Making Islam Relevant

Islam first reached India through its southern shores. However, by all accounts it was confined to a small population and territory. It was mainly the conquest of Sind by Muhammad ibn Qasim that introduced Islam in northern India in a big way. But the tragic end of this great Arab general applied a halting brake to the spread of Islam in India. The next warrior was Mahmud Ghaznavi but it is disputable if his exploits helped or damaged the cause of Islam in South Asia.
Meanwhile, some Ulama/Sufis tried to spread Islam through peaceful preaching and surely their efforts bore fruits in that they won a good number of converts to Islam. The overemphasis on the role of Sufis in peacefully spreading Islam in northern India, however, is both a political as well as intellectual convenience. The fact that the conquests and the resultant good administration of Muhammad ibn Qasim smoothed and paved the way for the Sufis to impress upon the people about the truth of Islam can not be ignored. Equally, rather completely erroneous is the opinion that sword played a role in spreading Islam in India or South Asia.
Shihabuddin Ghauri’s conquest of northern India particularly Delhi is very important historical event. It happened in late 12th century. His demise in the beginning of 13th century created a void which his incapable sons were unable to fill. The resultant anarchy compelled Qutbuddin Aibak to declare the independence of Delhi in 1206. The high importance of the event can hardly be over emphasized.
The fact that the new king was a slave must have spread like the proverbial bush fire. It also must have appealed to those sections of the society which were thrown on the margin by the oppressive caste system of Hinduism. It were these marginalized Indians who gradually began to embrace Islam. The Ulama/Sufis, who came to India in large numbers after the Mongol invasion and destruction of Iran and Iraq, also capitalized on the congenial conditions and made a great contribution to the spread of Islam in India.
It is mainly in the last one thousand years that Islam spread in South Asia, and from here it reached South East Asia becoming in the process the religion of the majority in Indonesia and Malaysia. Islam’s presence in other South East Asian countries is also substantial. If we combine the Muslim population of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh with those of Malaysia, Indonesia and of other countries of South and South East Asia, it would form over 40 per cent of world’s total Muslim population. This is a great, even miraculous, achievement of Islam which the mainline history of Islam normally ignores. Historians focus more on the early Islamic gains in Syria, Iraq, Iran and North Africa and do not pay the desired attention to what Islam has achieved in South and South East Asia.
Having noted the fact of great Islamic gains in South Asia, it is time that we also realized the grim and pathetic Muslim conditions in the region. The largest numbers of world’s poor and illiterate live in South Asia. Millions of people are living below the poverty line and equally large is the number of those who happen to be illiterate. It would be also right to assume that the Muslim share in South Asia’s poverty and illiteracy is higher than those of others. This makes a sad commentary on the affairs of Ummah in South Asia. And this has happened, and continues to exist despite the fact that our sacred scripture has put a great deal of emphasis on acquisition of knowledge and offering the poor due. Salat and Zakat are key terms in the Holy Quran and they respectively symbolize or represent the rights of God and those of fellow human beings that Muslims are duty-bound to fulfill. How then, it has happened that the greatest numbers of poor are found among the Muslims in South Asia and how is it that they also constitute the bulk of the illiterate population in the region?
The Prophet Muhammad’s commitment to social services is evident from what Khadijah, his wife told him after his return from the Cave of Hira where he first received the revelation. Several verses of the Quran also speak about helping the poor and the needy. And we also know that the first verses revealed in the Cave of Hira, are about the importance of knowledge and the technology of writing. Here, the Muslims of South Asia must learn a lesson. That their foremost important task should be to eliminate the scourge of poverty and illiteracy from South Asia. This would be perhaps their greatest contribution to making Islam relevant in the region.

[April 2008]

Conflict Management or Conflict Resolution

Almost every day Israel bombs and kills scores of Palestinians including women and children. It is taken as a routine matter and hardly evokes any condemnatory response from any worthwhile quarter in the West. On the contrary, a Palestinian fires at and kills a few students of a Jewish seminary in Yerusalem known for developing and teaching a theology of usurping Arab lands and settling Jews thereon and a host of Western leaders including the American President condemn it as Islamic terrorism. And the English media in India readily climb on the bandwagon and accepts the version of their Western sisters. We have known for ages that our English-speaking journalists rarely question things coming from the West, especially if they are about Islam and Muslims.
Propaganda is apparently a potent weapon. But when scrutinized and examined deeply, it dawns on us that a battle won through propaganda is always temporary. Likewise hitting an enemy, mostly perceived one, does not mean that you have solved the problem. There is something seriously wrong with the western concepts of victory and defeat.
The main problem with the dominant Western thinking is that it believes in conflict management than in conflict resolution. For conflict resolution you need to reach at the root cause of a problem in order to find out a just solution. For doing so you need not only a proper methodology of investigating a problem justly but also a mind, upright and fearless, which thinks and speaks out rightly. To adopt this course of thinking and action is always a difficult enterprise to undertake. It is beyond the capacities of men given to impulsive thinking, for the minds of such people are normally governed by immediacy and vested interests. Such people are incapable of looking beyond their noses and therefore prefer conflict management through false propaganda, misguided diplomacy, even warfare and shy away from solving the problem in a lasting and enduring manner.
Let us analyse an example to further explain our point. By mid 1990s it had become clear that late Iraqi president Saddam Husain had indeed abandoned his weapon development programme. The United Nations weapons inspection team was about to submit a favourable report in this regard sensing which late Saddam Husain started awarding contracts for rebuilding his war-ravaged country. He saw to it that no major contract was awarded to American and British firms for he considered the two countries responsible for the destruction of his country. Seeing a huge business slipping out of their hands the American firms put a great deal of pressure on their government to do something in their favour.
The American government, with a view to safeguarding the business interests of its firms, decided to prolong the Iraqi plight. They used the mechanism of the UN Security Council and purchased some members of, and also planted their own men in, the weapons inspection team. Understandably these men gradually and in a sophisticated and calculated manner began to find faults with the findings and conclusions of the inspection team. They even stooped so low as to allege that late Saddam Husain was hiding weapons of mass destruction in his palaces and demanded to search them. They failed to find the WMDs, however, for Iraq had none of them to hide. And when America realised that its paid agents were at the end of their wit, it decided to invade and occupy Iraq. Today they are in occupation of that unfortunate country for about five years killing Iraqis and getting killed in thousands. They have not found any WMD nor any proof of late Saddam Husain’s complicity with terrorist groups for whose elimination they had invaded Iraq.
So, through propaganda that involved blatant lies and brazen violation of international laws America apparently won the battle against Saddam Husain. Today they control the Iraqi oil and have also succeeded in eliminating late Saddam Husain but only to confront a bigger problem of insurgency, freedom struggle, even the “menace” of what they call “Islamic terrorism”. In fact, today they are badly caught in the Iraqi quagmire and are left with no option but to choose between the devil and the deep sea. In plain words they have installed a government in Baghdad which can not survive in office without their military support. And this government will have no hesitation in embracing Iran, their avowed enemy, if they leave Iraq today. Look, what America’s conflict management has brought to it. And look at the example of Israel. Created to solve the Jewish problem, it has become a perennial source of problems in West Asia. This is what we call misery upon misery.

[March 2008]

They Migrate to Make a Living

A young couple with a malnourished infant detrains on New Delhi Railway Station on 19 February, 2008. They take a bus and reach Nizamuddin. All of a sudden tragedy befalls the ill-fated family. The man is crushed under the wheels of a killer buleline bus while crossing the road. The wife of the dead is benumbed. Misery upon misery, she can speak only Bengali. Some people from among the crowd along with the police take the crushed body to a hospital where he is declared brought dead. The woman does not know if her husband is alive or dead, as she has not been told about it. But it appears as she had sensed that her husband was no more. She is alone and there is no one around to console her. She hangs herself to death leaving behind the one and a half year old child to live on in the indifferent world. This is the story of a poor Muslim migrant family from Bengal, the bastion or the paradise of India’s left. The left has too many chirping birds, charming and good-looking, who routinely appear on television channels opining on this or that national or international issues. We would not dispute the importance of issues they opine on nor world belittle the causes they cherish to champion. But we must ask what they have been doing in Bengal for the last three decades. It is not just the left but also the country’s national leadership cutting across party lines should do some soul-searching and ask the question why people from eastern U.P. through north Bihar to Bengal are so poor that they feel compelled to migrate to Delhi, Mumbai or to relatively smaller cities like Ludhiana and Kanpur for greener pastures. And what are the greener pastures for which they come to Delhi or Mumbai? If the migrant is skilled, he can get low-paid jobs in varieties of factories scattered across or around Delhi and Mumbai. And if he not is skilled, he can manually pull rickshaw, his wife would do cleaning works in houses for a pittance and children, if they are of walking age, can go for rag-picking. As regards a house, they can only dream of a slum, at best.
We all know India is a country of glaring inequalities. We are a nuclear power, our economy is among the top ten economies of the world, we are progressing by leaps and bound and we have the potential to compete with America in one or two decades. And, at the same time, we are home to the biggest population of illiterates, we house the largest number of people living below the poverty line and we have the abominable practice of child and bonded labour. The million dollar question is how to eliminate the dehumanizing effect of these inequalities on the poor and marginalized sections of the society.
In developing societies politics and bureaucracy matter a lot, for they take all the important decisions. Unfortunately bureaucracy in U.P. and Bihar is more corrupt than in other states and the political class has either been inept or crimilized, castiest and communal. It is, therefore, not surprising that the two states are backward, so much so that their population migrates to Delhi and Mumbai for earning pittance.
But what excuse Bengal has to offer? If bureaucracy is corrupt there, why the so called clean left leadership has been presiding over it. For about three decades the left has been in power in West Bengal. And they are in power mainly because the poor have been voting for them. The great majority of the poor and the marginalized in West Bengal is Muslim. The Muslim population constitutes about one-fourth of the state’s population. They were poor and marginalized even before the left front came to power. The complaint is that they have not developed during the left rule as well. In services, industries, banking and finance, in every sector of economic activity they just do not lag behind, in fact, their presence is feebly visible. Yes, everywhere their number hovers between two and three percent, though numerically they are about one quarter of the state’s total population. Such a state of affairs can obtain only in two situations: either the huge Muslim population in Bengal has become intellectually stagnant or they are routinely and systematically discriminated against. The left parties as well as the West Bengal government owe an explanation.
The kind and condition of greener postures that the migrants come to find in Mumbai and Delhi has already been explained. It is clear that they do not leave behind their homes and dear ones for better prospects. On the contrary, they come for small jobs which are available mainly in unorganized sectors where they are routinely exploited. But surely unlike their hometowns here in Mumbai and Delhi they get some work and thus earn their livelihood.
Yes, they come to Delhi to make a living and not to create law and order problems. Likewise they come to Mumbai to earn their livelihood and not to hurt the Marathi pride, belittle their culture or undermine their language. It is indeed adding insult to injury when some Thawkeray alleges that the migrants from U.P. and Bihar indulge in Dadageeri. There might be such migrants but are they within the reach of the long hand of Shiv Sena. Surely not, their prey is the poor migrant who has a family back home to feed. Such people never indulge in Dadageeri nor have they time and luxury to create law and order problem.
Tragedies like the one mentioned in the beginning of the article may occur anywhere and anytime. We can not take and treat them as a type also, for surely there are migrants who have made good fortunes in Mumbai and Delhi. But the vast majority remains poor, marginalized and preoccupied with earning their daily bread and butter. They are neither Dada nor law-breaker. The most visible and obvious truth about them in that they have been betrayed by the bureaucracy and political class of their home states and are routinely harassed, exploited or poorly paid in places like Mumbai where they have gone to earn their livelihood.

[February, 2008]