Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity) by BS Murthy (epub read online books .TXT) 📖

in the Islamic folklore? In contrast, the heaps of shoes that Nasser’s soldiers rid themselves of so as to run faster to safety in the Sinai desert give an unerring account of the martial decay of the once dreaded Muhammadan Armageddon. What with the battles of the day being fought on the borderlands that dampen their spirits for the ‘spoils of war’, the material incentive ‘here’ for them, it is as if the fauzis of Islam have lost interest in making it to the ‘Hereafter’ that Muhammad said was laid for the martyrs amongst them.

Thus as the Decommissioned Adult of the Muhammadan wouldn’t be able to grasp even the apparent military might of the non-Islamic world of the day, so the Musalmans are ever prone to wait in perpetuity for a Saladin to appear on the Islamic horizon that has only been turning gloomier by the day. However, the umma mistook the bravado of Saddam Hussein, in leading up to the fiasco of the ‘Mother of All Battles’, for the bravery of Saladin at the Horns of Hattin; ‘dekhiye, O Saddam hai, Saddam – ‘Look he’s Saddam but Saddam’ - many a Musalman in India proudly proclaimed thus with a boding sense of an impending doom to the U.S. the Great Satan to the umma. Thus, as the anticlimax of a swift Saddam surrender became a shocking reality to the Musalmans the world over, the umma was crestfallen once again, and began to sulk all the more. It seems as though the psyche of the Musalmans is that of the front-benchers at the cinemas, who visualize the unreal on the reel as the real in life to relieve themselves of the drudgery of the reality, though momentarily.

Nonetheless, Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, who made peace with Israel to get back their Sinai, would have been Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Egypt, if only its Musalmans were less hostile towards their own visionary. But as the unbound hatred towards ‘the others’ rules the demented minds of the Musalmans, they made him pay with his life for their blind prejudice towards the Jews. It’s as though the jihadi Arabs wouldn’t mind Israel keeping their land so long as they have a cause to hate the Jews and hope to annihilate them in the end, let it be just before the end of the world! In what could be the greatest irony of their faith, the Arabs eye the promised land that their own God gave the Jews, not prepared even to share it with them. It’s as if Allah, aided by the followers of his Messenger seeks to evict Jews, His chosen people from the promised land into which He, in His Jehovah avatar enabled his Prophet to lead them into, but to no avail. Strange are the changing moods of the Semitic God!

Well, having failed to have their way with the Jews with their warmongering, the Palestinians could have pored over the hadith for an alternate strategy to hurt the enemy. And find they did that lies in the following episode from Muhammad’s life sketched by Martin Lings.

“About the same time news came of the danger of another projected raid from further south; but in this instance the Prophet divined that the hostility against Islam was all concentrated in one remarkably evil man, the chief of the Lihyanite branch of Hudhayl. If they could be rid of him, the danger from that quarter would become negligible; so he sent ‘Abd Allah ibn Unays, a man of Khazraj, with instructions to kill him. “O Messenger of God,” said ‘Abd Allah, “describe him to me that I may know him.” “When thou seest him,” said the Prophet, “he will remind thee of Satan. The certain sign for thee that he is indeed the man will be that when thou seest him thou wilt shudder at him.” It was as he had said; and, having killed the man, ‘Abd Allah escaped with his life.”

So to the chagrin of the Israelis, Yasser Arafat resurrected the ghost of ‘Abd Allah ibn Unays in the form of Al Fatah to infuse his jihadi in the disgruntled minds of the Palestinians. Well, the Israelis did find ways and means to counter the Islamic terror tactics in due course, for after all, hasn’t history proved that while the Musalmans turn desperate in defeat, the Jews steel themselves in adversity? Thus pushed to the wall, Arafat, by fusing the Quranic diktats and the Muslim hurt with hadith as the catalyst, developed the deadly fidayeen in the Islamic laboratory of the Palestine. Confronted with the martyr missiles being thrown at them by the Islamic desperados, the Jews responded by decimating their dwellings and deporting their families.

Maybe, the Israeli hope was that the potential martyr might give up, realizing that his loved ones in this world would have it tough even as he’s having a heck of a time in ‘the hereafter’. But right ‘here’, the Israelis had to face the barrage of protests from human rights activists, morons all, who fail to grasp the rights of legitimate offensive and the wrongs of a misguided aggression. What is worse, in support of the extremist causes, they second fiddle from a safe distance, either owing to their naivety or vested interests, and /or both, and thus end up being insensitive to the sufferings of the victims of the so-called armed struggles they espouse.

Whatever the Israeli calculation, the hadithian response on the ground was a mixed one. While it might have brought sanity into many a Palestinian home, there were enough shelters in the refugee camps for the Hamas to rope in the fidayēn in numbers. After all, isn’t martyrdom too tempting a proposition for the shahid what with the promised company of all those black-eyed virgins? Lest there should be any doubt in the minds of the prospective martyrs about the capacity of man to enjoy so many women, lo, the Quran had clarified that their own virility increaseth a hundred fold to be able to have them all! Oh, Muhammad! The uniqueness of the Muhammadan cult is that belief enables the believer to endure the hassles of the Islamic dogma ‘here’ for the rewards of the ‘Hereafter’ guaranteed for the martyrs.

Given the Israeli ascent, maybe vexed with Palestinian excesses, ‘the God’ had tilted the Divine Scales towards the Jews, His originally Chosen People, all again, at the cost of the Musalmans as He warned them thus in the Quran:

“O Ye who believe! Whoso of you becometh a renegade from his religion, (know that in his stead) Allah will bring a people whom He loveth and who love Him, humble toward believers, stern toward disbelievers, striving in the way of Allah, and fearing not the blame of any blamer. Such is the grace of Allah which he giveth unto whom He will. Allah is All-Embracing, All-Knowing.”

 

Chapter 28

Delusions of Grandeur

 

Peace being the ‘supposed’ message of Islam, the religion that the Palestinians and the Pakistanis together profess, strife seems alike to be their political fate. While it is apparent that the Arab hostility towards Israel is steeped in the legality of tenancy, it can be seen that the Kashmir quagmire is rooted in Pakistan’s delusions of Islamic-grandeur. Whatever, it is the paradox of the Muhammadan creed in that that it provides a common ground for the Palestinian need, and the Pakistani greed, for ‘land’ that leads them on their self-destructive course.

Even before the ink was dry on the British deed of Hindustan’s partition, Pakistan surreptitiously pressed its tribal Muslim hordes into the Kashmiri flux to annex the Paradise on Earth to its Land of the Pure. What with Raja Hari Singh, the ‘vacillating’ Hindu King, having had no army to name, the mujahideen, armed to the teeth by Pakistan, could overrun a large chunk of his land, but owing to their jihadi habit to plunder, and the acquired vice of rape, these marauders had senselessly antagonized even the Kashmiri Musalmans, who came under their sway. Nevertheless, before the mujahideen could turn the fabled valley into a Pakistani trophy, Hari Singh’s Hindu sentiment and Sheikh Abdullah’s patriotic fervor saved the day for Kashmir as the former, acquiesced by the latter, inalienably aligned the State with the Union of India. Though the Indian forces entered the scene and stalled Pakistan’s progress through its proxy rogues into the heart of the valley, yet, stymied by the cease-fire call of the comity of nations, the wooly Nehru’s own making, the Indian State couldn’t reclaim all of Kashmir to itself. If anything, the geo-political game of the Western nations in those cold war days enabled Pakistan, which teamed up with them against the Soviet Union, to usurp the thirteen-thousand-odd km square area, which it ironically calls ‘Azad Kashmir’.

Thus lying divided in the laps of the adversaries, Kashmir became an arena of strife with many sub-continental twists and turns. Whatever may be the Pakistani brief over all of Kashmir; it cannot harp on the legality of its accession to India for after all, Raja Hari Singh derived the power to accede his kingdom, the way he willed it, from the same document that created Pakistan! So be it, but to which group the Pakistani blood that its ‘jugular vein’ carries belongs to? Is it Rh+ for Kashmiri Muslims or the Rh- for Kashmir Valley?

Well for the right answer, the question is better addressed to mohajirs, the Muslim migrants from the Gangetic plains into the Pakistani Sind. Why didn’t Pakistan fail them by not letting them feel at home in the homeland of the Musalmans of Hindustan that it was supposed to be? So also, the Bihari Musalmans, though they were cohorts with the Punjabi Muslims in the massacre of the Bengali believers in the then East Pakistan, yet fail to get the entry visas into what was left as Pakistan.

Won’t it then serve the secession-mongers of the Kashmir valley to ponder over why the Pakistanis, unwilling to suffer the presence of those faithful in their midst, are so fond of the Kashmiri Musalmans living beyond their borders? Unless they had turned morons by the Islamic death wish to sink with the failed state of Pakistan, it should be apparent to them that unlike the Bihari believers, they have a fabled valley to add to the map of Pakistan. And that is about the Pakistani land greed camouflaged with the religious solidarity to seduce the Kashmiri Muslims into its inimical fold.

Be that as it may, way back in the 16th Century, had not the Portuguese wrested Goa from Islam and ousted its believers, Pakistan would have an irrefutable claim on it in the partitioned Hindustan, but that again is history! Whatever, the urge of the Musalmans has always been to expand the Islamic territory on the global terrain, and thus Pakistan’s Decommissioned-Adult-Muhammadans fail to take India’s Kashmiri perspective into account, much less analyze it to see if any course correction is needed in their India outlook.

The two-nation theory by which the ancient land of Arya Varta was partitioned was an illusion of the Indian Musalmans that was not subscribed by the Hindus of India, and had they wanted a country for them only, wouldn’t they have ceded some more land to Pakistanis, if that were needed, as a quid pro quo for ridding the Islamist presence from their Indian midst. But, rightly or wrongly, that was not the way Hindustan was partitioned, and if so, what’s the rationale for those millions of Musalmans to stay back in Hindustan even after Pakistan came into being?

So, any Pakistani argument for wanting Kashmir, citing its Muslim majority would be untenable to any reasonable mind, and likewise, the urge of those Kashmiri Musalmans to merge the valley with the Islamic Pakistan wouldn’t sync with the spirit of partition. If not, won’t it make a case for the Indian Musalmans to seek the merger of those areas with Pakistan, wherever they happen to form the majority, and let their brethren, wherever they are in minority, to continue living in