Afghanistan and Pakistan are the countries wherein this monster is all set to eat violently those who nurtured it for their own vested interests. This left doing politics, normal living, and meeting people all at risk. And thousands of children, the elderly, and young people have fallen victim to it.

Media and scholarly, academic reports reveal that Muslims living in the West too are now influenced by their preachers and imams. They have begun to believe in sectarian conflicts as well as emotional slogans like a revival of the old Caliphate. Amazingly, thousands of youth born and bred in the West were recruited or joined the forces of the fake Caliphate established by the notorious Abubakar Al-Baghdadi a decade ago?

Pakistan was created in the name of Islam, but what is the condition of Islamic ideology there? What is the sanctity of a human life? From time to time, a fanatic mob would rise, blaming a person for blasphemy. No matter whether he is a Muslim or non-Muslim, it would kill him in cold blood or often burn him alive. The police simply watch the spectacle, indeed, occasionally participate in the crime. Later, religious people would start justifying the heinous act by citing old jurists and their fatwas. And secularists and liberals would start condemning the act. The administration remains deaf and dumb. Judiciary very seldom takes suo motu cognizance. After a few days, the matter is normalised.  The cruel bloody mob then goes out in search of another prey. All businesses of life and religion continue to thrive!

The killing of the then Governor of Punjab Salman Taseer by his own official bodyguard a few years ago on fake charges of blasphemy is a case in point. The dastardly killer was then turned into a saint! The presumably educated advocates in Pakistani courts threw rose petals over him when he came to face the charges of murder. After his execution, his grave has been turned into a shrine. Thousands visit it regularly to pay their obeisance. What Fanaticism!

While the West is thinking of building colonies on Mars and China is conquering new vistas with AI, what is the favourite pastime of the great Muslim ulama, clergy and religious scholars of Pakistan and India, indeed even Bangladesh?  It is to make ordinary Muslims blindly believe in unverifiable predictions about the appearance of the supposed Imam Mahdi. These people are saying, day in and day out, particularly sice the genocide of Palestinians started, that Dajjal is about to come out and Mahdi has to appear and after that Jesus will come and the rule of Islam is just about to be established on the whole planet.

Religious Muslims are generally simple-minded and naive. They believe in these myths. They do not feel the need to move forward in the world. Our task should be to promote science and technology, indeed first create a scientific temperament among the rank and file of Muslims.

 History shows that this situation will finally lead to the point when the political leaders will have to resort to fighting the monster of their own making as Pakistan is compelled to do with the Taliban now. Muslim clergy and ulama in the Indian subcontinent must also repent and take a vow never to use religion for political purposes. If Muslims come to this point, they must put before them some hard facts to eradicate extremism from its foundation.

First, this demon of extremism did not come down from heaven directly. It is a cherished baby born of religious thought which is taught and studied in our religious schools and madrasas under different titles, such as the enforcement of Sharia, Jihad and eradication of infidelity, polytheism, apostasy, etc. Radicalised people and extremist movements draw inspiration from this traditional theology. They propagate it for their dastardly purposes. This prominent religious thought and its political interpretations popularly called Political Islam have been logically criticized by some thinkers and brilliant minds of Islam like Maulana Waheeduddin Khan and Javed Ahmad Ghamdi. Had there not been stirring uproar, protests, and threats from ulama in the face of scientific reasoning, certainly the thought of these thinkers would have changed people’s minds and popular narratives.

Now to counter the religious radicalism in Muslim societies we have to develop a counter-narrative to the propagated traditional religious thought. Still, it is unfortunate and tragic for Muslim societies that violence and extremism prevail to protect religion and preserve Sharia.

Unfortunately, the culture of disagreement with politeness and respect has not yet developed. These situations require us to be sensitive to freedom of opinion in religious ideas and thinking. And to be frank, our clerics and religious preachers exert a policy of pressure to prevent the freedom to express free opinion. If they want to reveal the error to those who disagree with them, they can do so in an open way by resorting to the weapon of knowledge and reasoning. The world of knowledge does not accommodate compulsion, protests, uproar, and tyranny. It is a counter-narrative of popular religious thought presented by the likes of Mr. Ghamidi that alone can reform the situation in the Muslim community, not propaganda of secularism or anti-religionism. Iqbal the poet and philosopher tried a century ago to draw our attention to the same truth in his lectures on the need for reconstruction of religious thought that he delivered in Aligarh and elsewhere. Sir Syed and his school of thought made the same effort.

Second, in secular fields, we do not allow someone to establish institutions to graduate children and boys as doctors, engineers, or skilled in any division and department of science and arts. This cannot be done without giving Muslim children general education for twelve years or so. But children and young people are trained as religious scholars in madrasas and centres of religious learning. These madrasas close the door of modern learning on them altogether and play with their future lives. Some of them could have been doctors, some of them engineers, poets, writers, photographers, etc.. But these madrasas, regardless of their aptitude, taste, inclinations, or qualifications, make great efforts to make them religious scholars only and deprive them of all opportunities to choose an area of science and art of their own choice.  They cut their ties to society and made them aliens in their own societies by depriving them of general public education for twelve years. Therefore, it has become necessary to prohibit religious schools, like all other institutes of specialized education, from interfering with a student without giving him general education up to 12 grade.

We can say with confidence that this one step alone will change the current situation created by the institutes of religious education. As Founder-Editor of NewAgeIslam.com, Mr. Sultan Shahin told the UN Human Rights Council at Geneva some time ago, madrasa education is the biggest violation of the human rights of Muslim children. Every child has the right to acquire general education before going in  for specialisation in any field. If we don’t give our children medical or engineering education at the age of five, then why burden them with theology at such a tender age. Young children and adolescents need general education first. They should have the choice to go in for any specialisation they want.

Thirdly, it is necessary to end the dominance of clerics and preachers of hate in masjids and mosques. They generally use Friday pulpits for their vested interests in Muslim societies. If we don’t do this, we cannot escape extremism. Who does not know that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) established a Sunnah regarding the Friday prayer? It was that the Imam (head of government) or whoever he appoints is entitled to lead the Friday prayer and deliver the sermon. No one else is permitted to use this pulpit unless they have this specific instruction from the ruler.

However, throughout the decadent age, Muslim monarchs typically lacked the necessary tools to perform this function. They gave the Friday pulpits to the clergy and Ulama. Since then, the Ulama and clergy have gained such clout that they utilize Jumma (Friday) sermons and mosque pulpits to push their objectives and vested interests in Muslim societies.

This has resulted in deepening the sectarian lines. Now separated along sectarian and Fiqhi lines,  in lieu of God’s mosques we have Ahle Hadis mosques and the Hanaf mosques, Deobandi mosques, and the Barelvi mosques, etc. They ought to be God’s mosques alone wherein worship of Allah is practiced.

 Mosques are now becoming hubs for extremism and sectarianism. The mosque must be run by a collective management of Muslims and should not be used by individuals, movements, or organizations to spread a particular theological or political message. Mosques are houses of God. They must not be transformed  into sites of conflict and disunity among Muslims. They should never be used to radicalise Muslims for a particular purpose. This is an essential step.

Research Associate with Centre for Promotion of Educational and Cultural Advancement of Muslims of India, AMU Aligarh.

Courtesy: New Age Islam

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In many ways, the Batla House ‘encounter’ was a defining moment for the residents of the area and the larger Muslim community in India. For the migrant population living in Batla House and its adjacent localities, the stigma of being from the area meant that they were in very real danger of losing their odd jobs. For the students of Jamia campus, it meant being additionally burdened by the tag of ‘terror’ which attached itself through the insidious police leaks to the media. Having taught at the university those days, I remember the many questions the students had in their mind and the many refusals of the Delhi autos to ferry to that locality. The media, as pliant as ever, resorted to the worst form of profiling of Muslims living in the locality, as always refusing to ask difficult questions from the police and virtually acting as the lapdogs of the state machinery.

Most affected perhaps were students and other migrants from the city of Azamgarh. Local Muslims refused to give them accommodation and kicked out their tenants overnight. The fear within the Muslims was so much that the Ummah fizzled out: Muslims were condemning other Muslims as terrorists. The reason was clear. Majority of those killed in the police were from Azamgarh. Anyone from that place automatically became a suspect: for the state, for the general population and for Muslims themselves. But ultimately what defined Batla House was not the fact of the encounter but the resistance to it mounted by the locality and the university. Encounters had taken before: in BJP ruled Gujarat as well as in Mayawati ruled UP. And although there was widespread disbelief at the story that the police was peddling, there was no concerted attempt on the part of civil society or others to challenge the police version.

The Batla House encounter singed the community as before. But what was different this time was that people began questioning the police version and were successful in pointing out huge contradictions in the version of the state. The present book by Neyaz Farooquee must be understood in this backdrop: a courageous attempt by a young man to understand how the world around him changed after the so called encounter and how the resistance to it gave him the courage to open up.

Neyaz’s book should be considered a testimonio. Growing up as a student in those times, his narrative is representative of the voices of many a young men who would have undergone a similar emotional and mental turmoil. The structure of the book seems a little confusing at first but then it makes a lot of sense in juggling time: the constitution of the present is always informed by the past. Through his eyes, we see what the incident meant for young Muslims in Batla House.

 What comes across starkly in the book is the deep distrust which Muslims have towards the police and state machinery. This is not imaginary: Muslims have been unfairly targeted by the police in riots after riots. Actually, more than anything else, Muslims fear the police the most in any communally charged situation. This fear and distrust is only exacerbated by the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media as potential terrorist. Through an engaging narrative, Neyaz is able to bring out the hurt of the locality towards the media personnel who were more than willing to become complicit with the statist agenda. That hurt became acute, when organizations like the NHRC, charged with protecting the human rights of individuals, refused to visit the site of the encounter in order to put fears of the locals at rest.

This autobiographical book brilliantly tells us the process through which the Muslim community is put on the path of alienation through a systematic othering by the Indian state. What is noteworthy about the book is the complete refusal by the author to put the blame for this state of affairs on any one political party. Thus it is far balanced in many ways from other works which squarely blame the rise of Hindu right wing parties for the many ills which beset the Muslim community. A dispassionate analysis will tell us that the story is perhaps more complex. Parties of all shades have been responsible for the current mess that the Muslims have themselves into.

However, it is also true that the community itself has done little to come out from the morass that it finds itself. Simply blaming others for its own conditions never solves any problem. Rather it is the misrecognition of the problem itself. It would have been better if Neyaz would have gone into this aspect also. There is a certain opaqueness within the community when it comes to discussions about lack of education, jobs, representation, etc. Unfortunately, what we end up hearing is that all this is the result of discrimination against the Muslim community. This is not to deny the existence of such a problem, however, that cannot be the only reason for the backwardness of the community.

 Muslims have to look within and do a soul searching about their political priorities. They also have to ask whether there is anything wrong with the theology which they have been practising so far. There is a problem if there is a reluctance on part of the community to teach their young about modernity and become an obstacle in the education of millions of young children. There is the added problem that the hegemonic Muslim theology has had a complicated relationship with the idea of the nation itself.

But then, one single book cannot encapsulate each and every facet of the problem which Muslims as a community are facing. This book gives us a slice of the problem: how the Indian state itself alienates the community which it should be integrating in the first place. Through police action and various other processes of othering, the Indian state produces the Muslim minority as the perpetual other which is in need of humanization. All the time, the inhumanity of the state towards this community is hardly talked about. Neyaz’s book is a timely reminder to all those who are interested in the integration of the Muslim minority that without being empathetic to the concerns of the community, we are only alienating it further. This can have potential serious consequences for our collective destiny as a nation.

Arshad Alam is a columnist with NewAgeIslam.com   
 

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Protesting for political freedom outside the Supreme Court in Malé. Dying Regime via Flickr, CC BY

The Maldivian police have reportedly entered tourist resorts in their hunt for political opponents. In response to these authoritarian actions, protests erupted in the streets of the capital, Malé.

Even within the country, it’s not clear what exactly is happening. With contradictory and confused reports emerging minute-by-minute, other countries are now advising their citizens either to refrain from travelling to the Maldives, or to exercise caution if they do so.

This situation has also soured the diplomatic relationship between India and China after another former Maldivian president, Mohamed Nasheed, expressed his desire to see India send troops to help keep the piece. China, which has recently invested in the Maldives, responded that India “has no justification for intervening in the Maldives crisis”.

On the face of it, this might look like a political power struggle with causes both domestic and international. But there’s something else at work too: the Maldives’ very particular religious politics.
 

Hardline turn

Maldivian authorities claim that 100% of its population are Muslims, and you need to be Muslim to be a citizen. Conservative Islamic groups in the country have been vocal in their support of the current leadership.

In the 2013 election, when Yameen replaced Nasheed, the rhetoric used against Nasheed portrayed him as anti-Islamic. One pamphlet widely circulated on social media read: “President Nasheed’s devious plot to destroy the Islamic faith of Maldivians.” The current ruling party also organised a rally with the slogan “my religion, my nation” during this time of crisis.

A protest against president Abdulla Yameen.

Conservative religious elements are very visible in the Maldives. One Maldivian friend told me that someone yelled at him because his small shorts were an affront to Islamic values – and in today’s Malé, the niqab (the full veil) is more visible than ever before.

I myself recently visited the Maldives to talk to different universities about setting up exchange programs between my own university and Maldivian ones. As a scholar of religion, I was surprised to hear from these institutions that they had conducted research on Muslim extremists in the country. Among the countries that produce recruits to the so-called Islamic State (IS), the Maldives makes one of the highest per capita contributions: there are estimated to be more than 200 Maldivians fighting for IS in Iraq and Syria.
 

The Saudi factor

One international player in this crisis is Saudi Arabia. Like the Chinese, the Saudis have invested plenty of money in the Maldives – it recently granted the Maldives a US$150m loan to pay off its foreign debt. The political opposition in the Maldives blames Saudi Arabia for spreading the conservative and violent form of Islam that the current regime espouses.

According to the opposition, the Saudis finance conservative Maldavian imams who spread Wahhabist doctrines across the country. International relations scholar Azra Naseem also sees a pattern between the radicalisation of Maldivians and the influence of Saudi Arabia. As Naseem puts it:
 

The increasing hegemony of Salafist/Wahhabist ideologies over Maldivian religious and social cultures and thought, and its control of religious discourse, forbid Maldives from speaking of not just another religion but also to pick up on any other strand of thought in Islam other than their own. Sufism, which is so much a part of South Asian Islam … is discouraged in the Maldives if not outright outlawed.

These conservative trends are at work across South Asia. Sri Lanka, for example, is feeling the growing influence of so-called da’wa (missionary) movements such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Tablighi Jamaat. These movements started their missionary activities in the 1970s, but they have since become part of a violent and deadly conflict between so-called reformists (conservatives) and Sufis. The same dynamics are at work elsewhere too. But so far, only in the Maldives has a full-blown political crisis broken out – and the outcome of that crisis might yet turn out to be a preview of things to come elsewhere.

Andreas Johansson, Director of Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET), Lund University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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This volume contains articles by Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. B R Ambedkar, along with contempory writers   Afroz Alam, Aftab Alam, B.F.Firos, Binu Mathew, Cynthia Stephen, Dr Akhileshwari Ramagoud,  Gaurav Jain, George Abraham, Imran Khan, K.P. Sasi, Kavita Srivastava, Manali Chakrabarti, Megha Bahl, Sharmila Purkayastha, Mohammad Ashraf, Neha Saigal, Oliver Dsouza, Parul Verma, Parvez Alam, Prof. Shah Alam Khan, Ram Puniyani, Sally Dugman, Samar, Satya Sagar, Shamsul Islam, Sheshu Babu, Subhash Gatade, Suhail Qasim Mir, Sukumaran C V, Susmit Isfaq, T Navin & Vidya Bhushan Rawat and others

Here is the preface of the book:

A pall of gloom has descended upon India. An all pervasive fear grips the nation. When the state puts its nose into your food plates you know that fascism is here. When vigilante squads roam the streets lynching people you know that fascism is here.

Robert O Paxton  in his classic book “The Anatomy of Fascism” writes “I propose to examine fascism in a cycle of five stages: (1) the creation of movements; (2) their rooting in the political system; (3) their seizure of power; (4) the exercise of power; (5) and, finally, the long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalization or entropy.” It seems to me that India is at the fifth stage  – the radicalization of Hindutva, which is the Indian version of fascism.

This radicalization of Hindutva is taking place at different levels. Through engineered riots or low level skirmishes that divide society vertically to massive social engineering programmes like the  ‘beef ban’. Beef ban gives blanket license to Gau Rakshaks to lynch people. It is also not just an incursion into our food rights but also will affect the livelihood of millions of already stressed farmers. This beef ban will wreck the cattle sector and also will break the backbone of the farmers, driving them to suicide.

This book contains articles that Countercurrents.org published on the topic of beef, the oldest of which is  Dr Ambedkar’s seminal essay “Did Hindus Never Eat Beef?” which we republished on 5^th May, 2003, to the lynching of 16 year old Junaid in a train on 22^nd June, 2017.

When fascism knocks on our door we have only two choices. 1. To succumb to our fate and surrender meekly. 2. To fight back with all our means. It’s time India took a decision. To surrender or fight back is the question. Surrender is not an option and it is also against human nature. Our reflexive action is to fight back. We’ve to go back to the basic nature of the Republic and fight to win back the Idea of India that the founders of this nation imagined.  Let’s stand up for the idea of India we learnt to love as children and we want to pass on to our children. Let’s do it by holding the constitution of India in one hand and the tricolour in the other hand. If we rise up as one, this emerging fascism will, as Robert O Paxton said, dissipate into entropy. I hope that this book will help in our fight for the idea of India we all stand for.

It’s time everyone came out of their comfort zones and did something to rescue India from the fascist pall of gloom that has permeated the body politic of India. Countercurrents has proposed a campaign “An Hour For Communal Harmony” in which everyone from a 5 year old child to 90 year old elder citizen can take part. This is a set of easy to do tasks everyone can do that can restore faith in our humanity and bring communal harmony to India. Come, join this campaign and let’s make sure that we collectively prevent the radicalization of Indian fascism. If we work together collectively Indian fascism will be engulfed by the collective humanity of Indian citizens.

This is not easy. This is a long drawn struggle. I sincerely hope that this book will equip everyone in their struggle to win back the India we all came to love as children. I hope this book will help restore India to its founding principles.

You can order this book form  http://peoplesbookshop.com/product/political-economy-beef-ban/
Those out side India should mail to mail@peoplesbookshop.com to order the book.

Binu Mathew is Editor of www.countercurrents.org. He can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org
 

The post Indian Fascism: Radicalization or Entropy? The Choice Is Ours! appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Matthew Fearnley [Licensed under CC BY 2.0]
 

As a child, when I visited Jagannath temple of Puri in Odisha, my mother told me how Kalapahada, a Muslim king, had attacked and destroyed much of the temple. She added how Ma Mangala, the local Thakurani (village goddess), protected the shrine, and forced Kalapahada to retreat. Eight such Thakuranis guard the temple, she told me. I was filled with awe at the image of warrior-goddesses riding lions and tigers, protecting the grand temple complex that was at the heart of my cultural inheritance.

Years later, during a tour of South Indian temples, I heard a similar tale, of a Muslim warlord called Malik Kafur who attacked and desecrated the shrines of Madurai and Srirangam. The narration had details of a fascinating adventure embarked upon by local priests who went all the way to Delhi, disguised as singers and dancers, impressed the Muslim ruler there, and convinced him to return their sacred icons. In some stories, a Muslim princess follows them and ends up deified as the Muslim consort of a Hindu deity. Were these pre-modern attempts to reconcile communal rivalry?

Over time I encountered similar tales in Ujjain, Mathura, Kashi, Ayodhya, Kolhapur, Somnath and Kashmir. Most of these stories had many self-evident internal inaccuracies and contradictions. Such is the nature of orally transmitted lore. What was interesting is not what was said, but how it was said.

There was never any rage or bitterness in my mother’s voice, or any sense of victimhood, when she narrated the story. She did not want me to hate Kalapahada, or Muslims. In fact, she almost seemed to justify Kalapahada’s action by telling me how he was actually Hindu who was stopped by orthodox priests from entering the temple as he had either married a Muslim girl he loved, or had been forced to convert to Islam by his captors. This made him angry, because he loved Jagannath too much, and that is what made him a monster. The point of the narration, for my mother, was to impress upon me, how the glory of Jagannath survives despite all attacks and misfortunes, which is why we must have faith in him, cling to him as a raft in tempestuous waters. In other words, the narration was rooted in the paradigm of karma.
 

Justice for the gods

Karma, however, is often mocked in educated circles. In lecture after lecture, for the past 20 years, I have encountered young students, presenting common understanding of karma rooted in colonial and missionary discourse. Reduced to fatalism and determinism, karma is seen as a cultural excuse for maintaining caste hegemony and social stagnation, one that must be abandoned. It is never seen as a key factor for Hindu tolerance, the ability to reconcile with change and diversity.

Students of modern education are trained to be scientific and rational in their thinking. This demands rejecting the paradigm of karma and embracing the paradigm of justice, equality and revolution. We are told the latter is the rational way, the right way. No one points to the underlying Abrahamic “saviour” complex.

Revolution is seen as anti-determinism, anti-fatalism, anti-karma – as something that determines progress, and grants freedom. This makes it “the good fight”. This paradigm fuelled national building as we rose up against imperial powers, and did not just accept them. It led the founding fathers of our country, many of them lawyers trained in England, to challenge what was claimed to be old traditional (karmic? regressive?) modes of thinking and establish a constitution that would create the Idea of India. Sadly, it had unintended consequences.

What was embraced by the Left was also embraced by the Right. If the Left saw the immediate past as oppressive, the Right saw the medieval past as oppressive. If the Left sought justice and equality for the poor and the marginalised, the Right sought justice and equality for Hindu gods whose houses, they believed, had been torn down by Muslim kings and whose doctrines, they argued, had been mutilated by colonial scholars. Those who demanded an end to Brahminical privileges on grounds that they had enslaved the Dalits for centuries started being challenged by those who demanded an end to what they called state-sponsored appeasement for Muslims who, they argued, had enslaved India for a thousand years, and who had, they pointed out, wiped out all trace of Hinduism, and Buddhism, in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and now Kashmir.

Educated members of the Right saw temple lore not in terms of karma and devotion, but as memories of social injustice. They started demanding equal treatment for Ram, and Krishna. Temple discourse was systematically changed. It was no longer about the glory of stoic and wise gods, who patiently watched the rise and fall and rise of their temples, but of devotees who wanted the glory of their gods to be restored. Hindu religious leaders who during the Freedom Struggle focussed on rediscovering and popularising Hindu philosophy were recruited to speak of the lost glory of Hinduism to evoke a sense of victimhood in their disciples and followers in India and abroad. For the Right knows, like the Left, there can be no revolutions unless there is a festering wound, and a villain.
 

Truth of the historians

Then came the historians. Armed with data, they claimed the Right was spreading lies, and all these temple lore, retold over generations, were myths. By myth they meant fiction. A few sensible historians prefer the use of the word imaginary, over fiction, or myth, for they realised that not a single religious “fact” however profound, from resurrection to prophethood, is based on measurable, verifiable, facts. Where one locates matters of faith, still remains a question. Rational extremists insist that all religious doctrine is essentially “fake news”. And you see this in the writings of many modern young, rather combative, historians, who want to prove that all Hindu temple lore are nothing but fabricated propaganda serving Right Wing radicals.

First, these modern historians argue that Muslim kings broke temples because temples were centres of wealth and power, and there was no religious motivation whatsoever. It had nothing to do with the Islamic contempt for shirk, or idolatry, and polytheism. These Muslim kings were actually mimicking their local Hindu counterparts, these historians argue, who were also breaking temples of rival Hindu rulers. It had all to do with wealth and power, not Ram or Allah. In other words, these historians separate the political from the religious.

Second, they point to the relative paucity of archaeological evidence of temple desecration, disproportionately low compared to the perception whipped up by temple lore. They provide evidence of how many temples were given grants by Muslim kings, how many Hindu officers worked for Muslim kings, and Muslim officers worked for Hindu kings, almost indicating the total absence of bigotry – or, at best, prevalence of cynical secularism that uses religion as a lever to secure rules, breaking and building temples and mosques as per convenience.
Third, they argue that biographers of Muslim kings, not wanting their masters to appear greedy, draped the political action with a religious cloak, and went on to highly exaggerate the extent of the plunder, describing in gory details how Hindus were killed or enslaved or converted for the glory of Islam. Writing of such hagiographies began 800 years ago, and continued for nearly 500 years.

Finally, these historians show how, during the British Raj, colonial historians who were the first to apply scientific methods in the study of history, had prejudices of their own. Their uncritical examination of the hagiographies of Indo-Muslim rulers helped them to establish the idea that India was plundered and enslaved by Muslims. This was to discredit the local kings and to establish the East India Company as saviours. Later, this became a lever in their divide-and-rule policy. This discourse contributed greatly to the demands for Pakistan, the partition of India, and the clamour for Hindu Rashtra, cherished by those who subscribe to the Hindutva doctrine.

This separation of the religious from the political by historians is an interesting exercise. It almost grants legitimacy to temple breaking. It does not distinguish the difference between breaking of Hindu temples by Hindu rulers, who would move the images to their own private temples (not as trophies, but as deities), and Hindu temples by Muslim rulers, who would not do the same. For example, in Puri Jagannath temple complex, the guides point to images placed in minor temples, with full fledged rituals and priests of their own, that were as per temple lore brought by kings of Puri from Kanchi in the South after a great battle. Did Sikandar Butshikan, who 500 years ago broke the Martand temple (dedicated to the sun-god) in Kashmir, do the same?
 

Not bigots but cynics

If non-religious but merely political breaking of Hindu temples is not such a big deal, could it be argued that the breaking of Babri Masjid, had it happened in medieval times, would have been fine as long as it was a Hindutva, hence political, exercise, and not a Hindu, hence religious, one?

Right now, holy and historical monuments around Kaaba in the holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, are being torn down to make way for five-star hotels. This is being done by the local government, and the royal family, who are guardians of the shrine. Protests by Shia Muslims and historians of Islam are falling on deaf ears.

Are these religious actions of the Wahabi theocracy, or simply economic activity to cater to the vast number of pilgrims entering the holy city, as is being claimed? Will these historians declare mosque-breaking in Mecca legitimate if inspired by economic ambition, may be even political, but illegitimate if inspired by religious sentiments? If it is alright for Muslims to break mosques, can Hindus break mosques too? Or will such thoughts be dismissed as false equivalence, and reckless whataboutery?

Many have argued that Islam is being treated with kid gloves in academic circles, almost the same way as so-called “cow protectors” seem to be treated by the current government. While it is perfectly fine for educated liberals of the West to mock Christianity or even (pagan?) Hinduism, the very same people take pains not to appear Islamophobic, going to the extent of arguing that hijab is empowering. Why, Saudi Arabia has even been included by United Nations Women’s Rights Commission.

I wonder if this has something to do with collective Euro-American guilt at turning a blind eye to the Holocaust or to the role the West played in establishing the Jewish state of Israel in Muslim-controlled regions thus triggering the Palestinian tragedy that haunts us to this day. Or does it have to do with American military interests in West Asia – what they call the Middle East. After all, only in the United States, are educational institutes mapped on geographical grounds, mirroring military divisions. Thus we have Departments for South Asian, or for African, studies, for example.
 

If these modern historian commentaries on pre-modern history is to be believed, then religion played no role in the fall of the Vijayanagar empire in the 16th century at the hands of the Deccani sultans. Likewise, the rise of the Maratha Empire spearheaded by Shivaji in the 17th century was recast as religious only during the freedom struggle, not before. And kings like Tipu Sultan were just complex politicians, destroying some temples, supporting others, and cynically using Islam only to make alliances with the Ottoman Empire, never letting their private faith interfere with their public policies.

It almost seems these historians are trying to tell us that modern secularism is a re-discovery of medieval secularism, and that religious fanaticism is a recent invention. Medieval Muslim – or Hindu – kings, were not bigots. Religion played no role in their decisions. That is like saying that religion played no role in the migration of Protestants to America, or in the rise of England as a nation-state. Or that Evangelical Christianity plays no role in the political decisions of Singapore and South Korea. Or that religion was not the core issue for the Crusades, that horrific war between Christians and Muslims that lasted for centuries.

This character-certificate-giving approach of some modern historians, who it would seem, like to see themselves as warriors against fake news, makes me wonder how scientific these historians are in attitude. Why do they seem to function with an agenda in mind? Why do their writings appear to presuppose a villain over whom they are trying to intellectually triumph? Does that not make them activists, rather than social scientists?

Scholarship in the humanities has today become about identifying privilege and exploitation. It is about reframing the past in terms of injustice and inequality. It is driven by the demand for social justice. There is an increasingly evangelical tone in historical writing, as if to assert relevance, and guarantee research grants.

Recently, there was news of local Indian historians who traced vast metal bells taken from Portuguese churches and placed in Hindu temples by Maratha warlords. From all accounts in the public domain, these historians have neither tried to give their scholarship a communal twist as the Right tends to do, nor have they pretended to to call this a secular exercise, as the Left tends to do. There is an acknowledgment of the intense Maratha-Portuguese rivalry along the Konkan coast 300 years ago, but there is no attempt to define the battles as political, economic, or religious – or to declare them legitimate or illegitimate. It is simply acknowledging a historical fact, and letting the readers wonder about motivation and drive. There is no defendant or prosecution here, just a tone of mature scholarship, aware of contemporary political realities.
 

History, myth and memory

Culture is not shaped only by history. It is also shaped by memory of people. And their myths, their truths, their notions of God and pollution, which inform their identity. In the quest for what they define as truth, smug historians remain clueless about emotions that cannot be captured in epigraphy or archaeology, which carry forward over generations in complex ways. Will those historians eager to see Ashoka’s edicts as truth, not royal propaganda, also see Modi’s ‘mann ki baat’ as the material on the basis of which he has to be understood by future generations?
As I write this essay, I am well aware that the Left will slot me as a Hindu sympathiser (which is true) hence Hindu fanatic (which is false). But it is important to spotlight the deep and dark and insidious prejudice of many scholars in the humanities, who have reduced science into religion and rationality into activism. Let us not forget that words like “developed”, “progress” and “privilege” are not factual, but emotive adjectives, designed to manipulate the mind, enforce a value judgement and evoke a particular kind of reaction. Political correctness is an obstacle to systematic thought. It stops us from understanding the root cause of crisis in contemporary times. Missionary zeal of historians often mimics the missionary zeal of Christian Evangelists. Both want to save the world with truth. They just differ on what truth is.

To dismiss emotions of a people, to reduce what my mother told me as “fake news”, or seen as no different from Right Wing propaganda, can be very annoying. Mocking a community’s cherished truths as disingenuous and inauthentic can irritate the most mature and sensible of people of that community who understand the complex nature of inherited communication. When this irritation dips into rage, rationality evaporates. And that is when the politician sweeps in and argues for a “post-truth” world, where the traditional is respected in the most grotesque way.
As the world hurtles towards rage and violence, a sense of misunderstanding prevails. It is easy to blame radical politicians and religious leaders for igniting the spark. But let these truth-seeking academicians who create a storm over memory and myth in the name of objectivity also take responsibility for collecting the fuel.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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