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Islam guides the human soul towards pristine purity and frees it from any malaise that disturbs the conscience. Islam, through its Prophet, the Quran, holds a dialogue with the human soul. Such a guided soul will illuminate every sphere he will saunter into
By Shujaat Ali Quadri
When poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, popularly known as Allama Iqbal, delivered his path-breaking lectures in Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, he sought to pave a path that would lead to the reconstruction of Islamic theology in the light of modern science.
Many years before Iqbal, Sir Syed of Aligarh too had called upon his qaum (community) to shun the baggage of the past and illuminate its future course in the radiance of emerging avenues of new knowledge systems.
A century later, Muslims, alas, are staring at the same morass – how to reach the fulcrum between traditional and modern thoughts to find a suitable and working place in plural and constitutional societies like India.
Ironically, Iqbal himself seems to have been appropriated by hardliners, even while his soul-stirring poetry is peddled as impassioned harangue to mobilise masses for political purposes only, or to regale lethargic intellectual gatherings. He is the ‘poet laureate’ of Pakistan, a country which is anything but a state of his idealist and rational imagination.
On the contrary, Pakistan has been serving as a fertile ground of Islamist narratives that would turn off any serious scholar seeking an abode in the so-called ‘land of the unblemished people’.
Many scholars took a leaf out of Iqbal’s book, or, fired up by their own inclinations, they attempted to counter extremist Islamism and its use for gains that were purely materialistic and political.
They averred that Islam guides the human soul towards pristine purity and frees it from any malaise that disturbs the conscience. Islam, through its Prophet, the Quran, holds a dialogue with the human soul. Such a guided soul will illuminate every sphere he will saunter into. This is a succinct introduction of Islam.
One of the most fervent champions of such a modern and reformist outlook is Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. Ghamidi has challenged prevalent Wahabi-Takfiri and other variety of extremist thoughts that have been used by traditional Islamist organisations like Jamiat e Ulema Islam Pakistan and Jamaat e Islami Pakistan, as well as violent groups operating in the country.
When Ghamidi categorically countered the use of creating an Islamist State, or loosely defined Caliphate, by such groups, he was targeted by assassins, and he had to leave Pakistan thereafter, forever. However, he has bravely continued his scholarship in exile.
Why are such examples of Pakistan and defiant modern scholars necessary to understand the rot within ‘Discourse Islam’ and its myriad variants? Because they provide us with an easy window to glimpse into how the theatre of extremism – in its various avatars – keeps unfolding. And also how ways could be devised to find its anti-dotes.
The return of Taliban in Afghanistan three years ago and the overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad’s ‘moderate if not secular’ government by thorough-bred Islamists have once again set the stage for Iqbal’s reconstructive quest and to tell the young generation that the triumphs of militias in Kabul and Damascus are not victories of Islam, but they are achievements of elements that are making use of Islam to find human resource to their very personal projects.
If we cull out a few themes from the extremist narratives that need to be blunted by counter arguments, the first could be the search for universal Islamic governance, or the Islamic State, or the establishment of a global Caliphate. This has found an echo in almost all extremist literary cannons. Roots of such radical thoughts largely lay in 18th century onwards in Wahhabi or Salafi writings, or verbal deliberations that made use of religion inevitable as a war cry in intra-peninsular conflicts in the Middle East.
While the Middle East kept boiling even after the fall of Ottoman Caliphate in an interesting show of the use of the ‘Caliphate narrative’ in the downfall of an established Caliphate, these loosely defined concepts were carried by some Indian clerics who travelled to Saudi Arabia and other Islamist-infested geographies.
Luckily in India, before and post-Independence, Islamists joined mainstream Indian life either under the compulsion of national politics or by the pull of assimilative Indian life that is naturally plural and presents absolutely no case for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. The only such venture was a movement called Khilafat Movement in the 1920’s and it was led by Mahatma Gandhi.
Muslims, largely of religious denominations, shepherded behind Gandhi, and once that movement came to naught along with elimination of the Caliphate in Turkey, Indian Muslims saw salvation in our national political pursuits, whether they were endeavoured with the Indian National Congress, or through separatist All India Muslim League. The Muslim in the political sphere was not an Islamist extremist. At the most, he was a communitarian, or, sometimes worse, communal.
With the creation of Pakistan, nonetheless, the floodgates of Islamist interpretations opened up, sometimes with active prodding of those at the helm of power. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, otherwise the epitome of Muslim modernism and the community’s democratic march into future, condoned tribal raids in Kashmir in late 1947 as “jihad”, thereby ‘opening up’ a term which is being misused, year after year, in a country that was established in the name of Muslim nationhood and by those people who claimed to fight regressive clerics to take the community into an enlightened new age.
The use of such narrow definitions and their maneuverability by making gullible youth take the violent path has since then been a heady template which has been used successfully by Pakistani rulers, most notably by late Gen Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s.
Rest is a recent history that has been fabled enormously, and that most of us may recall very well.
Now with Syria emerging as a wake-up call and almost similar regression returning in neighbouring Bangladesh, it is imperatively urgent that such strains should be removed from Islam-oriented commentary, otherwise they would lead Muslims into a morass that was beset before them in the 19th century and for whose solution they have been groping in every alley of hope.
There are also a number of challenges because of the ever-oscillating political atmosphere in our own country. In such a backdrop, the confrontationist approach in popular Islamic narratives will only invite more misery.
The Quran, the word of Allah, as described above, talks to the whole of humanity. It made a distinction between those who are evil-doers and those who avoid evil. It lists qualities such as compassion, justice-inclination, piety, unbiased attitude, adjustment in multi-faith life as guiding principles in the lives of individuals and communities.
With emphasis on these and other self-reformative messages from the holy book, Muslims have to avail all avenues of human progress, in whichever society they dwell in, whether they are in majority or minority. Their aim has to be excellence in life, and the pursuance of principled politics.
The Quran doesn’t stipulate any condition to establish a rule of Muslims over any land and people. Its emphasis is the rule on hearts. And that is pivoted on a universal formula – best of human conduct. It says, “Those of you are the best that are best in overall conduct – i.e. taqwa.”
This is the remedy to cure all social ills. So that the mind and the soul does not meander here and there, and wander meaninglessly. Rest is is politics and digression.
Dr Shujaat Ali Quadri is Chairman, Muslim Students Organization of India.