It takes just a few

From John Dayal: Two interesting notes on what a cult or two can do to a Faith and a Religion. We all, of course, know what the Sangh Hindutva Parivar has done in the last few years in India.


November 4, 2006
First Published: 00:49 IST(26/7/2007)
Last Updated: 00:57 IST(26/7/2007)
Sadia Dehlvi
July 25, 2007
Ideology of intolerance
Yes, the Muslim world is facing oppression and injustice, but we can no longer escape the fact that we have enemies within the community. The Glasgow attack and the Lal Masjid horror are recent examples of extremism and terror. Clearly there is a crisis of ignorance, leadership and faith. Muslims must acknowledge that there is a radical fringe which needs to be identified and rejected. We cannot allow the pulpits of our mosques or the institutions of learning to be seized for the discourse of anger and the rhetoric of rage. It has become imperative to understand the root of militancy, which is transforming the glorious tradition of spiritual quest and scholarship in Islam to one of terror.
Prophet Mohammad said, “Beware of extremism in your religion”. This ideology of extremism stems from religious outfits like Tablighi Jamaat whose recruits are operating world over. Tablighi Jamaat was founded by Deobandi cleric Maulana Mohammad Ilyas Kandhalawi in 1920. The Jamaat-e-Islami, Ahle Hadis and Salafis share similar views.
Islam in the subcontinent is the legacy of the Sufis. Wahabism is an import from Saudia Arabia, which seeks inspiration from Ibn Wahab who died in 1786 AD. Unfortunately its followers are unaware of the political and religious activities of its founder and have become victims of the mission rhetoric: “purify and spread Islam”, which allows emotion to rule over knowledge.
The Wahabis reject the historical Islamic belief that the spiritual chains of Sufi orders (silsilas) are linkages to Prophet Mohammad. Ibn Taymiyya, a 14th century scholar, remains the primary source for Wahabi ideology who was barred from teaching and jailed several times in Damascus for issuing heretical fatwas. Taymiyya’s life was spared because he publicly repented amid 700 scholars. He slandered the Caliphs Ali and Osman, discredited Sufi scholars like Ibn Arabi and Imam Ghazali, preaching that visiting the Prophet’s shrine was sin. Inspired by Taymiyyas forgotten teachings Abd al-Wahab of Nejd in East Arabia saw himself as a reformer and preached that Muslims who sought intercession to God through Prophet Mohammad and the Sufis are polytheists who practice shirk (innovation).
Ibn Wahab’s initial devotees were largely Bedouins and he declared those who did not believe in his teachings as unbelievers. He told them: “It is halal (permissible) to kill and plunder Muslims who make mediators of the prophet and auliyas (Sufis) with a view to attain closeness to Allah.” The Bedouins used the verdict to justify the loot of Haj pilgrims. Ibn Wahab taught that it was sinful to build tombs over graves and said: “If I could I would demolish the Prophet’s shrine.” He did not believe that waqf foundations were Islamic and pronounced that salaries to Qazis were unlawful bribes. Ibn Wahab burnt original Sufi manuscripts including copies of the world famous Muslim prayer manual “Dalail ul Khairaat” by the 15th century Moroccan Sufi scholar Jazuli because along with salutations and blessings to the Prophet, its narrative included an eloquent portrait of the Prophet’s shrine. His followers plundered and desecrated the tomb of the Prophet’s grandson Imam Hussain in Karbala.
Wahabi orthodoxy was a minor current in the Muslim world till promoted by the Al Saud dynasty that came to power in 1924. The house of Saud established matrimonial alliances with Ibn Wahab’s family furthering his strident teachings to justify their take-over of the holy cities and establish the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The royals ran bulldozers over the remnants of all meditation cells and the early Sufi tombs along with the adjoining mosques. The historical tombs of the Prophet’s family and his companions at Jannat ul-Maali and Jannat ul-Baqi, the sacred graveyards of Mecca and Medina were razed to the ground.
Mecca and Medina are now managed by the Wahabis and their control has robbed pilgrims of the right to express devotion in a manner of their choice. Constant patrol of the muttawas (religious police) ensures that pilgrims don’t touch the exteriors of the prophet’s shrine or offer salutations to him. At Medina turning towards the Prophet’s tomb for supplication (dua) is met with harsh reactions and pilgrims are forcibly turned around to face the direction of the Kabbah. Women are allowed in the compound but are subject to severe restrictions of time and space.
Through well-funded outreach organisations the Wahabis spread their version of Islam where listening to music, celebrating the annual birth anniversary of the Prophet (milad-e-nabi) and death anniversaries of the Sufis (Urs) are unlawful in Islam.
Be it for Muslims or non-Muslim, the Wahabi ideology is rooted in the politics of extremism and terror negating the Quranic message of peace and brotherhood. “Islam is a religion of peace,” has been reduced to a mere cliché. Muslims have to become good communicators of that Quranic and prophetic message by reclaiming their lost intellectual heritage and reviving academic discourse on the rightful traditions of Islam.
“… and who saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of mankind.” — The Quran 5:32
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November 4, 2006
Dipankar Gupta
July 25, 2007
First Published: 00:58 IST(26/7/2007)
Last Updated: 01:02 IST(26/7/2007)
The threat from within
Sikhs may be just 2 per cent of the population but in their self- image and deportment, it is as if they constitute 200 per cent of India’s one billion. As the saying goes: “Ek Sikh barabar sava lakh.” Even during the worst days of the Partition, Sikhs never felt insecure about their religion as their Hindu counterparts did, and continue to do.
Why then does a small, insignificant sect like the Dera Sacha Sauda, that does not even claim to be Sikh, get mainstream Akalis and a large number of everyday Sikhs so hot and bothered? This Baba is no medieval tyrant and martyrdom of any kind would be thoroughly wasted on him. He is a minor figure whose demonising by the Akalis raised his stature and downgraded their gurus who gave up their lives in far more glorious battlefields.
The question then is: How did the Sikhs suddenly turn so insecure? When did it happen and where were we all looking? Or did the lights suddenly go off in the changing room?
The original Panthic Party, which later morphed into the Akali Dal after 1947, never evinced such worries either, and those were very difficult times. They regularly participated with the Congress before Independence. The party even supplied the Congress with a stable of leaders from Pratap Singh Kairon to Swaran Singh. On election campaigns in undivided Punjab, the Panthic Party frequently displayed the Congress symbol along with its own. On no occasion did any of this to-and-fro movement from Panthic Party and back threaten Sikhism. Nor did the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee declare Kairon or Swaran Singh, or any of the others who took their political blood lines to the Congress, apostates or ‘tankhaiyas’. Sikhism had that much confidence.
In 1899, when Sardar Kahn Singh Nabha wrote “Hum Hindu Nahin (We are not Hindus),” he did not castigate any other religion but just said the plain truth. The Sikhs were not Hindus and let the record state the facts. It was not as if he was prompted to write this tract because of the perceived fear that Hinduism was eating up Sikhism. In this sense he was not the mirror opposite of Swami Dayanand who took every other religion, including Sikhism, as a threat to the Hindu faith.
Nabha’s interjection was to remind his readers of the symbolic energies at the heart of his faith without deriding non-Sikhs, nor, even for a moment, hoping to proselytise other religions to his own. Even the Singh Sabhas and Chief Khalsa Diwan of that period were intent on crafting a separate Sikh identity and not in impressing their own thought prints on their immediate religious neighbours.
Interestingly, in the 60 years after Independence, the Akali Dal has never used the Partition to evoke partisanship the way Hindu parties, and sadly, the Congress even, have done from time to time. This is indeed quite remarkable. Sikhs too had suffered along with Hindus in their migration to east Punjab and beyond. And yet, unlike Hindus, the Partition is history for Sikhs, and not a source of political energies.
When I was working with re-settled rural Sikh refugees in Punjab and Haryana, what struck me the most was that they found my questions, which recalled the Partition, quite stupid. So many of these Sikhs told me to move on and not keep looking over my shoulder for monsters and chimeras of the past.
That was such a relief. Hindu refugees, in general, were still agonising over the Partition and related stirring tales of their experiences during those times. Most of this recall was highly adorned as my Hindu respondents in the early 1990s were either babies or playing in the mud in knickers when 1947 happened. Some post-Partition Hindu families even held prayer meetings to solemnly remember the day they were ousted from their homes. I found none of this among Sikh refugees. It is no surprise then that even a sectarian party like the Akali Dal has no use for the Partition as a leavening political agent.
Later, during the bad days of Khalistan, a large number of Sikhs felt that they were humiliated by the Indian state, but on no account did they believe that their religion was under threat. Khalistanis were, of course, baying to the contrary from the margins, but an overwhelming majority of Sikhs did not politically side with these secessionists though they were widely admired for giving the hated agents of the government a tough time. This is not an ‘a-ha’ moment for, in spite of the trauma post-Bluestar, Sikhs were willing to look ahead the moment Prime Minister V.P. Singh visited Punjab with a healing balm.
The Khalistani years, if one may call them that, however demonstrated that in times of crisis, it was not as if there were Sikhs and Sikhs. Regardless of caste and origin, all Sikhs came together. This is where the difference lies when we come to the Sikh over-reaction to Dera Sacha Sauda. There are now Sikhs and Sikhs and the lines are drawn along the grooves of caste.
Most of the animus against Baba Ram Rahim came from the Malwa region of Punjab where Jat Sikhs are politically dominant. It does not matter really if Jats vote Congress today and Akali tomorrow, it would always be a fight between ‘lions’. Dera Sacha Sauda trampled on this territory by bringing in non-Jats to kick up dust and spoil the Jat versus Jat slugfest.
This is why Baba Ram Rahim was so profoundly despised in Jat-dominated Akali circles. It was not because he was undermining Sikhism so much as using his “low caste” followers to defeat Jats in their own lair that made Baba Ram Rahim such a hated poster-boy for the Akalis. If the Congress had won without his support, that would still have been acceptable.
It is not true, as the Akalis allege, that in the advertisement put out by Baba Ram Rahim he dressed like Guru Gobind. His turban did not have a ‘kalgi (or plume)’, he was stirring Rooh Afza (or something pink) with a ladle and not with a sword (which is Khalsa tradition), and further, he was wearing pink and not blue, not even white. No icon of Guru Gobind can ever be depicted in that colour. Chhatrapati Shivaji’s popular imagery looks closer to Guru Gobind than this pink spectacle.
And yet many Sikhs blindly believed the Akalis when they said that Baba Ram Rahim was imitating Guru Gobind and thus mocking Sikhism. The majority of such Sikhs did not bother to verify the facts as they were primed to believe anything against him. It was their Jatness, not their Sikhness, that Baba Ram Rahim deeply hurt. In the 1980s, Hindus too eagerly believed the tale that the Anandpur Sahib Resolution was secessionist. The drive to hate always numbs the better senses.
At the end of the day what is most depressing is that Sikhs are becoming caste-ridden, and more and more like Hindus. If this trend continues then Sikhism will probably find its greatest threat from within and not from figures clad in baby pink.
Dipankar Gupta is professor, social sciences, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
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