One woman standing

Against the oppression by the Dawoodi Bohra priestly establishment

BY ZEHRA CYCLEWALA

Zehra Cyclewala is a leading figure in the reformist movement against the tyranny of Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin, the high priest (dai al-mutlaq) of the Dawoodi Bohra Ismaili Shia sect. Here, in a conversation with Yoginder Sikand, she relates the story of her decades-long personal struggle against priestly tyranny. As the syedna turned 100 in March, massive celebrations were organised by his followers across the world to project him as a popular and pious leader. But Zehra’s life tells a different story.

My name is Zehra Cyclewala. I am 55 years old and have lived in Surat for most of my life. I was born into an orthodox lower-middle-class Dawoodi Bohra family. My parents had five children and I was the youngest child. In the mid-1980s, soon after I completed my education – I did my graduation in commerce – I joined the Saif Cooperative Society in Surat, a bank established in the 1960s by a group of Bohra traders. It was inaugurated by the Bohra high priest, Syedna Burhanuddin himself, and enjoyed his blessings. I started work there as a clerk and gradually rose to become its manager.

From the very beginning, the Saif Cooperative Society gave and took interest. The syedna obviously knew of this and had no problem with it although some Muslims believe that even bank interest is forbidden, or haram, in Islam. However, two years after I joined the bank, the syedna issued a fatwa claiming that bank interest was forbidden and demanded that the Bohras working at our bank leave their jobs at once. All the staff of the bank were Bohras at that time. Because the Bohras believe the word of the syedna to be akin to divine law, they hurriedly complied with his order and quit their jobs. I was the only one to refuse. After all, I thought, the bank had been giving and taking interest from the time it was established up until the time this fatwa was issued so the syedna knew about this all along; why had he suddenly decided or realised that such interest was haram? The syedna himself had inaugurated the bank and when he did so, he had no problem with it dealing in interest. I thought there was something fishy about this fatwa.

Despite enormous pressure on me to give up my job, I refused. I lived with my mother, Fuliben Taherali, in Surat and was her sole source of support because my father had died when I was 20. I simply could not do without this job. So in spite of the syedna’s order, I stuck on. The District Cooperative Society Board appointed a non-Bohra administrator – a man called Mr Daru – to run the bank and I worked under him. The Bohras of Surat were not pleased by my defiance of the syedna’s orders and soon complaints about me reached the syedna’s religious establishment – the kothar.

The syedna’s eldest son, Qaid Johar, came to Surat and met with me; he insisted that I must resign. “Why should I?” I asked. I told him that a branch of the Bank of Baroda functioned in a building built on a plot of land owned by some Bohras in Surat and that this bank also dealt in interest. The bank paid rent to the Bohra owners who in turn parted with some of it to enrich the syedna’s establishment through the syedna’s local amil, or representative. “Why don’t you stop taking rent from the Bank of Baroda?” I asked him. Qaid Johar was shocked by what he regarded as my impudence. He told me that I asked too many questions and said that this was improper.

As I said earlier, by this time there was enormous pressure on me to quit my job. The Bohras believe that the syedna is a divinely appointed man. To displease him, they believe, is a sure way to land in hell: To refuse his orders is to disobey and revolt against god. This is what the syedna has made them believe. Hence they believed that my refusal to quit my job was no ordinary revolt – it was open defiance of the divine will. And so a campaign was launched in Surat to excommunicate me. My house is located in the middle of Saifi Mohalla, a Bohra locality, hardly five minutes walk from the Jamia Saifia, the principal Bohra madrassa. All my neighbours were fellow Bohras. Soon after I was excommunicated, they all stopped speaking to me. Even my relatives were forbidden to interact with me – even over the telephone.

Yet even in the face of this ostracism, my mother insisted that I must not give up. “Don’t you quit your job,” she said. “You have to stand on your own feet. Your community is not going to help you when you need it.” I did as she said. After all, I was no longer young and it was not easy for me to get another job. If I had quit my job, who would feed us?

The syedna has a powerful weapon that he readily deploys to shut up anyone who dares protest against his oppression. Anyone who speaks out against his crass corruption (on the basis of which he and his vast family have become enormously rich by levying all sorts of taxes on the Bohras) or dares to criticise his dictatorship is at once excommunicated. This is called baraat. A Bohra who is thrown out of the community’s fold by the syedna can have no social relations at all with any other Bohra, not even with his or her own family. Numerous spouses have been forcibly divorced because one of them dared to differ with or raise his or her voice against the oppression and corruption of the syedna and his henchmen.

And so I too was declared a mudai, or apostate, and was subjected to baraat. Even my closest relatives, barring, of course, my mother, with whom I lived, stopped talking to me. When my mother and I walked on the streets, fellow Bohras spat at us; many of them hurled abuses and cursed us. I refused to take this lying down. After all, I was always assertive, even as a child, and could not tolerate nonsense. I filed a case against almost 20 Bohras who used to torment me and my mother in this vulgar manner. This was in 1989. I won the case and my tormentors came to me asking for forgiveness.

Meanwhile, the syedna’s men continued to try to force me out of my job. They entreated Mr Daru, the newly appointed administrator of the bank, to throw me out but he refused because I was good at my work. When I discovered that several rich Surti Bohras, including some who had been office-bearers of the bank, had taken loans but had defaulted on payments, I took them to court and the court forced them to return the money that they owed. This greatly incensed these men and, using the enormous political influence that the syedna wields, they pressurised the government of Gujarat, which was then led by the Congress, to remove the bank administrator and appoint someone else in his place, someone who, they hoped, would do their bidding. They managed to do so and Mr Daru was replaced. Mr Daru’s only ‘fault’ was that he had refused to agree to their demand to expel me from my job.

Once the syedna’s men had succeeded in forcing Mr Daru out of the bank and since the new administrator was a pro-syedna man, I believed my own job was under threat. So I sent letters to top officials, including the chief minister of Gujarat, informing them about what was going on. Thereupon, at the instigation of the syedna’s men, I was suddenly demoted to the post of accountant. I approached the court in protest and the court issued a stay order, declaring that I should not be removed from the post of manager. And though the new bank administrator pursued the case in the high court, the high court upheld the stay order in my favour.

However, because the majority of shareholders of our bank were Bohras who believed that the word of the syedna was divine law, they voted to suspend me despite the high court’s stay order. This was tantamount to contempt of court. And so for three years, from 1989 to 1991, I could not go to work. It was at this time that I began meeting with other women – Hindus, Sunni Muslims and Christians – who had also suffered in their own way and were trying to speak out against their oppression. We formed a support group and tried to help each other cope with our difficult situations. It was these women who inspired me to persist in the struggle so that I did not let the bank’s board of directors off the hook. After all, by voting to suspend me they had violated the court’s orders. So I filed a contempt of court case against them which dragged on for two years but in the end the court ruled in my favour. The directors of the bank begged the court for mercy and I was reinstated as manager while 15 Bohra men were suspended from the bank’s board of directors. Until then, the bank had been in the hands of the syedna’s cronies. To stabilise the bank and to make it more broad-based, I appointed several Hindus, Sunni Muslims and reformist Bohras as members of the society and so it became much more cosmopolitan.

Throughout this time I refused to relent although the syedna’s men kept sending me messages urging me to ‘repent and you will be forgiven’. But what did I need to repent? It was not me, but they, who had done wrong. They should have repented, not me. I refused to tender any apology although I had to face, and still continue to face, brutal social ostracism. After all, my struggle was not for myself alone but for the many Bohras who live under the cruel tyranny of the religious establishment. It was a struggle for truth and justice.

In 1991 my mother fell sick but no relatives could come to see her for fear of being excommunicated. She too had been excommunicated by the syedna because she lived with me and refused to accede to his orders that no Bohra should have anything to do with me. She knew that having been excommunicated, she would not be buried in a Bohra graveyard. Still, even on her deathbed, she stood like a rock behind me, insisting that I must never surrender to injustice. Shortly after that, she passed away. No Bohra came for her funeral – not even her other children, my siblings. The Bohras of Surat refused to bury her in the community’s burial ground. I insisted that she should be buried there and nowhere else because I was a Bohra and I had my rights and my mother had been a Bohra too. The Sunni Muslims of Surat offered to let her be buried in their cemetery. I thanked them but declined, saying that if I accepted their offer, it would be conceding defeat in the struggle against the syedna’s religiously sanctioned tyranny.

News about my mother’s body being thrown out of the Bohra mosque soon spread throughout the town and so, in the dark hours of the morning, and under police protection, a crowd of some 10,000 Sunnis and Hindus collected at the Bohra graveyard and ensured that my mother’s body was laid to rest there. Not a single Bohra attended the funeral.

Sometime in the 1990s a local Bohra leader, Yusuf Badri, who was then secretary of the Bohra Jamaat of Surat and a close confidante of the syedna, had taken a loan from our bank but because he had not repaid the loan, interest on it had mounted and he owed the bank almost double the principal. He refused to pay us back on time and I was compelled to take him to court. The court issued a warrant authorising the seizure of the property of his guarantor, a Bohra industrialist called Haider Hazur. Accompanied by some policemen, I went to Haiderbhai’s house with the court order. When he saw me there, he said: “How dare you come here? You are an apostate!” I told him that he had to repay the money otherwise the court would take action against him. Scared of what might happen, he asked for three days to pay up.

Just as I left his house, some Bohras began screaming like madmen, alleging that I had abused the syedna. They began hollering to the Bohras around to come out and beat me up. Soon a huge crowd, including many Bohra women, had collected and surrounded me. Somehow I managed to escape. I ran to the nearby Mahidharpura police station but the crowd of Bohra men and women, more than 5,000 strong, had followed me there. They started raising slogans, crying: “Give us Zehra Cyclewala! We will kill her!” The Bohra amil of Surat, Syed ul-Khair, son-in-law of the syedna, was leading the crowd. “Come out and we’ll hammer you!” he shouted.

Inspector Khan of the Mahidharpura police station said to me: “Ask them for mercy and they will let you go or else they might kill you. Why create a fuss about refusing to say just two words in apology?” But I refused: “I would rather die but I shall never ask them for mercy. After all, what have I done wrong?” The policemen did nothing to control the crowd or stop them baying for my blood. Instead of beating them with lathis or tear gassing them or even registering a case against them, they lent them their support. Such is the enormous power of the Bohra establishment.

Although I was perfectly innocent and the crowd was at fault, a false case was registered against me, claiming that I had abused them! I tried to register a formal complaint at the police station but I was not allowed to do so; instead, I was put into the police lock-up where I had to spend the entire night. The next afternoon I was taken to the court. A huge crowd of Bohra women had gathered there. They demanded that I be sent to jail. But the magistrate refused, saying that it was a bailable case, and so I was released on bail.

Because it was no longer safe for me to stay in the Bohra locality where I lived, I shifted to a Hindu locality for a couple of days. The Bohras had spread all sorts of falsehoods about me, claiming that I had caused a disturbance by abusing the syedna, so I went to the offices of leading newspapers in Surat to tell them the truth. I told them that they had been fed with propaganda and had published false stories about me without any investigation. Now they had to publish my version of events or else I would go on hunger strike and lodge a complaint with the Press Council. The journalists heard me out and the next day they published my story.

Because the police had sided with the Bohra mob instead of supporting me, as soon as I was let off by the court, I along with several of my women friends from the Surat District Mahila Sangh, a women’s group of which I was a founder, went to meet the police commissioner and told him how badly the policemen had treated me. I don’t know what I would have done without the help of these women colleagues, most of whom were Hindus and Sunni Muslims. With the help of the police commissioner, a case was registered against a group of Bohras who had attacked my house while I was in the police lock-up and eight of them were arrested. But I was not satisfied with this measure and filed a writ petition in the high court against the policemen as well as the Bohras who had assaulted me. I complained about how the police had refused to register a case of rioting against the Bohras and instead had kept me locked up in jail. Some policemen came to me and asked me to forgive them but I refused. If I relented, I thought, how would these people, who are paid to help the victims of those who violate the law, learn that they cannot refuse to abide by their duty?

Soon my case was heard in the high court, which ruled in my favour and came down heavily on the Bohra rioters and the police. By now things had become so tense that I was afraid some enraged Bohra could easily kill me. So the court ordered that I be given police protection 24 hours a day. Two armed policemen were assigned to protect me and they accompanied me wherever I went. This continued until 2006.

Meanwhile, in 1998 the Rotary Club of Surat decided to hold a function to honour me for my struggle against the tyrannical Bohra establishment, an event that was announced in the press. As soon as the Bohras of Surat heard about it, they arrived in a huge horde outside the Rotary Club and began shouting slogans against me and the club’s decision to honour me. On seeing them, the men who ran the club got scared and just a day before the event was to be held, they told me that they had called it off. When my colleagues in the Surat District Mahila Sangh heard of this, they were enraged. They went to the club and told the men there that they had dishonoured and insulted me when they went back on their decision to felicitate me. The next day this was splashed all over the papers. But we didn’t stop at that. We sent a legal notice to the Rotary Club stating that if they did not apologise within three days, we would file a defamation case against them. The club folks got nervous and asked me to forgive them, promising never to do this sort of thing with any woman again. I told them that we accepted their apology but that they must also issue an advertisement in the press to this effect, including the fact that the orthodox Bohras had forced them to cancel the programme.

The advertisement was published in three newspapers – it must have cost the club a lot of money! – but we women were glad. After all, we did this not so that I could salvage my reputation but so that organisations like the Rotary Club would learn not to cave in under pressure from reactionaries and that they would stand up for justice, which they claim they are committed to.

Because I had taken on the syedna’s henchmen, the police and influential organisations like the Rotary Club for siding with the tyrannical Bohra establishment, several newspapers carried reports about me. This further incensed the syedna’s blind supporters and one of them, a certain Mustafa Dodia, tried to trap me. It was later discovered that he had been paid by the syedna’s men to do this. Dodia lodged a false police complaint against me, claiming that I had tried to kill him. He got together a group of Bohras who went on hunger strike outside the police station, demanding my arrest and removal of the police protection that the court had granted me. I was not one to take this lying down, of course. I responded by filing a counter-complaint against Dodia, alleging that he had demanded the removal of my police protection so that he could kill me. His demand, I added, was tantamount to contempt of court, for the court had ordered that I should receive police protection. Finally, Dodia was forced to withdraw his false complaint. The crime branch investigated his complaints against me and found them to be completely concocted.

Initially, I was the only Bohra in Surat to speak out against the tyranny of the syedna and his men. I had no idea that there were other Bohras – in other cities, and even in other countries, who were fed up of the extortion and the corrupt dictatorship of the syedna and his family in the name of Islam – who were agitating against all of this. Gradually, I came into contact with these reformists. News of my struggle reached them and they contacted me. They were inspired by my lone battle and believed that I had something to tell other Bohras, to teach them that standing up for truth, for values, for principles, was true surrender to god and that the supine surrender to a corrupt priesthood, which the syedna insists on in the name of Islam, was its complete contradiction.

In 2001 a group of reformist Bohras invited me to Canada to speak on my life and to help galvanise the Bohra reformist movement in the West where a number of Bohras live. In 2005, I was invited to an international convention of reformist Bohras in Birmingham, England, where my biography titled One Against All, written by the noted Bohra reformist Yunus Baluwala, was released. In the same year I insisted that the reformist Bohras of India organise a convention in Surat where the major Bohra madrassa is located. Some people were scared to do this in the very den of the syedna, as it were, fearing that they would be attacked by the syedna’s cronies, but we went ahead and it was quite a success.

I began my struggle and my public life in the Saif Cooperative Society in Surat and I still work there, now as its manager. Our business has expanded considerably over the years. And I must say that despite the torrent of hatred that has been directed against me all these years, many Bohras who refuse to countenance any criticism of the syedna now come to me with requests for loans. Although I am still officially excommunicated from the Bohra fold, many Bohras come to my office to see me. They cannot invite me to their homes or family functions, of course, because of the syedna’s orders. My brothers and sisters too cannot meet me. If they dare to, they stand the risk of being excommunicated themselves.

I attend reformist Bohra conferences wherever they are held. I am also invited to speak at meetings held by secular women’s groups and in this way I have had the chance to travel to various parts of India. Hindu and Sunni Muslim groups also invite me to their meetings and I am grateful to them for their support. Wherever I go, I talk of the central role of women in promoting reform and resisting tyranny in the name of religion, which is an affront to true spirituality. I also stress the need for communal harmony. From my own personal experiences, not from reading fat books, I know how deeply interrelated patriarchy, communalism, violence and priestly tyranny are.

I owe a lot to my mother who stood firmly by me when I was excommunicated. For that she was thrown out of the community herself but she refused to budge. “Zehra! Never cave in to tyranny,” she always insisted. “Keep your head high. This is what god wants.” Some Bohras from Surat, blind followers of the syedna, offered me 50 lakh rupees if I issued an ‘apology’ to the syedna, even suggesting that this would enable me to rejoin the Bohra fold. Recalling what my mother always told me, I said to them: “I will never do that, no matter how much money you offer as a bribe. I know that by offering me money you want me to shut my mouth, to stop me from speaking out against the tyranny of the priests, to stop the Bohra reform movement.” Had I accepted their offer, my reputation as someone who has always stood for certain principles would have been in tatters and people would then say Zehra has sold herself for money. But since I have never been cowed by their threats and blandishments, I can, as my mother always told me to, hold my head high. And thus after I leave this world, people can say: “There was a Bohra girl called Zehra who shook the Bohra community and dared to challenge the tyrants within it.”

In memory of my brave mother, and as a small token of appreciation for all that she stood for, I have recently set up a charitable trust in her name. The trust, which has five trustees – a Hindu, a Sunni and three reformist Bohras – offers modest financial assistance to the needy. We dream of doing many things in the future, one of them being to establish a common graveyard for people of all religions and communities so that people who are tormented and oppressed by their religious leaders, as my mother was, can find a final resting place there.

Sometimes people ask me why, if the syedna and his henchmen are such tyrants, we reformist Bohras do not convert to another religion or to another Muslim sect. Why do we insist on remaining Dawoodi Bohras? I have a simple answer: This is precisely what the syedna wants. If we reformists quit the Bohra fold, he will be able to rule just as he pleases and without any opposition whatsoever. That is why I insist we must remain within the Bohra fold and continue to struggle for our rights, for true internal democracy. I think Islam, if correctly understood, tells us that this is precisely what we should do.

I have lived a long life of struggle. I have had to face terrible odds. All through this struggle it was not desire for personal revenge or power that goaded me to take on the Bohra establishment but an irrepressible commitment to justice. That is something basic, or ought to be, to all human beings. I simply cannot compromise on this. Some people may say that I was too obstinate or even vindictive, that I should have compromised instead of taking people to court, staging demonstrations and lodging police complaints. But I tell them: “If we keep quiet and cave in, tyrants will continue to play with our lives. Speaking up against tyranny is surely a fundamental duty and right, is it not? Surely this is what Islam, properly understood, should inspire us to do.”

And this is what the Bohra reformist movement is doing. The reformists are appealing to the world to see the trickery behind the ‘pious’ exterior of the syedna and his cronies who misuse and misinterpret religion to extort money from the Bohras and enforce a stultifying form of slavery on them, on their bodies and minds, all in the hallowed name of Islam. This is how the syedna and his family have become among the richest in all of India. Anyone who dares to speak out against this tyranny is automatically thrown out of the community.

I appeal to the government, political parties, intellectuals and social activists and to people in general to see through this charade of the syedna and his cronies who have been twisting Islam in order to promote their own interests. I ask them to stop supporting and patronising these men. The syedna turns 100 this year and hectic activities are underway to celebrate his centenary. A lot of public functions will be held to project him as a truly ‘pious’ man and a ‘popular’ religious leader. I appeal to people to listen to my voice, to the voice of a Bohra woman who has seen through and struggled against the tyranny of the Bohra establishment for decades, not to fall prey to this nefarious propaganda.

(As told to Yoginder Sikand.)

(Yoginder Sikand works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at the National Law School, Bangalore.)