Following the September disaster, lampooning of Islam has turned pretty outlandish. Unfortunately, matter of faith only deepens in rainy days. One just can’t reason, for faith knows no reason. Faith, however, has a deep reservoir of innate goodness. And this is true for all faiths.
Unsettling as it may be, this is the right time to culture the innate goodness of faith.
Constructive discussion of faith without emphasising the negative is the right thing to do. Muslims should define their faith. If it is left to others, negative connotations will be perpetuated. With this in mind, I admire the likes of young Yasin, who raised a significant post-9/11 hoopla on Harvard University’s campus, in an attempt to re-define a very contentious term. If a billion plus Muslims can decouple their psyche from the Jihad of Daniel Pipes/ Bin Laden, and identify with that of Yasin, this shall bode well not only for Muslims, but also for the world at large.
I myself know little of Islam and am not a practicing Muslim. But as I grew up, I saw my grandfather’s strict practice of Islam. I also saw my father’s very loose practice of Islam. But they both were good human beings. They were truthful to themselves and to others. They befriended Muslims and Hindus with the same fervour.
This is what developed my worldview of Islam. I harbour not a single shred of doubt that if my grandfather and father, by chance, were born of Hindu or Christian parents, they still would have been equally wonderful human beings.
If we incorporate this common-sense espoused by so many, Islam suddenly becomes more homely, calm and peaceful. Our course now should culminate in a renewed definition of religion and not an overall negation. Talking ill of religion is bound to backfire. Playing with a boomerang is inherently insane!
Is faith innately communal? Yes, the simple act of living in a particular community naturally makes one a little communal. I grew up in a very small village with a 50/50 religious divide. During a football match with the neighbouring village, my community was my village. On Eid, members of the other religion were routine fixtures in our house. And we were always at their homes during Durga Puja. That was my community and I lived communally!
When there was a football match between Kanchanpur (the neighbouring Muslim village) and us, we always stuck together irrespective of the village’s religious divide. But as we move away from our villages, this intense personal touch diminishes, and a different kind of communalism develops, precariously detached from any personal attachments.
A community with less cohesion thus evolves. There is nothing wrong with this. It is natural. Denying this natural inevitability will bring nothing but peril. But this type of community need not and ought not be able to achieve the dominance that we see in today’s world!
Commonality of faith very logically can construct a community amongst the faithful. As Prof. Wilson argued in his acclaimed book “Darwin’s Cathedral,” this possibly has some evolutionary basis conferring a significant survival advantage to the group. Two communities with two distinct faiths, thus, can very well expect certain unavoidable communal rifts.
Beyond the bounds of religion, however, are other “significant forces,” like friendship, economic interdependency, linguistic homogeneity, cultural bonds and above all an ethno-national identity.
When properly permuted, these non-religious forces can be extremely cohesive, surpassing that of religion. Thus a well-functioning societal structure can, at least potentially, harbour an overpowering centripetal force that, often successfully, diminishes those religious rifts.
Any kind of fraternity, including faith, is innately communal. However, such communality should not arise to the exclusion of all others.
A thoughtfully directed cultivation of cultural ethos, is therefore required for the construction of a well-functioning societal construct, that like a massive star shall produce a wrinkle of comfort in the surrounding space, where everything else can then orbit (including religion).
If we think of the pre-1940 society of Bengal, before the introduction of the Muslim League (ML), regardless of our religious affiliation, culturally we were much more homogeneous.
My father did not mind having the prefix of “Sriman,” along with his surname of Rahman. The Dhuti (a garment my father used to wear) was not an unusual belonging for a college-bound Muslim youth.
With the arrival of Muslim League, my father relinquished “Sriman,” and then shredded his Dhuti in an effort to conform to the hegemony of ML, who themselves were non-natives of Bengal.
Maybe the black hands of the ugly Imperial Raj, shrewdly colluding with their kowtowing fawns, raised the temperature at the fault line, and led to the eventual eruption of Kolikata and all the events that followed.
This rift of the 1940s was suddenly smoothed over in 1952. A less-than-religious, more ethnically vibrant ethos was rooted in the alluvial soil of the then East Pakistan. This led to a war of liberation and led us to independence.
But alas! Somewhere along the way we kind of lost our liberation. Aided and abetted both by secularists and Islamists, we are almost back to the pre-1947 predicament of religious division.
