Author: V P Bhatia
Publication: Organiser
Date: February 17, 2002
Introduction: Paki columnist disappointed
at Lady Nadira's failure to convert Naipaul.
Conversion of the non-Muslim infidels
of the entire world being a divine mission ordained by Islam, Muslim Tablighi
(Proselytisation) organisations are surreptitiously working all over India
towards that end since independence on an unimaginable scale with Gulf
money, according to reliable sources. Add to this the mushrooming of militant
Madrassa networks in most of our border areas and you have an insurrection
like situation as in West Bengal just now where thousands of skull-caps
have suddenly appeared in a Palestine-like Itifada (rebellion) to oppose
ban on unauthorised jehadi education. India is obviously the special target
of the cash-rich ulema and maulanas, because of its extra-soft secular
nature for two purposes: To inflate Muslim numbers for electoral dominance;
and to completely Arabise a large number of semi-Muslims who still retain
some of the old Hindu customs after group conversions took place over the
centuries to escape terrific atrocities by invaders and conquerors.
Many group conversions took place
during Muslim onslaughts in the hope of the turn of the tide to enable
them to go back to their mother society under favourable circumstances,
especially in Punjab. But the tide did not turn, not even under Maharaja
Ranjit Singh' whose rule was too short for the purpose. It became worse
even with the coming of independence when purblind Nehruvian secularists
allowed the Maulvis to restart their consolidation work in exchange for
bloc Muslim votes. As a result, India is in real danger of becoming an
Islamic slum with dexterous use of Muslim vote bank by divisive caste and
communist forces. There is a definite method behind the escalating Islamic
endeavours to take dominant hold over our polity under the guise of defeating
the Hindutva forces. Kashmir has shown how Hindus can be ousted from majority
Muslim pockets even in free India. More such pockets are being created
all over India. Our system is incapable of talking pre-emptive measure
until a crisis explodes in our face.
In last week's column, reference
was made to the Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul's marriage with twice-divorced
Pakistani lady journalist Ms. Nadira Khanum (ex-Alvi) which has caused
much heart-burning to a leading Paki columnist who is disappointed at her,
failure to change Naipaul's views against Islam (unlike some of the Muslim
wives in India like those of some of our film makers and others). The Pakistani
columnist's comments are noted as below:
"V.S. NAIPAUL does not like Muslims
in general and Pakistanis in particular. On our part after paying back
the compliment or the lack thereof, we have an additional reason for not
liking him. He decamped (ran away) with the lovely Nadaan Nadira Mustafa
or Nadira Alvi or simply Nadira as she once was.
"Muhammad Khalid Akhtar of Chakiwara
(a mythical Pakistani 'man in the street') is of the view that Nadira was
not so nadaan (unwise) after all as she it was who decamped' with Naipaul,"
said the earlier mentioned Khalid Hassan about the second marriage of Sir
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul to the twice-divorced Pakistani journalist
Nadira Alvi a few years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 2001.
Apparently according to Khalid Hassan's
commonsense Muslim-Nadira was not so foolish after all to marry the best
living (richest) writer of English prose, a scion of a migrant Brhamin
Hindu family whose grandfather, a ceremonies-performing Pandit, had migrated
to Trinidad (West Indies) from the poverty-stricken Ayodhya region of India
in 1890 along with hundreds of contract labourers for the sugarcane fields
of West Indies where he continued to perform the same functions of a community
Brahmin in the new country. Obviously, Naipaul inherited the Brahmin's
superior intellectual powers through his father, a semi-failed journalist
who worked for the Guardian of England, till he lost the job and became
a failed novelist. In any case, Naipaul has asserted the Brahmin's superiority
of intellect just as the poet-philosopher of Pakistan, Sir Muhammad Iqbal
did, with pride and came to the top of the literary world.
Iqbal's pride in Brahmin ancestry
Iqbal, a third generation convert
from Sapru Pandits of Kashmir had once in a verse challenged a Syed, the
highest caste Muslim directly descended from the Prophet's clan, to dare
match him in superior philosophic wisdom inherited from Iqbal's Shiva-worshipping
Kashmiri Pandit forefathers as follows:
Main asal ka Somnati
Aaba meray Lati aur Manaati
Tu Syed Hashmi ki aulad
Meri khaak kaf-e-Brahmin zaad
Hai philosophy meri rag rag main
Poshida hai resh-a-gul main.
"I am the descendant of a family
of true worshippers of Somnath (Shiva). My Kashmiri Pandit ancestors were
devotees of the gods named Lam and Manaat (whose idols were removed from
Kaaba by Prophet Muhammad after conquest of Mecca). You may belong to the
highest Muslim caste of Hashmi Syeds. But my mortal body of five elements
(panchbhut) has been incarnated in a Brahmin family. Philosophy is, suffused
(hidden) in every vein of my body, blossoming like a flower in its every
atom."
Sir Vidya went to Oxford on a scholarship
and decided to follow the difficult profession of a writer, working extra-hard
over it and ultimately reaching the top in most trying circumstances by
sheer grit and confidence in his intelligence, inspired by his father's
example in the uphill journey. He was a truly self-made writer etching
a place for himself in a hostile society despite his aloofness and unsocial
habits. He specialises in quiet comedy like R.K. Narayan and an incisive
on the spot study of the ex-colonial countries, especially the actually
practised Islam in a number of non-Arab converted countries like Iran,
Pakistan, Malaysia. and Indonesia. His books Among the Believers and Beyond
Belief. Among the Converted have made him as some kind of a prophetic writer
about the real nature of Islam and made him very popular in the West, especially
America in a milieu of Christian-Islamic confrontation since 1979 in Iran.
Prophetic Writer on Islam
Now to the Nadira affair. Some of
the cutting comments of the leading Paki columnist Khalid Hassan in two
separate articles may be noted as samples of his anguish at the un-Islamic
act of Nadira. He goes to the extent of calling Naipaul as a new brand
of Prince Dracula celebrated in some Western horror films as one specialising
in bloodsucking of aristocratic ladies by mesmerising them. As he puts
it, "Anyone who has seen movies with names like The Brides of Dracula would
know that the delicate angelic maidens whom the Prince of Vampires takes
away become Vampires themselves after he has sucked their blood from their
conveniently long necks. This is what has happened to our Nadira. She is
not the one whom once one knew. She has become the Bride of Dracula." It
is a shock to him that one of the rarest sophisticated Muslim ladies, once
known as Nadira Khanum Alvi has become a Hindu's propaganda tool to defend
his anti-Islam polemics benefiting Hindutva.
Khalid Hassan conveniently quotes
some other leading authors to damn Naipaul. For example, the Bengali Marxist
Amitav Ghosh who wrote, "In recent years, Naipaul has directed his fire
against Islam only and slipped into the error of celebrating Hindu revivalism.
Naipaul does not hide his deep dislike for Pakistan even though he was
offered great hospitality whenever he went there to collect material for
his books "In the end" says Hassan, "he committed the ultimate discourtesy.
He decamped with our own Nadaan (silly) Nadira, or perhaps it was the other
way round, who defends him passionately for his attacks on Islam despite
"universal reaction in Muslim countries that he had been given prize because
of the contempt and ion with which he had written about Islam and Muslim
societies." In fact, a barrage of propaganda was let loose against him.
Khalid Hassan however conveniently forgets how Nadira unabashedly hooked
Naipaul at a party in Lahore. She walked upto him and asked, "Can I kiss
you?" and before he could reply, she actually kissed him, thus showing
deep spiritual attachment to him despite his anti-Islam image. No wonder,
now in an exclusive interview from their extensive Wiltshire country home
in UK, "Lady Naipaul (as she likes to be called) roundly attacked critics
who had accused her husband of being against Islam as a religion. Visibly
upset by some of the comments made in newspapers and on television", she
said, she was speaking from the heart. She told the interviewer Amit Roy.
"We have emerged from this nightmare" let loose by the biased media. "My
husband's books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief are a testimony to
Muslim people's suffering." These books are a portrayal of darkness prevailing
in the Muslim world and nobody has suggested a way out of this darkness.
The Muslim "lack the honesty to look at the mirror and accept it (Islam)
as an experiment gone horribly wrong. Only then can we free our people
from the monster that feeds off their ignorance everyday."
Naipaul's books are a testimony
to Muslim people's suffering, says Lady Naipaul
Further she said, "I am disgusted
and bewildered at the media frenzy against Naipaul's stand against Islam.
I am also a Muslim woman who has written against the oppression of her
people, particularly women by clerics and the feudals of our sporadic one
-legged democracies. I only wish to ask all my husband's critics whether
they really know of Islam in its present form and how it is put into practice
in tyrannies like Pakistan. Have they ever visited Pakistani jails? Have
they ever stood, seen and heard the shrieks of women being beaten by kikkar
(a thorny tree) rods for a confession by the police? As a Muslim woman,
above all a mother, I have stood close to heresy by simply being a helpless
victims of these demonic punishment."
Ironically, President Pervez Musharraf
has in his own chastisement of Mullah-dominated society of Pakistan indirectly
endorsed what Nadira has said about the backward, medieval society of Pakistan
which, Musharraf says, has bred sectarian violence and terrorism and brought
bad name to Islam all over the world.
However, Khalid Hassan's real grouse
against Nadira marrying Naipaul is that besides indulging in "ugly caricatures
of Islam in his books", he has "rationalised the demolition of the 'Babri
Mosque' because according to Naipaul its building by Babur was an 'act
of contempt for the Hindus'. This hometruth is supposed to confirm his
"deep antipathy for the religion (of Islam), its people and its ideas."
The crowning irony of it all is that Naipaul has dedicated his book Beyond
Belief to his "Muslim wife Nadira". A jealous Palestinian intellectual
Edward Sayeed called Naipaul "a mental suicide whose obsession with Islam
had caused him to stop thinking. Which was an intellectual tragedy of the
first order'. Obviously, Hassan and Sayeed want the whole world, especially
the centuries-old Hindu victims of Islam, to forget its sadistic barbarities
emanating from the Quranic edicts themselves. No wonder, the 19th century
British Prime Minister Gladstone, is quoted by Rafiq Zakaria in his book
on Muhammad Iqbal, as remarking "there can be no peace in the world as
long as this book (Quran) is there." No wonder also that Pervez Musharraf
is reported to be asking madarsas to remove passages calling for militant
jehad against Kafirs from the Quranic, texts taught therein.
