Image Courtesy:ndtv.com
Let me at the outset categorically junk the lurking innuendo evident in the latest diatribe of Al-Qaeda head Ayman Zawahiri. We Indian Muslims have never looked for external support to defend our rights guaranteed under the Indian Constitution. This is like a savage murderer crying out sermons on the value of human life.
Unlike your theocratic dictatorial regime, Ayman Zahiri, where the space for individual liberties is smothered to death invoking misconstrued religious dictates, India is the largest temple of democracy and pluralism. My country has the adequate fluidity to absorb and mitigate her inner contradictions.
Betraying the news of natural death, the Al-Qaeda’s supreme commander Ayman Zawahiri has recently released a standalone statement on the Hijab controversy in India. This comes from the head of a dispensation who has clipped the freedom of women by banishing them from schools. After initial progressive signs of moderation, the Al-Qaeda regime that was emboldened after the bungled withdrawal of American bootsfrom Afghanistan, has blatantly succumbed to pressures from hardliners. It has demonstrated, once again, that it still clings to outdated tribal Islam with a crass regard for civil liberties and multiple religiosities.
Although India has already found fleeting references in his speeches earlier, his broadcasted messages solely on an Indian issue today demand critical attention. This shows the designs the Al-Qaeda has entertained in the region in manipulating the occasional discontent innate to a democracy. In their pipedream of establishing an Islamic Caliphate, India with its large Muslim population has been a vital cog. Community leaders and security experts should proactively engage to distill the incipient trends of radicalism, especially based in the cyber world.
Al-Qaeda’s version of Islam
Understanding of blinkered understanding of the Al-Qaeda’s religious views will help better read the messages in context. Al-Qaeda believes in ethnic tribal Islamic traditions nurtured by hardcore Salafism exported from the Middle East. It is antithetical to divergent religious interpretations and follows contrived rigidity of Islamic Sharia totally expunging the spirit of religion, Sufism. Following tribal traditions of patriarchy and sustenance through war spoils, they believe in the harsh interpretations of Islam.
Islam, like any religion, embraces changes in terms of laws and cultural evolutions. Al-Qaeda refutes timely accretions to the religion discrediting them as profane innovations as they believe in a puritanical form of religious version. In their scheme of a polity, Pashtun ethnicity is endowed with hegemony. They follow a highly illiberal patriarchal social system and thus women are prevented from appearing in public.
They resort to violence to destroy and tarnish anything they deem as ‘Shirk’ (forbidden things in Islam). This is a scriptural stricture in the Al-Qaeda’s interpretation of Islam. They conveniently dump into oblivion the plural and multi-cultural teachings of Islam. To establish a Pan-Islamic Khilafat to prop up their radical ideologies is central to their political idea. According to the Al-Qaeda, also identical to political Salafism, Islam cannot survive without political establishment.
Indian Muslims reject the Al-Qaeda’s dogma
Al-Qaeda has no moral right to guide Indian Muslims. Al-Qaeda is at loss without the rudimentary understanding of Indian democracy. Indian democracy is celebrated not for the absence of inner contradictions; but for the pragmatic forte to accommodate and diffuse differences.
The sermon of Zawahiri, although focused on the Hijab issue, is a sinister ploy to discredit democracy and send out innuendoes of subverting the system. It has in fact tried to preach misogynistic and theocratic political messages. The allegations of Indian democracy supporting pagan Hinduism is plainly misleading, and a rigid theocracy like the Al-Qaeda cannot digest the notion of mutual coexistence.
Whether Hijab is essential to religion is contentious within the religion. But, for a muscular patriarchal Al-Qaeda, Hijab is indispensable- to limit the visibility of Muslim women. The Karnataka High Court’s verdict banning Hijab from schools with compulsory uniforms, itself shows the diversity of the Indian system to accommodate diverse opinions in a rainbow polity. Indian judicial system has ample space for grievance redressal through peaceful means.
The militant ascendancy of Right-wing Hindutva poses existential threats to the idea of the nation, but the country has enough checks and brakes to prevent such aberrations from being the norm. While the recent shift to majoritarian nationalism spawns doubt, the nation has the consciousness to implement the Constitution which guarantees equal justice irrespective of religious affiliations. But the exhortations of Al-Qaeda’s supremo to disparage Indian nationhood based on this fickle aberration are like blaming the eclipse on the sun. This has actually hurt the cause of the Muslim community, evident from the statement of the Karnataka home minister who attributed the Hijab protests to ‘outsider influences’.
Indian Islam is one among the multiple interpretations of Islam. It is fundamentally different from puritanical bare dogmas of the Al-Qaeda in its inclusiveness, localism and syncretic moorings. Indian Islam is malleable and adaptive to timely evolutions as a religion is supposed to be. It reposes faith in multicultural society and plural cultural ethos. Indian Muslims are not hapless lots to seek guidance from the rugged terrains of uncertainties.
The Zawahiri’s call to arms should not be taken as such and dismissed, as the wails of a self-styled evangelist. It is part of a larger plot to promote radical insurrections in multi-religious societies. Indian Muslims have earlier repudiated the call to join ISIS to fight the infidel state. The Muslim community has to maintain extra vigilance from radical overtures from ‘outsider forces’. Along with this, governments have the constitutional onus to assuage the grievances of the minority communities to assure safety to all.
*Mubashir is a journalism student at Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi currently on internship with SabrangIndia
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