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

as the Messenger of ‘the God’ for them? If not, Suhayl and others would not have said what they said to Muhammad about his divine claim without a mundane witness to name.

Even beyond the boundaries of belief, it is the penchant of the faithful, not just the Musalmans, to assert that all that is there to know can be found in between the covers of their religious scriptures. While nothing can be farther from the truth, the Quran portrays many a divine contradictions, one of which is refreshingly welcome in that as against its averment all through that it carries for man the final message of the God, it states that, “Such of Our revelations as we abrogate or cause to be forgotten, we bring (in place) one better or the like thereof. Knowest though not that Allah is able to do all things.”

Moreso, underscoring the need for a periodic Islamic update, Muhammad had also said, “Islam began as a stranger and will become once more as a stranger,” and promised to his flock that ‘the God’ would not abandon them,

“God will send to this community, at the head of every hundred years, one who will renew for it its religion.”

 That being the case, wonder the way the umma shuns the reformist Musalmans, few and far in between anyway, and what’s worse, its ulema brands such as apostates and condemns them to death. Maybe in that sense, in that sense alone, Bernard Shaw is right in opining that Islam is the best religion with the worst followers.

Above all, Quran also affirms that:

“If all the trees in the end were pens, and if the sea eked out by seven seas more were ink, the Words of God, could not be written out into their end.” 

Thus, isn’t it ironical that Allah Ta’ala should have exhorted his faithful to unquestioningly believe what he supposedly revealed to his Messenger in the Quran? It’s as if what the God gave the Musalmans with his right hand, he took it back from them with his left hand thereby leaving them stranded on the ‘straight path’ he paved for them. Hence, what sense doth it make for the Musalmans to believe that the quran-hadith-sunna trio is the ‘be all and end all’ of the divine guidance; well it is for them to think.

Be that as it may, it is imperative for the Musalmans of the day to understand that a review of Islam is overdue, which, their prophet himself felt that it would need from time to time. Why not the maulanas of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (no mistaking it as an elected body of Indian Musalmans) take the lead in not only reviewing the ‘out of tune’ features of their faith but also in seeking honourable compromises with the Hindus on all contentious issues as Muhammad had done with the Quraysh? Well, a little give and take shouldn’t upset them as Muhammad himself had said,

‘Verily ye are in an age when whoso omitteth one tenth of the law shall be doomed. But there will come an age when whoso fulfilleth one tenth of the law shall be saved.”

That being the case, wonder why the mullahs should be so paranoid as what is Islamic and what is un-Islamic for the umma in these modern times!

So be it but the moulvi-mullah combine’s apathy for modernity and the appeasement of these obscurants by the Hindu pseudo-secularists for their political gain, together subject the Musalmans to a double squeeze. Moreover, the Islamapologic media, controlled by those that are either naïve about or indifferent to the Islamic dogma, in its eagerness to be on the right side of secularism, runs a tirade against the Hindu nationalist forces, only ends up in helping the perpetuation of Muslim obscurantism. What is worse, as if to light up every minority household with its naïve Hindu torch, it infuses in the Indian umma a sense of neglect by the Indian State itself. Why, in a routine exercise, its glamour boys ‘n gals attribute umma’s economic backwardness to the Hindu biases rather than exposing the age-old Muslim apathy for secular education. Wonder how these fail to see the children of Hindu maids and Christian coolies everywhere walking up in their scores to Covent schools in their secular uniforms.

What about the Indian umma’s apathy towards the native cultural connotations in spite of the fact that some of their ilk had showed how to fuse the Indian ethos with their Islamic souls. Won’t it be an idea for them to overcome their fixation over the bigoted Aurangzeb and revisit his great-grandfather, their Akbar the Great, and dust his Din- i Ilāhī? Why eulogize the anti-Hindu despot Tipu Sultan when they have Dara Shukoh, the ‘enlightened paragon of the harmonious coexistence of Hindustan’s heterodox traditions’, whom Aurangzeb, his brother put to death?  

Well, coming to the current times, why can’t they take a leaf out of the life of the music maestro of Maihar gharana, Allauddin Khan, the incomparable saint of the Hindu - Muslim synthesis. He was an outstanding exponent of the Hindustani classical music who, being a devout Musalman, and in spite of the Quranic injunctions against idol worship, in the hill temple at Maihar, he was wont to sing in ecstasy before the deity of Sārada Māta, the goddess of learning. Though his religious dogma would have him not to bow but to Allah, his theological wisdom enabled him to grasp the truth that the Omnipresent Allah would be present in the Hindu Deities as well; and so he had seen the falsity of the Muslim fallacy in making the Almighty a captive of Islam. Moreover, neither did he suffer any Quranic qualms in naming his daughter as Annapurna nor had he undergone any Islamic pangs in giving her hand in marriage to Pandit Ravi Shankar, his disciple, much before he became illustrious.

Besides, there was the mesmerizing Bismillah Khan, whose recorded shehnai exposition was adjudged, in 1960s, as the best among all varieties of instrumental music in the world, and he too suffered no Quranic qualms in enthralling the audiences in Hindu precincts. Why hadn’t Naushād Ali, Shakēl Badayuni, and Mohammad Rafi proved to the Indian Musalmans that while reveling in the Hindu devotional music, yet they could be practicing Musalmans? Won’t every Hindu soul forever be moved by their combined effort in the Baiju Bawra song - man tarpat hari darshan ko āj - that impelled a sādhu of Rishikesh to rush to Mumbai, the then Bombay, for the darshan of the lyricist! Well, exemplifying a ‘reverse prejudice’, the Hindu ascetic, who expected the adorable persona with a flowing beard in saffron robes, wouldn’t believe that the suited-booted Shakēl could have indeed imbibed the Hindu spirituality to compose that hymn-like song. That’s not all, one Yusuf Khan Sarwar Khan as Dilip Kumar, the peerless thespian of the Indian silver screen, could fervently pray before assorted Hindu deities on the celluloid and yet remain a Musalman by heart and soul!

Moreover, hadn’t President Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam prove that a Musalman could draw as much spiritual solace from the Quran as well as from the Bhagvad-Gita? What about KK Muhammed, the geologist, who stood by his professional integrity and personal conviction to affirm that indeed the disputed Babri Masjid was built on the ruins of a grand Hindu structure that is in spite the orchestrated propaganda unleashed by his fellow-Musalman Irfan Habib, in cohorts with the left-lib Hindu renegades to the contrary? Above all are the Muslim fauzis of the Indian Armed Forces, who fight against their co-religionist army of Pakistan regardless, and if need be sacrifice their lives for their country.

As for the Hindus, don’t they love the continuance of the Indo-Islamic culture, exemplified by the Hindustani music made mellifluous by Bismillah Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Begum Akhtar et al in their scores? What a void the Indian romantic hearts would have been sans those ghazals, qaŵalis, and mujrās that ooze so much eroticism? Don’t they toast the Abdul Hamids who sacrificed their lives for them fighting against Pakistan, and the Abdul Kalams who design missiles to deter it from attacking Bharat Mā ta?

Needless to say, the Hindu-Muslim amity depends on the Muslim willingness to address the Hindu national concerns and the Hindu understanding of the Muslim religious fears. And, as the communal peace is a two-way lane, one would wish that the Muslim genius, at last, might come up with new alignments for their straight path in the Hindu setting for a smooth ride ‘here’ on their way to the ‘Hereafter’. Wish in the coming years, India would be blessed with an Anwar Sadat to dare defy the bigotry of the mullahs, and /or a Kemal Atatürk to cross swords with the Islamic fundamentalists to make a lasting difference to the Hindu-Muslim coexistence.

For their part, the Hindus should not misconstrue the soft centre the Indian Musalmans tend to nurse for Pakistan in their hearts as a synonym of their anti-Indian ethos for their minds are conditioned by the umma’s Quranic paranoia. So, they get habituated at seeing things from the pan-Islamic prism, which stymies their Indian vision besides sullying their national image, and sadly for them, there would be incessant alerts of ‘Islam in danger’ from around the world, which keep their psyche forever stressed by their kafir enigma. But as a two-way street keeps the traffic smooth, Hindus and Muslims should together build one for which the latter must be more religiously open than they are.

Surely, Islam in the original form has outlived its utility to the poor believers, and if only the stilted media gets its act right to drive home this point into the minority minds, the interests of the Indian umma would be well-served that its Islamapologia is fouling. But meanwhile, would the Musalman bigots and the Hindu sophists, who aid and abet them in feeding their folks with a religious diet, apply their minds to bridge the Hindu-Muslim economic divide?

 

Chapter 32

The Hindu Rebound

 

The Hindu fundamentalism is a misnomer, coined by the cunning and subscribed by the naïve, which comes in handy to the Semitic proselytizers to undermine the Indian nationalism. Why, it should be apparent to the discerning that while Brahmanism is orthodox, the sanātana dharma, delineated by swadharma, is amorphous, and in them lay the social diversity of the Hindu spiritual ethos.

By the time Bharat gained independence, what with the gurukuls having given way to the missionary schools for long, the Brahmans, by and large, were an unemployed lot, and in spite of their depleted landholding, yet their exalted position in the polity precluded them from engaging in their non-traditional activities. What with the deprived social patronage adding to their economic woes, they became moribund to end up being the parasites, and it is probable that the prejudices that bedevil the Hindu spirituality might have been the products of the idle minds in those lazy Brahman bodies.

However, after the trauma of the partition was lived down, the Brahman exodus to the urban conglomerates started in earnest, which though eroded their village presence and with it their social influence as well. Just the same, settling in the urban settings, they, as McCauley’s chelas (what a fall for the Hindu gurus of yore) began bracing themselves to take up the clerical spaces that were up for grabs in the British administrative corridors in India. Consequently, the weakened Brahman hold on the village grassroots began to dent the power of the manu dharma on the Hindu polity for its guardians had begun to desert their swadharma. But eventually the ebb of sanātana dharma accompanied the Brahman economic tide brought about by their overwhelming absorption into Nehru’s public sector undertakings, the supposed pillars of independent India’s Soviet modeled socialist economy.

Exposed to the liberal ideas that held sway all over the world during the sixties of the last century, the Brahmans in urban dwellings began distancing themselves from the orthodox ways and the social mores of their forebears in