By Hatif Imam for TwoCircles.net
My great uncle attained the coveted post of a Tehsildar before independence. He was a poet and a pious Muslim, a beardie and a champion hockey player. When he appeared for an interview for the lofty position of a Deputy Collector, India had attained independence and his interview board comprised of four liberals, necessarily-Hindus. They said how can you keep an Islamic beard as a serious government officer? My great uncle responded by saying that ‘when I look back in history I see all the great men keeping a beard-Socrates had a beard, Shakespeare kept a beard, Marx kept a beard and even Bernard Shaw kept a beard so I thought I will also keep a beard in emulation.’
Unfortunately, one can hardly find a similar precedence for wearing a burqa so I have no ready-made riposte for Ramchandra Guha’s charge that the Burqa is a medieval, antediluvian symbol of Islamic gender oppression and a sign of its, perhaps bestial, medievalism. Mr Guha also suggests that Muslims of India are backward because they cling to these medieval beliefs and that they don’t have an enlightened secularising leadership to lead them out of their oppressive ghettos. He seems to suggest that till that happens these medieval looking fellows, particularly their bizarre-looking womenfolk should not participate in modern politics. Further, he blames Hindu (and, by definition rare) Muslim left-liberals for practising what can only be called, from the subtext of his piece, a secularism of appeasement.
I will try and address these concerns briefly. There is no doubt that time and time again Muslims and Islamic beliefs come unstuck on the issue of gender equality as demanded by the modern world. The shortcoming is both sociological as well as theological. But first, let us take the incidence of the Burqa, which is inescapably implicated in a patriarchal power relation. However, in the real world, there are many different kinds of burqas-ranging from the Afghan shuttlecock, to the Saudi only-a slit-for-eyes, to the Bohra open-faced one to the now modern coat plus Hijab. I am not sure Mr Guha is aware of these distinctions but going by his locus, and presumably the spring of his revulsion, it is the face covering black veil that he has an objection to. Well, even I find it horrible. My mother used to wear it back in our hometown but would often disrobe herself of it after we had travelled some distance from home. There is also no doubt that its usage has, ironically, increased in the contemporary era. But, and here is the rub, the Burqa allows more mobility to many young women than before. If by wearing a Burqa a girl is allowed to attend College and move outside of the home, would you deprive her of it?
Time and again, it has been pointed out that political participation should be restricted to individuals without communal identity. In one stroke, Mr Guha seems to reject the entire Khilafat movement from the canon of our independence movement. He also expels such worthies from being objects of our veneration as Maulana Mohammed Ali, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Maulana Hasrat Mohani, who by the way coined the slogan Inqalab Zindabad. Mr Guha must know that Sir Syed was a beardie and a moderniser. Very much like his nemesis the USSR or Communist China, Mr Guha would also like to see these medieval symbols perish but he seems to be unaware of the violence that this entails. Mr Guha has of course, like Francis Fukuyama before him, worked out the end of history. Well, his end lies in a European past, the Enlightenment. By his reckoning, our future too lies in a Western past.
All we can do is to achieve what England or America, by his reckoning, have already achieved. I expect that it is possible in the real world to be both religious and liberal, even for Muslims. Politics is an arena of negotiation, no path is eternally closed to any people.
I am not sure whether Mr Guha is espousing that one should reform one’s Islam before stepping into the political arena or that there is absolutely no room to be Islamic and modern-democratic both. But in the real world, there are multifarious modes of religious reform and gender advancement and empowerment. In the real world, the Burqa can be empowering, just as many non-Muslim girls cover their faces and drive scooters in the wide hinterlands of this country. In the real world, religion can be a powerful tool towards a democratic polity as our beloved father of the nation showed. In the real world, some of the most fundamentalist impulses among Muslims arise in highly-educated engineers, computer programmers and technicians, masters of the so-called scientific knowledge we want for Indian Muslims. In the real world, the ghettos are full of signs of the modern world such as aspiring fashion designers, models, musicians, DJs and filmmakers. Even gays if you like. In the real world, Owaisi is a Democrat who has never contradicted constitutional values and Togadia, well, what should we say. In the real world, almost every single Muslim, including the most orthodox Madarsa fundamentalist spends hour upon hour berating his or her community and desperately urges reform, especially attainment of high education for them. In the real world Muslims send their children to English medium schools as soon as they can and if there were more government schools in ghettos they would all be packed. I wish we could all make a clean breast with the past and become born again Muslims all at once but the past doesn’t leave us so easily.
To be fair to Mr Guha, his concerns touch themes and topics that have been endlessly debated in the last two hundred years. How to be both Muslim and modern as well as the impossibility of being both. How to be a Muslim leader as well as a leader of Indians? Can there, should there be any communal identity in the political realm? Can one’s Muslimness become incidental to one’s political career or will it always be foregrounded by supporters and opponents? Can one be an atheist and a Muslim leader? Can there be any Muslim collective identity that is not separatist and/or communal and hierarchical?
Like Carlyle or Lytton Stratchey before him, Mr Guha shows a lot of faith in great leaders leading ‘their’ people into a sunny utopia. I would suggest instead that beware of great secular leaders. The last time the Indian Muslims had one, we had a bitter partition in this country.