Another blogger was hacked to death in Bangladesh for being critical of Islam. Elsewhere, a huge debate has been ongoing over an article by American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali that called for a reformation in Islam.
The subject of freedom of speech in the context of criticism of religion, which had come to global centre-stage with the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, is very much in the news around the world.
It is a very difficult topic to speak about without offending someone or the other. However, it is necessary to make the effort, because a rational discussion on the complex issue is better than allowing the discourse to be hijacked by extremist loonies outraging at one another.
Living in India, a country with all the world’s major religions and hundreds of languages, one learns sooner or later that as far as possible you have to let people decide their own issues for themselves. If there is a question internal to Islam, then it is for Muslims to decide which way they want to go.
Hindus, Christians, and the rest are better off solving their own problems. Atheists such as Hirsi Ali, by definition, are also outside the faith. They are critics of religion per se, and therefore are not in a position of empathy with believers.
Their hostile positions are unlikely to help spark any move towards reform. On the contrary, such hostility would provoke more believers to rally under the banners of their faiths, to which their identities are usually linked by the accident of birth.
If the desire for change comes from within, then some practices can change with time. For instance, the Hindu practice of burning widows at the funeral pyres of their dead husbands came to an end due to a combination of reform movements within Hinduism (led by Hindus such as Raja RamMohun Roy) and British policy which backed the reformers.
This change did not involve writing a new edition of the Bhagwad Gita or the Upanishads, and did not tamper with any article of faith central to the religion. However it was a practice that the orthodox resisted changing, because that is what the orthodox do.
They resist change for no better reason than to keep things the way they are.
It is conceivable that change may be for the better, or the worse, and all decisions are not easy. Some decisions, such as deciding not to burn widows upon the death of their husbands, are however relatively easy for rational adult human minds.
Some others may be quite hard. We cannot peer into the future and see how our decisions will play out over the years. Something that seems like a good idea today may prove, in the course of time, to be a very bad one. Similarly, something that most of us today consider a terrible idea may, turn out later to be a stroke of genius.
Is it a good idea for society to run wholly according to religious writ? Probably not, if the history of the world is anything to go by. The quality of human lives has improved in many measurable ways over the centuries, thanks to the advances of science.
The basis of science is not faith, but doubt. Its attitude is to question everything, including the divine rights of priests and kings. From those questions we have built a world more prosperous than anything our ancestors knew or even imagined.
However, we seem to have lost some things in the bargain. The comfortable certainties of older times, the cocoon of family and community, the mental and emotional stability that comes from being rooted, are gone. We have lost our connection with the earth and with nature.
We have even lost our sense of time. It is now a commodity, like our work. We buy it and sell it; time is money. So is space. Look at property prices. Land is money. Every element and compound is money. Gold, of course, but look at water. If it is packed in the right bottle it can be quite expensive too.
Only the air awaits reduction into money. I am sure some clever economist or MBA must be working on a way to monetise every breath we take.
This is not an ideal world. If it were an ideal world then there would not be so many unhappy people. Not all unhappy people are dirt poor. From anecdotal evidence and experience, it would seem that many of them are at least middle class by the standards of their own societies.
And there have been instances of some of the richest and most famous people in the world committing suicide or dying quite miserable deaths. It is therefore by no means clear that the liberal, consumerist modern world that we have built is the best of possible worlds. Only the Panglossian would think that all that has befallen our lives and world are for the best, or that this is the best of possible worlds.
Questions about this world of proliferating universal access to Big Macs and Single Income No Kids homes are therefore not out of place. Unfortunately, the questions are drowned in the fury of those who have suffered the worst of Western hegemony in the past 100 years. This is the peoples of formerly colonised lands, particularly in the Middle East, parts of South Asia and North Africa.
Here, the experience of colonialism is being repeated anew. A lot of what is wrongly characterised as a problem with Islam is probably a result of colonial and neocolonial policies and Cold War geo-politics. US President Barack Obama has had the good grace to say that ISIS is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq which grew out of the US invasion of that country.
The Taliban, too, would probably not exist without the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the Cold War rivalry that led the US to support the very people they have been fighting since 9/11.
Going further back, colonialism created structures and hierarchies that excluded those who did not adopt the cultures and mannerisms of the colonisers. This is evident through the formerly colonised world to this day.
Western languages and ways of dress have implicit superiority attached to them. The hierarchy is internalised by those who are excluded just as it is by those who benefit from it.
We cannot understand the confused anger of the excluded if we do not look at it in its structural and historical dimensions.
Nor is it possible to set things right by insisting, even now, that the fault lies wholly with the peoples who have been oppressed, and is rooted in their cultures or holy books. The textual and the actual often differ. This is true even for religions of the book, and accounts for the great diversity in practices within faiths such as Islam and Christianity.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has divorced herself from her roots and is an apostate to her faith, should at least acknowledge that the position of those seeking reform in the Muslim world might be strengthened to a considerable extent if injustice and inequality at the structural and geo-political level were addressed.
That would allow religious cultural practices to evolve in peace to meet the requirements of survival in the modern technological world. Invading countries and killing people, and then blaming their religion for the backlash, is not the best way to spread sweetness and light.