Wide Angle

Wide Angle
Saeed Naqvi

Talking Islam with a visionary
President Abdurrehman Wahid rises from his chair in obvious excitement. "Is Swami Agnivesh in New Delhi?" Wahid has almost totally lost his vision. So he makes this query looking right through me. I had met Swamiji a few days ago and, to the best of my knowledge, he is still in Delhi.

"Navrekha, where are you?" Wahid turns around hoping that Navrekha Sharma, joint secretary dealing with Indonesia, would hear him. Navrekha was deputy chief of the Indian embassy in Jakarta some years ago and it must be put down to excellent political anticipation on her part that she developed a personal rapport with a man who is now President of Indonesia. Navrekha rushes to him. "Please locate Swami Agnivesh", Wahid pleads. " I must meet him". He pauses. " He is a man of God and a great personal friend of mine".

He then begins to reminisce. "No one else would share a room with him. Only I would. And do you know why? Because Swami Agnivesh would often sleep with his head on thefloor and feet on the wall. That was his form of yoga", he laughs. This was during conferences of world religions. What was billed as a brief TV interview in the South Drawing Room of the Rashtrapati Bhavan has turned out to be an exciting acquaintance with an extraordinary world statesman. He is a Muslim cleric with a wide knowledge of Hindu scriptures.

He heads a country with the world's largest Muslim population and yet, contrary to conventional expectation, a friend of Israel, particularly of Shimon Peres.

Analysts have marveled how Wahid has continued his two-week foreign tour even as his defence minister, Gen. Wiranto, has refused to resign in the wake of the report on army excesses in East Timor.

Wahid laughs, like an elderly uncle at a child's defiance. "He is not being defiant", he says, "Wiranto is a good friend of mine. We shall sort it out amicably. Wiranto is not to blame but he may have to take moral responsibility".

In his meeting with Prime Minister Vajpayee he dwelt at length on theHindu civilisational and cultural width, embellishing his conversation with references to the Mahabharata and Ramayana. I would have thought leaders like L.K. Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi would have found him exhilarating. But no meetings were scheduled.

Of course Wahid had come with a large business delegation and there is a great deal of promise in enlarging areas of economic ties. But Wahid, should he survive the upheavals in his own country, is the sort of leader we must engage on a broad civilisational basis. His tolerant and catholic vision of Islam has applicability in India as well.

Islam, according to Wahid, is a set of beliefs, a personal ethic; it cannot replace a civilisation. Islam is the dominant colour of the Arabian civilisation. But the dominant colour of Indonesian civilisation is Indonesian. Religion conditions personal lives of individuals. They do not replace civilisations which accommodate them.

Wahid is wary of labels like "syncretic cultures" and "secularism", even"federalism". He says the Dutch left behind a unitary system. Jakarta has to be sensitive to the provinces where sectarianism has taken root. The attitude towards these provinces has to be guided by federal principles without giving it that name. "As Shakespeare said, what's in a name", he laughs. Labels, he says, lend themselves to diverse interpretations.

There is no room for religious extremism in Wahid's framework, but he does have an explanation for extremism and fundamentalism. In coping with modernism some religious groups tend to protect themselves by erecting around themselves walls of "formalism". Intolerance is the consequence.In India, diverse cultures, religions embellish a broad civilisational canvas. Islam in Indonesia, likewise, has adapted itself to its animist and Hindu past which informs its social texture.

I am, in a sense, interpreting the wide-ranging conversation I had with Wahid because a verbatim reproduction of his replies would be a series of aphorisms. How does he explain thefact that in important Muslim countries like Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia, the Army seems to have created for itself the right to intervene periodically and hold onto power for long spells. The Armies in these countries are a fact of history, he says. The frequency of their intervention reflects on the ineffectiveness of political leaders.

Just one meeting with Wahid acquainted me with a vision of Islam which seemed to be the very antithesis of the faith the establishment across the border in Pakistan is trying to promote a triple distilled Islam, pure in its fundamentalism, cleansed of all the civilisational colours that the great Indian Muslims (Sufis, poets, musicians) adopted and enriched. President Wahid, I hope, has inaugurated an era of the widest possible civilisational contact between two great nations.