Moderate, Meek Or Muted?

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: 

"This Sunday, the magazine section of a reputed Kannada daily has translated and reproduced an article that a writer called Taslima wrote sometime ago, perhaps in rage or to seek publicity... Although our writers and journalists have not been able to achieve anything else in recent days, they have successfully stoked communal flames and social unrest. Caught between our very clever writers and dim-witted fundamentalists are innocent people." 

The person expressing opinion here is neither the clever type, nor a fundamentalist and is certainly not an innocent bystander, so the natural question is where then does he position himself between these categories he casually creates?

After the introductory paragraph there are vignettes of Taslima's parents facing the wrath of enraged crowds in distant Bangladesh on account of their daughter. Immediately following this, Rashid breaks into a meandering recollection of his student days when he was forced to go 'underground' for three days after writing an article in a newspaper. The article, he says, was about people whom he knew while growing up on a coffee estate in Madikeri. His subjects - grandmothers and 'beautiful girls' - as well as their families were extremely upset that their faces had appeared in the newspaper. After all the newspaper was a taboo forum for a conservative lot. They had construed it as a serious violation of the trust they had placed in him and were on a look out to give him a sound thrashing. It is unclear here as to how to relate this incident to the Taslima farce taking place on the streets of Shimoga and Hassan. Should we here extrapolate an indictment of Taslima that people will not tolerate if you write on something as personal as the burqa? Or is it a simple parallel to Taslima's exile and predicament? 

Rashid's piece ends with a prescriptive note on how people like Taslima and 'boys and girls of various religions across the globe' trying to write like her should perceive writing: 

"Writing, like religion, is meditation and penance. Focus and goodness. It will be so nice if people think of it that way. One also hopes they add a bit of humour and love to it." 

The naivety is astonishing. 

Consider now the response of Fakir Mohammed Katpadi, a well-known fiction writer in Kannada who belongs to the Byary community from the coastal district of Dakshina Kannada. He is not as vague as Rashid is, but his struggle to offend none is obvious. The opening sentences set the tone of the entire piece: 

"Knowing pretty well that our people become enraged if their religious beliefs are questioned, I do not understand why our writers behave in this fashion. The more you question the belief of our people the more they pledge their loyalty to it and miss out the truth behind it. They become slaves of tradition. This is true of all religions."

Further to this status quoist position he says that Taslima's article, instead of creating a healthy debate on the burqa ends up abusing the prophet. 

"How can we ever forget that when Arabia's illiterate masses were following the tradition of burying their girl-child alive, the prophet created a position of respect for women in society... The lines from Sura Al Noor are quoted in the article, but why has the writer forgotten to quote an earlier passage from the same Sura where the purdah rules are listed for men. It is better the the writer reads the holy Quran again." 

After interjecting this caveat, he says that when Islam came to India via Kerala and coastal Karnataka in the 7th century, it did not bring the burqa along with it. "Until recently in Kerala burqa was not in vogue," he says and adds that the black burqa that we are familiar with today came nearly two hundred years after the passing away of the Prophet. 

Then comes a crucial, yet ambivalent paragraph where Katpadi argues in the following fashion: 

"If women can face the educational, economic and other basic problems of our society wearing the burqa why should anybody stop them? This is their choice. Only forcing somebody to wear a burqa should be considered an offence. In the same way, just because somebody wears a burqa they should not be provoked and considered uncivilised. Imposing this opinion on them is equally a big mistake." 

The argument of 'choice' is really intriguing here for the simple reason that it does not get extended to Taslima.

At the end there is a piece of cautious advise to his fellow Muslims: 

"Instead of giving a fitting reply to criticism, getting on the streets and protesting violently will only give a bad name to the community. We should remember that it will in no way help save the religion." 

What these fitting replies are is not spelled out by Katpadi.

Next consider the piece written by Siraj Ahamed, a literary critic in Kannada. He lives in Shimoga, where the protests took a violent turn and also took away two lives. He seems to be in love with the curfew that has been imposed in his town and ends up in a lyrical description of the emptiness that surrounds him. He structures it well though and in a prose heavily-laden with irony offers fourteen tiny episodes of life in the aftermath of the violence. Suddenly, towards the end of the introductory paragraphs he says the traditional techniques of literature are of no use to portray the perversions of the present and ambitiously invokes the 'abrupt narration' of Saadat Hasan Manto's Partition stories. What follows is a kind of circumambulation and a leisurely disengagement with the Taslima issue. Aspiring for a literary condition so quickly and so soon is the problem. While Ahmed understand the perversions of the present, he sadly forgets its exigencies.

Some other responses of moderates published outside the website indulge themselves in Taslima's 'genocide of truth.' They also attack the translator for adding 'further venom' to the original piece. There is a hair-splitting comparison with the original passages of the Quran. As I said earlier, the refrain is 'The Quran actually does not say so.' What is most apparent from this unfortunate incident is that the moderate Muslim intellectual seems to have conceded the role of engaging his community to the religious leader and the politician. In all these responses, none of the moderates question the role played by a Urdu daily run by a Congress politician in provoking a violent reaction that ultimately claimed two lives. 

There is a telling line in Siraj Ahmed's piece: 

"On the first day, people who participated in the protests against Taslima's article did not really know who had written it. Since it had appeared in a Kannada newspaper they thought it should be the handiwork of the usual suspects. People who were literate and who understood the workings of journalism also did not tell them." 

After all the veiled responses, I was exposed to refreshing candour when I read an autobiographical piece (in the anthology Lekha-Loka, 1998) by a respected Muslim woman-writer in Kannada - Sara Aboobakar. I would like to underscore three passages in that essay: 

"I thought if the man I married was educated he wouldn't be clouded by religious dogma. That he wouldn't pester me to wear a burqa. So I aspired for an educated man as my husband." 

The second passage: 

"When all rules in Islam apply equally to both men and women, is it fair that only men are allowed to go to the cinema? I would argue with my husband that he shouldn't make use of the facility that I have been denied. But he wouldn't mind telling me lies to visit the cinema." 

Third passage: 

"When I went to Mangalore I used to carry the burqa in a bag and wear it as I approached my mother-in-law's place. While returning from there I would take it off in the bus. I could gain freedom from the burqa only after my mother-in-law passed away."