Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

The men who have traditionally spearheaded the fundamentalist response of Muslim societies and who are widely regarded as representatives of Islamic conservatism are professional men of religion, the ulema, with various degrees of religious learning, who are also known as mullahs in Persia and India. In some ways, my encounter with the mullahs was psychologically the most difficult. The meeting itself was undemanding since besides our animating minds the encounter only involved a disembodied voice on the mullah’s part and ears on mine. The mullahs—Qari Hanif Mohammad Multanwale, Syed Mohammad Hashmi, Maulana Salimuddin Shamshi, Riyaz Effendi, and others—came to me through their sermons recorded live at different times during the last decade at various mosques and reproduced in hundreds of thousands of inexpensive audiocasettes which are widely available in the Muslim neighbourhoods of Indian towns and cities.

  The encounter with the mullah proved difficult on two counts. First, there was the persistence of my Hindu childhood image of the mullah as the wild-eyed man with a flowing beard who spewed fire and brimstone every Friday afternoon in the mosque with an intent to transform his congregation into a raging mob baying for the blood of the Hindu infidel—mine. Second, the mullah’s rhetoric, based on older models from the heyday of Islam in the Middle East, was unpleasantly foreign to me. Openly emotional, using the full register of the voice from a whisper to the full-throated shout, screaming and on occasion weeping as he is overtaken by religious enthusiasm, the mullah’s style of public speaking was distasteful to (as of the Hindu zealot) to me. My adult sensibility, influenced by psychoanalytic rationalism, recoils at the hectoring tone, the imperative voice, and the moral certainty which recognizes only the black of unbelief (kufar) and the white of faith and has neither time nor tolerance for the shades of grey.

  Influenced emotionally by fantasies from a Hindu past and cognitively by the concepts of a Western-inspired liberalism, my first reaction to the mullah was to label him a ‘fanatic’, the word itself an eighteenth-century European coinage meant to denounce rather than describe the religious zealot. The temptation to rip open the mullah’s facade of a just man gripped by religious passion to reveal the workings of other, baser motives was overwhelming. Indeed, the speeches of most mullahs, expressing contempt and indifference for everything other than the object of their passion and an unshakeable certitude in the rightness of their beliefs, seem to be verily designed for a psychoanalytically inspired hatchet job. The temptation to pathologize the mullah as an obsessional, if not psychopathic or even paranoid, had to be resisted if I wished to understand Muslim fundamentalism without resort to reductionist psychological cliches.4 The first step in such an understanding was to listen to the mullah.

  Sung in many voices and with varying lyrics, the music of the fundamentalist theme song is easily recognizable from one mullah to another. After a couple of obligatory ayats from the Qur’an in Arabic as a prelude, signifying that both the speaker and the listener are now in the realm of the sacred, the fundamentalist generally begins with a lament for the lost glories of Islam as he compares the sorry plight of Muslims today with their earlier exalted status. There may be a sizeable presence of Muslims in all parts of the globe, says one mullah, and the mosque and the Qur’an found in every country. Yet nowhere does one hear that Muslims are thriving, successful, or on the ascendant. A hundred and sixty million Muslims are being whipped by two-and-a-half million Jews, says another. Look at the sorry fate of Iraq, a land made sacred by the blood of the Prophet’s grandsons. At one time Sultan Salah-al-din Ayubi (Saladin) commanding a force of thirteen thousand in the battle for Jerusalem faced Richard’s army of seven hundred thousand and killed three hundred thousand Christians on a single day. Once, in the battle for Mecca—and the first battle of Islamic history is every mullah’s preferred illustration—the Prophet with a ragtag force of three hundred and thirteen (a number which along with the word ‘Karbala’ has become the most effective symbol of political mobilization), including women, children, and old men, defeated the one thousand armed warriors of Abu Jahl, many of them on horseback at the battle of Badr. Today, with all the oil, dollars, and weapons in the world, Muslims are slaves to the dictates of Western Christian powers even in the thirty-six countries of which they are the putative rulers. Once, when the Muslim saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti died in Ajmer, nine million kafirs (here, the Hindus) began reading the kalma, that is, became Muslims. Once, at the sight of Imam Rahimullah’s funeral cortege, twenty thousand Jews converted to Islam. Today, Muslims have trouble keeping their own faith alive.

  The choice of historical illustrations from the early history of Islam, including their legendary elaboration, to bring home the fact of Muslim degeneration and distress in the modern world is a pan-Islamic phenomenon. Few if any civilizations have attached as much importance to history as has Islam in its awareness of itself.5 ‘Recognize your history (tarikh)!’ is the common fundamentalist exhortation, in contrast to the Hindu revivalist’s implied suggestion, ‘Live your myth!’ From the Prophet’s time to the present, it has been Islam which has distinguished between self and other, between brother and stranger, between the faithful and the alien kafir, the unbeliever. It is therefore not surprising that in fundamentalist discourse it is the wider, Arab-centred history of Islam rather than the history of Indian Muslims through which a collective Muslim identity is sought to be shaped.

  After listing the symptoms of Muslim distress, the mullahs proceed to diagnose the disease. The bad condition of the Muslims, they aver, is not due to any major changes in the outer circumstances of Muslim lives but because of a glaring internal fault: the weakening or loss of religious faith. Muslims have lost everything—political authority, respect, the wealth of both faith (din) and the world (duniya)—because they did not keep their pact with Mohammed. At one time Allah gave Muslims the kingdom of the world only in order to test whether they would continue to remain His slaves. Muslims have failed Allah’s test. It was their religious zeal which made a small, unarmed group of Muslims succeed on the battlefield against overwhelming odds. (Now the Mullah begins to address the listener more directly.) Today, you do not respect the Qur’an. You do not respect the Prophet who is so pure that not a single fly came near him during his lifetime, a man whose sweat smelt more divine than shiploads of perfume. You may think of yourselves as Muslims but look into the mirror of the Qur’an and you will see you are not.

  The Arabs lose to the Jews in Palestine because they are fighting for land, even if it is their own land. They are not fighting for Islam, for the Prophet. Sultan Salah-al-din fought for Islam and won Palestine. On the eve of the battle against Richard, he said to his soldiers: ‘Paradise is near, Egypt is far.’ He did not defend Islam by the sword but by his character as a Muslim. The Christians, as is their wont, used to send beautiful young women to seduce and corrupt Muslim generals, their priests assuring the girls forgiveness for all sins incurred in the service of Christianity. Saladin rejected thirteen of the most beautiful Christian girls sent to his palace; in fact, the Christian women, impressed by the Sultan’s steadfastness, read the kalma On the other hand the Muslims lost India, not to the British, but because the last Mughal emperors like Mohammad Shah Rangile and Bahadur Shah Zafar were sunk in the quagmire of wine, women, and poetry.

  After the diagnosis the physicians proceed to pathogenesis. The disease is caused by the process of modernity which the Muslim body has not resisted. There is no difference today between the home of a Muslim and that of a Hindu, Jew, or Christian. The sickness of television has entered Muslim homes where families fritter away whole evenings in ungodly entertainment rather than in reading from or discussing the Qur’an. Some of them say, ‘We watch television only for the news.’ I ask, ‘What news? Of murders and accidents? Is there any news to gladden the heart of the faithful? Where is the news that a Muslim country has conquered an infidel land?’ People walk about the streets singing songs from movies, prostitute’s songs, rather than with the kalma on their lips. They follow educated people
who are the thieves of religion, who teach the separation of religion from life and from politics.

  Muslims have now taken to these deeply offensive modern fashions. They no longer give a revered name such as Fatima, that of the Prophet’s daughter, to their own daughters but prefer instead to name the little girl after some movie actress, a prostitute. Look at the Western-style trousers that men wear, with pockets in indecent places. You see men bending forward and taking out money from the hip pocket, next to the buttocks. In winter you can see them sliding their hands into the side pockets and taking out peanuts or cashews from these disgusting places and putting them in the mouth.

  In olden days a ruler would never permit the presence of a woman in official rooms or at public functions. A mullah would not perform the wedding ceremony where women were present. Now some of the rulers cannot even go to the toilet without a woman. Instead of only bowing before Allah, Muslims now bow before graves of various pirs (holy men) who are three feet underground. No wonder Islam is bending under the assault of kufr; Arabs are bowing before Jews and Christians, you before the Hindus. What is this preoccupation with worldly wealth and success? Allah says, I did not bring you into the world to make two shops out of one, four out of two, two factories out of one, four out of two. Does the Qur’an want you to do that? Does the Prophet? No! They want you to dedicate yourself to the faith, give your life for the glory of Islam.

  The remedy suggested by the mullahs is a return to the fundamentals of the faith as contained in the Qur’an. The Qur’an is Allah’s book, the light given by God to lift the darkness of mankind. Nothing can be added to or subtracted from the book. No arguments, no discussion, no objections, no asking for proofs. It is eternal and unchanging. It is not like the clothes you wear which are different for summer and winter. Follow every rule of the faith, not just the ones which are convenient. It is not what you want or wish but Allah’s wish that has to be complied with. It is not your likes but what is liked by the Prophet that must be done. All that is needed to live your life is contained in the examples from the life of the Prophet. All you need is faith—in Allah, the Prophet, the Book, angels, judgement day, paradise, and hell—and effort. If you cannot get worldly wealth without putting in an effort, how can you obtain paradise without it? Tell your daughters to offer namaz daily in the house; you won’t be able to tell them once they are burning in hell.

  Psychologically, then, fundamentalism is a theory of suffering and cure, just as modern individualism is another theory of suffering and its cure. The core of psychological individuality is internalization rather than externalization. I use ‘internalization’ here as a sensing by the person of a psyche in the Greek sense, an animation from within rather than without. Experientially, this internalization is a recognition that one is possessed of a mind in all its complexity. It is the acknowledgement, however vague, unwilling, or conflicted, of a subjectivity that fates one to episodic suffering through some of its ideas and feelings—in psychoanalysis, murderous rage, envy, and possessive desire seeking to destroy those one loves and would keep alive—simultaneously with the knowledge, at some level of awareness, that the mind can help in containing and processing disturbed thoughts. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, identifies the cause of suffering not in the individual mind but in a historical process which, however, is not fatefully deterministic but amenable to human will and eminently reversible. Individual and collective suffering are due to a lapse from an ideal state of religious faith, and the cure lies in an effort to restore faith in one’s inner life to its original state of pristine purity.

  Another striking aspect of fundamentalist religious discourse is not so much its warlike anger against the enemy—the modernization process, the infidels—held responsible for the contemporary sorry state of the Muslims, but the turning of this rage inward in a collective self-recrimination and masochistic self-hate. The loss of Muslim greatness is not grieved for, a process that would pave the way for an eventual acceptance of its loss and thus enable the community to face the future without a debilitating preoccupation with the past. Instead, the loss is experienced as a persisting humiliation, a narcissistic injury to the group self which keeps on generating inchoate anger rather than the sadness of mourning. The instances from history in the mullahs’ sermons are replete with sadomasochistic imagery, betraying an unconscious rage even as they seem to bemoan the lost glories of Islam. Their talk is liberally spattered with blood. Rivers of blood flow in the massacres of Muslims, fountains of the stuff spurt from the chests of children martyred to the faith. The atrocities borne by Muslims, both in modern and medieval periods, are detailed with much relish. It is not the doctors and the officers—the representatives of the modern world—who have sacrificed for the country’s independence, says Qari Mohammad Hanif, but the mullahs. Detailing incidents not recorded in history books, three thousand ulema were Laid on the road to Delhi and the British drove road rollers over their chests. Hundreds were sewn into pigskins and burnt alive. Impaling, burning at stake, being trampled under elephant feet, and the walling in alive of early martyrs is described with an eye for gory detail. The listeners are asked to visualize the plight of the pious woman who had hundreds of nails driven into her palms and feet saying to her infidel torturer, ‘You can drive a hundred nails into my tongue too and I will still take Allah’s name.’

  In addition to the sadomasochistic imagery, another theme in fundamentalist discourse is the inculcation of guilt. The speeches conjure up images of the ancestors regarding today’s generation of Muslims with eyes full of reproach and with a ‘Thou hast forsaken us!’ refrain on dead lips. Skilfully reactivating the guilt vis-à-vis our parents that is our common human legacy from early childhood, fundamentalism stirs anger and guilt in a potent brew.

  To trace psychological themes in Muslim fundamentalist discourse is not to reduce this discourse to psychopathology. Illness to the outsider, fundamentalism is a cure for the insider. For many Muslims with an inchoate sense of oppression and the looming shadow of a menacing future, with fractured self-esteem in the wake of historical change that saw an end to their political role and a virtual disappearance of their language, fundamentalism is an attempt, however flawed, to revive the sacred in social and cultural life, to give politics a spiritual dimension, and to recover in their religious verities a bulwark against collective identity fragmentation.

  Religious Politics

  To look more closely at the psychological processes involved in the fundamentalist mobilization of Muslims, I have chosen as my exemplary text a speech by Ubedullah Khan Azmi, an influential north Indian Muslim leader. Azmi, who has occupied important positions in Muslim institutions, such as the secretaryship of the Muslim Personal Law Conference, an organization through which the conservative section of the community has zealously sought to guard its autonomy in the making and interpretation of civil laws applicable to Muslims, is what I would call a ‘moderate fundamentalist’. By this I mean that, like all fundamentalists, he subscribes to the founding myth that a truly Islamic society existed only in the period of the Prophet and the first four Caliphs, and one must go back to those origins to restore the initial vitality of the community. As a moderate, however, he does not go so far as some others who advocate an opting out of or a rejection of the modern Indian political system, a jehad to recover the spirit of Islam’s original enterprise. Informed by fundamentalist beliefs, his politics is yet politics as usual in many ways, requiring a constant adaptation to changing political realities. Like many fundamentalist leaders who must operate within secular democracies, Azmi has negotiated a degree of political influence for himself (he is a member of Parliament) by entering into a mutually beneficial alliance with secular politicians of a mainstream political party, the Janata Dal. In such alliances, we know, fundamentalist leaders are willing to be carried along on a wave of purely socioeconomic or political resentment while they mobilize votes for their political allies by playing on religious passions and fears of their constit
uency, saying and doing things which the secular politician will studiously avoid.6

  The rhetoric of fundamentalist politics attempts to seduce its target group with a sense of participation in a collectivity with a transcendent purpose giving a higher value or meaning to life than could be given by any secular politics. The group addressed by the fundamentalist has the very satisfying feeling of being ‘chosen’ with a sense of mission connected with a sacred purpose, sanctified by God, and superior to the adversary’s mission which is not similarly blessed or is blessed by a lesser god.

  My selection of this particular speech, delivered in 1985, is not because it is remarkable in any way but precisely because it is not. It is an ordinary speech which takes as its springboard an insignificant event, the filing of a petition by an obscure Hindu lawyer in a district court in Rajasthan seeking a ban on the Qur’an. Unlike Rithambra’s speaking style which is modelled after Hindu bardic narration, Azmi’s rhetoric is in traditional Muslim style, interspersed with Urdu couplets for an audience which likes poetical flourishes in its orators. The speech as reproduced below is necessarily abridged, though not edited to change its essential content, images, or the sequential flow of thoughts.

  [I wish] I did not have to see this day. These are the offspring of Nathuram Godse [Gandhi’s assassin] who are talking of banning the Qur’an. The children of Nathuram Godse dream of occupying the Babri mosque. Ubedullah Khan Azmi declares openly, Look at the lineage of all traitors from the time of Mahatma Gandhi to that of Indira Gandhi and then look at the lineage of those who have been loyal to India from 1945 to 1985. What is the crime for which we Muslims are being punished? Our book is being banned, our personal law is being proscribed, our community’s very way of life is being restricted. Beware, history may repeat itself. Balasaheb Deoras may have to read the kalma [i.e., become a Muslim], Atal Behari Vajpayee may have to read the kalma, Mister Rajiv Gandhi may have to read the kalma.a