But You Don't Look Like a Muslim

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  My trip, however, had little to do with India per se. I was invited by the Asia Foundation, as part of a regional study group comprising delegates from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand and Nepal, to look at an on-going imam-training programme. The Asia Foundation is a non-profit, non-governmental organization working on development issues in the Asia-Pacific region. For over fifty years it has been supporting programmes in Asia that help improve governance, law and civil society; women’s empowerment; economic reform and development; and international relations. It ties up with private and public partners to support leadership and institutional development, exchanges and policy research. With a network of eighteen offices throughout Asia, an office in Washington DC, and headquarters in San Francisco, the Foundation addresses these issues on both a country and regional level. Our group, comprising twenty-one people from diverse backgrounds and faiths, is struck by the innovativeness of the idea of this present initiative: of identifying imams as leaders of influence and steering them to become engines of social change.

  Our motley group spends the next few days understanding the linkages that have brought disparate and seemingly polarized groups to work together. Asia Foundation, in collaboration with USAID, joined hands with the Islamic Foundation (under the Bangladesh government’s Ministry of Religious Affairs) to launch a Leaders of Influence (LOI) programme in 2004. In its first two years, LOI reached out to 5,000 imams through orientation programmes that dealt with developmental issues especially pertinent to Bangladesh: ranging from deforestation, poultry farming, aquaculture, managing environmental resources, primary education, family health, early marriages to public advocacy, local governance, protection of human rights and prevention of human trafficking. Encouraged by the response, it took up the development of a curriculum, in consultation with the Islamic Foundation. Newer, more topical, occasionally even contentious issues began to be built into the imams’ syllabi and training modules. In the five years since the LOI programmes have been running, it has ‘trained’ 11,500 imams (it had proposed to reach 20,000 religious and secular leaders by the year 2011). With time, a gamut of issues was added: the benefits of solar energy, income-generating ideas, capacity building, awareness regarding HIV/AIDS, and best of all, gender sensitization by talking about hitherto unmentionable subjects like marital rape and family planning.

  What is more, the imams are exposed to diverse faith groups and encouraged to talk with minority groups. We travel all the way to Sylhet to visit one of the seven imam-training academies which was, at that time, in the throes of an Intergroup Workshop. Youth leaders from secular parties, imams from the remote hinterland, representatives of Mosque Councils, Buddhist monks from Chittagong, Christian and Hindu leaders, a group of vibrant young women from the local YWCA and a handful of journalists are busy debating the ‘key challenges’ facing all of them.

  Earlier in the day, they have identified the key issues; I can see the list chalked out on a board and it is an eye-opener. They have, by mutual consent, drawn up a list of ten major areas in which they need to work; these are: primary healthcare, HIV/AIDS, forest preservation, anti-corruption, terror-free environment, local governance, utilization of resources, civic challenges, trafficking of minors and migration. Within these key areas, the challenges facing them are: mischief-makers from among their own communities who oppose change; political influences that come in the way of development goals; nepotism from those in positions of power; personal security when some of them dare to raise their voice; lack of support from the administration; the nature of law itself and the loopholes that allow the law-breakers to get away; and the rampant corruption that is virtually a way of life. A break in the workshop allows us to speak with some of the participants. One earnest young imam makes a telling point: ‘Whenever a religious leader speaks about women or women’s issues, everyone thinks he is making a political speech.’ Another speaks of the crushing and very real poverty of his flock that often puts sensitization issues on the back burner. A third rues their greatest collective misfortune: not being able to elect ‘real’ leaders.

  Asia Foundation is counting on the exponential effect of these imam training sessions. There are 300,000 mosques in Bangladesh; which means there are at least 300,000 imams. If even a few thousand are exposed to these new ideas during the rigorous forty-five-day training, they can in turn amplify the effect by word of mouth. And going by the formidable range of issues they have decided to take up, one is impressed by the sincerity and awareness on the part of the imams.

  Returning to Dhaka from Sylhet, I cross many a winding river, traversing a countryside rich with the emerald of tender paddy crops. The words of the young imams ring in my ears. The road from Sylhet to Dhaka seems familiar. The nagging sense of déjà vu makes me realize why: it could, in fact, be any road anywhere in eastern India. A green and yellow patchwork quilt spreads on either side of the road – the green of the paddy contrasts vividly with the yellow of the mustard in full bloom. Green-painted domes of mosques and tall minarets festooned with mikes occasionally peer through dense banana groves and swaying coconut palms. Gaily painted trucks and overloaded rickshaws jostle for space with state-of-the-art SUVs on highways that are often choked and potholed. I feel I am at home. The driver of our gleaming Land Cruiser is loquacious. He keeps up a running commentary on the many big and small rivers we cross: the Surma on the outskirts of Sylhet, the Kushiyara and the Ichchamati. In Bangladesh, he tells us with a laugh, when you don’t know the name of a river you call it the ‘Ichchamati’ for it means a river, any river, that flows as per its own will, meandering hither and thither, changing its course as it wishes. Once, there were many more Ichchamatis in Bangladesh with plentiful waters. Now, they are drying up, their waters are being pulled up by India, our driver tells us. Even the Padda (aka Padma) which yields the delicious hilsa (served to us for lunch in Sylhet) is drying up and the famed fish delicacy becoming exorbitantly priced. A heavy silence falls in the car as all eyes turn towards me.

  I am reminded of the fact that as we speak, thousands of miles across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent, high-powered talks are going on in Delhi precisely on this contentious issue. For, lest we forget, the gigantic delta that is Bangladesh is crisscrossed by 230 major rivers, fifty-four of them originating in India and three of them emptying their waters in the Bay of Bengal. The sharing of these waters between the neighbours has resulted in numerous treaties, yet no lasting solution has been found to a perennially vexing issue. The ghost of the Farrakka Barrage Treaty haunts all such negotiations. The building of dams upstream on the Ganga, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Irabati rivers, too, has had devastating consequences on the fragile ecosystem of Bangladesh. In this India is not the only culprit; it shares blame with Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar for affecting traditional river systems and the livelihoods they once sustained. Contaminated run-off waters from Indian fields and disposal of industrial wastes into the waters of many of these rivers has played havoc with riparian ecosystems in downstream Bangladesh. Having said that, India being the largest of the neighbours, ends up getting the largest share of the blame for many things that have gone awry in this part of the world.

  India is everywhere in Bangladesh: The black grapes being sold in such abundance even in the small hamlets we pass by the highway are from India. The TV channels are awash with Indian serials. Indian film stars and models are advertising everything from soap to insurance. The lobby of my hotel is milling with Indian businessmen and entrepreneurs. Despite the preponderance of Indian goods and people, I am struck by the curious love-hate relationship between the two countries. There is a tension in the air and it isn’t just to do with the bilateral talks underway in far-off New Delhi. Despite the Indian hand in the liberation movement of 1971 when the Mukti Bahini guerrillas worked hand in glove with the Indian military forces, several contentious issues arose early in the relationship. While equal sharing of river waters has always been a big issue, there has also been the added strain of the Teen B
igha Corridor and the terror outfits that India alleges have been operating from Bangladeshi soil. That many of these so-called terror outfits are funded by Ahle-e-Hadees organizations rooted in Saudi soil and the money for terror-related activities is said to be routed through Saudi-funded madrasas in Bangladesh is the subtext of much of India’s allegations.

  The combined weight of these many disputes puts a damper on any prolonged Indian–Bangladeshi bonhomie. There is also the tit-for-tat brand of diplomacy that affects everything from trade to geopolitics. For instance, when Bangladesh banned the export of hilsa fish, India retaliated by stopping the export of rice to Bangladesh. At a personal level, what irks many Bangladeshis, I suspect, is how much they know about India and Indians and how little we Indians know about them. This unequalness mars the tone and tenor of Indo–Bangladeshi dialogue – at every level.

  My plane from Dhaka to Delhi is delayed by the fog that falls upon much of upper India like a dense white shawl in the early weeks of January, like a quilt of invisibility. All the way back from Dhaka, I find myself reciting Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s haunting, conscience-stricken ode to the then newly born, bloodied Bangladesh. Written in 1974, ‘Dhaka Se Wapsi Par’ (On Returning from Dhaka) is one of the most hauntingly poignant poems, and brutally honest too in its admission of neglect and wrongdoing; for, save for a handful of Pakistani intellectuals such as Faiz and Intizar Husain, Pakistan has always preferred to bury memories of the carnage in East Pakistan in a conspiracy of silence. Faiz’s elegy deserves to be quoted in full and not in parts to fully savour its overwhelming sense of loss, defeat, shame and guilt:

  Hum ke thehre ajnabi itni mulaaqaaton ke baad

  Phir banein ge aashna kitni madaaraaton ke baad

  Kab nazar mein aaye gi be daagh sabze ki bahaar

  Khoon ke dhabe dhulein ge kitni barsaaton ke baad

  Thei bahut bedard lamhe khat’m-e-dard-e-ishq ke

  Thein bahut bemeh’r subhein meh’rbaan raaton ke baad

  Dil to chaaha par shikast-e-dil ne moh’lat hi na di

  Kuchh gile shikwe bhi kar lete manaajaaton ke baad

  Un se jo kehne gaye the ‘Faiz’ jaan sadqe kiye

  Ankahi hi reh gayi woh baat sab baaton ke baad.

  Agha Shahid Ali’s elegant translation given below from his book, The Rebel’s Silhouette, carries some of the ineffable sorrow of the original:

  After those many encounters, that easy intimacy, we are strangers now –

  After how many meetings will we be that close again?

  When will we again see a spring of unstained green?

  After how many monsoons will the blood be washed from the branches?

  So relentless was the end of love, so heartless –

  After the nights of tenderness, the dawns were pitiless, so pitiless.

  And so crushed was the heart that though it wished it found no chance –

  After the entreaties, after the despair – for us to quarrel once again as old friends.

  Faiz, what you’d gone to say, ready to offer everything, even your life –

  Those healing words remained unspoken after all else had been said.

  The seasons have come and gone for close to four decades. The Subcontinent has changed in more ways than one. The healing words have long remained unspoken. But life goes on. Faiz’s fervent prayer has been answered. The ‘spring of unstained green’ lies dappled across Bangladesh. I saw it with my own eyes – in the fields of tender paddy and bursting mustard.

  9

  THE HAJ AS TRAVEL

  THE BRILL DICTIONARY OF RELIGION describes ‘pilgrimage’ as ‘time-honoured migrations to outlying sacred places. This phenomenon of religious mobility is attested among peoples of ancient times … This devotional journeying is underlain by the belief that the local presence of a deity, a hero, or a saint in this specific place makes transcendence in immanence especially effective and available to experience, and thereby especially efficacious for one’s own concerns.’ From the point of view of cultural history, pilgrimage is a symbolic movement incorporating both bodily relocation and heightened piety. For Muslims, the Haj, or the pilgrimage to the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina is not merely a farz or duty but also a spiritual journey; one that can, for the fortunate few, lead to spiritual evolution and salvation. Consumed with a burning desire to see the two holiest shrines of the Muslim world, the Baitul Muqaddas, the Holiest of Homes, and the Haram Sharif, pilgrims embark upon a journey of faith that takes them out of their small, protected world, across the seas to another world that they have only dreamt of visiting someday.

  Since, in Islam there is no fixed age by when the pilgrimage must be undertaken, most Muslims, until very recently, used to postpone it for their old age. Until not very long ago, this accounted for older people afflicted by disease and infirmity and the poor and indigent forming the bulk of pilgrim traffic. Year after year, colonial governments across Asia and Africa had to incur the expense of repatriating the destitute and penniless, and local authorities had to cope with the burial of those who died of disease, neglect or poverty in the Holy Land. Also, given the phenomenally large numbers of pilgrims who descended upon the holy sites during the annual Haj pilgrimage, several issues came into play – trade, commerce, transportation, sanitation and the logistics of housing, feeding and caring for thousands upon thousands of ‘Allah’s guests’. The question of pilgrimage, thus, went beyond the confines of mere religion and spilled over from the personal to the public domain, from the sacred to the secular. And while the Haj pilgrimage has been studied from many perspectives – religious, sociological, cultural, even from the point of view of community health – it has seldom been viewed from the perspective of travel.

  There are records of Indian Muslims going on Haj from the earliest times. While a great many went of their own accord, there are references too to those who were sent on ‘compulsory’ pilgrimage. Akbar is known to have sent his regent, Bairam Khan, on one such prolonged stay in Mecca when the latter fell out of favour, and other Mughal chronicles too refer to this form of political banishment which was seen as an expedient way of getting rid of a threat, renegade, rival or embarrassing ally. This is not to say, however, that the great majority of those who went and, more often than not, stayed well beyond the number of days prescribed for the Haj, did not do so of their own free will. There have also been instances of alim, men of learning, who chose to extend their voyage after the Haj by going for extended periods of stay at centres of learning, such as the al-Azhar university in Cairo. For some, the Haj then offered an opportunity to meet Muslims from all over the world and interact with ulama from different traditions and discourses within Islam.

  With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 the Haj traffic picked up. The colonial government had a virtual monopoly on the ships that plied the Arabian Sea and the entire Haj traffic was rigorously monitored and controlled. The colonial government kept an especially careful eye on the Hajis who went from India not merely because they were Indian subjects, the great many of whom were venturing out into a new world for the first time in their life, but also because they were vital for reasons of trade and commerce. The British had a monopoly on just about everything that was sold in the markets of Mecca and Medina, and except for local produce everything that was sold in these shops was manufactured in Britain – a bit like the rosaries, skullcaps and other mementoes that the faithful bring back from the holy places now are ‘Made in China’!

  In olden days, a significant number of Muslims would go on the annual Haj pilgrimage by ship via Yanbou or Jeddah, and a smaller number by camel caravans that undertook the long, arduous overland journey across inhospitable deserts and treacherous plains. From 1882 to 1893 an average of just 12,000 pilgrims set sail for the Hejaz from Bombay. These figures increased considerably in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the imperial government took measures to alleviate the sufferings experienced by the pilgrims. Various Haj committees were formed to expedite the travel arra
ngements. While things improved substantially, the state of affairs was far from perfect and the journey of faith far from smooth. The pilgrims, as always, were a mixed lot: some were rich who, according to contemporary chroniclers, could afford all manner of luxuries, while others were so poor that they depended on the kindness of strangers even for food and shelter. As with pilgrimages the world over, the educated and relatively well-to-do Muslims always have a different experience of the Haj than the poor and the illiterate.

  Probably the earliest text documenting the Haj voyage from India and its sights and experiences is Anisul Hujjaj authored by the tutor of Princess Zebunnisa and dedicated to the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb. There is also the example of early writings on the Haj in the form of ‘visions’ or extremely personal experiences during the narrator-recorder’s stay in the holy places in a collection entitled Fuyuz ul-Harmain by the revivalist Islamic theologian Shah Waliullah written in 1730. These were followed by accounts by the poet Shefta in 1841, Siddiq Hasan Khan Bhopali in 1870, the Begum of Bhopal also in 1870, the Nawab of Rampur in 1872, to name a few. As sea travel increased, with increased maritime activity linked with the introduction of steam-powered ships across the Arabian Sea, more and more Indians began to set out on these voyages. By the late nineteenth century ‘a total of at least 100,000 performed the pilgrimage each year and some 30,000 came by sea’. Of these, the better class of Hajis, those who were literate and belonged to the shurfa or held jobs in the government, began to show a marked propensity to jot down their experiences – both during the travel and in the holy cities – providing us with accounts that are a seamless blend of the secular and religious, at once travelogues and religious treatises.

  Some of these Haj travelogues paint vivid pictures not only of the Haj experience but of the travel to these holy places in the hot Arabian deserts. Pilgrimage afforded a great opportunity to meet people from different corners of India, with the pilgrim ship becoming a huge melting pot. Apart from the Central Provinces, the bulk of the pilgrims were Bengalis, Hyderabadis, Gujaratis, Pathans, Malabaris, Memons, Bohris, etc. There were also a good number from Persia, Afghanistan, Java, Bukhara, Tibet, China, Burma, who came aboard en route. And they came from a wide cross-section of society: educated and illiterate, rich and poor, well-placed and socially and economically disadvantaged. The pious passengers were pirs, maulvis, teachers, newspaper editors, engineers, pleaders, doctors, subedar-majors, landlords, merchants, petty clerks, officials in the colonial government, among others. For many, this was a first outing – often from the village or town, sometimes from the province and almost always the first voyage outside the country. Except for the common goal – of performing the Haj and visiting the holy places - there were more differences than commonalities among those who had set off from their homes in different parts of the Muslim world.