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

the stunned umma started deluding itself that it is the Satanic America and the Zionist Israel that force their youth to don their suicide jackets.

But, where these ‘nice Musalmans’ can hide the ‘not so nice’ Medina stream of the Quranic diktats that were meant to aid Muhammad’s endeavor to establish the Islamic standard over the Kabah? At best, they might be turning the pages when they come across those inflammatory ayats in their scores in the Quran, meant to incite the Musalmans against ‘the others’, who do not subscribe to Muhammad’s creed. But, how were they to hide the inimical ayats that incite hatred towards the infidels from their kids that might put them on the path of fanaticism or worse, martyrdom? At any rate these are taught to them in madrasas chapter and verse, and that’s like adding fodder to the fuel of Islamic terrorism. Why only the Quran, even the hadith and the sunna, not to speak of sharia seem to play no less a role in shaping the separatist, intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos of the Musalmans. Oh how insignificant would Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ seem when compared to the moral dilemma of the nice Muhammadans burdened by these divisive diktats of their faith? Sadly, the majority of them prefer not to take the ‘not to be’ route that leads to the hazards of apostasy that could be the gallows, and thus end up being the hypocrites of the ‘religion of peace’.

Be that as it may, the Musalmans should ponder over as to why the Medina suras contain what they contain – religious venom - of what avail is submission and tolerance for embarking upon a conquest as one needs to name the adversaries and inculcate in the followers a sense of separateness so as to stir them into a state of aggression. Logically approached, those Quranic exhortations were primarily to serve Muhammad’s agenda, first of subduing the neighborhood Jews and then for avenging himself upon the Meccans by subduing them into his creed that they had earlier spurned; and viewed even from the Islamic angle, it could have been the will of Allah to stir his Messenger into action to gain ground for the faith in the sands of Arabia. That done, and it being truly in place in much of the world, for the faithful to still cling on to those Quranic verses of ‘the otherness’ betrays a lack of theological as well as rational understanding of Islam.

So the Musalman zealots would imbibe those very ideas to take their religious separateness to the frontiers of intolerant exclusivity, and inherent in their psyche is the need to uphold the primacy of their faith above all else. Of course, their upbringing enjoins on them to live and die for the supposedly holy causes of Islam, and attendant to this maxim is the righteousness of aggression against all those perceived as antagonistic to their dogma. Understandably, those anointed as the Islamic religious preachers and teachers, take it upon themselves the onerous task of indoctrinating the faithful to the dogmas of their own upbringing. It is this religious conditioning of the believers that fortifies their animosity towards the deviant, and that comes in handy for the fanatically deluded among the umma to set them on suicide missions. Maybe it is for the moulvis to consider whether Allah willed for his faithful strife without respite.

When the Sunni’s slaughtered three of their Shia cousins on a pilgrimage to Karbala in the strife torn Iraq, it had signaled that the storm of the Islamic terrorism had drawn the Indian Musalmans too into its vortex. While that should have woken them up to the perils posed by the double-edged sword of Islamic separateness, going by the talk on the street and the rhetoric in the maidān, it didn’t seem to be the case. In seeking for the causes of the killings that included eleven Pakistani Shias as well, the Indian umma seemed to lack the needed vision to comprehend the problem; after all, it had ever been the theme of the Musalmans and the logic of the Islamapologists to couple the Israeli intransigence in Palestine, the U.S indifference to the Muslim sensitivities, and of late the Indian suppression of Kashmiri separatism for the birth and growth of the Islamic extremism. Why that doesn’t wash as the Indian Mujahideen has raised its ugly head making Manmohan Singh eat his premature words, naively uttered in the wake of 9/11 that the Indian Musalmans would never take to terrorism.

Better, the umma instead of pushing the fidayēn filth under the Islamic carpet should sit up and think as to how to insulate their wards from the perils of the paranoia of Muslim identity, the forerunner of the Islamic intolerance and all that follows. Maybe they would realize that the Sufi cosmopolitanism, and not the Wahabi fundamentalism, was the motivating factor for the oppressed Hindu castes of yore to have embraced Islam in Hindustan. What with the surging radicalism across the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a real danger of a deluge of the Indian Musalmans into the murky stream of the Islamic terrorism. So is it not the time for them to go back to the Sufi roots of Indian Islam before the Sunni-Shia bad blood of Pakistan starts spilling over the border into their separatist mohallas? But the moot point is can they make the desired course correction? Of course, not as long as they hold the double-edged religious sword of separateness nearer to their heart; but then, if religion is opium, there is no opium like Islam.

Whatever, the fond hope of Islamic religious collaboration in India expressed by
Dr. Wilfred Cantwell Smith in Islam in Modern History, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, as quoted by Maryam Jameelah in her Islam and Orientalism is worth noting:

“The question of political power and social organization, so central to Islam, has in the past always been considered in yes or no terms. Muslims have either had political power or they have not. Never before have they shared it with others. Close to the heart of Islam has been the conviction that its purpose includes the structuring of a social community, the organization of the Muslim group into a closed body obedient to the law. It is this conception that seems finally to be proving itself inept in India. The Muslims in India, in fact, face what is a radically new and profound problem: namely how to live with others as equals. Yet it is a question on which the past expression of Islam offers no immediate guidance. Imperative is the willingness to admit that there are problems waiting to be solved.

This awareness has been rare in recent Islam, which has tended to believe that problems have been solved already. That the answers have somehow, somewhere been given and do not have to be worked out afresh with creative intelligence - this idea had deeply gripped, almost imprisoned the minds and souls of many Muslims. The Quran has been regarded as presenting a perfected pattern to be applied rather than as an imperative to seek perfection. Islamic law and Islamic history have been felt to be a storehouse of solutions to today’s difficulties to be ransacked for binding precedent rather than a record of brave dealing with yesterday’s difficulties, to be emulated as liberating challenge. Religion has seemed to confine behavior rather than inspire it. The fundamental fallacy of Muslims has been to interpret Islam as a closed system. And that system has been closed not only from outside truth but also from outside people.

The fundamental hopefulness about Indian Muslims, and therefore Indian Islam, is that this community may break through this. It may be forced to have the courage and humility to seek new insights. It may find the humanity to strive for brotherhood with those of other forms of faith. In the past, civilizations have lived in isolation, juxtaposition, or conflict. Today we must learn to live in collaboration. Islam, like the others, must prove creative at this point and perhaps it will learn this in India.”

Never did Islam become such a stranger in this world as of now, and sorely needs a savant, whose advent Muhammad had promised to his believers. Maybe as Cantwell Smith had theorized, hope ‘that one’ would somehow be an Indian Musalman to suitably renew Islam and rid it from the clutches of its fundamentalist-fanatic-fidayēn nexus, and make it a peaceful faith for the faithful and ‘the others’, notwithstanding the hatred that these spread. What else ‘the others’ can do than to wait for the advent of the savant for the well-being of the world, not just the Islamic world that is.

 

Om Bismillah: Bismillah Om.

 

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Publication Date: 12-04-2014

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Dedication:
Preface of Strife The lava of the volcano on which the world sits is the disaffection the Musalmans nurse towards the kafirs. While its chemistry world over is the Islamic religious rigidity, in India it is compounded by the Hindu ‘historical’ hurt, aggravated by the Muslim-appeasing political ethos of the State. It’s thus the Indian landscape is dotted with many of its earlier eruptions, but the one, in the wake of Godhra’s ‘burning train’ in 2002, affected everyone as never before. That a fanatical band of Musalmans should dare torch their Ram Sevaks in a railway coach of that Sabarmati Express seemed to the Sangh Parivar like Saladin crossing the Lakshman Rekha. And that the dalits too joined the hysterical Hindu mobs to burn their persons and property was beyond belief to the ghettoed Musalmans nevermind that many among the rioters were felled by police bullets.