Beauty and the Beast - The Palm Tree

I look at the palm tree that my recently deceased husband had planted in our courtyard as a sapling and which towers over the three storey house where he grew up, lived, married, helped me in nurturing our son, took care of his aged parents, was the best brother ever to his sister and where he stopped breathing in his favourite room, even as I instructed my son on CPR procedure on the phone 1100 kms away. This palm tree is special in the sense it is growing in Srinagar, Kashmir, which can get pretty cold in the winters and a tropical tree growing there is nothing short of a miracle.

I remember when the day after our marriage, when I stole down the stairs into the courtyard and found him whispering to the tree. When he sensed me behind, a certain sense of pride flushed through me, realising he was not embarrassed at being caught like this but was so sure of my understanding and sensitive nature that he extended his hand and went on to narrate the story of the palm tree. He swore that even though he had cared and watered it for years, it was only after he had started talking to it that it had shown any signs of growing.

Today he was sharing the most important moments of his life with it, and we both stood in a reverie, I peering into the fronds of the tree which was roughly a little over my height, 15 years ago, and he gazing lovingly at it as the din of the real world shattered our fairy tale moment.

Yes, it was a fairy tale. I called him my Beast. I was his Beauty. Both terms unconventionally appropriated to our marriage (as the term goes today) – he wasn’t a cruel one, just a tortured soul and I wasn’t beautiful in the materialistic sense of the word. I always referred to what he called his home base, as the Castle, which in my trying to scale to rescue him ended up hurting me deeply and out of which he could only escape in Death.

I got introduced to his personal demons early on in our friendship, sitting on the rooftop building of the newspaper office at ‘’Kashmir Images’’ that he used to work for, even as I had started collecting mine, sharing with him the countless stories of the tragedies of Kashmir I had collected in my UN Survey in the winter of 2001-02. His trauma had started in the 80s, a result of the childhood afflictions that the subcontinent’s society suffers from and which no amount of ‘’azadi’’ will ever liberate children from unless the malaise of incest and male abuse is acknowledged in the first place. He told me how talking to me was like standing under the shade of his palm tree; a shade his tortured soul had been searching for ages, and was relieved of the non-judgemental, empathetic, and loving shoulder that I provided.

I in turn told him how this gave me courage to share my personal stories, my past truths without apprehensions of judgement or bias and how much he was showing me a deeper picture of a society that ‘’won’t accept me, but won’t let me go either’’ – an adage which had become a mantra post 9/11. Those moments of soul-sharing talks, amidst the smiling, jeering and knowing glances of his colleagues were when we actually got married; the rest was just rituals. He was the darling of the staff, so evidently visible to me, and his sheer genius with language and understanding of the world, coupled with his maddening calm amidst the usual chaos of the newsroom was a delight to watch.

Everyone was happy for him, which is why all went out of the way to accommodate our unconventional marriage, something he had resolved to do with his mental toughness, despite the usual subcontinent cultural opposition peculiar to middle class families whose parents believe it is their god-given right to choose a girl for their son. For you see, on the Indian subcontinent, you do not get married to the man only, you get married to the whole family, immediate and extended – a conclusion I came to learn in a few years.

Unconventional it was –in every sense. I took a principled stand against dowry, something I had been writing about for months now, and my three conditions are legend in among my kids. How I kept three conditions before him after I answered in the positive to his marriage proposal, ia a story I like to tell people whenever I narrate our Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, knowing full well a Kashmiri man from a middle-class family with strong ties to them would never be able to go along because of peer pressure. But he surprised me, in fact, astounded me.

Estranged from my family which is a whole book and will someday be explored elaborately, I had told him the only dowry which would come from my home would be my roughly 3000 odd books, collected painstakingly all through childhood and teen life well into my twenties. Secondly, as I had understood Islam, my bridal trousseau and any accessories or jewellery would have to come from his side. Thirdly, there would be no ‘wazwan’ (Kashmiri wedding receptions which are competing with the Big Fat Indian Weddings in their lavishness despite the conflict) and it was to be a simple affair just like the Prophet’s daughter’s had been – dates and the Kashmiri ‘kehwa’ (green tea).

As I lay these three conditions before him explaining my reasons for them despite my having accepted his proposal, looking down all the while, sure in my heart that he would never be able to cut the trappings that all sons of the continent were accustomed to and getting ready to assure him when he refused that I would always be his best friend and ‘listener’ despite everything, I missed the twinkle of his eyes, as his respect for me soared in his heart. Later in life when we would recall these moments and I came to know what he was thinking, feeling and experiencing, it seemed I had echoed his heart and mind but needed my wilful stubbornness to actually go through with what his pen had always been opposing – 40-50 year old Kashmiri women sitting unmarried at home because of the inability to pay dowry (including his aged aunts).

I found myself embracing my Beast in spirit (this was a conservative outdoor setting in a Muslim region) as Arshid started speaking his mind. My soul found its oasis for the first time as I basked in the love of man who not only agreed to the conditions because he loved me but because they were his principles too. The marriage was a huge success that not only did his newspaper do a front page story on it, but it was featured on the radio programme ‘’Sheherbeen’’ too on 15 June 2002. Trust his colleagues-cum-friends to almost spoil it with a little ‘’wazwan’’ but we gave in because their darling Arshid was getting hitched, not to mention that they did it slyly – Bashir Manzar’s (his mentor, friend and editor) hand behind it whose delight was evident as he signed our ‘’nikahnama’’ despite his misgivings about my family’s absence as Arshid later told me.

Of course it is not easy standing on one’s principles in the backwaters of a backward region of a third world country. The coming year showed us how hard it could be and how much our combined willpower, our awareness of society and its manipulations, our knowledge of psychology, both mass and individual, and our communication lines through intimacy weathered us through the storms. Until the birth of our son, which in the subcontinent and in sharia Islam is a huge thing as I discovered. He became the excuse to renew broken ties, rebuild broken bridges, resolve grudges, and establish new foundations for families – this time for mine as well. It was a new marriage of sorts.

These days as I pore over his belongings, his books, his spectacles, his lighter, his favourite hoodie, his phone with sweat mark of his fingerprints still visible, I try to analyse as I have done countless times if the Beast inside him that he had learned to tame when he met me, had started to rear its head in those days of turmoil with the family over his stand on our principles. The violence that ensued sometimes all along my pregnancy shows me that it did, but the overwhelming love that he showered later as he expressed regret, pain and his undying love for me would show me he was reining in those demons.

As he started witnessing what women go through during birth, and nursing later, the new father in him started gravitating towards his own mother, a silent, invisible, unheard figure till then despite her non-stop chatter – a woman he had never really bonded with, having transferred his affections naturally to his father. The labours of birth and the sheer physical exhaustion having silenced me into a calm that was preparing me for the nurturing I would be doing to raise him, I watched as he now took the time to sit with her and listen beyond the usual inane language and chatter what she was actually trying to say.

This was a study of sorts as I saw how Kashmiri women despite their famous beauty of legends and folklore had been relegated to the background and the only way they could catch the attention of their men was to become as loud as possible. And my usual self started thinking about those dark ones, those silent ones, those invisible ones who would not resort to any noise to express themselves and would turn to the silent, blank pages of a diary even as I did, filling them with the ink of their thoughts.  

  

I watched the new father settle into a role he had prepared for months before the birth as he proved yet again how much he could resist the archaic traditions and how radically similar he was to me as he supported me in joining the new trend of pregnancy/parenting classes which believed that fathers should be inclusive to the whole process including operation theatre procedures. This is a revolution in itself in Kashmir and I am forever indebted to Dr. Zahida of the Mother Care Clinic, Mehjoor Nagar, shifted to Barzulla now, who gave me the most modern experience of child care and pregnancy both pre and post.

I have often wondered if my child had been a daughter, how different an effect it would have had on all – the family – him, his parents, my parents, the extended relatives, neighbours, and our life. But those musings are relegated to just some intellectual exercises in the recesses of my mind that I indulge in sometimes. Arshid’s delicate handling in changing Azza’s diapers, patting him after his full feed of breast milk, crooning him to sleep showed me he would have been as tender with either, a daughter or a son. My mother has a story to tell about him when I was still under the effects of anaesthesia, the result of an emergency C-section after my baby developed distress due to a prolonged labour of two days. It is a story my son does not like but has grown to like. Mama narrates how when my baby, a healthy 4 and a half pounds, was given to her, and his grandfather (Arshid’s Papa) recited the obligatory ‘azan’ (adhan) in his ears, Arshid just gave a cursory look while keeping eyes glued to the Operation Theatre door. A surgery is a huge thing in Kashmir and having grown up on the hypochondriac tales of many a relatives about the effects of anaesthesia and post-surgery blues, for Arshid it was nothing less than an open heart surgery happening to me despite Dr. Zahida’s reassurances.

To my mother and son, my husband standing vigil at my head as I drooled and moaned under the waning effect of the chloroform, whispering glad tidings of the arrival of our child as if that would pull me out of the daze, was proof of his immense love for me – a fact I tease them with ‘’Are you jealous?’’ in a friendly banter. When we discussed that moment in the coming months, his deep fear of losing me, it was the start of my continuous dialogues with him on morality and how Death was an inevitability we should never shy away from talking about – something ‘good’ Muslims are often told in Quranic verses, and in the Muslim culture of participating in a burial so that the materialism of the world is kept in check.  

Talking about death with a man who had tried to commit suicide 13 times in his 20s was an experience which deepened my love of life in the most Sufistic way – to be in world but not of it. To never form an attachment, but to live life to the fullest with the detached attitude that one day it will end – something I envision for my son and always advise youngsters when counselling them about their reckless ways; to give back to the world, to make it a little less dark, a little more happier in every tiny possible way.

Arshid’s palm tree grown through compost (decayed organic material from the kitchen), nature, water and secret whisperings is a monument to the little way a deeply troubled man, fighting for sanity, amidst the repression and gore of conflict tried to make sense of his life.  

           

The Philosophy of Mass and Individual Suicide

As a teacher in charge of young adults for decades, attempts at suicide or the tragically successful ones are not new to me. Even as children growing up into puberty slashing wrists was a common sight. Whether it was girls fed up of confinement at home in Muslim households, or their early marriages, or jilted boys over unrequited love, suicide attempts were fairly common in the 1980s. It didn't help that Bollywood of the 80s was obsessed with stalker heroes and the advent of cable TV in the early 90s made it possible to watch every third-grade movie ever made in the industry. The usual fare of Dostoevsky's novels and Nietzschean philosophy in adding nihilism to a syncretic culture which celebrated life didn't help things either nor did the eruption of the proxy war by Pakistan in 1989. 

Having the gift of being a patient listener, and a near superhuman empathy towards the underdog, the disabled, the weak, the marginalized  and the ''quiet'' (introvert), I was in a position to pull many a young adult out of doldrums and talk them out of what they thought was the end of the world over failed exams or break-ups in relationships. Maybe this enabled me to fall in love with a man famous for attempting suicide 13 times and surviving.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38704578/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/t/amid-conflict-kashmir-man-tries-suicide-times/#.WE4JVbJ97IU

I have often asked my father-in-law why didn't he just let his son go. 13 attempts mean the will to live has completely died down, and no amount of empathy, counseling, medicines or therapy could spark that will which exists in all species on earth and biologically helps them to overcome odds in the environment to survive. As he sees his only son time and again relapse into self-destruction through chain smoking, occasional binge drinking, aggravating the myriad health problems in the heart, stomach and lungs, despite a supporting wife, a living child and a successful job, the nearing 70 year-old man has only the language of silence to convey his answers to me as he brushes the dark circles under my eyes, while smoothing his over.

I know what he is saying. At least his son is in front of his eyes. There are Kashmiri fathers who were pallbearers for their sons' funerals and many did not even get the bodies of their sons or news of their fates and have had no closures. My idea of asking is if anyone is so desperate to go, as long as they are not hurting anyone else along the way physically, why prolong the pain and tangle loved ones when they could have overcome the immediate pain long ago.

But then I look around, standing with my 14-year-old on the banks of the river Jhelum and see an entire state doing the same thing. As my phone pings, and news of the suicide (fidayeen) attacks in Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Paris reach me periodically, I try to understand yet again how to stop this attempt at suicide by an entire community, an entire population, an entire civilization.

I have my principles about jihad and having evolved my own interpretations, living in a Hindu majority country where Muslimophobia is fast developing on a national scale, I am not averse to resorting to violence if one has to defend one's family or in self-defense. The stories of the Partition are alive for me, having had relatives' and friends' testimonies to make it real. No Kashmiri grows up without the 1947 events etched onto his/her/their minds be it the ''kabaili'' raid on Srinagar or the 10 million displaced, killed and forced to migrate or the Jammu massacre of Muslims.

But I am more inclined towards the interpretation of the higher jihad vs the lower jihad, where the higher one entails adopting a child, getting a sister/daughter married in the subcontinent, taking care of terminally ill parents or children, giving away food when you have none, earning your keep through halal means or simply the pursuit of knowledge even if you have to go to China (a hadith - saying of the Prophet- as in those days traveling to China would have been a huge deal). The everyday things of rebuilding a society or reforming it, which is much more difficult than picking up a sword or a gun is what the higher jihad is all about. 

Yet I see twisted versions of the lower one constantly being enacted in the global arena whether it is Palestinians blowing themselves up in Israeli buses, or stabbing Israeli mothers in their homes, or women fidayeen blowing themselves up in marketplaces, or armed men killing school children be it Beslan or the Army Public School, Peshawar tragedies. Even though the religion of Islam is common to the perpetrators of all these mentions, that is not to say there aren't terrorists in other religions or cultures as well. India harbours Hindutva goons, and the rise of the rightwing national ruling party doesn't make things easy for the scores of Indian Muslims living there with its periodic ''beef politics'', ''love jihad'', or outright planned carnages like the Muzaffarnagar riots, the Gujrat pogrom against its Muslim population or the now and then ''encounter killings''/ ''extra-judicial'' deaths of innocents.

In this communal scene of 2016 Indian history, a state asking for secession, based on the idea of the ''unfinished business of Partition'', or because it doesn't trust New Delhi with its governance/administration any longer due to a long history of interference, pampering of dynasty politics, and ''broken promises'' seems like a good idea. The thousands of disappeared youth, extra-judicially killed, scores incarcerated, mass graves and the deployment of heavy military might in the state also makes a case for secession. But wouldn't it be mass suicide considering the geopolitics of the region? And why take those who do not want to separate from India like the Ladakh and Jammu natives with them? Why impose this ''aspiration'' whether regressive or progressive on the others?

I am brought back to the idea of suicide. If you are so desperate to go, then do it. No amount of counseling about how ''life doesn't end here'', or ''there is a whole big, beautiful world out there'' or ''your best is yet to come'' will change the fact that another attempt is going to be traumatic to those who love and care about you. But if you believe becoming a martyr on the path of Allah by taking a few others along with you without their consent to score a political point or register a political protest is God's will, then you need to rethink your belief and your interpretation. Similarly, a population which holds hatred of the Hindu so much that they are willing to create another border between them for further ghettoisation need to understand that civilizations live together and pluralism is a progressive concept.

Every community can fight for its rights within a Constitutional framework, and if it happens to be a secular, socialist one with the right to religion embedded in it from day one, then what is the need to go ahead with the suicidal mission and take non-willing participants with you. But like I often ask my father-in-law, why not just let go. Why not just do it?

In my decades of a teaching career, I haven't yet told a child to go do it, and more than ever stopped one from doing it. But then these are children with their whole lives ahead of them. A mother can never, ever give up on that, having given birth herself and brought a life forth. A middle-aged man is a different case and so is a state which would rather annihilate their own in a siege from within and outside than give in. As I help my spouse up, drooling and crying in an agony that has held him in its grip for decades because of the abuse he suffered and which his own parents or sister know nothing about, I am inclined to reflect on ''mercy killing'' or euthanasia.

http://www.kashmirlife.net/plague-sorts-49841/ 

With my growing child watching his mother's fortitude in silence, his grandparents' grief and sad eyes, and developing a patience far beyond his ears as he cleans the room he shares with his beloved Daddy, I am forced to think of things with a rationality that medical doctors practice when they have the dilemma of the life of a mother and child to decide between. 

http://www.kashmirlife.net/on-a-suicide-mission-43011/

Kashmir isn't middle-aged yet. 70 years is hardly a coming of age for a kingdom ravaged by plunderers - brutal Afghan governors, maniac Huns, the stellar Mughals, the indifferent Sikhs, the imperialist Dogras, or the greedy Pak rangers accompanying the ''kabailis'' mostly of the Afridi clan. The response of the Indian establishment to the uprising of 1989, and then again in 2008, 2010, 2011, and in 2016 has been the same brutality as the previous plunderers. In the history of the establishment of the modern nation states that started in the 1840s, and the subsiding of the ''Great Game'' played throughout those centuries in the Hindu-Kush, the Pamirs, the Pir Panjal range, across the Karakoram all the way to the Khyber pass, Kashmir is another ''pawn'' being used in all of this. The sooner the ''indigenous'' people realize the better. 

Otherwise repeated attempts at suicide render the melancholy of the person/state moot and only end up traumatizing the people/communities around. With studies coming up about how trauma can be passed on to the next generation via genes (Holocaust survivors, Hiroshima survivors, Armenian genocide survivors, Russian gulag survivors, the comfort women of Japan, China and Korea, and the recent Yazidi women survivors in ISIS captured territory), it will become pertinent to dwell on the ''dilemma'' I face every day. Let go of something that so desperately wants to go or fight for life.  

The counter-narrative is the idea whose time has come

Recently there was an Arena segment in the Aljazeera program hosted by Mehdi Hassan in which the future of ''Indian-administered'' Kashmir was debated between Ather Zia, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado and founder of online journal Kashmir Lit and Sualeh Keen, writer and cultural critic.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2016/12/age-humanitarian-intervention-161209045532864.html

My response to Madam Zia's comments to Mehdi's question that the human rights violations of the Kashmiri Pandits is never talked or referred to and her reiterating that the UN has a mandate for Kashmir's ''case''. 

The Kashmiris lost any ''case'' they had the day, week and year the secessionists / separatists ethnically cleansed the ''indigenous'' Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley and supported the Hizb/JKLF circulated hit lists for targets to be assassinated with names of secular, liberal, Leftist Muslims, Pandits, Sikhs forcing them to migrate.

That terrible crime made the silent majority complacent in the cleansing by creating an atmosphere of terror - pitching an ISI-Pak Army sponsored rag-tag group of guerrillas against the might of the Indian Army. Those self-styled Rambos had no qualms putting a civilian population in the line of fire, leading to scores of the 1990 Gowkadal-like massacres on the streets and bylanes of Srinagar as was bound to happen in a proxy war/ shadow war/ guerrilla war sponsored openly by the Pak Establishment in 1989.

The case of it being a common, natural struggle of an economically deprived, misgoverned state for more democracy, representation, and development by overthrowing an incumbent, corrupt dynasty who were treating Kashmir as their ''jagir'' with interference from New Delhi was forever lost when Islamo-fascists in the garb of freedom fighters hijacked ''the struggle'' by closing down cinema halls and acid attacking/knee-capping women into wearing the hijab/burqa.

The case was lost at the altar of manufactured consent the day the 'intifada factory' at Press Enclave, Residency Road, Srinagar ''taught'' young writers to only write about India's mishandling of the sentiment of Muslims and to only selectively condemn the violation of human rights in the numerous workshops under the guise of Creative Writing, which the founder of Kashmir Lit mentioned above also sponsors.

The Kashmiris continue to lose their case even today, forcing the hegemony of the Kashmir Valley on the Ladakhis, Kargilis, Baltis, Gilgitis, Jammuites, Rajouris, Doda natives and others by ''manufacturing consent'' through hooliganism, threats to individuals by sending gunmen to silence dissenters, and various intimidation tactics that is peculiar to Muslims globally by declaring them ''lesser Muslims'', apostates, blasphemers, and endangering their lives in an already charged, insular society; trying to silence those who do not tow the line of ''azadi''.

Living in Colorado and lecturing the world about what is good for Kashmir reeks of a sense of superiority, and condescending attitude from Madam Ather Zia, something that the Left-dominated academia at JNU is always propagating in its approach to postmodernism, and the usual US imperialism / Indian occupation which resulted in the JNU row. The practice of taqiyya (lying) and ketman (lying by omission) is apparent especially on a Qatari-funded channel with a normally hyper moderator like Mehdi who surprisingly appeared controlled and neutral today but who is known to have staged audiences. Inviting a dissenter, from Indian Kashmir like Sualeh Keen was mere tokenism just to make it look like a debate. 

This penchant to term the conflict generated by the proxy war of Pakistan a long, ''drawn-out struggle'' by Madam Zia is very condescending and far removed from reality. A long ''drawn-out struggle'' in a siege from within by non-state actors and from outside by state troopers for almost 30 years is not something you gloss over sitting in a studio in the US in a secular, liberal and rich country. It drives men, in private jobs out of work for months, to insanity. Forced to rely on their savings, with old and infirm parents and elders dependent on essential commodities/ medicines to reach the Valley, the ''drawn-out'' seige with its hartal (strike)-calendar exposes the struggle for self-determination for what it is - a gross human rights violations by the Hurriyat on their own people. The administration fights to get through the NH-1 in the cold, brutal winters sometimes with aerial support and the stone-pelters paid for by the ISI hawala channel funded money do not make it easy. 

Children confined at home for months and deprived of an education with schools burnt and exams postponed or canceled are the second generation to witness this, mine having already been a victim of deprived dreams and disrupted lives. We were the lucky ones. An entire generation of men was lost to torture and forced disappearances by the brutal crackdown on militants by the State and the orphans of both militants and Kashmiri police personnel killed in the line of duty, growing up in various orphanages and homes, are proof of that. I'm not even going to touch upon the mental subjugation and insanity prevalent in such a ''siege'' - rising marital discords, depression in children and young adults, rising suicide rates and drug addiction, and so on. 

Follow the money and gold, follow the bullet is what I always say. After decades the arsenal used in the fidayeen attacks on various camps in India have been traced to the Pak armory. What is left is for all the money, gold and offshore accounts related to the J&K Bank to be traced. India would rather blind and maim, and kill its own citizens and take up the self-destructive demonetization just to make sure the border is never redrawn again with a nuclear-armed aggressive neighbor. If Madam Zia with her tenure in a US University doesn't understand this then what can be further said about this zeal for a long ''drawn-out'' struggle. Instead of impeaching the Hurriyat to cut their losses and dealing with New Delhi to save face, she is implying that Kashmir implode into a civil war and mafia land grab which it eventually will and has already started witnessing.

The counter-narrative is the idea whose time has come. There is a saying, I am not sure which culture or country or tradition to credit it to:

One should not terrorize anyone to the extent that fear dissolves. I am modifying it to - the dissolving fear develops into a certain death wish and when those fearless speak, the counter-narrative crumbles in a swish. Rahul Pandita, once tweeted - ''Kashmir is essentially a Greek tragedy - of sons who do not return home, and of sons who cannot return home.'' I am taking it further to say - ''Kashmir is also essentially a human and evolutionary tragedy - of mothers who send their sons to death dressed as grooms of Allah and of mothers who defy certain death/ostracism in keeping their sons away.'' I am one such and will be till my dying day, always resisting the lure that ''jihad'' in Kashmir holds for our boys/men.

The counter-narrative is the idea whose time has come.

The Lecherous Platonic Friend on Facebook

This is an indulging post, something I do from time to time. There is this interesting phenomenon that I have noticed ever since I registered on Facebook. For me, social networking sites are educative and interacting tools. Having been deprived of information, and current affairs for decades while living in a conflict zone and having been fed an agenda-driven media narrative, I was thrilled to discover, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, Blogger, Google+ etc. For me, it meant finding validation in my secular, and liberal beliefs, something I had been clinging to in my silence of decades, despite the majority narrative that my ethnic group of Kashmiri Sunni Muslims (immediate and extended family, relatives, acquaintances, peers, batch mates, friends)has. I found similar minded people in not just my community but globally — a similar reflection of my thoughts, beliefs or non-beliefs, opinions, and a more accurate factual narrative than what had been filtered to us.

But an interesting thing happens when a woman (a minority within a minority within a minority- a Kashmiri Indian, Muslim, woman) starts stating her views. You get a regular mansplaining, either by mail, or inbox or on posts and threads. I am not counting the hate mail and threats here. I have mostly listened with respect and attention and explored the suggestions given but more often than not they would border on the condescending and patronizing behavior of telling a woman what and how to think. This is now normal for me and I just gently brush off such attitudes.

But the most important thing that I observed was and, that is the intention for this post, was that a woman who is seen as giving her frank opinion publicly, away from the herd mentality is somehow seen as ‘’easy’’, or ‘’loose’’. There have been a number of lecherous gestures and messages, or attempts to build an intellectual relationship, but the Platonic falseness gets demolished in a few days, weeks or months when the intentions of gaining access to my space are made clear. I am very outright in my awareness of cyber crime laws, hence the intentions are revealed hesitantly but they are always revealed in time nevertheless.

It makes an interesting observation for me as a life-long observer of society and culture, that a ‘’brainy’’ woman is seen as a conquest. It also goes into areas of ‘’Southern indigenous tribal’’, educated men seeing an intelligent woman with her own opinions from a ‘’Northern Aryan’’ region who should be won over, but at the same time always falling back on viewing her as a body and not a mind. I find it flattering but annoying too, since it just confirms what feminists all over the world have been fighting for and is clearly a lost cause, at least in the subcontinent.

The intellectual men are never going to take an independent-minded woman as an equal, the women around these men already consider them as ‘’competition’’ (I have no idea where they got the idea since I know for sure now, men tend to always, always fall for easy, dumb and unintelligent women who just flash their eyelashes and appear as damsels in distress in need of assistance and end up boosting their manhood). In fact, it can be very difficult to lead a life where you have the image of a fiercely independent, knowledgeable and aware woman. You have to face the internalized misogyny among educated, liberal and aware men all the time and to have the women at our backs, breathing down our necks, and countering our views just to impress the ‘’frat boys club’’ is a bit too much.

This idea of ‘’loose’’ or ‘’modern’’, that somehow defines if a woman is not towing the status quo and is a dissenter to populist politics or popular opinion, then she ought to be automatically smoking, drinking, uninhibited about other stuff is what I encountered early on. Many, many young adults and grown men often automatically respond to my not wearing the hijab with a prompt, ‘’So you smoke and drink too?’’ To see this in men, well in their 30s, 40s and 50s is disappointing because it exposes that feminism hasn’t made any inroads and how difficult and near impossible it will be to change the subcontinents’ attitude towards women as an equally important, contributing species.

I do not mind the irritating, lecherous, patronizing from otherwise very knowledgeable and delight-to-read men since all the above social networking sites have facilities in their apps to check the very zealous Sir Galahads. I am well over that feeling I used to get, like dirty water poured over me, when walking on the streets of Srinagar in the 90s, minding my own business, Kashmiri Muslim louts used to deliberately encroach on my space with their snide comments, pushing, and eve-teasing. I have realized the information technology is also a highway of sorts and one will meet all sorts of lecherous characters. Social networking apps provide them with the security of fake avatars to indulge in their fantasies, but only the aware, intelligent and bold woman will have the gumption to put them in their place, no matter how much they falsely praise them for their ‘’independent opinions’’.

In the end, we are just bodies to them, and they are looking for an opening or a relaxation of our natural guards and radars (something that Indian women develop since childhood due to rampant incest), to act out on those fantasies. So praise or criticism as I always say, should be like oil on water. Do your own thing, speak your mind and do not mind the creep!

Pan Islamism and why Kashmir/Muslims will never integrate into civilizations

I started searching for the role of Muslims in 1947 in the formation of Pakistan and came up with the Hijrat of 1920. This lead me to the book 'Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement', 1918 By M. Naeem Qureshi. Which further brought up Jamal al-Afghani and his famous disciple Muhammad Abduh, who surprised me, or at least his Wikipedia entry did. 

His views on Islam seem very modern and liberal and he was definitely called an infidel according to his biographers, by his contemporary Muslims and both teacher and disciple fell in and out of favor with various Sultans and Kings of the then fragmenting Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East and Central Asia. 

Their zeal for Pan-Islamism was in response to the hegemony of European Colonialism that they saw in their travels to various Muslim lands. But then they did not stop at just criticizing the West. Muhammad Abduh, in fact, went further and advocated that, ''...the two greatest possessions relating to religion that man was graced with were independence of will and independence of thought and opinion; and because Western civilization was based on these two principles, it had progressed to a much happier stage in the evolution of mankind. 

Pan-Islamism went through its various stages, starting from the early days of Islam as a ''religious concept'' and moved on to become a ''modern political ideology'' in the 1860s and the 1870s at the height of European Colonialism when Turkish intellectuals began discussing and writing about it as a way to save the crumbling Ottoman Empire, according to the Oxford Islamic Studies site. From becoming the ''favored state policy'' as a ''defensive ideology'' directed against European political, military and economic, and missionary penetration in the East, ruling bureaucratic and intellectual Pan-Islamist elites of the fast-becoming obsolete Ottoman Empire, sought to pose the Sultan as a universal Caliph to whom Muslims everywhere would owe allegiance and obedience. 

It is this very nature of Pan-Islamism of excluding culture and ethnicity as primary factors in its goal of 'Ummah' unification that I object to. As much as its early advocates continue to surprise me as I explore the translations of their writings, it is this core principle at its heart which stands out as a sore to seculars like me who live in places where a myriad of Islam is seen, followed and believed in. No doubt, the early advocates of Pan-Islamism wanted to offset military and economic weakness in the Muslim world by favoring central government over the periphery and Muslims over non-Muslims in dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the Great War (World War I), but to me this ''sociopolitical solidarity'' which seeks coordination through political and economic cooperation internationally has now become an important ''political tool'' for the recruitment of extremists and terrorists in the perceived foreign aggression post-World War II. 

Muhammad Abduh's conclusions from his vast array of works do not convince me that he was a true liberal and believer in social justice, even though both Jamal al-Afghani and he faced opposition not only obviously from the British rulers and diplomats but also from their own fellow compatriots and other Muslims, even down to what, we may in modern times call, inspiring their personal trolls to declare them as infidels. Abduh's quote,'Muslims suffer from ignorance about their own religion and the despotism of unjust rulers'', could very well fit into what I often call the ''Misgovernance of Kashmir'' - a term taken from the champion of Kashmiris, Robert Thorpe, a young British Army Officer who arrived as a tourist in the Valley in 1865 and wrote his first-hand observations in his book 'Kashmir Misgoverned' and was probably poisoned because of it and lies buried in the Christian Cemetery in Srinagar. 

Another quote attributed to Adbuh is uncannily similar to what independent observers post 90s started speaking of when they visited Muslim lands and their writings/observations came in the public domain due to social media networks, for example, the works of V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Hari Kunzru, Rabih Alameddine, Aatish Taseer, Kenan Malik, the various documentaries about the Middle East showing life as it truly is and the latest popular Ali A. Rizvi on his life in Saudi, Pakistan and in Canada straddling three civilizations. The quote goes: ''I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but no Islam.''

Why I am still suspicious of these two revolutionary men is because no evidence was found in their works and activism to show that they leaned towards favoring political democracy or parliamentarianism. According to both their biographers and research experts like Nikki Keddie on al-Afghani and Mark Sedgwick on Abduh, both of them were no dangerous fanatics or religious enthusiasts and belonged to the broadest schools of Muslim thought, holding political creed akin to pure republicanism. They were most obsessed with “the overthrow of individual rulers who were lax or subservient to foreigners, and their replacement by strong and patriotic men, rather than Constitutional, Civil Law and Social Reform For me the test for a true liberal and emancipator is what they think of women's rights and I am sure they both would have failed my test in the 1800s. 

Also the fact that their actual intentions of liberating men from enslavement, providing equal rights to all, abolishing the monopoly of the mullah's (religious scholar's) exegesis, and advocacy for abolishing of racial discrimination and religious compulsion was suppressed and hijacked by latter-day organisations such as the Muslim World League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Their agenda of modern Pan-Islamism projected these two as the founding fathers of the Wahabbi/Salafist ideologies (indoctrinating strains of Islamic thought, jurisprudence, interpretation and philosophy culminating in the formation of the barbaric and brutal ISIS) by linking them with leading Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Maududi, and Ayatollah Khomeini who actually stressed their belief that a return to traditional Sharia law would make Islam united and strong again (an early Islamic Kharijite extremist concept which practised takfir)  is what brings me back to the ''hijacking of movements by Islamists'' for their own agendas as has been done in Kashmir since the 90s. 

What could have been a simple protest against the high-handedness, interference, and pampering of India of the ruling elite turned to be a Pak-sponsored armed revolt which left a generation dead, disappeared and maimed for life, physically and mentally. The 'Tanzimat'' reform period in the Ottoman Empire has a similar disgruntlement echoing when secularization of the leadership, so that the Christian population would feel more a part of the Empire, through the promotion of a sentiment of equality for all citizens, and would be less likely to agitate for the right to self-rule; led to the formation of a constitution and a legislature. This was being achieved and had been achieved to some extent in Kashmir after 1947, but for the corrupt rule of the elite dynastic party the NC. 

Similarly, the West needs to be careful who it chooses as ambassadors from the Muslim communities, now with the mass migration of Muslims into the West. For in the example of these two, one can see how organizations like CAIR/Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas can operate among the white-guilt-ridden Western countries. A much better example is to be found in my initial starting point of the role of Indian elite Muslims of the 1940s who were responsible for the Khilafat movement and found a supporter in Gandhi too.