Faith and fiction

Does literature have a religion? Excerpts from the editorial in the latest issue of
Naya Waraq – a progressive Urdu literary journal published in Mumbai – that
raises some uncomfortable questions

Activists of the Jamaat-e-Islami are in overdrive in Mumbai and elsewhere these days. The objective? Promoting ‘Islamic literature’. Discourse on ‘Islamic literature’ had originally surfaced in Pakistan in the course of the nation’s search for its identity. What began as a discourse on Pakistani literature and Pakistani culture ended up as talk of ‘Islamic literature’. This discourse crossed the border around 1960 when some Muslims on the Indian side also began to talk of the same thing. Not surprisingly, those engaged in this endeavour were from the Jamaat-e-Islami.

The Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has long been known for the impetus it gave to movements concerned with the pursuit of knowledge and with social reform. But the same AMU has also produced meaningless babble. One could be critical of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, castigate him for promoting sectarian Muslim interests, but even his worst critics would concede that he was a progressive, far-sighted man who laid the foundations of a university to pull Muslims out of educational backwardness – a deed worthy of emulation even today. It is, of course, another matter that over the last 100 years those incapable of distinguishing between religion and communal narrow-mindedness have transformed this great institution into a ghetto.

Pre-independence, AMU played a major role in the clamour for Pakistan. Post-independence, the Jamaat infiltrated the institution’s literary arena in order to use it as a springboard for the promotion of ‘Islamic literature’. The extremist Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was also founded on the same campus. Sir Syed dedicated his whole life to building an institution infused with the spirit of enlightened Islam. What historical irony that the same institution should pass into the hands of those who have done everything possible, through word and deed, to project an image of Islam that perfectly corresponds with its Zionist portrayal! The end result is an extremely intolerant jihadi mind-set that allows no room for other points of view. It is with this attitude of mind that the Jamaat raised the banner of ‘Islamic literature’ and in the process reinforced the idea of Urdu being a language of Muslims alone.

What is ‘Islamic literature’? For the proponents of this idea the answer is simple. ‘Islamic literature’ is that which supposedly articulates the zenith of Islamic piety. It is a literary universe where any mention of alcohol, sensuality or sexuality is strictly taboo, where there is no room for doubt or scepticism, where there is nothing but undiluted praise for ‘Islamic values’, ‘Islamic civilisation’ and so on. You can’t even laugh at this joke of an idea, this imagined realm of ‘Islamic literature’ in which there is no place for Ghalib or Mir. If the Jamaat, the chief promoter of this imagined literary paradise, ever comes to power, the Diwan-e-Ghalib would almost certainly be banned.

I have always considered any discussion on ‘Islamic literature’ as juvenile and meaningless, for what can one say about something non-existent? What dialogue can there be with the mentally challenged, with those who are clueless about the fact that literature can have no religion, with those who are blissfully unaware that aesthetic sensibilities are entirely different from and in no way inferior to religious sensibilities? Literature demands from its practitioners a little bit of madness, a little bit of scepticism, a little bit of infidelity and an infinite amount of creativity. He in whom there is not a trace of irreverence, he who is always ‘sensible’, may be many things but never a wordsmith.

We may recall that until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Russian literature had dominated the global literary scene. But after the revolution only ‘proletarian literature’ and ‘revolutionary literature’ was recognised. The rest was declared reactionary and writers and intellectuals were denied any freedom of thought and expression. This resulted in such a downturn that Russian literature began and ended with one man: Maxim Gorky. Gorky emerged as the revolution’s ideal fiction writer but gradually he too ended up as a Krishan Chander of the Russian language.

Why Pakistan felt compelled to sound the call for ‘Islamic literature’ with great enthusiasm is understandable given the ideological compulsions of its ‘patriotic’ writers. But those living in a secular democratic society like India could do better than mimic our neighbours. Take a close look at our own Urdu ethos and culture and then cast a glance at the literary output, or dearth of it, in the Arab countries that claim to be Islamic states. Their situation is even more pathetic than that of the erstwhile Soviet Union. With the exception of modern-day Egypt, Iran and Palestine, no other Arab country has produced a single writer or poet worth the name in the last 100 years. How can countries where the fine arts are banned ever produce great artists or men of letters?

It must be pointed out here that Egypt, Iran and Palestine have had a long tradition of artistic and literary expression. Creative people in these countries have never been shackled as they have been in the others. Egypt sees itself as an ‘Afro-Arab’ society and prides itself on a cultural past that goes back to the days of the Pharaohs. Although it is part of the Arab world, multi-religious Palestine shows a secular democratic temperament. As for Iran, art and literature have been intrinsic to this civilisation from ancient times. Iranian cultural expression did suffer a setback during the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini but today it is once again attracting global attention with its outstanding films and other artistic productions. In short, had ‘Islamic literature’ been something more than a figment of some fevered imagination, we would have seen articulations of the same from countries where Islam still means chopping off the hands of thieves and the guillotining of murderers.

If we talk of Islamic literature, we would necessarily have to talk of Hindu literature, Christian literature, Buddhist literature and so forth. But has literature been founded on religion anywhere in the world? If we talk of Islamic literature, are we also prepared for more pigeonholes like Wahhabi, Raza Khani, Deobandi, Shiite, Ahmadiyya and other literature? This would be the inevitable outcome just as we find sectarian rifts in all self-proclaimed Islamic states.

‘Islamic literature’ is in fact nothing but a political project. Included in its agenda is the attempt to ‘cleanse’ Urdu of non-Muslim influences, a tendency the renowned Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri sensed 60 years ago as is evident from a letter on this issue that he wrote to publisher Nuqush Muhammad Tufail:

"The call for ‘Islamic literature’ is not just a question of rooting such literature in Islamic ecstasy. Rather, it is an attempt to place literature at the service of politics or of a particular community. The undesirable end result of this exercise would be a sense of superiority among Muslims. Literature would then turn into an instrument of supremacy and arrogance, a weapon of virulence. Such ‘Islamic literature’ would be a dangerous thing" (Man Anam, 1962).

This warning from Firaq half a century ago shows how he clearly recognised the forces behind the juvenile ‘Islamic literature’ drive. These very elements are today bent on literature’s circumcision. The most telling example of this is a ‘condolence letter’ that a spokesman of the Maharashtra unit of the Jamaat wrote around six months ago to writer Shamsur Rahman Faruqi on the demise of his wife, Jamila Faruqi. "On the day of judgement, every Momin (true Muslim) will reunite with his spouse," reads the message. "But the condition is that both partners should have independently earned the right to paradise for themselves through virtuous deeds. Sir, I have no idea about what your conduct, your inclinations, your world view and your beliefs are. But I can say with confidence that your literary works… will not get you paradise. If anything, I fear that your writings would prove to be a great hurdle."

This is certainly no condolence letter. It is if anything the firman of a heartless man who is puffed up with pride in his idea of Islam and who believes that not subscribing to such notions can only mean eternal damnation. The ‘condolence letter’ can neither be explained as a slip of the pen nor the raving of a madman. It is a letter written after due deliberation. It articulates not the personal views of an individual but the standpoint of the Jamaat-e-Islami. The letter writer has, after all, been a spokesman of the Jamaat for the last 20 years. We all know, don’t we, that any organisation chooses as its spokesman a person in whom it has full faith and confidence to reflect the organisation’s thinking on any issue. The condolence letter thus reflects the mind-set of the Jamaat in general and of its ‘Islamic literature’ fantasy in particular.

Not unlike the RSS, the Jamaat aspires to establish an Islamic state where people of other faiths would be second-class citizens. The RSS ideal of a Hindu Rashtra is in full view in Narendra Modi-ruled Gujarat where the basic rights of Muslims and Christians have been effectively suspended, where the situation of the minorities is worse than that of second-class citizens. To visualise what the Jamaat’s Nizaam-e-Mustafa (Islamic state) looks like, rewind to neighbouring Pakistan under general Zia ul-Haq where the Hudood Ordinances were promulgated to deny women their rights and the blasphemy laws made the situation of Pakistan’s Hindus and Christians comparable to that of Muslims in Modi’s Gujarat. General Zia patronised the Jamaat and ruled over Pakistan with the Jamaat’s support. His regime was a model of the Jamaat’s Nizaam-e-Mustafa ideal.

The Taliban in Afghanistan, an ideological offspring of the Jamaat, was bent on turning the wheels of history backward. They wanted to drag Afghanistan back into that era of Jahiliya (ignorance) against which the prophet of Islam had rebelled over 1,400 hundred years ago. In India, the Jamaat gave birth to SIMI. The path that SIMI chose in order to implement its agenda led it directly to the ISI headquarters in Pakistan. That is when, in a clever move, the Jamaat severed its overt links with SIMI and founded another students’ organisation, the Students Islamic Organisation (SIO), one that remains, several years later, no more than a paper organisation.

When a ban was first imposed on SIMI in 2001, despite its claim of having snapped its links, the all-India president of the Jamaat, Jamaluddin Umri, attended a meeting held in Delhi to chalk out a plan to legally challenge the ban order. Supported by the ISI, SIMI calls for a jihad against secularism and democracy and declares martyrdom to be its ultimate dream. Who else would rush to the rescue of such an outfit except those who had an ideological affinity with it?

Like the RSS, the Jamaat too appears benign when weak but bares its fangs the moment it gains strength. The moment it gained strength in Jammu and Kashmir it made life miserable not only for non-Muslims but also for Muslims who did not subscribe to its religio-political agenda. Its women’s wing, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, used muscle power and threw acid on young Muslim women to force them into the Jamaati mould. And what can one say about the Jamaat in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where they have made life impossible for religious minorities living in their midst? How ironic that self-acknowledged followers of Islam who train suicide bombers to target innocents justify this in the name of a religion that considers suicide a grave sin. How ironic that you deny minorities their basic rights and yet claim that Islam is a religion of peace and harmony.

Should we not condemn the Jamaat in the strongest possible terms for pronouncing the hell-for-you verdict on Faruqi for his literary work? Not to do so would be tantamount to silent consent to the Jamaati dogma. The Jamaat’s spokesman has assumed for himself the role of a gatekeeper at heaven’s door and issued a damning fatwa against Faruqi. I strongly condemn this and ask those who find it convenient to sail simultaneously in two boats to give up such hypocrisy and make up their minds. This unsavoury episode should also serve as a signal to Faruqi that the blind alley of fanaticism, narrow-mindedness and retrogression he has chosen to enter will lead him to the dead end called ‘Islamic literature’. There, lurking in that dingy corner will be some self-appointed soldier of Allah wielding a battering ram called Maulana Maududi.

Let us go now to Salam bin Razzaq’s story in Naya Waraq, which has given the followers of the Tablighi Jamaat sleepless nights, they who have been demanding an apology from the writer. Razzaq is charged with tarnishing the image of the Tablighi Jamaat, which is said to be the same as insulting Islam. The fact is that comprehending a literary piece is far more difficult than solving a mathematical puzzle. There are set ways to solve a mathematical puzzle but to make sense of a literary work you need intangibles like human compassion and intellectual maturity. Neither Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) nor Marxist theory is much use in the appreciation of works of fiction. Literary works can only be assessed within the framework of aesthetic sensibilities… Those who subscribe to narrow and rigid definitions of faith are lacking in the human compassion and empathy that is essential to appreciate fictional characters for what they are…

Thus those who have construed Razzaq’s short story as a castigation of the Tablighi Jamaat lack the imagination to get into the skin of the central character in his story, Jamila, to feel for and identify with her tormented existence. (Forced to work and support her family in the absence of her father, Jamila has to bury all dreams of marrying the man she loves.) With their blinkers firmly in place, the obscurantists and the narrow-minded devotees of the Tablighi Jamaat are incapable of recognising the hypocrisy of Jamila’s father, Jamaluddin, for they see him not as a character but as a co-believer. Not easy for them or anyone else for that matter to recognise the faults in their near and dear ones. They are also unable to see how Jamaluddin hides behind religion to escape from his responsibilities in the real world, how he evades his responsibility to arrange his daughter’s marriage – a duty which, in Islam, if left unfulfilled, even prohibits a Muslim from undertaking the Haj pilgrimage.

If anything, the Tablighi Jamaat followers should have been the first ones to castigate such a character. But that is never how it happens. When the Tablighi Jamaat calls upon its followers to leave home for an Islam preaching mission for periods ranging from three to 40 days it does not give a moment’s thought to the fate of the dependants in their husband’s or father’s absence. On the contrary, we have the criminal practice where praise is in direct proportion to the time a man agrees to devote to the mission. The Tablighis believe Allah has apportioned to each human being his or her share of life’s bare necessities so this is not something any Muslim needs to worry about.

Influenced by this reasoning, countless Muslims abandon their jobs and take to ‘Allah’s path’. It has also been observed that those given to extremes earlier in their lives also take to extremes on joining the Tablighi Jamaat. Once they become Tablighis they begin to see themselves as superior to all others, they believe paradise is theirs for the asking. Conversely, they have nothing but disdain for those who think differently and view them as obvious candidates for hell.

The Tablighi Jamaat is far more influential in Pakistan and Bangladesh than it is in India. Ziauddin Sardar, the UK-based Islamic scholar of Pakistani origin and author of over 40 books, began his own religious quest by joining the Tablighi Jamaat in his youth – an engagement that lasted but a few days! A regular columnist for the New Statesman, UK, Sardar wrote in September 2006 that we should rid ourselves of the misconception that the Jamaat is still the ‘harmless’ body it once was. In fact, it has changed ‘drastically’. According to him, the Tablighi Jamaat that was founded by Maulana Muhammad Ilyas in India in 1926 has changed to the extent that in the 1990s a breakaway faction added "jihad in Pakistan and abroad" as a seventh point to its traditional six-point programme. "In October 1995 a group of Tablighi soldiers from the Pakistani army were involved in a plot to overthrow Benazir Bhutto, the then prime minister. The plot was discovered; and Bhutto purged the army, sending a string of Tablighi officers into early retirement."

Sardar went on to say that the Tablighi Jamaat in Pakistan too is not what it used to be. "It has been infiltrated by groups such as Lashkar-i Tayyeba, the banned organisation responsible for sectarian violence in Pakistan. Office-holders in Lashkar-i Tayyeba, and other militant organisations such as Harkat ul-Ansar, openly boast that they recruit their volunteers from the Tablighi Jamaat."

Sardar’s concluding remarks: "So the Tablighis are not as harmless as most Muslims seem to think. The world has changed; and the Tablighi Jamaat has changed with it." As mentioned above, Sardar is no stranger to the world of Islam or to the religious or political movements within it. (He has, among other things, spent several years in Saudi Arabia where he was commissioned as part of a team of Muslim experts to prepare a plan for the growing number of Haj pilgrims.)

Yet in India the Tablighi Jamaat continues to be showered with high praise as is evident from the many letters sent to Naya Waraq. Such blind supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat probably believe that watching TV is ‘un-Islamic’. I cannot then ask how they do not know of the 1993 case of Qari Sharif, the imam of a mosque in Rawalpindi. Suspecting his wife of infidelity, the imam, in a bestial mood, electrocuted her by live wires inserted into her vagina. This monster of an imam was arrested only after protests by outraged women’s and other human rights organisations in Pakistan. Declaring him guilty, a trial court sentenced him to five years in prison and a fine of Rs five lakh. He was later released, thanks to the then president of Pakistan, Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, who commuted Sharif’s sentence in December 2000, and a religious outfit, the Quresh Foundation, which paid the Rs five lakh fine on his behalf. Soon afterwards the Tablighi Jamaat included Qari Sharif in a group that travelled to Europe to propagate Islam! The Jamaat-e-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat are equally guilty of condoning such barbaric conduct because Tarar, who pardoned him, belonged to the Jamaat-e-Islami while the Tabligh rehabilitated him with honour.

As mentioned earlier, Taslima Nasreen’s detractors have changed their tactics now. Earlier she was castigated for her novel Lajja and for blasphemy… She is now being attacked for the ‘shameless’ manner in which she has been writing about her sexual exploits. It has been said that it is not just society at large which cannot accept this overstepping of all limits of decency; even her own father was so disgusted that he called her a whore.

I entirely agree that our society cannot tolerate such sexual freedom and licence. I also believe that intimate relations between two persons, whether legitimate or illegitimate, are very personal matters. And it is indecent to parade such affairs before the public eye. But my question is: Is Taslima Nasreen the first woman to have done this? I clearly remember the case of the well-known Malayalam writer Kamala Das who converted to Islam several years ago. In her novel, My Story, she described in some detail the sexual abandon in a love triangle involving her husband and an unnamed friend. The book turned out to be a best-seller and was translated into several languages. I mention Kamala Das to point out that she was among the first women writers to go beyond the bounds of prevalent sexual norms, in her personal life and also in the literary realm. In other words, Taslima Nasreen was not the first ‘sinner’.

I would also like to talk about those intellectuals who are equally incensed with Taslima Nasreen for polluting the literary arena with her writing. Many of them have been regular readers of Naya Waraq for a long time. If writing about illicit sexual affairs makes a woman a ‘whore’, what shall we call a man who writes about his sexual affairs? I cannot think of an equivalent word in the Urdu language that is applicable to a man while there are plenty that apply to a woman. And I can cite countless instances of male writers who have recounted with great relish their illicit affairs with women.

Why go any further, I can offer extracts from the writings of the poets Nida Fazli and Saqi Farooqi published in this very journal (Naya Waraq) where they have, without any restraint or reserve, given first-hand accounts of their sexual relations with their lovers. I hesitate to quote from the personal accounts of Zubair Rizvi, also from this journal, for he has been extremely outspoken about a wide variety of his sexual experiences. Readers of Naya Waraq looked forward to issues of the journal with bated breath.

No one wrote a line to protest against such explicit writing then nor did anyone think of labelling any of these writers with the male equivalent of the word ‘whore’. Why? Men are only saddened when a woman tries to live her life the way men do. I am not concerned here with whether it is a good thing or a bad thing for a woman to make such a choice for herself. I am only interested in ascertaining whether there are different yardsticks by which we measure men and women. Is that which is forbidden to a woman okay for a man? If a man is sexually involved with more than one woman, others look upon him with great envy and admiration. He is considered a ‘stud’, a horse with extraordinary sexual prowess. But when a woman does the same she is dubbed a ‘whore’, someone worthy of being stoned. What is this but a blatant double standard? This, of course, should come as no surprise, for it is men who set the standards, be it in the realm of religion, culture or society. Cast a glance at our 10,000-year-old human civilisation and discrimination against women is what you will find everywhere. Prophets and incarnations of god did what they could to minimise this. But they could not bring discrimination to an end, for the men who followed them bent the rules and rituals to suit their gender. That is why we cannot yet claim to live by divine standards.

(Sajid Rashid is the editor and publisher of Naya Waraq.)