Will the liberal Muslim please stand up?

Biswajit Jha Yet another series of blasts in India. This time the blasts rocked the heart of India - the nation`s capital New Delhi. Like all the serial blasts that took place in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Bangalore in recent times, Indian Mujahideen (IM) took the responsibility for the heinous act, here as well.By reading the email titled ‘Eye for an Eye’ that the terrorists sent to different media organisations just before the blasts, it is clear that the terrorists have successfully set up a strong network inside India and can challenge the authority of Indian state with ease. The language and content of the mail substantiates again that the militants want to fan religious divide and polarise the society in the name of religion. The questions that come to one’s mind after reading the mail are: Do the terrorists represent the entire Muslim community of India? Do they reflect the feelings of the majority of their own community? Are these people doing any good to their own community which is dogged by illiteracy, economic backwardness and numerous other problems in most parts of the country? Does Islam justify hatred and bloodbaths of the innocent human lives? What are the objectives they are trying to attain by indulging in these evil activities in the name of Jihad (or the holy war)? By waging Jihad and indulging in atrocities, the terrorists have actually soiled the name of the whole Muslim community in the world, creating deep-rooted distrust among the people of other religions. There is no denying the fact that most of the members of the Muslim community need to fare better in India. Does the entire responsibility of the failure goes to the Indian state? Shouldn’t the Muslims share the blame for their present predicaments? Aren’t the narrow and bellicose versions of Islam responsible for their distress? During my stint as a scribe in Madhya Pradesh I had the opportunity to interact with a large number of Muslims. There I saw the dogmatic belief of a large number of Muslims on Madrasaas, which hardly impart the kind of education needed to sustain a person in the modern world, and apathy to court contemporary education. Generally, the Madrasaa-educated Muslims are left with no gateways to enter the mainstream of the society. The result is that they become over-obsessed with preaching of the clergies and belligerent forces to create hatred and dogmatic beliefs among them. We don’t live in a perfect world. As long as this world exists there would continue to be injustice in the name of religion, caste, creed and class-position. The only thing that will change is the face of the people who indulge in injustices. The Indian society, which consists of eighty percent Hindus, though not perfect, has been more or less liberal while dealing with the minority communities. Amartya Sen in his ‘Argumentative Indians’ cites several examples from the past and present where the Hindu community has been accommodative over the ages. If we cite examples from contemporary Indian society, it’s not difficult to find that there are several Muslims who have done remarkably well in their professional lives. Have any of the three Khans’ (Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman) or Naseeruddin Shah or Shabana Azmi’s films ever failed to hit the screen because they belong to Muslim community? Don’t we turn to feed our aesthetic senses to the concerts of musical maestros like Ali Akbar Khan or Amjad Ali Khan? Didn’t we whole heartedly accept APJ Abdul Kalam or Zakir Hussain as Presidents of India? Did we discriminate with Md Azaharuddin while handing him the captaincy of the Indian cricket team? Team India is the example of communal harmony that the people of this country can be proud of.We have plenty of examples before us where one can easily find that despite having some communal elements in Hindu society, the majority of the Hindus have been secular in dealing with the Muslims or for that matter with the other minority communities like Christian, Sikh or Jews or Parsees. Wherever any communal force of Hindu community tries to divide our society, it is the Hindus who first condemn them. Though things have slowly started to change recently, there are not many Muslim organisations, which stand up and deliver the message of communal harmony (as in the case of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind that issued fatwah against terrorists recently). Due to this mysterious silence, the common Muslims get to listen to only those bigoted interpretations of their religion propagated by clergy or communal forces. Why is there no Muslim organisation condemning the attack on controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin or the fatwa on Salman Rushdie who are accused of ‘blasphemy’ by their own community? Is intolerance the only way to deal with the people who differ? What’s the reason that most of the Muslims took medieval and patriarchal stance in Shah Bano case? It’s a shame that the moderate Muslims remain silent in fear of being labelled as anti-Islam. There are numerous learned Muslims I have come across who either keep mum or justify these acts citing examples from the Quran. These people don’t introspect over why Islam, which was supposed to be a harbinger for truth and peace, has become the symbol for intolerance, hatred and violence. The Indian Muslims have numerous examples in front of them that religion alone can’t improve the standard of lives. Pakistan, which was bifurcated from India in the name of Islam, is fast turning into a failed state. Time is rife that the educated or rational minded or liberal Muslims make the people of their community realise that for the betterment of life or for the development of their society, only religion can’t be the saviour. To connect to the mainstream Indian society, the Muslims ought to be educated and enlighten themselves with modern concepts. The over obsession with religion will only act as a force of self-destruction and will take them no-where.