Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity), BS Murthy [microsoft ebook reader .TXT] 📗

another Muslim fallacy is that none but them feel the like faith in ‘the God’, and it is for them to realise that as an overindulgent sweet tooth could be nauseating, so also their Quranic overdose would be debilitating. And making it a triple jeopardy for the umma is its penchant to gloat over the prowess of the Islamic warriors of yore, who subdued much of the old world, coupled with their delusory wait in these adverse times for the advent of their Savior-in-Chief, who would paint the globe with the Islamic green! No wonder that the desperate Musalmans mistake a desperado Osama bin Laden or a demented Baghdadi as the upholders of Islam and the suicide vests of the deluded fidayēn as the Coats of Muslim Mail.

Maybe a slight brushing up of the world history by the Musalmans, not just the Islamic victories of yore, unceasingly parroted in the Muslim mohallas – their cocoons of bitterness in the wilderness of dogma - might enable them to see the falsity of it all, which they insensibly made their article of faith. Better they come to know that the Christians of Abyssinia sheltered the early Muhammadans troubled by the Quraysh and the Hindu’s too didn’t chase away the Musalmans when they came to Malabar for trade.

When it comes to their misplaced notions about Hinduism, who were to tell them that the idols Muhammad was hell-bent upon breaking were those supposedly polluting the Kabah, and not the deities that inspire millions of devout Hindus in Bharat Varsha? Even after living for a thousand years in Hindustan, if the Indian Musalmans were to believe, as Mahmud Ghazni did, that the Hindus are idolaters, it speaks for their lack of awareness about the culture of their own forbears, well their pre-conversion ones. Oh, how these bigots ever shy away from accepting a Hindu prasādam from an acquaintance, so as not to pollute their Islamic palates being dreadful of deviating from the Quranic credo that is:

“O ye who believe! Take not for intimates others than your folk, who would spare no pains to ruin you: they love to hamper you. Hatred is revealed by (the utterance of) their mouths, but which their breasts hide is greater. We have made plain for you the revelations if ye will understand.”

“Wed not idolatresses till they believe; for lo! a believing bondwoman is better than an idolatress though she please you; and give not your daughters in marriage to idolaters till they believe, for lo! a believing slave is better than an idolater though he please you. These invite unto the Fire, and Allah inviteth unto the Garden and unto forgiveness by His grace, and expoundeth thus His revelations to mankind that haply they may remember.”

The Indian Musalmans might realize that these and many such Quranic injunctions exhorting them not to mix with the Jews, the Christians and the idolaters (poor guys who are denied even a capital ‘I’ in Islam) are but contextual for they were meant to address Muhammad’s compulsion to keep his meager flock together against their being poached by ‘the others’ in the formative years of his cult! Now that the faith got more than cemented in the minds of the Musalmans for so long now, and the umma too grew into the billion-believer size, would these Quranic exhortations still be valid? Certainly not for any but for the bookish bigots of the Xians included.

It is as well the Indian Musalmans realize that Islam is more than safe in Hindustan, in spite of its Quranic partition, and thus they might as well venture out of their ‘mohallas of faith’ into the nationalistic mainstream, as Hindus have no agenda for reconverting them into Hinduism. Maybe, it’s the problem of the political heads of India’s volatile democracy to herd their flocks into posh retreats, away from their poaching political opponents, and not of the mullahs of the numerous umma to keep the Indian Musalmans in the dark Quranic alleys.

That apart, when his believers were far and few between, it was imperative for Muhammad’s Islamic cause not to lose its ‘productive’ fair sex to the cupids of ‘the other’ faiths. But would it be valid still, when Islam is the fastest growing religion ‘here’; moreover, it is not as if the Hindu men are itching to seduce Muslim women into Hindu motherhood. So, when an odd Hindu fancies a Muslim female, what for the Musalmans still treat it as a case of ‘Islam in danger’, and attack the hapless couple! Well, if the Quran erects Islamic barriers for interfaith love matches, the Hindu prejudice places hurdles to inter-caste marriages, and it is high time too that the caste panchāyats that kill the transgressing lovers are wound up with Godspeed, once and for all.

The way the Musalmans of the day feel about them is the replica of what Alberuni noted of the Hindus of yore gloating about them; they feel Islam is the most glorious faith, their conquests are the greatest ever, their culture is the best on earth, their architecture is the marvel of the world, so on and so forth. Maybe it is time that the Musalmans have a balanced view of their victories and defeats over the centuries, but in their desperation for the advent of a Saladin to subdue the hated infidels, they have reduced themselves into gloating over the Osamas, the Nasrallahs, and the Baghdadis as the modern-day Omars. Oh, what a fall! Though their methods are reminiscent of Muhammad’s realpolitik of ‘ends justifying the means’, it pays for the Musalmans to know that he was a pragmatist with a singular mission, while their new heroes are but bigots chasing un-achievable goals. After all, one must be a moron to aim at making the world a dar al-Islam now or ever, which Omar and Saladin, not to speak of Muhammad himself, failed to do so! Well, umma may yet aver that but for Maria’s charming distraction; Muhammad surely would have conquered the whole world on his own steam.

But the moot point is that the Musalmans even in these modern times tend to be out of sync with the changed realities of the life ‘here’, and that begs for answers. True, that quran, hadith ‘n sunna inculcate a sense of alienation in the faithful towards the kafirs but then how many Indian Musalmans would have read their translations even in Urdu, their very own tongue, leave alone the Arabic originals; hardly any. However, umma’s kids, mostly from its deprived quarters, would be made to imbibe its separatist credo in innumerable madrasas, and, in turn, they as grownups spread those biases from the masjids, madrasas ‘n mohallas that insensibly becomes the creed of the Musalmans.

If anything, the history of the Muslim marauds of Hindustan, pictured as Islamic conquests and the perceived glories of Mogul Empire, with exaggerated spread over it that gets the word of mouth in the mohallas. Besides accentuating the Islamic sense of separateness, all this inevitably inculcates a false sense of pride in the umma about the divinity of its faith and the valour of the faithful. Not only that, this vainglory manifests itself, like in the false bravado of the Pakistan Army - one Muslim is equal to ten Hindu soldiers – nevermind it was mauled every time it ventured to take on the Indian Armed Forces. As if on cue, the hotheaded among India’s Musalmans, like Akbaruddin Owaisi, the youger brother Asaduddin Owaisi, a Muslim foulmouth politician from Hyderabad, boast likewise – “25 crore Muslims would need just 15 minutes without the police to show 100 crore Hindus who is more powerful”.

Moreover, the undying Muslim nostalgia for the Islamic heydays of yore in an otherwise gloomy scenario of the modern era of the Musalmans is evident, say, when it comes to choosing a foreign language as part of college curriculum; Muslim boys and girls invariably tend to choose Persian; and once when asked in a media survey, why it was so, the unwavering answer was, because it is hukummat ki jabān – the ruling tongue; well, Persian was the court language of the Moguls. It’s thus, far removed from the current realities of the world; Musalmans remain as fossils of royal frogs in the shallow Islamic wells of the past in their impoverished mohallas.

Thanks to the Quranic brainwash, poverty is not something that weighs the Musalmans down, as generally is the case with the rest of mankind, since for them life ‘here’ is but a ‘pastime’ of an enabling time to reach the ‘Hereafter’.

“Naught is the life of the world save a pastime and a sport. Better far is the abode of the Hereafter for those who keep their duty (to Allah). Have ye then no sense?”

“Those who love the life of the world more than the Hereafter, and debar (men) from the way of Allah and would have it crooked: such are far astray.”

Not only that, even when they venture out into the kafir arena, they wear their false sense of superiority on their sleeves notwithstanding their social or economic condition, and / or both. Nevermind their illiteracy, not to be mistaken with Islamic awareness, even their women tend to be overbearing with kafirs, which is exemplified in the way they evict ‘the other’ men from the reserved seats for women in the city buses, moreso in the Muslim dominant areas, for which trespass their well-educated Hindu sisters, for most part, would have remained mute spectators.

But the Hindu left-libs, who vouch for the Musalmans though there’s nothing of a left ideology in Islam and what’s worse, it suppresses every liberal outlook whatsoever is there. Nevertheless, as all these espy things Muslim through the myopic prism built with their Islamapologic glasses, so naturally they get the Indian Islamic scenario all wrong. Well, even though they harp on the Muslim backwardness, yet they desist from advocating secular education for the Musalmans; they shed secular crocodile tears over umma’s economic plight but dare not advise the faithful to trim the unsustainable size of their families; they subscribe to the alleged discrimination by Hindus against the Musalmans but shy away from reminding them about their Islamic hostility towards ‘the others’; they condemn, rightly so, any stray case of a Hindu roughshod over a Musalman or two Hindu, but whenever the boot is on the wrong Muslim leg, which is more often than not, they close their eyes and shut their mouth; they endorse the fact that India belongs to Hindus as much as it to its Musalmans but fail to condemn the latter’s averment that ‘Islam is above India’ and ‘sharia is over its constitution’, and this hypocritical exercise in Islamapologic chicanery goes on and on, and that has come to sicken the Hindus.

But what with the double squeeze from within by the mullahs and without by Islamapologists, needless to say, the umma stays as is where, and what is worse, some of them want it to be taken farther back to its medieval past. This about sums up the Islamic paradox for in these days even as ‘the others’ want to go forward, the umma has begun to crave to move backwards to its medieval origins of barbaric purity.

 

Chapter 31

The Way Around

 

While the wise use their abilities as the building blocks of life, the bigots turn their dogmas into its stumbling blocks, and same applies to nation building or causing its ruination, Pakistan being a living example of the latter. However, in what is left of
Arya Varta, it is a socio-political reality that even as the Hindus cannot wish away the preponderant Muslim presence in it, there is no way the Musalmans can turn it into a dar al-Islam either. So, as the Union of India, Allah Ta’ala willing, would forever remain a place of Hindu-Muslim conglomeration, it is only wise for both to realise that their future is firmly rooted in this common communal ground.

Sadly for the Indian umma, the gullible Arabs of yore catapulted their ‘cult