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Free Islam

Free Islam

Author: Farrukh Dhondy
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: October 10, 2001

I don't object to the way George Dubya speaks. I have no snobbery about his colloquialese. "Wanted, Dead or Alive" is a great phrase, and anyone who read comics in their childhood or watched Western movies, has retained it probably as the first public statement of law and order, much more resounding than "local constabulary have filed an FIR and show-cause amendment in the magistrate's court".

Dubya even gets highbrow on occasion and uses two syllabic words - "crusade" etc. This too is good. It conjures up the idea of the good guys riding out in shining armour to fight the bad.

There are two reasons to support the way President Bush, when not restrained by bureaucrats, tripped over by the uncertain machinations of his own mind or reading from his speech-writer's autocue, expresses himself.

The first is symbolic and we may now, with deep and grieving apology, be able to talk about the poetic cast of the great crime that was done to America. They hit the twin towers of the World Trade Centre (Despite being in India and hearing it twenty times a day, I refuse to call it "WTC") with two American planes, like a boxer punching swinging fists into his own head.

No doubt the perpetrators of this metropolicide wanted the world to see the symbolic destruction of capitalism, the system of Satan. Hitting the Pentagon wouldn't put the American forces out of business, but it would signal the symbolic identification of the enemy.

In reply, Dubya and America are perfectly justified and even obliged to use the patently American symbolism of the language of the Wild West to retaliate. So Osama should not only be wanted dead or alive, every Western cliché should be wheeled on. "Die punk, make my day" is what I would say to Mullah Omar if I was Bush.

There is a more profound reason for Dubya to speak as he does. It is to do with democracy and the fact that, even though the vote was close and disputed, he is, unlike the above-said Omar, the elected leader of a country. These guys, I mean Presidents of the US, are entitled to dress and speak as they do and in fact, to continue to represent the people who elected them, must in the interests of democracy continue to stay close to their roots.

Think of the betrayal of the people of Tamil Nadu if, after she was elected, Jayalalitha began to speak like a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford? And what would we think of Laloo Prasad Yadav if he adopted the haughty idiom of someone who went to Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge? Wouldn't do. The people would have elected an imposter.

So to Dubya, one may say, "speak as you will - 'Hi yo, silver missiles away!'" And talking of plain speaking, General Musharraf, poor guy, caught between a rock and a hard place, as we say in the US administration, is seeking to make some subtle distinction between the terrorists he harbours and the ones who attacked the United States. In the present conflict and in this hour of change in the world, this argument matters.

Musharraf says that the fellows who attacked the Kashmiri Assembly building were "freedom fighters", while he reluctantly is forced to classify OBL (This time I'll use the initials, because it stops one pronouncing one of the names of Satan) as a villain. Again there are two reasons why Mushy is wrong and why from henceforth this distinction cannot apply, or at least not in this case.

One of them is not that I have patriotic or nationalist Indian sentiments, as will become clear from the rest of my argument. It is that the Kashmir murderers were relying on the same welter of symbol as the New York fire-bombers.

They hit the building of a legislature whose legitimacy they question. The symbolic strike wasn't terribly convincing as the Farooq Abdullah government is seen as the monkey and not the organ grinder and killing the monkey is not the way to stop the music.

The other reason that Mushy is mistaken is that in the course of present events the biggest debate that is going to engage us all, even before the dust thrown up by missiles and suicide bombs settles, is the nature of the struggle.

Every opinionating editor asks "who is fighting whom?". True, there is no clarity about where the battle lines are drawn, but Mushy has helped us with his blunder. We can take it as a stepping stone on the road of our pilgrimage to the definition of freedom. Bahuth katthin hai duggad panghat ki.

This is what the war, or the action to end terrorism, is about. It is about the definition of freedom by which we aspire to live. And the first shot in the battle to arrive at such a definition, is that freedom is certainly not setting perverted male zealots loose in the market place to whip and cane little girls who do not cover their faces.

Freedom has nothing to do with preventing women from going to school, gaining an education, working and even getting medical attention in hospitals. Yes, freedom may entail the right to believe that anyone who pays taxes in America is guilty of collaboration with every American foreign policy and have therefore become fair game.

This freedom to hold an insane equation in one's head must go hand in hand with readily available psychiatric treatment for such believers and with police and jails to restrain them if they show the least sign of wanting to act on their belief by harming other people.

So Mushy, while he is contemplating the pain in his groin from the vice that has been permanently attached by Colin and Dubya to his danglers, should also spare a thought for the sort of freedom that the Kashmiri population, after its heavy-handed and unjust treatment at the hands of Indian authority, its blackmailing by maniacs from its own population and from Pakistan and its infiltration by mercenary riff-raff from all over the world, deserve.

Do they really deserve to be carried off to football fields to have their brains blown out in public by pistol-toting mullahs for alleged adultery? Do they deserve to be terrorised back into medieval obscurantism in the name of Mushy's freedom? Setting these fools loose to gain MILITARY VICTORY IN Kashmir is futile, but even if they did succeed, what sort of freedom will these mind-rotten robots have been fighting for?

There is, I would suggest, a new definition of freedom-fighting necessitated by the events of September 11 and it involves, in the first place our Muslim brothers and sisters. It goes without saying that freedom of religion is one of the clauses of the freedom we are discussing. There must be no acid thrown in the faces of women who don't wear burqas or tilaks or orange dupattas round their heads.

Freedom of worship obtains in America, in Britain and in India and these are fine examples of the way things can be organised. But this is the least of it.

The events of September 11 are a watershed in the history of world Islam and mark the divide at which the devils who have committed dreadful acts in the name of the religion must be isolated, denounced, anathematised and junked. This is not a dream.

It is the reality of choice that confronts six million Muslim immigrants to the US, one million Muslims who live in the UK and millions upon millions of Muslims who live in the albeit imperfect democracies of countries such as India.

Nothing less than a reformation, a Martin Luther led fight for a free, dynamic and modern version of Islam, able to exist in the modern world, is required. Impossible?

Christianity and Judaism are also revealed religions. There are crazy Christians about, but none of them go around burning witches and walling up anchorites. Judaism has a book which prescribes the punishment of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", but the ocular surgeons and dentists of Israel haven't been engaged by the state on any such mission.

One can't yet say the same about the amputating surgeons of the sacrilegious "fundamentalist" regimes which have hijacked, defied, debased and defamed the tenets of Islam.

Farrukh Dhondy is a writer and columnist.

Write to him at farrukhdhondy@aol.com
 


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