The Reverse Racism of the Indian Left-Liberal

'Cruelty perpetuated by someone with a "good conscience or a "strong moral compass" can often be the most unrelenting, uncritical and self-righteously determined cruelty imaginable', writes Maajid Nawaz in his 2015, October article - 'Not Muslim Enough? The Malcolm X Zombie Rises Again'.  Maajid Usman Nawaz is a British activist, author, columnist, radio host and politician  and author of Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism, which makes him an authority on Islam, Muslim culture, its regressiveness and progressive trends, and the dangers of speaking out, against the values of a religiously society with tribal loyalties. 

In the context of the Indian subcontinent - a powder keg of religious tensions - speaking out against the regressive practices in one's communities whether Hindu or Muslim, can have life-altering repercussions. Hence the Great Indian Liberal goes out of his/her way to diffuse any attempts at inflammatory speeches or disinformation. But in doing so, as pointed out by Maajid above, their good conscience ends up delivering the vilest, cruelest blow to critics/dissenters and reformers. Their labels for Muslim cultural critics as 'house niggers', 'capo', 'Useful Jews', 'Trojan Horse', 'Uncle Tom', 'shills', 'Islamophobes' and the takfiri reaction - 'Not Muslim Enough' are entering the public discourse in a huge way.

I had earlier outlined the burden of reform and why we do it. It is dangerous and full of risks for our family members too, but we do it because of unspeakable violations, intolerable injustice and the unflinching motive of making the future safe for our children. Of course, there is going to be resistance from our own. Whether they are practicing Muslims, cultural Muslims, agnostic or atheist Muslims, regressive believers, or progressive liberal Muslims, and everyone in between - each and every group is going to find some fault or the other in the approach or stance of Muslim critics/reformers. So it is expected to have the slanderous 'House Nigger', 'Capo', or 'Uncle Toms' thrown around by the group most resistant to change / reform. 

What is incomprehensible, reprehensible, and completely uncalled for is the 'Great Indian Liberal', joining the fray. This "racism of the anti-racists", the 'New Orientalism', in Maajid's words, is the new and deeply sinister form of bigotry because its racism, misogyny, and cultural bigotry thrive under our very noses undetected. Maajid used these words in the context of Roger Alpher's Haaretz opinion article describing Lucy Aharish as 'the Arab Woman' who 'had been neutralized' because she had 'committed the grave crime of forming an opinion', instead of 'mimicking the views' of her fellow Arabs. 

This 'reverse racism' is familiar to us Kashmiris of the Indian subcontinent who believe Kashmir's future lies with its continued accession to India while condemning the high-handedness of the Indian political-bureaucratic-military nexus dealing with armed jihad in the conflict-torn Valley. We get a lot more than 'sell-outs', 'traitors', 'native informants' - the male dissenters having to put up with Facebook spats, phone calls to family members, ostracism at the mosque and gatherings, while the female dissenters have to deal with the additional nuisance of rape threats and character assassinations. 

This 'reverse racism' or 'cultural bigotry' is not visible or obvious enough because, again in Maajid's words, it emanates from those who shout the loudest that they are on "our" side, that they speak for "us". This is why C. S. Lewis's observations in his provocative collection of essays, God in the Dock, has been quoted by Maajid -  "good men consistently may act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants... in some respects act even worse..". 

Now the question, the dilemma, the worrying factor is - if the Left, so historically having been the champion of the victims of racism, bigotry, and exploitation, turn out to be the biggest bullies of all, who will call them out? Who gets to invite the hordes of trolls (yes, they have picked up the traits of the right wingers and supremacists) and their penchant for ridicule, contempt, character assassinations, even threats, buoyed by extremists in the Islamist camps, delighted with the Left -Liberals speaking up for them?

Ex-Muslims, apostates, cultural Muslims and even pious, practicing believers do not tire of saying - "Ideas have no colour and truth belongs to no culture, but should be the pursuit of all"- (Maajid in his Daily Beast article) It is a bloodied war among Muslims that is being fought and may have a bitter end - the war against "practices in our culture that hinder our social mobility in a civilization". The "mainstream allies" like the Left, the Liberals, especially the "Great Indian" ones may inadvertently be contributing to the covert shutting up of dissenters and to the murdered bloggers.  

Those fond of the Malcolm X coined 'house Negro', forget one crucial detail - the house negros working in the mansions with their masters often influenced them to be less brutal to a fellow negro or save the life of a slave. Capos (Jewish, SS appointed heads of labor squads in concentration camps) often worked against the SS at great risks to keep inmates alive and get their plight out to the Allies. In horrendous times, the lot that fell on individuals whether they working in mansions as compared to field  slaves, the Jewish capos who had the misfortune of being selected as capos of the terrified labour squads, did what any normal person faced with certain death would choose to do - survive by any means possible and in the event probably save a life or two, instead of the brashness of being a martyr to the cause. 

The "Great Indian Liberal" who terms Muslims cultural critics and dissenters as 'capo' or 'house Negro is actually making their work much more difficult - the work of lifting their communities out of doldrums, ignorance and willful denial. In addition to their own families, friends and the community which ostracizes and resists them, they now have the to deal with the 'reverse racism' of the Left and Liberal, who act as if they are doing a favor to minorities. 

History teaches us, change in communities has always been difficult with the bitter truth often forced down people's throats in order to rip off the rose-tinted glasses from their eyes. Only Muslim dissenters from within can do it, with no small measure of help from non-Muslims. They are aware that every regressive practice they criticize and choose to overturn through legal recourse may be used by the right wing to bash up the minorities. In this dangerous obstacle course of reform, the Great Indian Liberal does a disservice to the brave women and men, in erecting hazardous barriers of libel, defamation and trolling. 

It takes years to convince generations of traditionalists that what has been going on is not right - be it the instantaneous triple talaq; religion-sanctioned polygamy; hijab or burqa compulsory diktats; FGM among the Bohra community; dowry demands; domestic violence attributed to verse 4.34 in the holy text; and the general second class citizenship allotted to women in lieu of the 4:2 half-testimony of  assault victims, blasphemy laws, etc. It takes just a few minutes on social media to besmirch a person with a photoshopped meme and throw him/her to the trolls.  

Of course, that doesn't deter ground workers who take risks to speak out, but the Great Indian Liberal had better get his/her act right if it really wants a lasting peace in the subcontinent. Still reeling from the effects of the communal Partition. This hijacking of Malcolm X's legacy and appropriating the Jewish experience to silence Muslim dissenters is going to backfire in a bad way like it did for Malcolm X when he was killed by his own and before his death apologized for his race-baiting, racially-divisive language in his past. 

The Zindiq Posts: The Atheist Muslim

The first thing that greets you as you pick up Ali A. Rizvi's The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason, is the quote by famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion  -  "A beautifully written page-turner... One man's epic struggle to climb out of the pit of dogmatic religion into the sunshine of enlightenment. And because the religion concerned was Islam, his success story is the more important for ou troubled times." 

I can relate to this "epic struggle", which I saw in my late husband Arshid Malik's life when I met him, fell in love with him, married him despite opposition from our families and with whom I had a stormy marriage of 15 years; before he succumbed to his depression and bipolar disorder (a consequence of untreated trauma of years of incest by a cousin). The combination of destructive internal factors of self-medication, nicotine and liquor and the external factors of mental and physical repression of living in a conflict zone where Islamist forces are hell bent on imposing sharia law while in a proxy war with a secular country took their toll on Arshid. A struggle it definitely was with his identity - politically, religiously, socially and ideological wise, when I met him and was impressed by his open display of it. But then he kept vacillating between belief (to my utmost disbelief to see him reading the Quran and offering prayers) to agnosticism as he started getting introduced to my friend circle on social media and back to atheism again when he realised there was a whole new world out there in the last years of his life. 

I recall showing him Ali A. Rizvi's posts and discussing Alishba with him and urging him to add them as friends. He was as fascinated as I had been and would often marvel at Ali's patience with trolls and his epic discussions with Kashif Choudhary MD, a regular debater who often challenged Ali. I learnt a lot from those debates, and how one had to keep one's cool, grow a thick skin, and basically keep sticking to the post and not allow anyone to digress from the main issue being discussed that time. Slowly, I realised my own confidence was growing and the silence which had enveloped me all those decades ago ever since the mind realised the childhood bigotry and later recognised the communal forces that upset the secular lives we had and tried to impose a radical Islam. 

It gives me immense pride to start off the blog with Ali A. Rizvi's book. Arshid would have approved. The author's biography reads as follows: 

Ali A. Rizvi spent the first twenty-four years of his life as a Pakistani youth growing up in Libya, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and the next fifteen years as an adult living in Canada and the United States. Rizvi is one of only a handful of nonbelievers from Islamic backgrounds that have openly voiced their views and told their stories without significant risks to their livelihoods. He has been writing extensively about the subject for several years, contributing to The Huffington Post and other major media outlets like CNN.com. In addition to being a writer, Rizvi is a medical communications professional and a trained physician with residency and fellowship training in oncological surgical pathology. 

The Zindiq Posts: Let's Make Heresy Great Again!

Inspired by Robert Bruce's 101.books Blog in which he read, reviewed and ranked 101 Modern Books in Western Literature in a space of four years, I figured it would be a way to put other unorthodox views in and about Islam out there. Considering there are very important voices of ex-Muslim, cultural Muslims, and secular Muslims trying to combat extremism in our religion, it would help to keep a comprehensive list of their books in one place. 

It also takes inspiration from:

Zindiq is a medieval Islamic term applied by Muslim theologians to "the criminal dissenters" - the professing Muslims who hold beliefs or follow practices contrary to the central dogmas of Islam and are therefore to be regarded as apostates and infidels. I first came across this term "zanadiqa" in Anouar Majid's ''A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America'', as I was building my sanctuary away from bigotry in 2014, after having survived a flash flood in my hometown and lost my collection of books on this subject. I get a lot of communication from people wanting to know more about dissent, about apostasy, and a general collective frustration about the chokehold that radical Islam and extremists have both on believers and non-believers, Muslims as well as non-Muslims. This is my personal quest about an ideology because of which I have suffered, been judged by and governed for my whole life and continue to face the consequences of having been born into its social matrix. 

I start with Ali A. Rizvi's book - The Atheist Muslim, the newest book coming out in the growing "zindiq literature" from Muslims. I will not restrict myself to only Muslims or ex-Muslims, but there are well-researched books by non-Muslims as well that have contributed to this global dialogue about the "clash of civilisations". I pick up Ali A. Rizvi because he was one of the first people I came across as I entered social media, who fascinated me with their views and even the truth of existing in the first place. Coming from a conservative and insulated, bigoted society, it was a thrill to see him articulate secularism, humanism, rationality, and logic and speak as a matter of fact about regressive practices in my religion. 

Gradually I became acquainted with Alishba Zarmeen, his very talented and straight-up wife who kept nothing back when calling out hypocrisy and obfuscation among Muslims. I watched as she grappled with trolls and gave them a mouthful with clarity and discovered that there could be women who could stand up to the mullah brigade who relished in putting down women if they had an opinion. Ali's posts brought up Faisal Said Al-Muttar and his views coming from a Middle-Eastern background, yet holding secular, humanistic views were a whole new window into an expanding world of dissent. I have come to know Faisal's book is upcoming and hopefully, I will be able to put it up on the blog soon. 

I have no idea how many posts I will dedicate to one book. It will depend on what each author has to say and how relevant it is in today's context. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani's books are not readily available and I will have to wait until I can order them online. Some like Ibn Khuldun's Muqadimma are easily available but require tough reading and will be put off for some vacation time or a long weekend, as I have a day job to concentrate on too and I am the primary care-giver to a teenager. But I am looking forward to a personal Enlightenment as I peruse these books and make my own list of 101 books in Zindiq Literature. 

The books are not going to be strictly non-fiction, though that is the best genre for Zindiq Literature, sometimes fiction is able to communicate universal truths in a far more articulate and forceful way than non-fiction - a case in question To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or Roots by Alex Haley, two of the most influential books in American Literature.  

Recommendations are welcome. 

Aging Bones

I wake up these mornings thinking of ways to make my apartment more welcoming for my mother, Mama as I have always called her. Ours has been a roller coaster ride, kind of converging now after a tragedy. I lost Arshid at age 42 and I guess it is something she can't accept even for a wayward daughter, even though she has practically cursed me to hell scores of times. Today she gaslights and denies all of that verbal abuse and I have reached a stage where having made peace with myself, I have compassion for both my parents, realising they could be the caretakers of my child if anything happens to me. 

I have always given voice to the voiceless. Now that I have a say in all things of my life, it makes sense to write for the ones who were never able to develop any control over their lives. Mama like the autumn leaves in the wind just drifted wherever Life took her and affected our lives in very drastic ways, something which my sister's isolationist behaviour is a visible evidence of. 

I woke up with the image and sense of Mama bent on her prayer rug at dawn, beseeching her Allah for my long life till my son is settled and well cared for. She cries a lot for me these days, worried for my ageing bones and various ailments that come along with age. Her jealousy of my having had a son long dissolved in the years that she got to care initially for her first grandson (mine) and then for years for her second one (my sister's). I am always aware of the abuse she took for not having produced a son and us sisters in tacit agreement let her dote over ours until they were actually in the danger of developing that 'Nawabzaada' (superior) attitude that many Muslim men display and which permeates their lives and their circle of influence. 

Mama is finally getting what was due to her all those decades ago, a secure home with her daughters settled and grandkids around her. She shuttles between Abu Dhabi, Srinagar and Delhi and is just about discovering what empowerment an "English education" brings to Muslim women especially if they are determined to live their lives on their own terms. I admit seeing my sister drive a car, deal with patients, and bring up her son in a very progressive way is far better than to see me do the same minus the driving and plus the speaking out against regressiveness in Islam. This is the only bone of contention between us and until Arshid was alive brought on sulkiness and temper tantrums from her. 

But now that she has lost her "son", she is careful to just appeal to me through teary eyes not to endanger her grandson with what I speak out against. I listen and understand and nod, but she knows as much as I in my being - I am never going to be silenced. Life was never able to silence me. Life has never been able to silence me. 

So I am jolted awake with the pressing worries of installing a geyser and English commode for her and make the apartment more friendly, sensitising my son on TV timings to reschedule according to Mama's favourite TV serials; and arranging of furniture - the sit-down carpet style of Muslim families really painful for my bones. I look forward to massaging her back, knowing it hasn't been soaped for a long time because she can't reach it and other intimate things that only daughters can do for their mothers. And I frame approaches and imaginary conversations in my mind about how to get her to tell about her childhood and teen years and youth, most of it having already heard but needed for polishing the chapters of my book. 

For in telling her story, I not only will be able to bring closure to a tumultuous relationship I have had with her but also explore if Islam, as we know it, were brought up in it, and are affected by it through our men, has any chance of a reform or not. A Native American writer friend once told me - Listen to Your Elders - a common ritual in the traditions of the tribes, to gather around a fire and listen to the Ancients. As I start my chores, I imagine the campfire in my apartment in the coming winter months, when, to escape the severe Kashmir winter I am determined that she while it away with us in a milder region. Her asthma will not be able to take another severe one. 

For the time being, we are happy to let her explore her new home which Baba finally built and decorate it, plan for it, care for it to her heart's content like a delighted little girl - an image I have firmly fixed in my mind from her countless descriptions. A reproduction of what she would have looked like taken from the net to inspire me  - a common tool for writers.

She playing "sazlong" (hopscotch) with one of my Uncles balanced on her hip, one of her 6 siblings that daughters often ended up caring for in bog Muslim households. A once strong body doing endless chores for a huge household from age 6 right up till she walked out of her marriage with two daughters in tow. Her painful knees bent in the 'sazda' are what concern me, her swollen ankles a very familiar sight for me, having the same affliction. Despite repeated advice that there is a provision in Islam for offering prayers seated on the chair, she insists on the hard way. I figure it also some sort of penance, pilgrimage, that every believer exhibits in order to earn 'sawab' (brownie points in English) or as the illiterate pirate in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies retorts in a comic scene while turning the pages of the Bible, "You get credit for trying".  



Image Courtesy: The Net

Stealth Theocracy

It is admirable to read young Kashmiri Muslim women (not all of them believers) stepping forward and making it their life's work to speak out for the female victims of injustice, rape with impunity by the Indian Armed Forces, mental health issues due to the Enforced Disappearances of their sons, husbands and brothers, and the general effect of the ongoing conflict of 27 years. I know for a fact personally how difficult it is to raise one's voice in a patriarchal setup, in a Muslim culture, especially against incest, sexual assault and sexual harassment at the workplace.

It is heartening to read about how their activism is changing their families, their circle of influence into using a taboo word such as rape to create awareness about the trauma that our women suffered long before social media and access to rural areas in the Valley. It is commendable that they are giving voice to those who neither have the articulation to give voice to the violation of their bodies and souls nor have the necessary support and rehabilitation mechanism in place.

However, it would have made all their activism much more credible and morally superior if they had an equal fervour for the atrocities committed in the same time period among those they never mention, and sometimes brush away as propaganda or hoax. I do not necessarily mean the activists currently doing the rounds on various Indian outlets, especially if they are Left-leaning. They could have mentioned or spoken for the Kashmiri Pandit women for all I know. But the same zeal, space, energy, assertiveness seems to be missing when it comes to the Pandit women who underwent the same trauma, atrocities, violations as the one whom they hold in front of the largest democracy in the world as a mirror.

I am going to state the obvious yet again -
that acknowledging the Pandit women underwent atrocities will expose the "struggle for self-determination" that they keep reiterating is for Kashmiri nationalism and a secular separate country as a stealth theocracy under the garb of Freedom Movement.

that recognising the Kashmiri militants had been capable of behaviour they accuse the Indian forces of doing inhumanly would bring them face to face with what their brothers, sons, and husbands could do if anarchy were to prevail with a lot of help from "our friendly neighbouring country".

that the impunity they keep shoving in the Geneva conferences, on Amnesty's pages, even in the UN meetings is also something their "beloved mujahideen" enjoy since not much testimony exists about these atrocities apart from the victims'own families and certain Right-wing groups. They can find a kinship with these right-wingers as they too do not acknowledge that a Kunan Poshpora occurred or that "rape is being used as a weapon of war by the Armed forces".

This is why it is important to step back and see things for what they are and where they stem from, especially if they keep occurring on a daily basis. I keep getting asked on forums how I cannot condemn what the security forces are doing in the Valley and I keep answering I do everywhere I can, only I am not selective when it comes to the beastly nature of man. It is dishonest if one only talks about the Armed Forces and their use of the AFSPA, and various sexual crimes against Kashmiri women and not about the women abducted by militants, or killed simply on the allegation of being informers, or forcibly married to militants under the threat of the "gun" (a common mafioso practice in the Indian subcontinent). It is equally dishonest if they are silent on the rampant incest, and other pervert practices going on in their homes especially marital rape which their beloved religion does not recognise nor does the law of the country from which they want to separate.

Selective condemnation brings its own problems with it. Apart from putting a question mark on your objective, it also does a disservice to the very women you are fighting for, and whose stories of assault are lost in the whataboutery, revenge policies, and dismissal theories (the same that you come up with like the Jagmohan Theory) of the other side/camp. In the Far Left-Far Right/ majoritarianism in the Valley/majoritarianism in the country polarisation, the victims become pawns and a mere statistics instead of the faces, names and people whose stories need to be told to bring closure and justice.

I was 15 when I witnessed the Gowkadal Massacre of January 21. My late husband (also 15 at the time) witnessed it separately and he acquired double the trauma having had to pick up bodies and help in their burial and seeing/cleaning those gunshot wounds. Of course, it brought us girls/women out on the streets pelting stones at the CRPF/BSF stationed near the various schools and colleges hastily in sand bag bunkers. Yes, we marched with memorandums to the UNMOGIP (United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan) at Gupkar, Srinagar in wave after wave of processions with Azadi slogans.

But on November 7, a few months later when a resident of our locality Pitti Koul was gunned down in front of our eyes, just for the fact she had come to retrieve her luggage along with her daughter made us step back. At least I did pause. The killer's name whispered in gatherings, the upright elders of my community hanging their heads, the young brats rejoicing, the security personnel who had to take her away for cremation was a trauma of a different kind, bringing me stark face to face to the fact brutality doesn't have borders or religion.

I do not expect these young activist women travelling the length and breadth of the country and the world on Scholarships; attending Literary Festivals and gaining support from Left-leaning bastions of free speech to speak for Pitti Koul or Sarla Bhat or Girija Tickoo, for the simple fact that they were not born at the time. It would be silly of my generation to let our blood boil when these women parrot the Intifada Script circulated on social media, penned down by the various journalists and activists of Press Enclave, Srinagar with permission from their Mirpuri sponsors in the UK and US. They were not there and they grew up in a Valley "siege" with concertina wires, curfews and every imaginable prison of the body and the mind.


"Stepping Out" to speak about the regressiveness in your culture and regressive practices in your religion is a as important as "stepping back" to understand what was going on, what are we demanding, is it the right aspiration, can we build a free country on the blood of innocents who genetically, ethnically, linguistically were our very own. The typical retort of "... but the Sikhs haven't migrated" also underlines your majoritarian bigotry, for the sheer fact Sikhs as a group have learnt their lessons well from the Partition, the brutal repression of the Khalistan movement and developed what is called "survival tactics" of minority groups when faced with annihilation and ethnic cleansing. They keep quiet and form alliances with the Hurriyat groups to ensure that they are not harmed, as in reverse the neighbouring Khalistan movement in the 80s redeems them in the eyes of the Kashmiri Muslims who see them as kinsmen rejecting the "Hindu Endia".

I reiterate the bold, daring and courageous work of the young Kashmiri Muslim women speaking out for their sisters are in my book already Nobel Prize winners of Peace and deserving of the Medal of Honour as Righteous Citizens for upholding the principles of justice, truth and equality. It would take them to a whole new level if they speak out for those whom no one wants to fight for because they do not fit the parameters of their Azadi Dream - the Pandit women killed in the 1990s, the Muslim widow whose husband was a cop killed while fighting their beloved Mujahideen, the father whose daughter was abducted or forced to marry a militant, or seculars, agnostics, atheists who live under constant threat to their lives in case a Mashal Khan lynching like mob descends upon them and who are dying everyday due to mental and physical health issues - committing physical and mental suicide.

I am hoping that day will come.

Pic Courtesy: The Internet
The body of Sarla Bhat, the hospital nurse who was abducted by the JKLF and gang raped for days and her body dumped on a roadside.

Travels of a Political Pilgrim: A Reading Part 1

I was reading Tufail Ahmad's travels in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to India's sixth largest Muslim population according to the 2011 Census. The political commentator's chronicles were published in Firstpost as a multi-part series to understand the mind of its Muslim community - its anxieties, aspirations and animating impulses. 

There were some themes which stood out among the dispatches and I will try and address them one by one. This is by no means a criticism of Tufail's dispatches but a reflection on what he brings to the table of dialogue and discussion regarding Indian secularism and the integration of Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent - a region which already has a bloody history of 70 plus years and the trauma of the Partition still fresh in the collective memory. 

The first theme which struck out from his first dispatch was ''peer pressure''. It was heartening to read that ''peer pressure'' and a latent and positive competition with Hindu girls is what was forcing Muslim parents to send them to school. Tufail attributes this statement to Arif Mohammad Khan, the reformist Islamic thinker and former Union minister. So external factors can do what internal factors have failed to do, ''...bring Islamic reformation and empowerment especially through non-Muslim institutions like democracy, education and sports (Tufail's words). He sums up that peer pressure may have persuaded madrasas to unfurl the national flag on Republic Day and Independence Day, but the rhetoric, articles, and leadership of some Muslim luminaries keeps the Indian Muslims at ''the cross section of integration and separation''.

The other theme which came up was co-existence which his dispatches suggest is a foreign word that the Indian Muslims are learning, that too only when their political and religious leaders have started demanding it in their speeches. It was refreshing to read that a change is coming over the Muslim leaders and they have at least started to speak the correct rhetoric in ''defense of liberal principles over religion-based identity politics that is eating at the roots of the Indian republic.''

Also noteworthy is Tufail's observation that most Muslim writers ''slip back into communitarian politics because they are not educated in liberal political philosophy''. An observation worth pondering over, considering Islamic scholars at one time championed reason as the primary guiding factor rather than texts. This out of the box, alternate thinking could be revived today. Any solution offered to get Muslims onto the path of progress does not necessarily have to be seen as treachery or blasphemy. 

Tufail Ahmad paid a visit to his alma mater Aligarh Muslim University during his travels and was disturbed to see religiosity having made a permanent seat in the socio-cultural atmosphere of the campus. He goes on to describe the history of the advent of this phenomenon and boils it all down to the demand for separatism by Muslims, first for separate prayer rooms, then segregation, moving onto reservation quotas in a country, and so on and so forth. We all know how the history of the subcontinent folded out, the last time a demand for separation was put forward and entertained. As told above, integration and inclusiveness are alien terms for Indian Muslims. 

It could be because of radicals masquerading as learned scholars, professing liberalism and advocating secularism whereas in fact they have very narrowed visions of these terms. The Bridge Course offered by AMU which an ex-SIMI man teaches, whose books in Urdu are known for radical ideas will not teach critical thinking to young men from madrasas who have never been exposed to geography, mathematics, social and physical sciences. They will only be co-opted in the academia of the University and will go on to spread narrow ideas further considering taxpaying money is going into funding muezzins and imams, and religious scholars in the Theology department of the AMU. 

Close on the heels of the theme of separatism, Tufail explores how a University which should have been a bastion of the spirit of free inquiry, ''progress of scientific research, rational attitudes of academics, and freedom of thought and expression exercised by students across the world'' actually ''strengthens the psyche which militates against the spirit of free inquiry''. The proof is the imam of the main mosque at AMU getting the same pay scale as that of an associate professor from the central government. 

He makes it clear that ''teaching of theology itself cannot be objected to if its purpose is to inculcate critical thinking among students''. But considering the theology department at AMU has not produced any Socrates, Plato or Avicenna, Ibn Rushd or Al-Farabi and instead, quoting a former professor of history at AMU, Shireen Moosvi, ''unreason is growing on campus'' then the State needs to assess what can be done about the retrogressive culture visible in the burqas and skull caps on the campus and the invisible censorship, corruption and promotion of selective ideas. 

This may very well be done by quashing the minority status of AMU, a case which the Supreme Court of India is currently hearing, as the notion ''strengthens Muslim isolation and aids their religious consolidation, preventing the Muslims from integrating into India's social mainstream'', further sending an incorrect sociological message that it is the ONLY university where Muslims can come to study. 

Of course, it is not like the whole of the Indian Education system is imparting ''critical thinking, knowledge and innovation'' but the excessive role of Islam in the lives of Muslims has shifted focus from progress and innovation to regressive aspirations and ghettoisation. It is scary to read Tufail's description of the ''cocoon'' of Aligarh created by the ''Aligs'' (old boys) of AMU. A haven for Muslims, it enjoys the status of one of the largest degree-awarding institutions in the country, but there is no scientific spirit and freedom of thought and expression, that define's a university's purpose''. There can never be - with students sporting long beards, and spending time in religious camps of the Tablighi Jamaat (an international revivalist movement with headquarters in new Delhi) getting better marks. 

For me personally, it is scary to think of the Kashmiris settling in droves in the campus for years and bonding with the Tablighis and then returning to my home state with this ''cocooned'' mentality from the ''jannat'' of AMU. I am not averse to the State intervening and holding accountability for the content taught, but with the mirror happenings in the BHU and the Indian Science Congress regressing to idiocy, I am sure it won't happen for decades. 

Not everything was gloomy about Tufail's dispatches. It was heartening to read about Maulana Tahir Qasmi's views, the Imam at Masjid Ratheri Wali and Nizam (chief executive) of MarkazBait-ul-Hikma Taleemi Al-Islami madrasa, both in Muzaffarnagar, who ''stresses the need for eliminating the gap between religious and worldly education in order to revolutionise the educational empowerment of Indian Muslims.'' 

Tufail rightly has concerns that his views will be taken critically by Islamic clerics as it blurs the lines between religious and non-religious spheres. But Maulana Tahir Qasmi offers it as the only solution which will enable students who study only the Dars-e-Nizami system of textbooks (named after Mullah Nizamuddin, d. 1748, an Islamic scholar, under whose supervision this system was supposedly made) and end up unprepared for life, rendering them jobless, not even able to fill a form for railway reservation. His offer of a practical solution of a seven-year Alamiat course inclusive of components of sciences, mathematics and English mandatory before awarding of any degree is echoed by other ulama (Islamic scholars). He is even supportive of girls taking up engineering, medical and other sciences.

Reading about how progress has been slow among Muslims since the four students of Maulana Mamluk Ali of Delhi went their separate ways - Maulana Qasim Nanautwi (Darul Uloom Deoband), Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (AMU), Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi (Barelvi School of Sunni Islam), and of course, Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya movement, I was filled with immense pride in the history of education in Kashmir, set up by the Missionaries and carried forward by progressive community leaders throughout the 1930s right up to 1990. A modest effort at summing it up is in the link below.

http://nation.com.pk/blogs/03-Nov-2016/burning-the-light-of-education-in-kashmir

It is sad to know that the madrasas established during the Mughal rule used to follow the madrasas of Europe and had religious as well as scientific education as part of their curriculum. But in recent times, this has degraded to just literacy and degree-conferring, with girls getting a token education to make them eligible in the marriage market. 

All the dispatches from First to Five point to the internal problems - alien concepts of co-existence, and integration; need for separatism at every level; the fleecing of funds from the Centre for a medieval type education which has become retrogressive; the ''cocoon of Aligarh Muslim University''; the problematic Dars-e-Nizami system of textbooks; and the psychosis about the elimination of difference between religious and temporal education. 

However, the silver lining is that ''peer pressure'' can contribute to a changing mindset as can State support by removing the status of a minority institution from AMU. 



http://www.firstpost.com/politics/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-secularism-versus-communalism-at-election-time-3285792.html

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-is-rise-of-religiosity-on-amu-campus-a-precursor-to-another-partition-3284388.html

http://www.firstpost.com/india/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-should-taxpayers-be-funding-amus-imams-muezzins-theology-department-3285786.html

http://www.firstpost.com/india/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-how-bridging-religious-worldly-knowledge-gap-can-reform-muslim-education-3290658.html

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-be-it-kairana-muzaffarnagar-or-aligarh-india-is-headed-towards-multiple-partitions-3293748.html

http://www.firstpost.com/india/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-tracing-the-rise-of-barelvi-islam-in-indian-politics-3304570.html

http://www.firstpost.com/india/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-farangi-mahal-once-a-bastion-of-islamic-education-looks-to-regain-lost-glory-3310446.html

http://www.firstpost.com/india/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-understanding-the-shia-sunni-muslim-divide-in-the-country-3311436.html

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-govt-must-address-minority-syndrome-which-causes-social-conflict-3314366.html

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-mubarakpur-sits-at-the-junction-of-islamic-doctrinal-sects-divided-by-taqleed-3321246.html

http://www.firstpost.com/india/travels-of-a-political-pilgrim-madrassas-play-key-role-in-inducing-orthodoxy-among-azamgarhs-muslims-3337960.html

Dilip Simeon's share of my blogs

NB: Arshia Malik's essays on religiosity, communalism and geo-politics in the South Asian region are timely and thought-provoking. They deserve a wide readership. The best reaction to them I can think of is contained in two proverbs: 
The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you - Russian proverb

What you run away from, runs after you - Romanian proverb - DS

https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2017/03/arshia-maliks-essays-on-islamophobia.html

THE DEBT OF MY GENERATION TO PAY!

If one sits down to assess the damage done by the continuous strikes, shutdowns and curfews in Kashmir on the psyche, intellect, mentality, and physical growth of our kids, the results would be mind-boggling.  As I see the effects of living in a conflict zone on my child, it can be very demotivating to realise it is going to take years, maybe even a decade to reverse the bad posture, the bad habits, and the unhealthy sleep cycle formed through months and years of instability, insecurity and chaos.

Kids need rhythms, patterns, routines and regularity to develop well, whether emotionally, physically, or spiritually. It is an age where they are just beginning to understand their bodies, its rhythms and hormonal changes, beginning to develop interpersonal skills, understand plurality and diversity and the importance of a self-identity. To have their lives thrown into limbo should be the crime of the new millennium. 

What makes me mad is that the Hurriyat thugs have their own kids and grandkids in presitigious institutions, and metro-cities with the facilities of 24 hour non-stop electricity and other technology, while our kids make do with whatever they can salvage in the up and down of the ''tehreek''.  If we are demanding a Nuremberg trial for war crimes by the Indian Army such as Gowkadal, Kunan Poshpora, Jalil Andrabi's custodial murder, then it is pertinent we also get the Hurriyat thugs on dock for the years of violence, apathy and abuse inflicted on our youth through their nefarious 'hartal calendars'.

It is easy for keyboard warriors of Facebook jihad to advocate sacrifice, struggle and martyrdom from American and UK Universities, well-funded by the petro dollars from the Hawala channels (the ISI-Saudi-Berkeley-Mirpur-London-JNU-nexus) from the confines of their 'safe spaces' and literally order our youth to deal with the regressiveness, the seige from within, the procrastinating attitudes and the sheer laziness of conflict economy that sets in.

There are those like me who could afford to ''Escape from Freedom'' and build a sanctuary away from the 'gulag of the mind and body' that Kashmir has become. Then there are those who cannot afford to leave and live entire decades like hostages in a Stockholm situation. In many a cases, there is intellectual death, but then the physically dead by choice are increasing in large numbers.

We owe it to the next generations to resist this injustice- an injustice which has become law - a law of the land, imposed by collaborators of a foreign military-mullah-industrial-complex hell bent on introducing sharia law. If we do not build a resistance for this fascism then the ones who are not able to get on the plane, or on that last taxi through the Banihal tunnel will forever be trapped in the Swiss Stockholm of the East.

It is our debt to pay.

The War on Bloggers

As the news about the missing activists and bloggers from Pakistan started to spread, I was reminded of the sustained covert and open war against bloggers, acticists, dissenters, heretics, and civil society in general, across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran and the Maldives. Since Avijit Roy's brutal murder in February 2015, the world has come to realise that anyone who criticises the ''mosque/temple-madrasa/shakha-social-welfare network of extremism'' will be on the receiving end and the state will,be apathetic to the plight of the critics. 


In India, rationalists Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and M M Kalburgi were murdered, shot respectively in August 2013 and February and August 2015. Their killings had sparked outrage in the country with several eminent writers and activists returning their state awards over ''rising intolerance'' in the country. Investigations point to Hindu right wing radical groups who were also responsible for the 2009 Goa blast. 

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/campaign-to-fastrack-dabholkar-pansare-kalburgi-death-probe-2924303/


At least eight atheists and gay rights campaigners have been killed in attacks in the majority Muslim country of Bangladesh. Since 2013, and the onset of the Shahbag movement and its vision of a Bangladesh as a humane and secular nation, the killers' targets have been free-thinking and open-minded people. From Rajib Haider to Nazimuddin Samad, a number of blogger deaths have taken place in the past three years, according to a CNN report In 2015, five bloggers were killed, including prominent Bangladeshi-American writer Abhijit Roy.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/28/opinions/bangladeshi-bloggers-opinion/


In both the cases of the murders of rationalists murders, the state's apathy has been evident. It is the bull of extremism which the state authorities have been reluctant or evasive or apathetic to take by the horns be it Bangladesh or India. The widows of the Indian rationalists still await justice and in between this comes the news of Pakistani activists' enforced disappearance. A Facebook post by Ahmed Waqas Goraya's wife cut through my heart and brought me out of mourning for my recently deceased husband Arshid Malik. Her post reflected my own heart so thoroughly that the old fire of dissent upended the cold grief I had been feeling this long, dark, winter in Kashmir. 

It reads:

... my husband, my companion, my best friend and the father of my child. I know him from last 13 years, out of which I am married to him for 9 years. Never, did he stop loving me... he is a person made from sentiments and yet very strong and opinionated. He was known among his peers for strong liberal views but I saw him as a progressive man with ideas that can flourish our son. That harmless man... went MISSING in thin air on January 4th 2017.. what a start of new year for our tiny family. I had so many thoughts for this year, so much to share with him when he returned from a family trip that he was making with our son. Due to my work commitments I had to return earlier while they fully enjoyed their stay in Pakistan... the land he was mad about... the land he always wished to prosper. What did he do wrong? What was his mistake? I can't sleep, I cant stop thinking... so many questions... what could Waqass have done wrong... a man that I married, a man so full of energy, vibrancy and patriotism, a man who saw and believed that he could raise his voice and have some freedom of speech. .. was that wrong? I don't know what could have been so threatening for the people who took him away. I only want him back... ASAP!

We both are alone without you and we miss you papa... please come home soon to make it feel like home. And please come alive and healthy, so full of energy and passion and that brightness in your eyes. miss you and ili pili..."

Her appeal is akin to Rafida Bonya Ahmed standing defiantly in a gathering crowd outside a book fair, her husband's bloody body lying in the background, her hands oozing blood from her severed thumb and fingers from the machete attack. A year later her video shows the same defiance, courage and bravery when she explained the night he was attacked and how she had made it her life's aim to take Avijit's fight against extremism, irrationality, superstition and communalism forward. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i99E0w_s-kU

There is something about bloggers and activists who speak out against extremism which prompts the irrational and communally divisive forces in any country to silence them instead of arguing or debating with them. The Maldives is a collection of atolls that adorn the Indian Ocean north of the equator like teardrops. A country committed to carbon neutrality by 2020, it is troubling to see that the Maldives is also facing the backlash of the aftermath of dictatorship of the Gayoom regime of 30 years. In 2014, Maldivian journalist Ahmed Rilwan was abducted in broad daylight outside his apartment in Hulhumale. 

State authorities at first denied any link between Rilwan's disappearance and the news of an abduction of a person from Hulhumale, but over the years the pressure of activists and the family's vigil and active insistence has at least brought forth an investigation which places a suspect among a group of 12 Maldivian jihadis who travelled to Syria. An investigative report published by the Maldivian Democratic Network implicated radicalised gangs in Rilwan's disappearance and possible evidence of ''hostile surveillance''. All this happened amidst growing concerns of Islamist militancy and rising opposition to President Yameen's rule as well as his despotic handling of the Nasheed case. 

http://maldivesindependent.com/politics/no-evidence-linking-reported-abduction-to-rilwan-disappearance-says-police-100817   

I can refer to the states of Afghanistan and Iran in passing because we are familiar with the fate of dissenters and critics within these two countries fighting in house Islamism and theo-fascism respectively as well as cross border terrorism by the Pakistani Establishment and the Red Dragon threat. 2017 seems to have been a year where the rise of the Right is colliding with the irrelevance of the increasingly Regressive Left which makes grounds for the state, as well as extremists to silence, murder, behead, abduct, disappear, imprison, falsely accuse dissenters of blasphemy, and unjustly sentence them to jail or force them into hiding or exile. 

Considering this streak of ''overt war against civil society'' is across South Asia, it would be well for people to realise that if they do not stand in solidarity with those families whose near and dear ones have suffered the terror of extremists and the state, then they will have absolutely no space in the coming years to voice their protests. The space for criticism and dissent is shrinking as countries fail or postpone their fight for secular Constitutions. Be it the Arab Spring, or the underground atheist movement in the Middle East, South Asia cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the fate of the missing activists.   

The Curse of being a Woman

It should not have been a curse to be born a woman. It shouldn't have been a cause for shame to be born a daughter. There was much to celebrate - that nature had designed all the faculties rightly enough to have a female child and life could be therefore thanked that no extra chromosome had turned the birth into another cursed nightmare. But in the subcontinent, a daughter's birth always comes with a twinge at the heart strings even though the families may have rectified their attitudes to the fashionable political correctness.

As a daughter and woman myself it took less than a decade of infancy and childhood to realise that my and my sister's and my female cousins' treatment at home was different. There was a hierarchy within the female 'zenana khana' (women's enclosure) too. The older sisters-in-law were matriarchs overriding their own mother and dominating the younger daughters-in-law tyrannically. So automatically the daughters born of the elder newcomers had advantages and privileges than daughters born to the recently inducted wives into the joint household.

As a bold and outspoken child with a tomboyish attitude, constantly putting forward logical reasoning, the matriarchs had no answers to my criticism of why my older boy cousins could go out unchaperoned or could do everything under the sun and I wasn't so much as given permission to join the school basketball team. I had to fight for it as usual. My sister being the docile and obedient one, of course, didn't get into verbal scrapes but even she got fed up of being held on the pedestal of what a dutiful and pious daughter should be like.

It was perplexing to see the hypocrisy applied to rules and regulations viz a viz the daughters vs the sons. Of course, on the surface, it seemed there was freedom and unlike the low-income families surrounding us we had relative independence and liberal upbringing. We were educated in top schools, fed, clothed well, provided indulgences of Eid pocket money and luxuries of a TV and books in our rooms. But years down the line I understood that it was to make us more marketable after college or university to the first families that offered their sons for sale  (dowry wise).

It's taken ages to understand why the men of the house thought it beneath their dignity to enter the kitchen or even pick up their used utensils and at least place them in the sink for washing; why the women were always washing, cleaning, cooking, mopping, dusting, organising, peeling, chopping, grinding while the men indulged in idle talk. The most hurtful memory I have that still stings my eyes is my mother bent double moping the floor with soapy water around chairs in the lobby and a male cousin of mine not even bothering to lift his feet while she struggled to get to the dry areas. I must've seen red because till this day I regret not pummelling him with my fists  -something I was known to do whenever I encountered any unfairness.

It's these daily humiliations, injustices, travesties and seeing all women as inferior that I developed scorn for any man pouting pious verses yet evidently neglecting the women in his own family. Yes, times have changed and people are more aware -  the men aware that their women suffer under patriarchy and the women becoming more and more aware of their rights. But this is just the beginning. On the surface it may seem as harmless chauvinism in a society that prides itself on calling the Earth mother or worshipping female goddesses or like every Kashmiri expert on Kashmir likes to say the women are treated better here than in any other state. But it's when the tiny news reports of "Woman consumes a poisonous substance"; "the Kashmir sex scandal; the rising number of domestic violence cases reported in 2016, that the misogyny that lies beneath the surface is revealed.

In the subcontinent which was divided by the British first in 1947 into India and Pakistan and then further into Bangladesh in 1971, the social networking wars of which country produces the most perverted, violent, men often run into long threads of more than 400 vitriolic comments. The basic DNA and behavioural traits are the same even though borders have been redrawn and more borders are being fought to be drawn in the coming years due to fascism, and cross border terrorism. In an age where even the UN recognises that countries cannot progress socially and economically unless their women are empowered in every sense, it seems uncivilised and regressive that we have to rethink our parenting skills in bringing up our sons. I am also advocating re-educating our daughters who will be future mothers and making them understand that they do not need to pamper their sons or their existence and status in the family is not dependent on the gender of their first-borns. The whole patriarchy/matriarchy thing hurts all - sons and daughters.