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VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN
Ours Faithfully
Muslims in India must choose between Talibanic Islam
and being true Indians
By Tavleen Singh
 If
it had not been for the hate mail my last piece on Indian Muslims provoked
I might not have felt the need to write again on the subject. Let us say
that the letters inspired me because they came as proof that what I wrote
about Indian Muslims needing to distance themselves from Taliban-type
Islam needed to be said. Let me give you just one small sample of the
sort of prose that has filled my mailbox since that last article appeared
three weeks ago. "It was the Britishers who brought all the 6,000
castes and combined them into one Hindu community. It was the Britishers
who made them to stand because neither Hinduism had any base of religion
nor any sane person will prefer this religion which worship mouse, elephants
etc and inflicted worst crimes in human history for at least 5,000 years
on Dalits and Shudras who in reality are real Indians."
 This
letter was from a Muslim gentleman from Mumbai whose contempt for Hinduism
was matched by his praise of Talibanic Islam. In his view, if there is
a utopia on earth it is Saudi Arabia, where "Hindus, Muslims and
Christians work and earn their livelihood peacefully without any Bal Thackeray".
Other letter-writers expressed their contempt not just for the Hindu religion
but for what they considered the physical inferiorities of Indians when
compared with Arabs. Muslims, according to them, were tall and fair and
handsome and could (naturally, therefore) easily conquer the small, dark,
cowardly people of poor old Hindoostan.
So, in my view, it is sad but alas true that
although there are civilised, moderate Muslims in India who do not think
this way, the semi-literate, madarsa-educated, lower middle-class Muslim
is increasingly being encouraged to think along these lines. This image
of himself and his religion as fundamentally superior to the local Indian
product is, in our currently troubled times, taking a battering. So more
and more Muslims are seeking refuge in what Salman Rushdie recently described
as "paranoid Islam".
In a recent article in the New York Times, Rushdie
wrote, "This paranoid Islam which blames outsiders, 'infidels', for
all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing
of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the
fastest growing version of Islam in the world."
Paranoid Islam is certainly our problem in India.
A long, evil collaboration between the mullahs and "secular"
political parties like the Congress has resulted in an atmosphere of extraordinary
paranoia among ordinary Muslims. The mullah fed a sense of separateness
and superiority-we have one God, one Prophet and look at those mad Hindus
with their thousands-and the Congress fed post-Partition insecurity. Politically
the result was-till the Yadavs crashed the tea party-a permanent, paranoid
Congress vote bank. Reliable at election time and unquestioning afterwards,
even if it was mainly Muslims who died in the communal riots that occurred
under "secular" Congress governments. Paranoia rarely allows
rational thought, so although the Babri Masjid came down under a Congress
government, the average Muslim blames the mob (read: BJP, Shiv Sena) rather
than those who should have protected the mosque from it.
If paranoia and an offensive sense of religious
and racial superiority is part of the Indian Muslim problem an equally
important part is the inability to deal with modernity. While the lowest
of Hindu castes now try to educate their children and acquire the tools
of modernity, Muslims seem to be moving backwards into some kind of medieval
idea of right and wrong, good and evil. It is through this medieval prism
that much of the modern world is seen. So although there was no TV in
the times of the Prophet he apparently banned it. Why then does Osama
bin Laden use it to talk to the world, you ask. There is confusion and,
curiously, anger at the question. TV is banned in Islam, full stop.
Modern, paranoid Islam is all about bans. Women
are banned from doing everything other than being born and producing babies.
They can't get educated, can't work, can't go shopping without a male
relative, can't get medical treatment, can't do anything that would put
them in touch with modernity, reason or just being human.
It is terrifying that this kind of Islam has
admirers in India. Terrifying that the average madarsa-educated Muslim
is encouraged to believe that there is something pure and wonderful about
this version of his religion which reduces women to being semi-human.
Muslims who wrote to protest against my last piece attacked me mainly
for questioning their patriotism. This I never did then and am not doing
now. What I am questioning is their ability to be Indians and supporters
of the Taliban and bin Laden at the same time. Is that possible without
justifying the Islamic terrorism India has faced from Afghanistan and
Pakistan? Indian Muslims face a choice between paranoid, pan-Islamism
and being Indian. It is time they made it.
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