Signs of the despair and rage of the ‘Arab street’ that have finally burst out into angry protests across the region were in ample evidence when I visited Egypt last year although I must confess I did not expect they would take the form that they now have. Forty days traversing the country, including a fortnight in Cairo and trips to the Mediterranean coast, isolated oases in the Sahara and down the Nile to Abu Simbel and to Aswan near the Sudanese border, were, to put it politely, no relaxed vacation. Egypt, despite being a favourite holiday destination that attracts hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists every year, is not quite an easy country for a lone tramp on a shoestring budget to navigate. 

Cairo, home to almost half of Egypt’s population, is a rapidly decaying city. I chose to stay in a dirt cheap funduq, a lodge frequented by travelling Egyptian and other African door-to-door salesmen which was located in the heart of the old city, also called ‘Islamic Cairo’. It was situated in a narrow lane just off the grand Al-Hussain mosque which, according to local lore (although this is contested), contains the severed head of Imam Hussain, grandson of the prophet.

My Cairene friends were horrified at my decision. A cafeteria in the area, which was once popular with foreign tourists, had been bombed recently and numerous people, including some tourists, had been killed. “All sorts of shady characters lurk in these parts,” they warned. Hardly any foreign tourists, they said, dared to stay there now, preferring hotels in the more upmarket parts near the Nile for safety. The area, they added in order to dissuade me, was filthy. But I had to save money for the long stay I had intended and this miserable funduq was all I could afford. Besides, I wanted to see life in ‘Islamic Cairo’ first-hand. My ramshackle rat-infested inn, which charged me the equivalent of 300 rupees a night for a diminutive room, was the best place to be based in for that purpose. 

Densely populated ‘Islamic Cairo’ consists of a maze of lanes that envelops a dazzling number of ancient Islamic monuments – mosques, madrassas, tombs and Sufi lodges – some of which go back to as early as the eighth century. At the heart of this sprawling quarter is the grand Al-Azhar, considered to be the world’s most influential seat of Sunni Muslim scholarship. Despite its historical importance, ‘Islamic Cairo’, like much of the rest of the city, and indeed all of Egypt, had, as I saw it then, all the telltale signs of despair and discontent that are now being excitedly discussed in the media. Most of the houses in the area, narrow and dingy and built cheek by jowl, were rapidly collapsing; garbage piled up in enormous pyramids along the lanes and even basic civic amenities were conspicuous by their absence.

Overburdened with a rapidly expanding population, with only two per cent of the country’s land area inhabitable (the rest being desert), vast numbers of Egyptians had flooded into Cairo in recent years. Over half a million of them had made the ancient tombs in the City of the Dead adjacent to the ‘Islamic City’ their home where they lived in miserable poverty. Only some isolated parts of Cairo, such as leafy neighbourhoods across the Nile where the country’s minuscule elite, many of them tied to the Mubarak regime, lived, were cheery.

And as for the people, not just in this part of Cairo but across Egypt, I must confess (at the risk of political incorrectness) that I found them rude, gruff and aggressive, with notable exceptions, of course. The country’s dismal economic conditions may have had something to do with that but I suspect that this was not the only factor. There were simply not enough jobs for the ever increasing number of graduates. Prices were skyrocketing although, unlike India, almost everyone I saw, including hordes of beggars who thronged outside mosques, seemed reasonably well-fed. Inequalities were rapidly mounting and the government apparently had done precious little to address the issue. It was apparent that the massive amounts of money that America was supplying Egypt to bolster the Mubarak regime – Egypt is the largest recipient of American aid after Israel – was certainly not benefiting Egypt’s poor millions. Rather, most of it was probably spent arming Mubarak’s army, to be used to quash any dissent, and to prod Egypt to stay at peace with Israel. 

Outside Cairo the situation seemed to be even grimmer. Berbers in the remote Siwa oasis near the Libyan border complained of how they were forcibly denied their cultural rights and how the state was hell-bent on Arabising them in the name of Islam although they insisted they were better Muslims than the ‘Arab’ Egyptians. The more visibly ‘African’ Nubians, denizens of largely impoverished ‘upper’ Egypt near the Sudanese frontier, too suffered neglect at the hands of the government and racial prejudice at the hands of the more Arabised and politically dominant northerners. Violent attacks on Coptic Christian churches in the area (two such incidents were reported during my stay) by suspected Islamist radicals were propelling large numbers of Copts, who long predated the Muslims in the country, to flee to Cairo or, preferably, to the West.

The rapid depletion in the ranks of the country’s religious minorities was having a devastating impact, I was told by Egyptians concerned at where their country was heading, on the country’s economy and on its long-standing progressive traditions, shrinking the liberal space and making the task of those who wanted Egypt to be ruled in strict accordance with a literalist reading of the Shariah all the more easy. 

That task was also being impressively assisted by Mubarak’s dreaded repressive rule. Government informers, I was repeatedly warned, were on the prowl everywhere. Mubarak had brutally crushed all dissent and I was told to stay clear of any political discussions with the people I met. Even mosques, often the refuge of those who have no other space in Muslim societies to vent their opposition, were tightly controlled by the government. Mosque imams had to fall in line with state diktats. To ensure their compliance, they were paid by the state and were thus for all practical purposes its agents. Their Friday sermons were prepared by the governmental authorities. Their task was simply to read them out, whether or not they personally agreed with their contents, without adding or deleting a dot. If they dared to disobey and spoke their minds, they easily risked being thrown into prison, branded as rabble-rousing ‘fundamentalists’.

A young man I met at the Al-Azhar mosque told me how he was summarily dismissed from his job at a book booth located inside the mosque simply because he had stocked some titles other than those strictly prescribed by the authorities. Islamically assertive men feared to sport beards, for, as some of them who dared to do so told me, they could easily be branded as ‘fundamentalists’ and be carted off to jail. That explained why even in Al-Azhar, which churns out would-be ulema in their thousands every year, almost every student was beardless. The vast majority of them, like their teachers (widely respected ulema), wore western clothes and not the flowing ‘Islamic’ djellaba, in many cases not through choice but rather because of fear. “Muslims have more religious freedom in your India than here in Egypt,” many an Azharite told me. It was clear that Mubarak, like many other pro-American Arab dictators, found the spectre of radical Islamists useful even as he sought to crush it, it being just the handle he needed to extract crucial western backing for his hugely unpopular regime by projecting himself as a bulwark against ‘Islamic fundamentalists’.

 It was also apparent that as people grew increasingly restive against Mubarak’s rule, which he had hoped to turn hereditary by passing the mantle to his son, Islam was assuming the form of a potent vehicle to articulate opposition to his regime. The increasing public display of ‘Islamic’ religiosity that I observed was clearly a form of defiant assertion of identity, a political statement in the face of a dictatorial regime that was seen as having bartered away Egyptian, Arab and Muslim interests to its western overlords.

The much touted ‘Islamic revival’ I witnessed in Egypt (and I suppose the same could be said of the phenomenon in much of the rest of the ‘Muslim world’) was deeply conservative and in many senses frighteningly obscurantist. Hundreds of ‘private’ mosques, defying the law that sought to place mosques under close government surveillance, had sprouted up all over the country. Satellite television had effectively demolished the state’s monopoly on Islamic discourse, with dozens of ‘Islamic’ channels, many of them peddling a deeply conservative neo-Wahhabi brand of Islam, now being beamed into almost every home. Saudi-funded publishing houses did brisk business, the Islam they advertised being profoundly supremacist and anti-western but without being politically revolutionary. The Muslim Brotherhood continued to exercise a pervasive influence through its many frontal organisations. The hijab had become so ubiquitous, donned even by women who were not particularly pious themselves, that it was said that girls and women without hijab were automatically assumed to be Christians.

 All of these were signs not, I believe, of a sudden mass burst in piety, as is sometimes alleged by poorly informed journalists, although no doubt this might have been true in some individual cases. Corruption and brutality continued undiminished in civil society, even among the more visibly ‘Islamised’ sectors of it. Becoming more visibly ‘Islamic’ did not necessarily mean becoming more socially engaged or even more purist when it came to money matters.

To cite a telling instance, in the vast market just across the street from the Al-Azhar Seminary, the ‘Islamic’ hub of Cairo, over a hundred smart shops (scattered among dozens of ‘Islamic’ bookstores) specialised in shimmering bras and skimpy belly-dance costumes, specimens of which they slung tantalisingly outside their windows and which adorned rows of buxom mannequins. Some of these shops were run by veiled women, others by bearded men with large prayer callouses on their foreheads. This blatant defiance of Islamic morality had not sufficiently stirred the ulema and students of Azhar – who, one supposes, are the backbone of the ‘Islamic’ revival across the country – to protest. It was not just fear that had forced them into silence and indifference. It was probably also that such blatant sexism did not provoke their righteous anger in quite the same way that, say, hounding ‘heretical’ writers – in which the Azharites have taken a leading role – has. 

The public face of the ‘Islamic’ revival that was directed against the Mubarak regime (implicitly in some cases, overtly in the case of underground radical Islamists who have been subjected to harsh repression), which I saw all around me, was by no means a positive one even though its target – toppling Mubarak and his cronies – may have been a laudable objective. The dominant version of Islam that informed this revival seemed to me to be harsh, fun-less and punitive and at the same time thoroughly incapable of providing a progressive alternative to Mubarak’s regime although it definitely had the potency to challenge it.

It sat in the growls, scowls and permanent frowns of the vast numbers of men propelling it. It lay in voluminous tomes and fatwas that prescribed medieval laws for dealing with contemporary problems. It was definitely anti-intellectual, as reflected in the enormous number of books I spotted in Cairene bookstores that (so I learned from an Indian student at Al-Azhar who translated their titles and tables of contents for me) spoke of Islam in terms of empty slogans, offering no sensible guidance for running the affairs of a modern society and economy deeply networked into a globalised world. It was reflected in graffiti scribbled on street walls exclaiming in triumph, ‘East or West, Islam is the best’ and ‘Islam is THE solution’. It was also incarnated in waves of bombings of churches and the growing demonisation of local Christians as alleged conspirators against Islam. 

Mubarak certainly deserved to go, about that there is no doubt, but as to whether those who will now replace him, including possibly the Islamists, will prove to be any better, I am not so sure.

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2011,Year 17, No.155- Revolution

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Islamisation of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks
By Yvette Claire Rosser
Publisher: Rupa & Co
Pp: 109
ISBN: 81-291-0221-8

Contrary to what professional historians might claim, there is really no such thing as an objective, unbiased and completely accurate writing of history. After all, not everything, even of significance, of what happened in the past can possibly be included in a text and history book writers have to pick and choose from past events that they deem fit be recorded. The very process of picking and choosing from the past is determined, among other factors, by the subjective biases of the history writer as well as his or her own social and institutional location. Then history writing is not simply about narrating the past but also involves a certain element of evaluating it. Here again this is strongly determined by the personal biases and preference of the individual historian.

The element of bias is greatly exacerbated when history textbooks are – as they are in almost every country today – commissioned by the state. The state wishes to mould its citizens in a particular way, to make them what it considers ‘good’ and ‘law-abiding’ citizens who have completely internalised the underlying logic and ideology of the state. The state, in its capacity as representative of a country’s ruling class, seeks to impose through state-sponsored history texts the hegemonic ideas of this class upon its citizenry. It is thus not surprising that such texts generally parrot the state-centric view of history that seeks to bestow legitimacy on the state and the country’s ruling class and ‘normalise’ their logic and world view.

This incisive critique of state-sponsored social science textbooks in Pakistan highlights the convoluted politics of historiography and what this means for the production of a ‘social commonsense’ for a state’s citizenry. Although Rosser does not say it in so many words, the current turbulent political scenario in Pakistan, in particular the rise of radical Islamist forces in the country, cannot be seen as inseparable from the narrow political agenda that the Pakistani state, ever since its formation, has consistently sought to pursue as is reflected in the social science textbooks that it has commissioned and through which it has sought to impose its own ideology on its people.

Rosser’s study focuses on the textbooks used in Pakistani schools for the compulsory subject called ‘Pakistan Studies’ which was introduced in the reign of the American-backed military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, in the mid-1970s. Pakistan Studies replaced the teaching of history and geography and was moulded in such a fashion as to instil in students an undying and unquestioning loyalty to the official ‘ideology of Pakistan’ (called the nazariya-e-Pakistan in Urdu). This ideology, questioning which is considered a punishable crime in the country, is based on the far-fetched and completely bankrupt notion of the Muslims and Hindus of the pre-partition Indian subcontinent as constituting two homogeneous and wholly irreconcilable ‘nations’. (Incidentally, this is the same perverse logic that underlies radical Hindutva in India.) It claims that Muslims and Hindus have never been able to live amicably together, that they have always been opposed to each other, that they share nothing in common and that hence it was but natural that Pakistan should come into being for the sake of the Muslims of South Asia.

There are several defining and characteristic features of the Pakistani social science textbooks that Rosser examines. Firstly, as she notes, their extreme anti-Indianism. This is a reflection of the fact that the ‘Ideology of Pakistan’, indeed the very rationale for the creation and continued existence of the state of Pakistan, is premised on the notion of undying and perpetual hatred of and opposition to India. India thus comes to be presented as viscerally opposed to Pakistan and as constituting a mortal threat to its very existence. In this way a form of Pakistani nationalism is sought to be fostered through the texts that is hyper-chauvinistic and one that is based on a constant reinforcement of an almost crippling sense of being besieged by what is projected as an ‘evil’ neighbour.

Secondly, and linked to the anti-Indianism that pervades these texts, are the repeated negative and hostile references to the Hindus and their faith. Hinduism is portrayed and projected in wholly negative terms, as if lacking any appreciable elements at all. Its followers are presented in a similarly unflattering way: as allegedly mean and cruel and constantly scheming against Muslims and their faith. Hindus, like Muslims, thus come to be presented in strikingly stereotypical terms: the former as virulently hostile enemies and the latter as brave soldiers in the path of god. They are portrayed as two solid, monolithic blocs and as being without any internal differences whatsoever, of class, caste, gender, region, language, political orientation and ethnicity. The only identity that they are projected as possessing is that of religion which is presented in starkly reified terms that often have little resonance with empirical reality. In the process the diverse, often contradictory, interpretations, expressions and the lived realities of Islam and Hinduism in South Asia are completely ignored in favour of extreme literalist, ‘orthodox’ and textual understandings. ‘Popular’ religious traditions, such as certain forms of Sufism and Bhakti, that bring people of diverse communal backgrounds together, are totally ignored because they obviously stridently contradict the claims of the ‘two-nation’ theory.

Thirdly, the textbooks present Pakistani history as synonymous with the history of political conquests by successive Muslim rulers, starting with the Arab commander, Muhammad bin Qasim, in the mid-seventh century. All these invaders and rulers, so the books piously claim, were goaded by a powerful sense of religious mission to establish ‘Islamic’ rule in the region. This alleged religious aspiration of theirs is presented as having finally culminated in the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Contrary to what is popularly known about him, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the ideological founder of Pakistan, is presented as an ‘orthodox’ Muslim allegedly inspired by the vision of establishing an ‘Islamic’ state run by Muslim clerics – something which was not the case at all.

The fact that most of the Muslim rulers and conquerors that these texts lionise might actually have been inspired by less noble motives – to plunder or rule – is, of course, conveniently ignored. Religion – in this case Islam – thus comes to be seen and projected as the sole motor of history with other factors, such as power and economics, having at best only a minor role to play. The history of South Asia before Muhammad bin Qasim is hardly mentioned at all although it was in what is Pakistan today that the Indus Valley civilisation flourished, that the invading Aryans composed the Vedas and that Buddhism led to a great flourishing of various arts and sciences.

In other words, every effort is made in the textbooks to present Pakistan as an extension of ‘Muslim’ West Asia instead of a part of the Indic-dominated South Asia. Not surprisingly, as Rosser observes, the texts single out particular historical figures who are known for their battles against Hindu rulers as heroes, among these the most important being Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghaznavi and Aurangzeb. Other Muslim rulers, most notably Akbar, who sought to reconcile Hindus and Muslims and promote a generous ecumenism, are either totally ignored or else reviled as alleged ‘enemies of Islam’. Furthermore, these figures, of both ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’, are isolated from their historical contexts, leading to biography turning into hagiography or demonology, as the case might be, in order to serve the agenda of the advocates of the ‘two-nation’ theory.

The same holds true in the texts’ depictions of certain key Muslim religious figures. Thus ‘orthodox’ ulema or Islamic clerics who stressed the claim of the inferiority of the Hindus and advised Muslim rulers to take harsh measures against them are hailed as heroes of Islam while others, including many Sufis, who sought to preach love and tolerance between Muslims and others and preached an ethical monotheism transcending narrowly inscribed boundaries of community, are conveniently left out or else branded as ‘un-Islamic’.

A fourth characteristic feature of these textbooks is their distinctly anti-democratic character. They purport to tell the story of the Muslims of South Asia from the point of view of Pakistan’s ruling elites. In the process history comes to be presented as simply a long list of battles and other ‘achievements’ (whether real or imaginary) of a long chain of Muslim rulers. ‘Ordinary’ people have no voice, being completely invisiblised in these texts. It is as if history is made only by rulers and that the histories of ‘ordinary’ people are not worth recording or commemorating. It would seem as if the writers of these books are wholly ignorant of new developments in writing ‘people’s’ or ‘subaltern’ histories.

The starkly elitist bias of the texts is also reflected in the fact that they almost completely ignore perspectives of ethnic groups other than Pakistan’s dominant Punjabi and Muhajir communities. This is hardly surprising since, as Rosser notes, most of these texts have been penned by authors who belong to these two communities. She writes that the absence of the perspectives and historical experiences of the numerically smaller ethnic and regional communities of Pakistan, such as the Balochis and Sindhis, also has serious implications for policymaking, for the demand for smaller provinces for regional peace in South Asia and equitable local development is not sufficiently appreciated and incorporated in national policies. This, Rosser comments, is reflected in the great "tension between official history manufactured in Islamabad and the historical perspectives of regional ethnic groups" (p. 4).

The anti-democratic thrust of these texts is also reflected in what Rosser describes as "a radically restrictive brand of Islamic exclusivism" that they project and propagate. The sort of Islam that these texts seek to promote is premised on the notion and dream of Muslim political hegemony and a deep-rooted sense of the innate inferiority of people of other faiths. This is – and this is important to note – just one version of Islam among many and one which Muslims who believe in an inclusive version of their faith would vehemently oppose. However, the texts present this, what Rosser calls ‘authoritarian’, ‘legalistic’ and ‘ritualistic’, brand of Islam as normative and defining, and completely reject alternate, competing, more democratic and humanistic interpretations of the faith (p. 9).

Rosser’s findings are of critical importance, particularly in the context of present developments in Pakistan which is witnessing the alarming growth of radical Islamist groups impelled by a version of Islam very similar to the one these texts uphold. Obviously, explanations of the growing threat of radical Islamism in Pakistan cannot ignore the crucial role of these texts which are compulsory reading for all Pakistani students thus playing a central role in moulding their minds and world views. The texts are also a reflection of, as well as a cause for, the pathetic state of social science research and discourse in present-day Pakistan.

Rosser’s Indian readers need not have much cause to be self-congratulatory, however. Although historiography in India is certainly more sophisticated in many senses than in Pakistan, a significant section of Indian history writers, particularly of the Hindutva brand, are no different from those Pakistani writers whose texts Rosser examines. Indeed they speak the same language of hatred and communal supremacy, propelling the same tired, debunked myth of Hindus and Muslims being perpetually at odds with each other. Likewise, they are both profoundly anti-democratic, having no space for the voices and aspirations of socially, culturally and economically oppressed groups upon whose enforced silence is premised the artifice of the ‘nation’ (‘Islamic’ or ‘Hindu’, as the case might be), whose sole representative ruling elites claim to be.

Courtesy: www.countercurrents.org

Archived from Communalism Combat,  May 2009 Year 15    No.140, Taliban 1

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Sloganeering in Srinagar

Hindi is the other name for Indianness’, declares a slogan in Hindi on a board put up on the otherwise bare wall of a makeshift chamber that one passes through as one makes one’s way out of Srinagar’s heavily fortified airport. An odd way, surely, for the Indian state to stress its claims to genuine respect for cultural and linguistic pluralism and to seek to ‘win the hearts of the Kashmiris’ as the tired and trite phrase goes – heavily Sanskritised Hindi of the Government of India variety not only being a totally alien tongue in Kashmir but also being seen as a potent symbol of Hindu chauvinism directed against Muslims. Is it then any surprise that the hegemonic version of Indian nationalism that this slogan represents has few, if any, takers in Kashmir?

Equally shrill slogans greet one as one drives out of the airport through Srinagar’s suburbs and into the heart of town. ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, ‘India is one, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari’, ‘Hindustan Zindabad’, ‘Kashmir, the Crown of India’, ‘CRPF, the Keepers of Peace’ and so on scream these slogans, painted on bunkers located at road crossings, behind which stand gun toting soldiers guarding the Indian flag. Few Kashmiris, needless to say, take these slogans at all seriously and a visitor from Delhi is still referred to as having come from India, for despite the obvious decline in violence in the region, for many Kashmiris India is still a foreign country and its armed forces an occupying power.

‘Thanks to Smt Sonia Gandhi for Nominating Jenab Ghulam Nabi Azad as Chief Minister of J&K State’ announces a sprawling billboard just down the street from the Tourist Reception Centre in the heart of Srinagar. It was obviously hurriedly put up just in time for Sonia Gandhi’s visit to Srinagar in March when she came to inaugurate a tulip garden in town. Care was taken that Ms Gandhi be duly informed about the man behind this outpouring of loyalty to her, his name, his picture and his designation as the president of the Jammu and Kashmir Youth Congress being prominently displayed in the centre of the board. Is one to understand, as the board seems to suggest, that the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir owes his position not to the people of the state but rather, to the munificence of a woman from outside who clearly has no mandate to do so?

Few Kashmiris take these slogans at all seriously and a visitor from Delhi is still referred to as having come from India, for despite the obvious decline in violence in the region, for many Kashmiris India is still a foreign country and its armed forces an occupying power

The tulip garden which Ms Gandhi flew in to inaugurate was greeted with much indignation in large sections of the Kashmiri press although obviously this was carefully left unmentioned by the Indian media that reported on it, which exulted in the claim that this was yet another sign of the conflict torn region returning to ‘normalcy’, with the flowers back in bloom. The sprawling garden, extending over several dozen acres and located in the lap of the thickly forested hills of Zabarwan on the banks of the scenic Dal lake, was the brainchild of the chief minister and has obviously cost the public exchequer an enormous amount of money. Ghulam Nabi Azad, needless to say, strategically chose to name the garden after the late Indira Gandhi and to invite her daughter-in-law to inaugurate it. Obviously, the choice of the name found little or no support among the denizens of Srinagar, most of whom, in any case, cannot afford the hefty entrance fee and were also understandably upset over newspaper reports that government officials were literally forcing schoolchildren to visit the park.

‘Inaugurated by the Vice-Chancellor’, announces a granite slab at the foot of a pillar that forms part of a new boundary wall that has come up at the entrance of Kashmir University. The man who managed to have his name inscribed therein is thankfully no longer in charge of the university but before he left he obviously made it a point to commemorate himself for the sake of posterity despite the fact that he was not known for his academic achievements, my university friends describing him charitably as even less than mediocre.

With elections in Kashmir around the corner, sloganeering politicians have been seeking to make waves by raising issues that they generally promptly forget once polls are over. So, as the Kashmiri press reports, some have demanded that Pakistani currency be allowed to be used in Kashmir, others have called for free trade across the Line of Control and all of them are branding the others as having betrayed the Kashmir cause and as allegedly working as Indian or Pakistani agents or even both, as the case might be.

Heated sloganeering also shrouds the raging controversy over a report recently released by the Srinagar-based Association of the Parents of the Disappeared (APDP) which claims that over a thousand unidentified graves located in the border tehsil of Uri in Kashmir’s Baramulla district might be those of innocent civilians done to death by the Indian armed forces and then branded as ‘terrorists’. The Indian authorities, predictably, have sought to hush up the issue while human rights defenders continue to insist that stern action be taken against the perpetrators of these crimes.

The truth however seems to lie somewhere in between. On a visit to the mountain village of Bijhama, located seven kilometres from the Line of Control, I was informed that while the APDP report speaks of some 200 unidentified graves in the village graveyard, just 13 of these are of men labelled by the armed forces as ‘militants’, mostly intruders from across the border, while the rest are actually of local inhabitants who died natural deaths. That, of course, is not to deny the reality of fake encounters in Kashmir involving the Indian armed forces but, as a human rights activist pressed upon me, if the authors of the APDP report are not to lose their carefully built up credibility they ought to have done their research more carefully.

Two weeks in Srinagar and, as usual, I’ve been subjected to a heavy overdose of sloganeering. We drive down to the airport although I, as always, have mixed feelings about leaving a place that I love so much. We stop at the Iqbal Park to take a photograph of the poet Iqbal (adored by many Kashmiris particularly because he was of Kashmiri origin), set against a strawberry pink board. Below his picture is a verse from him in Persian which talks of Kashmir as being the rose in a garden. Below that, in English, the board declares, ‘Make your own world from the clay of India’. If that is meant to be a translation of the Persian verse, it is obviously erroneous and misleading. But then the board has been put up by the Central Reserve Police Force and so, presumably, no one can dare question it.

The airport is abuzz with activity. Planeloads of tourists and soldiers are heading back to Delhi. Srinagar airport is unique. In no other airport in India is one forced to submit to lessons in Indian nationalism. ‘We are Hindis and Hindustan is Ours’, ‘India is One’ and so on scream slogans painted on little blue plastic boards placed haphazardly all over the waiting hall.

Slogans galore, but then that is part of what the whole war over Kashmir is really all about.

Archived from Communalism Combat,  May 2008, Year 14, No.131 – Agenda

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harmonious blending of various different traditions
 

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Over the last fifty years, Hyderabad has witnessed large–scale violence. Although deliberately engineered by political parties and vested interests in mot cases, they have been sought to be projected as ‘Hindu–Muslim riots’. Hyderabad is home to numerous Sufi dargahs, where people of all faith traditions come together to worship collectively. Such indigenous shared cultural and spiritual resources need to be further researched and promoted. In what follows, 74–year old Ranoji, from a Hindu Rangrez family, a resident of Hyderabad, speaks to Yoginder Sikand about his long association with a famous Qadri Sufi dargah of the city.
 

My name is Ranoji, I am 74–years–old. I belong to the Marathi Rangrez caste. Our ancestral profession is dying cloth. Although I know that art, I used to work as a tailor. I was born and have lived all my life in Hyderabad.

I am a poor man and have not even been to school. Yet, I have always been in search of a guru. My first guru was a swami from my own caste. Then, I became a disciple of a Brahmin and after that of the head of a Lingayat math. I have been coming to this dargah for almost forty years now. Nowadays, I spend the whole day here helping visitors. At night I sleep at the foot of the tomb of the late pir, who was my guru. All my four gurus taught me the same wisdom (gyan). Only the forms (roop) and language (bhasha) were different.

Some people ask me, "You were born in a Hindu family, then why do you live in a dargah and eat and sleep with Muslims?" But I tell them that just as the sun shines on everybody and the winds blow across every one’s fields, so also the same God has created and looks after every human being. The third eye of Shivji is the same as what Muslims call the nazar–i–nur (the eye of light), in whose sight there is no Muslim or Hindu or anything like that.

I never used to go to dargahs before. Once, when I was around forty and was working in a tailoring shop, the pir of this dargah, who passed away three years ago, came to the shop. He spoke to the seth (owner) of the shop and said that someone had told him that Ranoji makes good caps. My seth was a very short–tempered person. He told the pir sahib, ‘Caps? Who makes them nowadays?’ The pir sahib then turned to leave, but I entered the room and said to him, "Sahib, were you looking for the seth of the shop or for Ranoji?" He looked at me and said, "I was asking for Ranoji, my son". Then I told him, "Sahib, I am the Ranoji you are looking for. Tell me, of what service can I be to you?"

The pir sahib told me that he wanted me to make a cap for him. I drew various designs for him, but he kept saying, "No, no, not this one". Then I folded my hands and said, "Forgive me sahib, I am an uneducated man, but can I ask you a question?" He said, "Certainly, by all means". I said, "Sahib, please tell me, where did you get the idea of making this special sort of cap, whose design is so difficult for me to draw?" He replied that he had recently gone on the haj to Mecca Sharif, and there he was told in a dream that he should make a cap of a particular design for him to wear.

My pir was a devout Muslim, but he never asked me or any of his other Hindu disciples to become Muslim. He used to say if you realise yourself you will realise God. He used to tell me that all the Sufis had only one teaching: love (ishq). Love not only for God but also for all of His creatures.

I was so astonished on hearing that! Well, after that we managed, together, to design the cap he wanted. I asked him what colour he wanted it to be and he said the blue of the throat of a peacock (mor ki kanthi). So, I made the mor ki kanthi colour cap and he was very pleased.

That is how I first came in touch with the pir sahib and the dargah. Oh, that was so many years ago! After that I used to go sometimes to thedargah to meet the pir sahib, especially when I was not well or had somepersonal or family problem and he would pray for me.

One evening, I went to the dargah to meet the pir sahib. He had gone to another dargah for urs, so I waited for him to return. He returned at two in the morning after the qawwali was over. I thought he was tired, so I did not want to disturb him. I just sat on a bench in the porch of the dargah.

In the morning, I suddenly awoke to find people running here and there, shouting loudly. I asked them what the matter was. Somebody told me that the pir sahib had had a heart attack and he had been rushed to the hospital. When I heard this I went running to the hospital. The guard at the door told me I couldn’t enter because the pir sahib had been prohibited from speaking to anyone. So, I stood outside the door, crying. Just then the pir sahib told the nurse, ‘My disciple (chela) is outside, tell him to come in’. She tried to reason with him, saying that the doctors had given strict orders that he should not speak to anyone. But he would not listen and insisted that I be let in. So, the nurse relented and allowed me to come inside the chamber.

When I entered, the pir sahib sat up in his bed and embraced me. I helped him to the toilet and then changed his clothes for him. The nurse brought him some soup, but he refused to eat. His wife and daughter were there. They, too, tried to convince him to eat but he wouldn’t listen. Finally, I took some bread, soaked it in the soup and said, "Sahib, please eat, for my sake". He agreed and I fed him with my own hands. After finishing his food, he looked around and asked me if anyone else had come to see him. There was no one else apart from his family and me. He asked his daughter to give him a notebook and a pencil. He wrote my name on a piece of paper and gave it to me. I think what he wanted to say was that I was the only one who had come to him in his hour of need. This world is really selfish, brother, what can I tell you?

The pir sahib remained in the hospital for several weeks till he recovered. Every evening, after finishing my work in the shop, I would go to the hospital to be with him. That is how I became so close to him and he accepted me as his chela.

One day, when the qawwals were singing at the dargah, the pir sahib took me in front of the main grave and said a dua, praying to God for me. At that time I was keeping the fast (vrat) of Narsimha Dev and so had grown my hair long. After that I said to him, "Sahib, can you please show me a place here where I can recite the name of God (ishvar ke nam ka jap karna)?" He took me to the main chamber of the dargah, where the graves of the founder of this dargah and his wife are located. He pointed to the gap between the two graves and said, "Sit here and do your meditation".

He let me pray in whatever way I wanted to. He used to say that the Sufis believe that though different people use different names for God, it’s all the same thing. In my zikr I generally recite the kalima, ‘lailaha ilallaha, muhammadur rasul allah’ (‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet’).You know, that is the same as Ram nam satya hai (‘Ram’s name is the Truth’) or Om namah Shivaye.

My pir was a devout Muslim, but he never asked me or any of his other Hindu disciples to become Muslim. He used to say if you realise yourself you will realise God. He used to tell me that all the Sufis had only one teaching: love (ishq). Love not only for God but also for all of His creatures.

My pir would treat me like his own son. He would hug me and say, "Ranoji is my very life" (Ranoji meri jaan hai). He would tell me, "Son, this world is a toy which lasts only for a few days. The real life, which shall never end, comes only after death". He would constantly think of death. In fact, he dug his own grave eighteen years before his death. He told me that I must be present at his burial.

The pir sahib passed away three– years–ago. We do not believe that pirs die. Their spirits continue to guide us. That is why I spend all my time in the dargah at my pir’s feet. I am a poor illiterate man, I have never been to school. But, my pir was a spiritual university by all by himself.

You know, my brother, all this talk about Hindu–Musalman is really wrong. Love alone is true religion (saccha dharm).

Mandir dhoya masjid dhoya

mal mal ke ang dhoya

dil ka mayl na dhoya

tu kya paya?

(You cleaned the temple, you cleaned the mosque

You scrubbed all the parts of your body clean

But if you didn’t remove the dirt in your heart,

Then, what have you achieved?)

Archived from Communalism Combat, July 1999, Year 6  No. 51, Ethos

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