The missing Muslim ethos

More recently, so brazenly one-sided seemed the coverage of the Afghan operation that the intervention of Al-Jazeera was a relief

IT was a huge relief from the emotional stress since September 11 when the telephone rang late one night. It was Nina on the line from Washington. “Give Aruna (my wife) a big hug, Saeed” she gushed “I want to tell both of you that we are still friends and that the clouds will pass”

Nina is one of our oldest friends in Washington. Lively, bright as a button, well groomed and an economist whose decisions affect our lives.

“Of course we are friends” I said. Then my voice broke. I collected myself. “We are going through great turbulence, Nina, but I am sure a 25 year-old friendship can withstand such upheavals.”

The call was an intensely emotional experience not only because of the disturbing global situation but because this was the first time an old friend had identified me as a Muslim. She had also reminded me, without saying it in so many words, that she was a Jew.

Never in our association had our religious beliefs been of any apparent consequence. She was a serious Jew as deeply committed to the state of Israel as she was to the United States of America. The texture of my faith is guided totally by the interpretations of Islam available in the vast body of Urdu and Persian poetry, or in the great Sufi traditions. It is remarkable that there is not a single Urdu poet I have read who gives any quarter to the purist, Taliban-like traditions in Islam. All of this would be double Dutch to Nina which probably implies that I have covered more distance in meeting her on common, cultural turf.

And not just Nina. Suddenly the memory trotted out a procession of names at Princeton, those newspapers in Boston and Salem and, of course, the unforgettable company of Joy the Clown in Atlanta Georgia.

While on the one hand Nina’s call reassured me (and her), which I assume was her intention, it also made me hugely aware of the large cultural gap that existed between me and all my friends in the West.
My education, however inadequate, had enabled me to negotiate my western friends on their terms. But they had no access to my roots or the civilisational data which shaped me. This is not a complaint. That would be illogical. Throughout history people on the periphery have studied, imitated, aspired to be like the metropolitan centres of control. That has been the natural order of things — the global hierarchy.

The confusion arises when this state of affairs persists despite notions of globalisation promising the global village. True, this is a mirage which has to be chased for decades yet before it becomes as “palpable to feeling as to sight”.

But in the interregnum this imbalance leads to a sort of intellectual apartheid. The periphery pursues knowledge of all the civilisational baggage that informs metropolitan centres. But these centres of control, partly because of inadequate knowledge (and therefore lack of sympathy) covers up this gap by disproportionate exercise of power — military, economic, political.

What am I driving at? Take the traditional attitude towards the intolerant in the Indian subcontinent. How can we expect the west to know any more when the subcontinental elite itself is divorced from any knowledge of the “Mullah” and the profile he has traditionally been provided in our literature?

Take these Persian couplet by that remarkable 17th century Mughal Prince, Dara Shikoh:“Behesht an ja ki Mullah-e-na bashad/Ze Mullah shor-o-ghoghai/ Na bashad” (Paradise is where the noisy Mullah is not) “Jahan Khali Shawad az/Shor-e-Mullah/ Ze fatwa hash parwa-e/Na bashad” (Where the noise of the Mullah’s fatwas are absent)
“Dar aan shehri ki Mullah/Khane darad/ Dar anja heech daanai/ na bashad”. (You cannot find any wisdom in the city where the Mullah lives).

And Dara Shikoh is not an exception. In fact, there is no Urdu (or Persian) poet of any stature in the subcontinent who has ever given the “Mullah” any quarter. But this pronounced tendency in Urdu literature must not be taken as licence to berate Muslim or their moderate theologians. The attack on the Mullah, Sheikh, Zahid, Mohtasib always comes across as rebellion against an oppressive religious and social order.

This part of the Muslim ethos is simply not available to the west. And, as I have said, how can it be when it is not available even to ourselves?

Before the advent of mass media, the post-Gulf War international TV networks, this intellectual gap, though harmful in the long run, did not do instant damage.

Sadly, the global reach of TV is in inverse proportion to its knowledge of other societies. The quest for instant expertise, quickly contrived phrases to describe complex situations and communities, the smart punchline superseding restrained description — all of these contribute towards the accentuation of prejudice rather than bridging the gap.
Take the Bosnian war, for instance. The Gulf war inaugurated the era when wars would be directly telecast into our living rooms.

But while the medium worked to the advantage of the West in the case of the Gulf War, directly telecasting the technical superiority leading to the Anglo-American victory, in Bosnia the media amplified unprecedented brutalisation of Muslims which the Muslim world watched in helpless horror for four years.

The complexity of the conflict was never dissected or communicated. How Serbian intellectuals smarting under ancient grievances, worked towards Serbian expansion first by attacking Croatia. Here the historical antipathies between the Serb Orthodox Church and the Croatian Roman Catholics were to the fore. The Bosnians were sandwiched in the middle. But the Western media, instead of clarifying the old Orthodox-Roman Catholic conflict created, for easy communication, two ethnic quantities — Serbs and Croats. An impression was created that these ethnic entities were in conflict with Islam, namely Bosnian Muslims. The Catholic-Orthodox conflict was underplayed. The projection was of a Muslim-Christian clash.

More recently, so brazenly one-sided seemed the coverage of the Afghan operation that the intervention of Al-Jazeera was a relief.
That to me appears to be the crux of the matter. Unless we stabilise a global information order, much more decentralised than it is at the moment, most information will come across to many of us as slanted. And whenever conflicts erupt, you and I, Nina, will be telephoning each other anxious and bewildered.

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