Puppets Of Faith Theory Of Communal Strife (A critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n more)

by BS Murthy

  Thus, while the Muslim dominance of India caused its stagnation, the British deliverance from the same heralded the Hindu socio-political resurgence. The emotional relief of the Hindu to be rid of the political yoke of the M usalmans, after nearly eight centuries, evoked a feel-good in the country's majority. With the mainstay of the population, so to say, enamored of them, and they too having come to value the ancient Hindu philosophy, which got reduced to mere prejudice by then, the British loved India as best as their own interests would permit them to do. And having succeeded in subduing the squabbling Nawabs and the disjointed Rajas, the British slowly but steadily unified the country to usher it into the modern era; they built roads and bridges, brought in the radio and the railways, and the telegraph and the telephone.

  But, to the chagrin of the M usalmans, the British banished Persian, the language of the Mogul Court, and introduced English to administer India, which turned out to be a boon to the Hindus for it facilitated their entry into the administrative portals, and that gave them an edge over the M usalmans, thereby ushering them into a new age in their ancient land. Even though the evangelists failed to take the Hindu souls en masse onto the Christian path of salvation, yet the British saved the Indian souls by modernizing the hitherto neglected healthcare system. And it was their educationists that enabled the Hindu's innate scientific temper to flower in the, Ramans, the Boses, and the Ramanujans etal.

  Besides, the secular education that McCauley introduced produced a body of Hindu thinkers and reformers, mostly Brahmans, and predominantly Bengali at that - the Arabindos, the Tagores, the Bankimchandras, the Ram Mohan Roys, the Ambedkars, the Tilaks, the Malaviyas , the Gurajadas, et al - in their scores, which laid the seeds of equality in the Indian soil at long last. But yet there are the critics, who aver that his educational mechanism turned India into a nation of clerks, of course not without some justification; and as history tends to repeat itself, the skeptics of the day aver that the IT upsurge in the end would reduce humans into a bunch of keyboard operators; undeterred though the technology has set its eyes on Al. Whatever, there is a price to pay for a millennium of stagnation of slavery, isn't it?

  So, the Brahmans, as though to make amends for the sins of their progenitors, strived hard to clear the social debris that Brahmanism had left on the Indian soil. The Hindu reformist zeal, with due help from the Western Samaritanism, which put the Brahman orthodoxy on the back foot, which, in turn, enabled the community to contain abominable practices such as sati, untouchability, child marriage et al, that is besides opening the altars for widow marriages.

  With the momentum so gained on the social front, as the Hindus began to dream about changes in the political arena, Gandhi ingenuously transformed India's masses into 'Soldiers of Peace' to fight against the mighty British that stunned them in the end. While the world marveled at it, India showed to it as to how an ancient nation of peace loving people, with a dominant religion of philosophical orientation, can successfully

  shape its struggle against a foreign rule in the modern world through non-violent means. How well, Pearl S. Buck captured it all in her assertion that only a religion like Hinduism and a country like India could have produced a Gandhi!

  Nonetheless, India's struggle for freedom had had its righteous streaks of aggression as well as the pacifist stances of Islam, for even as Subhas Chnadra Bose and others across the country, opted for an armed struggle, the Indian M usalmans, along with the majority of the Hindus, stuck to the Gandhian course of non-violence. That is, till Muhammad Ali Jinnah fired the Muslim imagination with the call for the creation of Pakistan, the separate homeland for the M usalmans of Hindustan. Whatever, as the Hindu hopes for freedom rose, so did the M uslim fears about the domination of their religious rivals in free India increased, and it seemed as if the wheel was about to turn the full circle for the Hindus and the M usalmans as well.

  While for the Hindus, the end of the British Raj would seemingly herald a Rama Rajya, i.e. after a thousand year interregnum, for the M usalmans, whose domain of eight centuries the British had ended; it portended the worst - the Hindu domination of them. That was after the baneful land reforms of the British, which had already proved to be the last nail in the coffin of their parasitic life of leisure and luxury. Besides, given the propensity of the M usalmans to live by their glorious past, the prospect of a Rama Rajya would have seemed a setback for Islam in Hindustan.

  Since the religious loss of face is something that the M usalmans dread the most, so, what would have salvaged the Islamic prestige than a separate nation for them in the subcontinent? Besides, a 'here' they can call their own, that would enable them to take home their fond memories of the past glories that the two-hundred-year mogul rule symbolizes. M oreover, as the notion of a M uslim nation would restore the loss of power and pelf under the British Raj, the craving of those M usalmans for Pakistan cannot be faulted.

  But it's their hypocrisy behind the demand for separation on the specious ground that M uslims cannot coexist with the Hindus, that is abominable. Why didn't they live with the Hindus for a thousand years by then; oh, that was when they happened to be the rulers, isn't it? Well in reality, Indian M usalmans found it galling to live under the imminent Hindu rule in the independent India; and in an encore, the same supremacist psyche came to the fore in latter-years as the Hindu nationalists, at long last, had come to rule their Bharat that is India.

  Whatever, after centuries of inimical M uslim misrule the Hindus have had to endure, they should have a reason to feel indebted to the British for having given them a modern nation, though truncated. Maybe, the Singh Pariah's nationalist lament over a lost Akhand Bharat, patriotic though, is misplaced for with one M usalman for every two Hindus in it; Islam would have erected enough roadblocks for the undivided India to modernize itself. Moreover, if not for their grant of Pakistan as the homeland for the Indian M usalmans, the British could have unwittingly Balkanized India, or worse!

  So, notwithstanding the unpalatable partition of their ancient land, the Hindus have every reason to be grateful to the British for releasing them from the Islamic shackles that their Brahman-kshatriya duo willy-nilly put them into. And for the same reason, the M usalmans are wont to grudge the British for having divested them of the Dilli gaddi that is in spite of their having ensconced them in Rawalpindi, which, of course, they see as a consolation prize. Won't the Indian M usalmans' resentment of the British validate the adage that "one's meat is another man's poison"? It's another matter though that in hindsight it appears that the Pakistani capital-shift from Rawalpindi to Islamabad was a forerunner into its Islamic disaster!

  Chapter 24 Ant Grows Wings

  Never in the history of Islam, not excluding that of its M essenger, was the destiny of the leader so providentially tied with the fate of his people as that of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Indian Musalmans. And like Muhammad before him, Jinnah (peace be upon him as well for his soul too must be restless in his grave) also did not survive long enough to bring about the political consolidation of Pakistan, and to the like effect. While the grand religion of M uhammad rendered itself into sub-faiths so soon after his death, Quaid -e- Azam's Pakistan, as if to prove the truism of the Italian saying, 'to its own hurt that ant grows wings', sundered itself into two nations that was before it could celebrate the Silver Jubilee of its coming into being. Just the same, by then, it had glaringly exhibited the brutality of the intra-lslamic intolerance on its Eastern stage, in all its Punjabi - Bengali variation, for all to see, and for any of those who might have missed it, it was reenacted in the Iran-lraq war by Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein. Well if anything, their legacy of Shia-Sunni strife is sought to be perpetuated in all its cruelty in Iraq, Pakistan et al, seemingly forever.

  Whatever, the roots of the Islamist separatism in Hindustan lay in the political ambitions of the Muslim aristocracy and the economic interests of the middle-class M usalmans, who wanted to have it easy in a country of their own bereft of any Hindu compe
tition. But the separatist sentiment propelled by the mullahs and the self-interest of the elitist groups needed political fusion to facilitate Pakistan, and the leadership for that came from an unexpected source, in the persona of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whom M uhammad, if not banished him as an infidel, owing to political expediency, would have certainly branded him a hypocrite. Like the hostility of the Quraysh motivated Muhammad to capture the kabah for Islam, so wasjinnah's zest to take up the cudgels of Pakistan for the Indian Musalman arose from his desire to settle scores with Gandhi's Congress that sought to sideline him.

  But unlike Muhammad, who provided for his faithful of Medina with the 'spoils of war', Jinnah was constrained in propping up Pakistan for Islam had no precedents for nation building, intellectually speaking that is. While Allah in his own wisdom withheld its wherewithal from Muhammad, he too did not survive long enough after the conquest of Arabia for him to have developed the grasp of managing the national economy. So the M usalmans have no hadith or sunnah to go by on that count, and even otherwise, Muhammad's methods would show that he believed in the adage of 'ends justifying the means', rather than in the 'merits of the means applied '.

  Given that man, in passing through the pathless woods of life, has to remain in tune with its ever changing currents, the Musalmans though are forever in a quandary sticking to 'whatever' dished out in the quran, hadith 'n sunna. True, they pore over their Islamic texts in the hope of finding a clue here or a hint there but to no avail; well how were M uhammad to know about the complexities of modern life in his desert times of yore. That is about the Muslim habit of viewing the ever-altering world through M uhammad's rusted medieval prism, and what they divine through that is there for all to see. After all, one only sees what one looks for, and no farther.

  Moreover, being an autocrat that he was, besides being their sole arbiter, M uhammad had no compunctions in furthering the faith among his flock with "do as I say but don't do as I do" dictum. So the Caliphs, who succeeded him, and the Sultans, who followed them, found it expedient to follow in his convenient footsteps to the detriment of the umma though as an increment to the Islamic tradition that came in handy to others who followed them. It's thus the rulers of today's Islamic world, Saudis downward; tread on Muhammad's autocratic path with hadithian props. And true to

  form, the democratic nation of Pakistan that Jinnah envisaged for the Indian Musalmans first came into the Quranic domain and, in the end, ended up being the fiefdom of its fauzis and fast ripening for being taken over by the jihadis.

  And in time, thanks to Zia ul-Huq's political expediency that ushered in the sharia to humor the mullahs, the 'land of the pure' was turned into the backyard of the jihadis as well as the launching pad for the fidayen, the martyr missiles of Islam. Well, as if to add insult to injury, Zia famously declared that democracy wouldn't suit the M uslim genius, nevermind their theologians proclaiming from the rooftops of the world that Islam as a religion is essentially democratic! While that only shows how far the 'frog in the well' vision can take one, Pakistan failed to infuse Iqbal's muse to better his sdrae jahon se achchd hindositon hamdrd, which he penned for India before he pitched in for Pakistan

  But much before Pakistan was tilled in the Islamic fields of Hindustan; its seeds of failure, as observed by W. W. Hunter in The Indian M usalmans, lay in the Wahabi roots of the Indian M uslims at the loss of their imperial power to the British.

  "The Wahabis, now a scattered and a homeless sect, profess doctrines hateful to the well-to-do classes of M uhammadans. In formal divinity they are the Unitarians of Islam, they refuse divine attributes to Muhammad, forbid prayers in his name, and denounce supplications to departed saints. It is their earnest, practical morality, however, that contains the secret of their strength. They boldly insist upon a return to the faith of the primitive Muhammadan Church, to its simplicity of manners, its purity of life, and its determination to spread the Truth, at whatever expenses of the blood of the Infidel, and at whatever sacrifice of themselves.

  Their two great principles are the unity of God and the abnegation of self. They disdain the compromises by which the rude fanaticism of M uhammad has been skillfully worked up into a system of civil policy, and adapted alike to the internal wants and foreign relations of Musalman States. They exact from every convert that absolute resignation (Islam) to the will of God, which is the clue to the success of M uhammad.

  But while, like other reforming sects, they ceaselessly insist on this fundamental doctrine, they weaken their cause among the learned by their Unitarian divinity, and among the simple by a rude disregard of established rites and hallowed associations. In the greater part of Asia, the Wahabi convert must separate himself from the whole believing world. He must give up his most cherished legends, his most solemn festivals, and his holiest beliefs. He must even discontinue the comforting practice of praying at his father's tomb."

  About the state of Islamic Educational institutions in India during the British Raj, Hunter had this to say in his well-researched work:

  "Even the few among them, who, if left to themselves, would try to do well, had no means for obtaining any sound or practically useful knowledge. In the first place, the time daily devoted to teaching was too short. The fixed hours are from ten to two, from which about twenty minutes must be subtracted in order to allow masters and students to smoke a hooka, known in the College slang as M oses' Rod; and about half an hour for calling the roll - a ceremony which had to be performed twice a day, as many of the students disappeared finally at twelve O'clock. Some of the more diligent supplement the meager College curriculum by reading 'religion' in private Musalman schools outside.

  Such external studies consist chiefly of the M uhammadan Tradition (Hadis) and law books of the fanatical medieval stamp - a sort of learning which fills the youthful brain with windy self-importance, and gives rise to bitter schisms on the most trivial points within the College walls. Not long ago, as the English Resident Professor was going his

  evening rounds, he heard a tumult in the students' rooms. 'Your religion is all wrong,' and similar phrases, resounded through the corridors, and fierce were the denunciations on all sides.

  He hurried to the scene of the uproar, and found that one of the students had found in a law-book that during prayer the heels should be joined, else the petition has no effect in heaven or on earth. Those who had said their prayers with unclosed heels denounced the discoverer of the new mode as a pernicious heretic; while he and a little band of followers consigned all who prayed in the old fashion to the eternal torments of hell.

  Three hours' instruction is as much as they could possibly obtain from the College teachers in the day; - one who has practical acquaintance with it, tells me that the actual time of teaching seldom exceeded two and a half hours. Anything like preparation at home is unknown, and indeed is opposed to Mohammedan ideas. Each master reads out an Arabic sentence, and explains the meanings of the first, second and the third word, and so on till he comes to the end of it. The diligent student writes these meanings between the lines of his textbook, and by easy degrees learns the whole sentence and the interpretation thereof by heart.

  To teach him how to use the dictionary at home, or to reason out the meaning of a passage on his own account, is an altogether foreign invention, possibly dangerous to his religious faith, and at any rate unknown in the Calcutta College. At the end of seven years the students know certain books by heart, text and interpretation; but if they get a simple manuscript beyond their narrow curriculum, they are in a moment beyond their depth. Such a training, it may well be supposed, produces an intolerant contempt for anything which they have not learned. The very nothingness of their acquirements makes them more conceited, they know as an absolute truth that the Arabic grammar, law, rhetoric, and logic, comprise all that is worth knowing upon earth.

  They have learned that the most extensive kingdoms in the world are, first Arabia, then England, France, and Russia, and that the largest town, next to M ecc
a, M edina, and Cairo, is London. Au reste, the English are Infidels, and will find themselves in a very hot place in the next world. To this vast accumulation of wisdom what more could be added? When a late Principal tried to introduce profane science, even through the medium of their own Urdu, were they not amply justified in pelting him with brick-bats and rotten mangoes."

  Then, the ultimate M uslim response to their loss of power, which possibly led to the blind alley of the Hindu-M uslim disaffection, is captured, again by Hunter thus:

  "During the last forty years they have separated themselves from the Hindus by differences of dress, of salutations, and other exterior distinctions, such as they never deemed necessary in the days of their supremacy."

  This new craving of the Indian M usalmans for separateness might have naturally led to the clamor for more madrasas for the intensification of religious education to the young things to make them more M uslim. About the reluctance of the zealous M uslims to send their children to secular schools, Hunter states thus:

  "The truth is, that our system of Public Instruction ignores the three most powerful instincts of the Musalman heart. In the first place, it conducts education in the vernacular of Bengal, a language which the educated Mohammedans despise, and by means of Hindu teachers, whom the whole Mohammedan Community hates. The Bengali school master talks his own dialect and a vile Urdu, the latter of which is to him an acquired language almost as much as is to ourselves. M oreover, his gentle and timid character unfits him to maintain order among M usalman boys. 'Nothing on earth' said a