The Peace Loving Indian Muslim and His Terrorist Counterparts
July 20, 2006 | Filed Under Point of View
I am a muslim in plain clothes. I do not sport a beard or wear a skull cap when I pray. I am mostly dressed in jeans-tshirts and sometimes Kurtas (the fab india kinds). My name isn’t a very common muslim name either. Not too many people realise that I am a muslim, until they know me well enough.
Religion has always been something personal to me. I do not need to flaunt it. I do not need to spread it. I do not need to claim it. I was told about Islam when I was young. I don’t remember when it started but there was a phase in my life where I had completely rejected religion. Today, when I say I am a muslim and am at a state where I accept religion, I must also say that I am completely at ease with who I am and what I am. If you call me Hindu, Christian, or attach the name of any religion on me, I will not be offended, on the contrary I will call you enlightened.
Today religion is used more as a political vehicle. People give false illusions to their fellows that they are there for them. When in reality, you will probably never know who helped you in time of crisis. If you rely solely on people who champion the cause of your religion, sooner or later you will be confronted with a void of sorts. Cause leaders have a life, even Mahatma Gandhi did. Although we call him a Mahatma and call him the father of the nation, his influence seems to have clearly ended.
There was a time in India when religion was synonymous with culture. Culture now seems so much like a thing of the past it is almost synonymous with history.
Many muslims in my country are poor. Many are illiterate. They have not been fortunate enough to have had a first-hand experience of religion. The Koran is written in Arabic, there are translations available in many local languages but I can assure you that very few Muslims in India would have read a version that they have understood. (Many muslims can read arabic but not understand it). Most muslims have to rely on someone else’s word. Some preachers of religion do not know the responsibility on their shoulders, they do not know how any word they say can be counted as the word of God by those who have not bothered to verify it on their own.
The three first words of Islam – Bismillah, Al-Rehman, Al-Rahim, mean: In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. If one thinks about it, the two greatest qualities of God, that God wants humans to emulate is that of kindness and of being able to forgive. Unfortunately, these very simple and basic principles are forgotten somewhere.
Any peace-loving muslim will condemn terrorism with fervor. But there are terrorists in our country who are active politicians, there are parties who indulge in terrorist activities. We are too soft on these people. These people seem to be above the law. When will these people be put under trial and punished?
While there are terrorists who dress up and think they are Muslims, I must say that not all terrorists are muslims.
We need a stronger police force and a judicial system that is truly empowered to be above the political system.
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8 Responses to “The Peace Loving Indian Muslim and His Terrorist Counterparts”
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You’re so right. I fear that the Huntington clash of civilizations will become a self fulfilling prophecy.
i really like this post, like it’s something that had to be said. things seem so overwhelming at times, especially when you realise the vast majority prefer to be led than find out for themselves.
I am very saddened to read this post. Saddened because someone has to justify a community,
declare a feeling, and somehow try to avoid being branded. I used to face this problem once.
I was the butt of jokes when Bal Thakeray rattled off the “Marathi-non Marathi ” debate. I
also remember being ridiculed for belonging to a religion that purifies houses with cowdung,
practices child marraige, demands dowry, espouses caste, and worships trees and animals. And
I knew that my faith is not all that. My faith is my communion with God.
Religion and faith are two different things. At the core of religion is a spiritual
experience from which a path has emerged. A direction that one can follow to achieve one’s
own spiritual awakening. This path has many components (processes if you will call them in
modern jargon) – the spiritual doctrine is the first. It is a set of teachings which we
believe have come directly from God (God’s own word) and a set of preachings (the words of
a chosen messenger). After this come the methods of going nearer to God- prayer, meditation,
rituals all come in this category. All these are designed to take you closer to your own
spiritual awakening. Once you have reached that point you are on your own. You are on your
own when you are born, when you die, and when you have communion with God. That is not the
domain of any religion. When you and God talk – it’s only you and God there and nothing
nothing can quantify or standardize that process.
All this is the inward projection of religion. Taking you towards God. Taking you to the
point till you reach awakening and are able to go on your own towards your own singular
union with God.
Religion also has an outward projection. It is a way of life, and a way of relating to the
world around us. It tells us how to be good to people, how to forgive, how to be virtuous
and stay away from vice, how to respect elders, and to guide the younger people to the
differences between good and bad. It gives us traditions which help preserve and pass on the
good things to the next generation. It gives us festivals where we learn to celebrate the
victory of good over eveil and to thank God for creation and all that is happiness and pure
and all the good things that have happened to us.
Religion is organized faith.
But it is a garment that you must shed when you are near God and with God – in much the same
way as you would take off your clothes before bathing. It is a way to get there but it is
not God or a substitute to God.
I am deeply pained by what happened in Mumbai and am even more disturbed because I am so far
away from my beloved city and its wonderful people. But that has not shaken my belief in the
eventual triumph of the good and the just over the evil and the cruel. Forgive my moving
towards history and statistics but as a student of history I know that there have been only
252 years in history when the world has not been at war. And these have not been continuous
years but rather days and months of peace time counted together. Humans have used war to
increase their wealth, their power, their geo-political ambitions, and their lust. In the
quest for fertile land, greater wealth, and more women – nations have waged war down the
centuries. We have an inclination towards violence. I am a firm believer in evolution and I
believe that nations needed violence to wage war and they needed warriors who became
victorious and had more chances to mate and breed than the peace loving types. But when
nations settled down to a prosperous and lazy life there were also the peaceful makers of
art and poetry and music that were encouraged and were given chances to mate and leave
offspring. Humanity’s future has hung between these two evolutions. By the way, I think the
thinkers and the preachers are the rarest breed and most of them didn’t seem interested in
breeding and mating anyway and that’s why we have so few of them. We are living in very
peaceful times, and death has ceased to be commonplace and therefore it surprises us and
makes headlines. Even a solitary murder makes headlines. History tells us that over 62
million people died in World War 2 (about 2.5 % of the world’s population at that time) and
about 500,000 people died during the partition of India (mostly in Punjab which is why
Gandhi is special because Gandhi was in Bengal where the fighting stopped when he went
there) about 3 million people were killed by Pakistani armed forces and up to 200,000 women
raped in what lead to the Bangladesh Liberation War in which India intervened. In addition
to this we have had dictators who seem to have competed against each other for killing
people in their regime. Cambodia’s dictator Pol Pot leads the list with even the most
reasonable estimates putting the number of people killed in his regime at 1.4 million
between 1976 and 1979. (We are not including Hitler whose killings are already counted in
World War 2. ) Josef Stalin is also another figure who lost count of how many were killed.
Even the most stingy estimates say that he may have ordered about 800,000 to 1.5 million
exceutions alone and we are not talking of those who died from starvation in Siberian
prisons. Idi Amin may have been responsible for upto 300,000 deaths, and Saddam Hussain is
estimated to have executed 61,000 people in Bahdad alone. His count ranges between 300,000
to 500,000 so we may have a photo finish here. Slobodan Milosevic who was probably the only
dictator who was tried in a court and imprisoned for genocide – was accused of being
responsible for the killing of 7,000 people. That’s as far as justice can get. Sometimes
killings get out of hand and cannot be attributed to one person alone but the general mayhem
that prevails during that time. About 937,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in
Rwanda by Hutus within a span of 100 days in 1994 while the world did nothing. The ongoing
attempts by Sudan to stop the insurgency in one of its provinces Darfur is estimated to have
already taken 2 million lives and the problem is ongoing. Hey do you want me to go on? The
list is not yet over and we are just talking about the 20th century only. We have yet to go
over to Vietnam, Indo-china, Congo, the Iran-Iraq war, burma, and so on. Now you know why
the world is still not taking notice of the Kashmir problem? (By the way the Kashmir problem
has seen over 45,000 killings since 1989)
So the point I want to make is that Humanity has generally been violent and killings have
been commonplace. More often than not religion has been used for exactly the wrong purposes.
The first person to probably recognize the motivating power of religion was Constantine who
saw Christianity as an opportunity and an excuse to unify all the vast regions of his empire
and to use it as a means of expansion of his boundaries. The crusades were also wars fought
under the motivation of religion. The Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, was another example of
nothing but using religion as an excuse to plunder wealth. Make no mistake, the easiest
thing to do is to awaken people to religious camaraderie. Tell any Hindu that Hindu women
are being raped in Kashmir, and being kidnapped and forcibly converted in Pakistan and even
the most softspoken guy will be aroused to hatred. Publish in a foreign newspaper that
Christain missionaries are being martyred by barbaric Hindus in India and even the most
educated people in the West will be stirred. The same goes for Muslims who will not be told
that the Iran Iraq war led to the death of 1.5 million iranian Muslims and about 650, 000
Iraqi Muslims between 1980 and 1988. Saddam also took a $14 billion loan from Kuwait which
led to a financial crisis that led to Saddam invading Kuwait in 1990 and the start of the
Gulf War. All these wars also used Jihad for inspiring Muslims to kill one another. The same
goes for the internal wars in Somalia (still going on toll till now is 450,000) and
Afghanistan (at least 50,000 dead). Here too Muslims were asked to wage a holy war against
Muslims.
So we now know what the coercive power of a virtuous war can be. Crusade, Jihad, Dharma Yudh
- all these concepts voo people to make the ultimate attempt to struggle against the wrongs
of the world. It is always inspiring to be the knight in shining armour, the noble warrior
who is the servant of God, who fights for honor and the upliftment of faith. Who is a
guardian of truth, whose waepons are bathed in the blessings of God and whose martyrdom is
salvation. A kshatriya is the one who saves his people from “Kshati” or harm, who provides
the “Chatra chhaya” for the good and the faithful. The noble knight is the embodiment of
righteousness (the prince Ram who was the maryada purushottam – whose valor is extoled even
in Islamic Indonesia, and communist Russia) bravery and the power to act are the virtues of
the chosen and this is what we have learned and loved.
Yes Dharma Yudh is the call to act. For Dharma is a way of the stitha pradnya – the
steadfast pursuer of truth whose acts are all the way toward God’s will. But Dharma demands
purification of the self “the man vijay” before the “jag vijay” the need for
“Jihad-e-asghari” and “Jihad-e-akbari” to be together. One must act yes, for that is our
Dharma(duty or truth).
Our Dharma as educated people is to spread education and dispel the half truths that are
nothing but propaganda and masked heresy. Yes the path is steep but we as individuals must
come together for this purpose. Yes we have to bring people closer to God, but the first
step towards that is to bring people closer to peace. Societies must first attain peace in
order for the people who populate them attain the inner peace required for coming closer to
God.
And history has taught us that the best bet for this is democracy. Democracies have rarely
fought against each other and when a national decision is made by a group of elected
representatives, the odds are that the decision to attack will be deferred in favor of
peace. Let us begin by taking the benefit of democracy by being courageous enough to vote
and even contest elections. Let us start small but dream big. Let us improve the things
around us.
And this is possible. I will not talk about Gandhi but of others who have in their own small
way tried to change the world around them and they succeeded. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan – the pioneer of
the intellectual revolution in India, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the founder of modern Turkey,
Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani – the economic revolutionary who is responsible for most of the
economic revival of the Middle East, Mahatir Mohammed – the builder of modern Malaysia,
Rosa Parks – the lady who with a single act of disobediance sparked a revolution, Ibrahim Rugova
who in the face of senseless violence built a nation from passive resistance, Helder Camara who is
the most significant 20th century thinker after Gandhi to preach about the addiction to violence
and the need to depart from it, Steven Biko – the non-violent revolutionary from South Africa,
Mohammed Khatami – the reformist Iranian leader, and Andre Trocme who saved people in the face of death
These are warriors – true to their righteous struggle and brave even in the face of death and hardship.
I want to be like them. That is the community to which I belong.
I am writing this for Sheece my friend and my brother because I care for him and I don’t
want him to be apologetic for the behavior of others. I do not believe in the original sin.
Yes that was the undercurrent I sensed in this post. It is like saying I will hate you and kill
you because your ancestors created pakistan, or your brothers destroyed the Babri Masjid, or
your father likes K.L. Saigal and Noorjehan and keeps on playing those dreadful songs (people do hate me for that).
You don’t need to think the terrorist is your counterpart merely because he has a Muslim name. You are
a poet – sensitive to the voices of the heart and you are closer to communion with God than any of us
are. I don’t think there is anything you share with them for I don’t think they believe in God, because
God is peace and the Holy Quran attests that truth.
Sorry for taking up that Web space. Not seeking publicity. Just kept writing, You can delete this.
hey sheece, long time no see on xanga!
i feel the way daniele^^^ above feels. when i first read clash of civilisations, i trashed it thinking that such a scenario would be checked before any escalation. but i m beginning to do a rethink on that. maybe huntington was right and foresaw what most of us didnt. i really fear such a situation might arise.
very well-written post btw!
It is indeed unfortunate that we need justifications like this. What upsets me more is that its educated trash that thinks like this..
“While there are terrorists who dress up and think they are Muslims, I must say that not all terrorists are muslims.”
I couldn’t agree more with this.
I’ve found myself dispensing these kinds of justifications only too often in recent times………and to seemingly broad-minded individuals who I have great respect for.
To Usha,
I trashed the Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” too, when I first read it and I do it to this day. I don’t think this is a cultural war……….its still an economic one.
As Edward Said tried to reason in his criticism of Huntington, civilisational identity is not “a stable and undisturbed thing, like a room full of furniture in the back of your house”. The clash is more within civilisations that between them, as Huntington would have us believe.
I think you’ve just voiced what me and probably a lot of others like me feel… but have either never had the courage or never taken the effort to voice.
It really is sad, isn’t it?.