Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: Afternoon Despatch
& Courier
Date: October 1, 2004
It was not possible for me to convince
him that America was not the kind of closed society in which a government
could kill its own people by hijacking its own planes
As I wandered the Mumbai suburb
of Mumbra last week in search of moderate Islamic voices a line by Ghalib
kept going through my head. Khuda key vaastey purdah na kaabey sey utha
zahid, kahin aisa na ho van (vahan) bhi yahi kaafir sanam nikley. Translation
will lose the beauty of the poetry and the subtlety of the sacrilege but
I hope keep the profundity of the idea. For God's sake, oh priest, do not
lift the veils that conceal the Kaaba for what will happen if you find
there this same heathen God. Why did my wandering in Mumbra remind me of
this line? Because at the end of a day spend in Mumbai's most Muslim neighbourhood
I realised that no Muslim poet would dare write something like this today.
If he did he would be reviled by the average Indian Muslim and treated
as an apostate. During a long day of talking to many people I met nobody
who could be described as a moderate.
Closed society
The most moderate voice I heard
was that of Naib Qazi, Noorul Amin Khatib, and even he was convinced that
it was not Muslims who were responsible for 9/11 but Jews. Repeating something
I heard in the streets of Mumbra all day he said, 'We condemn what happened,
it was very wrong but who knows who did it? It could not have been Muslim
because Islam is a religion of peace and it is against every principle
of Islam to kill innocent people'.
Khatib, aside from his religious
duties, plays a political role in the locality and is general secretary
of the Thane City (district) Youth Congress. As a man of religion he wears
a typical Islamic beard and since we met while he was on his way to namaz
in the neighbourhood mosque he wore an Islamic skullcap. He talked sensibly
about the events that had occurred in the past three years to alienate
Islam from the rest of the world but it was not possible for me to convince
him that America was not the kind of closed society in which a government
could kill its own people by hijacking its own planes. He explained that
he did not think the government was responsible so much as a small group
of Jews who controlled policy making in Washington. Nothing I said could
convince him that he was wrong.
When I asked if he did not think
that something bad had happened to Islam in recent years and that a fanaticism
had crept in that would have made a Ghalib impossible he said no, he did
not think this. Islam was exactly as it had been fourteen hundred years
ago, as pure and as perfect a guide to every aspect of life. Nothing had
changed and nothing needed change. So, why do I describe Khatib as a moderate?
Because compared to voices I heard in restaurants, in the street and in
the interviews I conducted with people like Mohammed Afroze he is a moderate.
Afroze is the man whom former Home
Minister, L.K. Advani, once described as the first Al Qaeda terrorist to
be caught in India. This is his story. He was studying to be a pilot in
London on that fateful September 11 and returned to Mumbai a few days later.
He claims it was because the Uncle he was staying with in London was trying
to force him into an unwanted marriage but the police found it suspicious
that he should be staying in a hotel instead of with his family in Cheetah
camp. They also found it strange that he should be able to afford pilot
training in London when his family lived in a slum. So he spent seven months
in jail during which he claims he was tortured brutally and made to sign
a false confession.
Afroze is now a businessman and
aspiring politician. He is standing as an independent in the coming assembly
election in Maharashtra. I met him in his brand new factory, on the edge
of Mumbra, where he makes sequinned and embroidered leather goods for the
Russian market. Afroze's father and a friend called Naseem sat in on the
interview and at one point when I asked Afroze what he thought of the Muslims
who had killed children in Beslan Nacem started shouting that my questions
were anti Muslim. 'Why don't you ask about Bosnia, why do you ask about
Beslan, it's clear from your questions that your are anti Muslim. Why don't
you ask about the children who are being killed in Palestine?'
This intervention made me try and
explain the difference between terrorism and violence perpetrated by a
state but it was useless. I was now labelled and for the rest of the interview
I had Afroze and Naeem talking about the danger that Islam was in and how
wrong it was that if a mosque was bombed the government did nothing but
if a Hindu was attacked then there was an uproar. Bombs were thrown in
a mosque in Parbhani, why does the government do nothing, did people not
die? It turns out that people did not die and that the incident was too
small to merit more than a paragraph in the press but it is this kind of
indignation that I encountered time and again in the streets and restaurant
of Mumbra.
Mumbra is among the filthiest suburbs
of Mumbai. Garbage lies uncollected in vast dumps in the main bazaar and
the tiny flat that Ishra Jehan's family lives in overlooks a stagnant pond
that has become solid with rotting garbage. The stench is overwhelming
and living conditions in Mumbra worse than most slums. Residents believe
that it is because it is a Muslim locality that municipal authorities pay
no attention.
Residents also believe that it is
nonsense to say that Ishrat Jehan was a terrorist. Ishrat, 19, was killed
in an 'encounter' with the Gujarat police in June. The police claimed to
have unearthed a plot to murder Narendra Modi and justified Ishrat's killing
because Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in one of their websites admitted that she was
one of their operatives. The police also claim that Ishrat was paid large
sums of money for her work as a terrorist.
Sense of isolation
When I met her family, though,
there was no sign of any money. Her widowed mother and brothers and sisters
live in a tiny one-room flat in whose shabbiness and general decrepitude
there are signs of grinding poverty. Her younger sister was teaching a
group of small children and her 16-year-old brother, Anwar, said the only
thing he knew about Javed, the alleged master terrorist, who his sister
was killed with was that he was a friend of their late father.
"We knew him as children and he
came to see us not long ago and offered my sister a job because we have
had financial problems since my father died two years ago. As far as I
know she was going to be paid Rs. 3000 a month but had been working only
a few days when she was killed.
A middle-aged lady who said that
she had known Ishrat since she was a little girl, said that nobody believed
that she was a terrorist. And, in any case, what was the need to kill her?
There were five bullets in her body and she was just a girl of nineteen.
It is incidents like this that add
to the sense of grievance among Muslims and to their sense of isolation.
But, having said that it needs also to be said that the fanaticism you
see in a place like Mumbra is frightening. Where are the community's moderate
leaders? Where are the poets and writers who once dared to ask questions?
