinous barbarisms. Here is what Maulana Aqilul Gharawi has to say on thematter: "the seeds of democratic reform are enshrined in three keyIslamic tenets of Shura, Ijma and Ijtihad." Mr. Owaisi, go read somebooks.

IV

Do not then permit an Owaisi to hijack the educated traditions of Islam intothe politics of fascism. Think how repeatedly the Quran and the Prophetemphasise the central value of learning; had that not been the case the Arabsmay not have given us the marvels of Algebra and Geometry and wondrousarchitectures and canal systems built to impeccable scientificprinciples—traditions that need to be deepened and carried forward.Think also that had a Copernicus or a Galileo not questioned Church teachingswith regard, for example, to the placement of the earth within the solar system,the modern world in which the Owaisis practice politics and speak freely maynever have been born. After all, why is it that the questions Ms.Nasreenhas been asking are also being increasingly asked in many countries where Muslims are in vast majority, not excluding Iran? Why is it that there areas many commentaries on the holy book as there actually are? Or so manysects of interpretation among Muslims, just as among Hindus, Christians, Sikhs,Buddhists, Jews and others? Great are the books that grow, become richer,and change their meanings for us with advances in time and collectivehuman experience. Only the limited ones remain tethered to astagnant stake.

Especially with regard to India, it is not the violent intolerance ofthe Owaisis and the Togadias that has through the centuries ensured our mostunique commingling of faiths and lives. Remember that if Islam flows sohandsomely through the nations’s blood stream even today, it is to the noblevision of the Sufi orders that we owe such a rich consequence. Andsimple and long-lasting was their teaching: they refused alldiscrimination as between faith and faith, they made no distinction between highand low, they spurned the lure of authority and power, they saw the earth as atestament of universal love, spurning dogma and self-serving religiousbureaucracies, they sang songs, they danced in ecstasy, and they were one withwhatever was loving and noble in man or beast. And they did not think ofwoman as second to man. And it is for those reasons that a Chisti in Ajmeror an Aulia in Nizamudin or a Nooruddin in Chrar-e-Sharief in Kashmir draw totheir resting places the believer, the infidel, the fat, the starving, thesinner and the saint, year after year, century after century. And we arethe children of their magnificent union with a Meera, a Nanak, a Raidas, aNamdev, a Narsi Mehta, a Kabir, a Bulla, a Farid, a Tulsi.

There is the heritage that we must acknowledge and own, saying to the Owaisisand the Togadias that, being blood brothers on the other side, they keeptheir contagion to themselves in a house of common aboard, but far from whereour children, sisters and brothers live.

Before we set off in umbrage to behead a suffering woman who only wishes tospeak as she has experienced, let us recall that our own poets have askedquestions and expressed skepticisms that far outdo what Ms.Nasreen might wish tosay. After all, it was Ghalib who wrote:

hum ko maaluum hai jannat ki haqiiqat lekin
dil ke khush rakhane ko Ghalib ye khayaal achhaa hai.

(They must be all correct, of heaven
The eulogies we hear;
But, may God so command that He
Is discovered somewhere there!)
RG ...[for a literal translation and detailed commentary, please click here -- Ed]

Ask yourself, has Nasreen gone that far—to question the very existence ofgod or heaven? And yet, what has happened that Ghalib pleases us no end,while a poor Nasreen so inflames? Ghalib offends nobody when he says of himselfthat he is only half a Muslim, in that he drinks liquor but eats not pork.Nor are we inflamed that the great predecessor of Ghalib, Mir Taki Mircould say of himself:

Mir ke deeno mazhab ko poochte kya ho unne to
kashka khencha, dehr mey baitha, kab ka tark Islam kiya.

(Why ask of Mir what his creed or religion be?
He wears vermillion, sits in the temple,
And has long renounced Islam.)

Surely, perhaps Owaisi and suchlike ought to have been demanding a burningand banning of both Mir and Ghalib. Perhaps they haven’t heard the namesor read these poets. They may yet do so.

Have we, then, forgotten the lessons these and other great thinkers taughtus—that no true religious or spiritual impulse can co-exist with intolerance,bigotry, hate, because intolerance, bigotry, hate are always somewhere or theother expressions not of our love of god but of lucre, dominance, and power.And, crucially, far from being protests against "modernity." they are inthemselves vicious by- products of it.

V

While I am about it, it is time that governments and parties at the centreand the states recognize that the time to play games with bigotry are long past.While they crow about our rising indices of economic clout, they have not aminute to lose in attending with more than the same passion to the matter ofcitizenship and equality before the law, at the heart of which in a pluralistdemocracy resides the sovereign right to peaceful dissent. And that rightcan never be truly protected in a secular democracy unless itincludes the right to interpret or question scripture as well. Indeedtheir mealy-mouthed failure to uphold secular citizenship everyday auguments themaurauding energies of bigotry and enervates the efforts and convictions ofthose segments that would protect the republic from the atavisms of variouskind. Should they fail to put their sectarian lusts on the back-burner,they must prepare for a conflagration in which they will find themselves infatal embrace. Far better that the embrace is executed here and now alongthe best principles of non-sectarian humanism.

VI

Finally, one is deeply heartened by the spontaneity and volume of outragethat the Hyderabad incident has evoked from not just "liberal" Muslims but,more to the point, Muslim clerics and maulvis. Whereas I have many ofthese responses on my notepad, let me conclude by citing just two orthree:

"The attack on her cannot be justified; the attack was againstthe  spirit of Islam." 

-- (MaulanaAbdul Wahab Khilji, Vice President, Milli Council.)

"We should stick to only lawful means to register our protestagainst her.

-- (MaulanaKhalid Rasheed, Firangi Mahal,Lucknow).

"Our culture and ethos is based on the foundations of a uniquesecularism, based on the cocept of  "Sarva Dharma Sambhava," unparalleled in the world and which is evolving as we speak.This concept could provide aglobalised world with certain key answers that it is desperately seeking."

(Muslim Intellectual Forum, Mumbai)

"As Muslims of India and the Muslims around the globe, we urgeMr.Owaisi and Mr.Farhat apologize to not only Ms.Nasreen but the Muslims of the world for the audacity of insulting them by speaking in their behalf without their permission."

(Mike Ghouse)