Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: India Today
Date: November 19, 2001
If it had not been for the hate
mail my last piece on Indian Muslims provoked I might not have felt the
need to write again on the subject. Let us say that the letters inspired
me because they came as proof that what I wrote about Indian Muslims needing
to distance themselves from Taliban-type Islam needed to be said. Let me
give you just one small sample of the sort of prose that has filled my
mailbox since that last article appeared three weeks ago. "It was the Britishers
who brought all the 6,000 castes and combined them into one Hindu community.
It was the Britishers who made them to stand because neither Hinduism had
any base of religion nor any sane person will prefer this religion which
worship mouse, elephants etc and inflicted worst crimes in human history
for at least 5,000 years on Dalits and Shudras who in reality are real
Indians."
This letter was from a Muslim gentleman
from Mumbai whose contempt for Hinduism was matched by his praise of Talibanic
Islam. In his view, if there is a utopia on earth it is Saudi Arabia, where
"Hindus, Muslims and Christians work and earn their livelihood peacefully
without any Bal Thackeray". Other letter-writers expressed their contempt
not just for the Hindu religion but for what they considered the physical
inferiorities of Indians when compared with Arabs. Muslims, according to
them, were tall and fair and handsome and could (naturally, therefore)
easily conquer the small, dark, cowardly people of poor old Hindoostan.
So, in my view, it is sad but alas
true that although there are civilised, moderate Muslims in India who do
not think this way, the semi-literate, madarsa-educated, lower middle-class
Muslim is increasingly being encouraged to think along these lines. This
image of himself and his religion as fundamentally superior to the local
Indian product is, in our currently troubled times, taking a battering.
So more and more Muslims are seeking refuge in what Salman Rushdie recently
described as "paranoid Islam".
In a recent article in the New York
Times, Rushdie wrote, "This paranoid Islam which blames outsiders, 'infidels',
for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the
closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently
the fastest growing version of Islam in the world."
Paranoid Islam is certainly our
problem in India. A long, evil collaboration between the mullahs and "secular"
political parties like the Congress has resulted in an atmosphere of extraordinary
paranoia among ordinary Muslims. The mullah fed a sense of separateness
and superiority-we have one God, one Prophet and look at those mad Hindus
with their thousands-and the Congress fed post-Partition insecurity. Politically
the result was - till the Yadavs crashed the tea party - a permanent, paranoid
Congress vote bank. Reliable at election time and unquestioning afterwards,
even if it was mainly Muslims who died in the communal riots that occurred
under "secular" Congress governments. Paranoia rarely allows rational thought,
so although the Babri Masjid came down under a Congress government, the
average Muslim blames the mob (read: BJP, Shiv Sena) rather than those
who should have protected the mosque from it.
If paranoia and an offensive sense
of religious and racial superiority is part of the Indian Muslim problem
an equally important part is the inability to deal with modernity. While
the lowest of Hindu castes now try to educate their children and acquire
the tools of modernity, Muslims seem to be moving backwards into some kind
of medieval idea of right and wrong, good and evil. It is through this
medieval prism that much of the modern world is seen. So although there
was no TV in the times of the Prophet he apparently banned it. Why then
does Osama bin Laden use it to talk to the world, you ask. There is confusion
and, curiously, anger at the question. TV is banned in Islam, full stop.
Modern, paranoid Islam is all about
bans. Women are banned from doing everything other than being born and
producing babies. They can't get educated, can't work, can't go shopping
without a male relative, can't get medical treatment, can't do anything
that would put them in touch with modernity, reason or just being human.
It is terrifying that this kind
of Islam has admirers in India. Terrifying that the average madarsa-educated
Muslim is encouraged to believe that there is something pure and wonderful
about this version of his religion which reduces women to being semi-human.
Muslims who wrote to protest against my last piece attacked me mainly for
questioning their patriotism. This I never did then and am not doing now.
What I am questioning is their ability to be Indians and supporters of
the Taliban and bin Laden at the same time. Is that possible without justifying
the Islamic terrorism India has faced from Afghanistan and Pakistan? Indian
Muslims face a choice between paranoid, pan-Islamism and being Indian.
It is time they made it.
