It has been an interesting exercise to watch the reaction of moderate Muslims in Karnataka to the violent incidents following the publication of a Taslima Nasreen piece in a Kannada newspaper a fortnight ago. Most of the reactions that I will report and comment upon below are, I emphasise, of moderates whose writing I have had a chance to follow for over a decade now. These writers are not self-assigned moderates or publicly-proclaimed ones, but have come to represent a mature Muslim voice in the state by consistently following a liberal trajectory in their writing. I am conscious of how tenuous these tags could be, but still it serves a purpose when there is a persistent effort to paint a homogeneous picture of the Muslim world.
However, the reaction of these moderates to the Taslima incident has confounded me. One can understand their hesitation about turning polemicists on this subject, but one did not expect their disapproval of inflammatory politics and fundamentalist tendencies within the community to be so spiritless. One did not expect their distress and anger to hide behind the flourish of literary prose. During the crisis, they came across as people walking the tightrope or as trapeze artists swinging and pouring into the opinion of two contradictory worlds -- the world they believe in and the world they oppose. Even while they kept their freedom to disagree with the 'shallow barbs' of Taslima on the burqa, they could have perhaps been a little more direct and taken a larger view of the reaction-pattern within the community. It is ludicrous to suggest what they should have said, but clearly I have a gut-disappointment with their responses defined by ambiguity and ambivalence. In short, moderate opinion need not have been a meek one.
There is one dominant strain in most of these reactions and that is Taslima indulges in a grand disfigurement of the Quran. 'The Quran actually does not say so' is the refrain. Let's assume that Taslima distorts, even that she distorts deliberately, but the question is how does a moderate voice defend a genuine misreading of the Quran? What place does the irreverence of a non-believer have in a moderate's mind? To what extent would such a mind confront the seclusion and immobility of meaning?
Interestingly, a majority of the responses I have chosen to represent here have appeared on a Kannada portal which has been a committed forum for tempered dialogue and inquiry since its inception a few years ago. It was relaunched early this year and has a creditable following among Kannada intellectuals. Here again is another wonderment: Given the freedom and relative anonymity that the Internet as a medium offers, one wonders why the moderate Muslim dithers even here to speak his rational mind. What is this unnatural restraint all about?
Let us first look into the response of Abdul Rashid, the editor of the portal and an award-winning writer in Kannada. He is actually reproducing an article that he has written some time ago on Taslima with a fresh introductory paragraph. It begins with a rather callous dismissal: