Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora

Secularism, Religion, Representations

Claire Chambers, Caroline Herbert

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415659307
• eBook ISBN: 9781317654124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Literature

Literary, cinematic and media representations of the disputed category of the 'South Asian Muslim' have undergone substantial change in the last few decades and particularly since the events of September 11, 2001. Here we find the first book-length critical analysis of these representations of Muslims from South Asia and its diaspora in literature, the media, culture and cinema.

Contributors contextualize these depictions against the burgeoning post-9/11 artistic interest in Islam, and also against cultural responses to earlier crises on the subcontinent such as Partition (1947), the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war and secession of Bangladesh, the 1992 Ayodhya riots, the 2002 Gujarat genocide and the Kashmir conflict. Offering a comparative approach, the book explores connections between artists' generic experimentalism and their interpretations of life as Muslims in South Asia and its diaspora, exploring literary and popular fiction, memoir, poetry, news media, and film. The collection highlights the diversity of representations of Muslims and the range of approaches to questions of Muslim religious and cultural identity, as well as secular discourse. Essays by leading scholars in the field highlight the significant role that literature, film, and other cultural products such as music can play in opening up space for complex reflections on Muslim identities and cultures, and how such imaginative cultural forms can enable us to rethink secularism and religion.

Surveying a broad range of up-to-date writing and cultural production, this concise and pioneering critical analysis of representations of South Asian Muslims will be of interest to students and academics of a variety of subjects including Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Women's Studies, Contemporary Politics, Migration History, Film studies, and Cultural Studies.

ISurveying the field; comparative approaches

1 The making of a Muslim

Tabish Khair

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764382-2

Ziauddin Sardar (writing with Merryl Wyn Davies) notes in the introduction to The No-Nonsense Guide to Islam that

[a]s Muslim writers, we constantly find ourselves caught in a pincer movement. Our Western friends associate Islam largely with violence and bigotry, despotism and suppression, obstinacy and chaos. Our Muslim friends, on the other hand, emphasize that the very term Islam means peace; they conceive of Islam as a religion that by its very essence is about peace and justice.

(Sardar and Davies 2004: 8)

This is not an uncommon experience among Muslim writers, as is also evident in the interviews in Claire Chambers's British Muslim Fictions (2011b). In this essay, I will attempt to examine this, not by evaluating the evidence on both sides, but by looking at the avenues by which I—a boy aspiring to become, and then becoming, a writer—came to feel and be constituted as a ‘Muslim writer’. I will examine not just the salient elements of this perception on both (or many) sides, but also the ways in which I have encountered, unwittingly absorbed, and finally resisted those constitutive elements.

Islam came to me in two ways. The first one was the Islam I was born into. It fell on my shoulders as lightly as a silken shawl embroidered by hand. I was hardly conscious of it, though the month of Ramadan was special, even when I did not keep a fast (which was often, though my parents fasted regularly),¹ and there were festivals to look forward to. This Islam was filled with the smoke of incense sticks during Shab-é-Baraat; it wore white churidaar kurta—the sleeves carefully crinkled with the help of a special kind of stone—for both Hindu and Muslim festivals. There was no purdah in this Islam; my mother and my father's sisters were mostly university graduates and one of them had an academic career. Both my grandmothers (who had no Western education)—even my mother's mother, who spent her days praying and reading the Qur'an—had never worn purdah. This Islam did contain relatives who wore purdah—but once they took it off indoors, they spoke and thought like everyone else in the family. Moreover, many of these purdah-wearing distant relatives were working women—more so than some of my aunts, who were relatively affluent and chose not to work. I was hardly conscious of all this being Islam (or, for that matter, ‘not-Islam’). It was simply the way we lived.

But it is the other kind of Islam that concerns me here, for this is the Islam of which I was made conscious by others. When did this Islam penetrate into my consciousness? My parents and my aunts narrate a story about a time when I was four or five years old. They had caught me arguing with an older boy, the son of one of the maidservants. According to them, I had been asking him in Urdu: ‘Don't Hindus have one nose and two eyes like you and me? How can you say that they are different?’ This is Episode 1 in my story of the Islam that the world made me conscious of. We will return to it later. Let me put on record the other episodes first.

Episode 2: I am older, probably 11 or 12. I am in the playground of our Roman Catholic missionary school in Gaya, sitting on the railings of the slide. I am too old to use the slide, but evidently not old enough to dissociate myself from it. Two of my class friends, boys who have studied with me for at least six years, come to me. They are arguing. One of them says, ‘Ask him, ask Tabish yourself’. The other turns to me and puts the matter to test. He asks, ‘You are not Muslim, are you?’

Episode 3: I am in my late teens and travelling alone by train for some reason or other. A distant cousin has been requested to book a railway berth for me. When I get my ticket—or is it when I see the passenger list pasted at the station?—I realize that I have been listed as ‘T. Kher’. The cousin explains to me that it would be safer to travel under a Hindu name, as there is communal tension in many parts of north India and riots might break out between Muslims and Hindus. I remember feeling proud, ashamed, excited: proud of my ability to pass for a Hindu, ashamed of the need to do so, excited to be playing a kind of teen agent.

Episode 4: I am in my twenties. I am still living in my small home town, but have started writing for the Times of India. The Delhi edition carries a long piece by me criticizing Rushdie's lack of understanding of Muslim sentiments and beliefs, but defending his rights as an artist and a human being, a piece written without reading The Satanic Verses (a novel I could lay my hands on only much later, because of the ban imposed on its publication in India). Emboldened by the success of the piece, which provokes healthy debate in my circles, I collaborate with my best school friend, Gyanendra Nath (who was to die later in a road accident), to write a critique of the Mahabharata TV serial. This evokes more extreme reactions. A couple of our acquaintances—supporters of what was a small Hindu Rightist party in those days, the Bharata Janata Party (BJP)—get very angry with Gyanendra. To me, they only say: ‘Gyanendra is at least a Hindu; why don't you write about your own mullah religion?’

Episode 5: I am stung by the challenge to write about my own ‘mullah religion’. I decide to take it up and write an article on Islam in India. It is published by the Times of India. The article is simple to my mind: highlighting the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, or independent reasoning, I ask why Indian Muslims—or, rather, Islamic scholars in India—do not reform aspects of religious practice in keeping with the spirit of Islam and changing times? I mention things I would like to see reformed—for example, it might be a good idea, I argue, to consider replacing the ritual sacrifice of animals during Eid with charity in the shape of cash. Nothing happens for a week. Then (I am told) the article is taken up for discussion on the radio and all hell breaks loose in my town. Only in my town though. The local mullahs start preaching against me, I get anonymous phone calls from people who threaten me with death and worse, my defence of Rushdie is suddenly recalled in the vivid colours of apostasy, a mob surrounds my father's clinic demanding that I should be turned over to it to be ‘disciplined’. My father, a religious man and a respected doctor, does not want to call the police, because he is afraid the matter will turn into a Hindu-Muslim riot if (Hindu) policemen are involved in it. He goes out to speak to the leaders of the mob: he is alone, except for one of my uncles, the Urdu writer Kalam Haidri. The mob is on the verge of turning violent, but there is still some respect for my father. My father, a believing Muslim who knows his Qur'an and hadiths inside out and can speak the language of the crowd, argues with them for three or four hours. By the end, he has convinced them that I have not done anything ‘unIslamic’. They go away, some of them still muttering.

Episode 6: I have just moved to Denmark. My first novel has been published in India. A (Danish) journalist requests to interview me. During the interview, I tell him about the mob. But I narrate the incident to highlight the local character of the threats (the result of small town conservatism and intrigues, rather than global Islamism), its transitory nature (after a few months I could enter even Muslim mohallas without feeling threatened), and, above all, the complexities brought forth by the fact of the mob's discussion with my father. I insist on these points. Imagine my surprise when the article appears bearing the heading: ‘Indisk forfatter-talent betalte dyrt for at støtte Salman Rushdie’ (Budding Indian writer pays dearly for supporting Rushdie).

Episode 7: I am in my early thirties and doing a PhD at Copenhagen University. At a highly cultured dinner, I am seated next to an erudite, refined Danish woman and an African Muslim scholar based in the UK. The wine is poured. ‘But do you drink wine?’ the woman asks the professor. When he replies in the affirmative, she bursts out: ‘You are the first normal Muslim I have met’. I look at the Muslim scholar; he looks back at me. I do not know if we should be grateful for, or resentful of, the ‘normality’ that has been bestowed on us, which, by its very definition, would be denied to my parents, who will not touch even a drop of wine.

What if the hands are powerless, these eyes

Still see: O let the wine stand where it lies!

(Ghalib, my translation)

Thus writes the great nineteenth-century Urdu poet and Indo-Persian writer, Asadullah Khan Ghalib. One can quote so much by and about writers, thinkers, travellers, mystics, and scholars from Muslim societies of the past (and the present) that contradict all definitions of Muslim ‘normality’, whether formulated by Islamists or non-Muslims, whether formulated in criticism or admiration. After all, the world's most famous paean to wine, Rubaiyyat, was not only written by a Muslim, Omar Khayyam, but Khayyam was a qualified preacher and scholar of Islam. Again, ‘alcohol’ (al-kuhl) and ‘cider’ are both Arabic words (the latter of Hebrew etymology), perhaps borrowed by Europe during the early Crusades.² And yet the definitions keep on being pushed into my flesh, pinning me to this worldview or that. It is these easy and obdurate definitions, these piercing definitions that worry me most of all.

When I look back at my first episode narrated above, I am surprised by its lack of definitions. My parents were practising Muslims; they would not touch any kind of alcohol. They were also urban people, with a very middle-class, ‘Islamic’ suspicion of sages and saints, faqirs, and mysticism. So their openness to Hindus was not a direct gift of Sufism; unlike the Sufism-vogue in some circles today, my family was not into visiting Sufi shrines and so on.³ Their Islam was centred on the Qur'an, the ahadith, and family traditions. They were, moreover, not the kind of people who would think or talk too much of secularism or other such abstract ideas. And yet not only did I say what I said to the older boy, but all the elders around me heartily appreciated a child's refusal to allow abstract definitions to divide living bodies. Having one nose and two ears was what counted. When I look back on that first memory and through the following years, what I sense most of all is a stiffening of definitions, the concrete enactment of abstract boundaries. It changed so soon to a choice being forced on me in a playground: are you Hindu or Muslim? And that forced choice itself excluded me from a large part of my cultural heritage: write about your own ‘mullah religion’, not about Hinduism, as the two BJP supporters put it. It ended with the Muslim mob surrounding my father's clinic and the cultured woman in Copenhagen excluding practising Muslims (like my parents) from the bounds of ‘normality’.

The hardening of definitions. The constricting of the space of definitions. It reminds me of another sher (couplet) by Ghalib, a sher that would sound like blasphemy to many Islamic fundamentalists. Here it is, in a somewhat free translation:

For God's sake leave the Kaaba's veil alone;

There too may lie hidden a god of stone.

(Ghalib, my translation)

But I do not wish to lament the end of multiplicity, like the Moor in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). Laments and tears are what we might sometimes owe the past, but I live in the present. I have a young son and two daughters, who, I hope, will grow up into the future. I seek not lamentation but understanding. Above all, I seek understanding that avoids the old definitions—the definitions that, once adopted, pin you to the board of the same answers as always.

As such, for the rest of this chapter, I will not talk of what Muslims are or are not. Neither will I quote the Qur'an to highlight the multiplicity and past/potential progressiveness of Islam. I will not dwell, for example, on the fact that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has much to do with the systematic persecution of Marxists and communists in Muslim countries, very often with the direct support of the West. I will not highlight the links bin Laden had with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the 1980s or point out how Israel, considered a democracy in the West, remains a living illustration of the success of rampant power and authoritarianism to most Muslims. I will not focus on the contradiction that while Muslim history teems with tens of thousands of differing exegeses of the Qur'an, the leaders of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’—people who claim authority on the basis of the Holy Book—have hardly written any works of exegesis. As Abdel Salam Sidahmed and Anoushiravan Ehteshami point out in Islamic Fundamentalism (1996), apart from al-Maududi (d. 1979) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), there is hardly any significant work by Islamists.

I will not even try to defend the ‘spirit of Islam’ against the frequent charge of misogyny by placing the relevant hadiths and Qur'anic verses in historical context, a task performed admirably by Fatima Mernissi in Woman and Islam_ An Historical and Theological Enquiry (1991). Neither will I examine the ahistorical idea of a ‘clash of civilizations’ as used in the media—at best, a case of the boy who cried wolf—or examine the extent of the menace that Islam is said to pose. The latter examination has been performed with much intellectual honesty by John L. Esposito in The Islamic Threat (1992).

What I am interested in is a contemporary formulation that might enable us to understand the problems—and explore the possibilities—in a broader context, a context that does not get pegged down by hegemonic definitions of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, European, Arab, civilization, culture, and so on. For the problem of stiffening definitions stems from attempts at hegemony by various elites in both the West and in Muslim countries.

Again and again, this attempt forces the mask of the past on the Islam I grew up with. Islamists evoke the ‘glorious past’ and urge a return to what they think were the Islamic values of yore. Critics in the West see aspects of Muslim societies—including fundamentalism—as throwbacks to the past or, if they are kind, its remnant. An editorial i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: contexts and texts
• Part I Surveying the field: comparative approaches
• Part II Syncretism, Muslim cosmopolitanism, and secularism
• Part III Currents within South Asian Islam
• Part IV Representations, stereotypes, Islamophobia
• References
• Index