Far from expanding the aura of Islam, the recent Glasgow airport attack only underlines the shrivelling up of the sphere of influence of jihad and Muslim rage. This may seem surprising to those easily alarmed by media overkill about terror cells lurking in every locality, but a brief pause would show that Islam’s disunity and absence of strategy to face its Western tormentors have led it into the proverbial chakravyu from which exit is unknown.
This may sound harsh, but the truth is that Islam is in peril because it is ideologically at sea. Islam appeared ascendant after the 1979 fall of the hated pro-American Shah Reza Pehlavi, and Muslim societies everywhere clamoured for orthodoxy to protect their culture from perceived Western decadence; but the Iranian Revolution exposed resurgent Islam’s inability to cope with the modern world.
Post-1979, moderate regimes like Egypt and Jordan enhanced their Western ties to survive threats from radial clerics, while anti-West regimes came under greater pressure. Libya caved in after prolonged defiance and Iraq is a virtual colony; its laws are being rapidly changed to convert it into an American corporate paradise. Pakistan, linchpin of international terror, is in a bigger mess than Afghanistan; and Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, is weak and has lost its oil wealth through the creation of East Timor. Iran is already on the radar of oil-thirsty Texas majors; Saudi Arabia and Turkey are hardly stable.
This highlights Islam’s true crisis: not a single Muslim country is politically, economically, militarily and intellectually viable. Politically, most regimes rely on the West to survive the hatred of their own people. Then, they are interlinked with Western economies even when they have rich resources like oil. Militarily and technologically, not a single Islamic country can manufacture its own weaponry or contribute to world technology in any sphere. This is the reason why I insist that no matter how many terror attacks happen (they appear to be declining in India), Islam is the loser. It cannot secure sovereign control over any non-Muslim society.
But the greatest vacuum is in the realm of thought. In its conflict with the West-dominated world, Islam has failed to contribute thinkers who can articulate the Muslim quest in terms acceptable to both orthodox and modern-contemporary believers. No important and independent Muslim thinker resides in a Muslim country. Modernizing Muslims live in the West and speak an idiom unacceptable to the masses. This is Islam’s true dilemma.
One reason for this crisis, in my view, is the insistence of modern ulema that their interpretation of the Koran be fully accepted by the faithful if they wish to escape the charge of apostasy. This gives Islam an absurd rigidity its intellectuals say did not exist in the past, and internally fractures Muslim society into ‘flock’ controlled by ulema of different masjids. Obsession with the small picture – witnessed in India in the denial of alimony to Shah Bano and the forced return of Gudiya to a husband she had forgotten, and in the stoning of adulterous (often raped) women in other parts of the world – have forced the community to shrink, rather than grow. Self-confidence is undermined by the ulema, who ironically, are the only leaders Muslims recognize.
I hesitate to indulge in comparative theology, yet the Vedic Hindu arrangement is worth offering for the consideration of monotheistic traditions. Hindu tradition is divided into two streams: Sruti, revealed divine word, and Smriti, actual practice. Sruti and Smriti may converge at times, but more often they diverge. Hence the Hindu hierarchy of values where the ideal is placed above the actual, but the actual is tolerated though exhorted to strive for the ideal. My point is simply that the Hindu ability to accept the reality of the Imperfect Man is the source of the unique Hindu mental agility to cope with an ever-changing world.
In monotheistic traditions, however, emphasis on perfection through driving the human herd to attain impossible attributes inevitably gives totalitarian power to religious or political vanguards, denying genuine liberty and autonomy to the masses. The Christian world tried to resolve this crisis by attempting a division of church and political authority. But the American experience in particular shows that corporates and other institutions continue to wield disproportionate power in society; nor is the church entirely bereft of political leverage.
There are some lessons India should draw from the current international brouhaha over the Glasgow-Bangalore link. We must tackle our home-grown or Pak-trained terrorists firmly, and shun a propensity to suffer vicariously for the West. We need not refuse cooperation to Western countries attacked by terrorists, but we must sharply rebuke interference in our internal affairs. Britain wants help in probing the Bangalore links of the UK bombers, but why did the European Union of which it is a member ask President Kalam not to hang Afzal Guru, prime accused in the attack on the Indian Parliament?
It was Western propaganda that not one Indian has been found linked to the dreaded Al Qaeda, when the fact is that all Islamic terror cells have internal connections and arrangements with each other, and this fact is highlighted when it suits the investigating agencies. I am suspicious that Britain found the Al Qaeda link with Indian Muslim doctors precisely at a time when it was keen to repatriate Indian doctors (Hindus and Muslims alike) whom it had invited to settle there.
India has no legitimate reason to be sympathetic to Britain. Modern Islamic jihad came to our shores at the instance of the British, in whose hospitable clime Choudhary Rehmat Ali conceived the idea and the boundary of Pakistan. British officials facilitated the Great Calcutta Killing of 1946, which forced Congress to accept Partition, by removing Hindu officers from all affected police stations. Lord Louis Mountbatten ‘advised’ Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru to take the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations, and we have since suffered a jihad that has slowly spread from the Valley to each and every state.
All international discourse since the New York attack has been West-centric. And the West has used it to launch its own ‘holy war’ to cleverly reoccupy lands once held by Christendom. India was never one of them: let the religion of love grapple with the religion of peace.
The Pioneer, 10 July 2007