But You Don't Look Like a Muslim Read online

  He then goes on to urge the men to look for ways of educating girls that are in accordance with the ‘qanoon-e qudrat’ (the laws of nature). Elsewhere, taking the example of Europe and America, Sir Syed said:

  The social and economic conditions of these countries might allow women to be taught certain subjects so that they become postmasters or telegraph masters or members of parliament but in Hindustan we do not have such conditions and nor are we to have such conditions for hundreds of years to come.

  However, the most direct view on the subject of women’s education is to be found in Sir Syed’s written rejoinder to an address from the women of Punjab. When the wife of a certain Khan Bahadur of Gurdaspur made a formal address on behalf of the ladies of Punjab and expressed the fervent hope that one day a messiah will appear for them as indeed Sir Syed had appeared for the Muslim boys, Sir Syed responded by first listing the many good qualities for which he respects the women of his qaum, namely neki (piety), burdbari (maturity/sagacity), mohabbat (love), har qism ki mushkilat ki bardasht (tolerance for all manner of hardship), sabr (patience), bacchon ki parvarish (raising children), ghar baar ka intezaam (managing the household). Claiming he is not against education per se but modern education such as being given to boys, he urges women to pursue the ‘purane tariqe ki taalim jo tumhe deen o duniya mein bhalai ka phal dega’ (the old-fashioned education that will bring you benefits in both this world and the hereafter). Dubbing those who wanted modern education for girls kotah-andesh (short sighted), he says he would prefer girls to be educated by the elderly sharif ladies of the mohulla (qaum ki buzurg masturat) in their homes, as their grandmothers had been and read the same books that their nani-dadi had, all the while ruling over their domestic kingdom:

  … live like a princess: What need do you have for the no-good godforsaken books of these modern times? The men, who must earn the bread for you, have to gain all sorts of new knowledge and learn new languages and the new ways of the world but nothing has changed as far as you or your educational requirements are concerned.

  Aligarh had to wait eight years after Sir Syed’s death in 1898 before one man – Shaikh Mohammad Abdullah - decided that a ‘normal school’ was the need of the hour for girls, that is one where, apart from deeniyat (theology), girls would also be educated in elementary mathematics, history, geography, health and hygiene as well as manners and morals. Others disagreed; even the most enlightened among Shaikh Abdullah’s contemporaries at Aligarh felt a school should be set up to train teachers who would, in turn, educate Muslim girls from sharif families within the confines of their homes especially given the acute shortage of ustanis (female teachers). But in his heart Shaikh Abdullah knew such a scheme was not practicable; schools that provided elementary education, ibtedayi taalim, to girls were the real need of the hour. Those who argued that even Muslim countries had not attempted to establish separate madarsas for women could not conceive that any sharif family in India would ever think of sending their daughters to school. What was worse, detractors of such new-fangled ideas declared that Muslim girls from such families would end up meeting non-Muslim girls or those from non-sharif families. One is reminded of the word Nazir Ahmed, the novelist, had used to describe girls who might be sent to English-style schools: ‘hudhdangi’ (rowdy). As the debates went on, the nub of the argument for and against educating Muslim girls appeared to be purdah: ‘The greatest arguments were about purdah and women too were taking part in this debate.’ To Shaikh Abdullah, it appeared as though separate but equal schooling for women could offer a viable option, that is, secular education along the same lines as men but one that made due provision for purdah. Without further ado, he rented a house in Ooper Kot, a neighbourhood in the old city of Aligarh, hired an ustani from Delhi and with the active assistance of his wife, Begum Waheed Jahan, set up the Aligarh Zenana Madarsa in October 1906.

  4

  BURQA: MOVING TOMBS FOR

  MUSLIM WOMEN

  BORN A MUSLIM AND RAISED a momin, a believer, I am struck each time people link deen or faith with externals – be they beards or burqas. If anything, I am struck, yet again, by our propensity to not want a debate on anything that questions this entirely specious link between true faith and the observance of certain practices. Is it, I ask myself yet again, because somewhere we are afraid of the debate and the real issues it might raise? Do we Muslims prefer the cacophony to the debate because we would rather not go to the heart of the matter?

  I was reminded of this while rereading The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The subject of purdah and its observance crops up in many fragments of letters, reports of prayer meetings and speeches. In a public address at Fatehpur in May 1947, Gandhi had said:

  True purdah should be of the heart. What is the value of the outer veil? I go so far as to say that even the Quran Sharif does not mention outward purdah. How rapidly the times we are in are moving. Today we are here, tomorrow we will have moved far ahead. In such times what is the point in continuing the worthless custom of purdah?

  We have indeed moved ahead spatially but the custom continues. What is worse, from a largely social custom it has acquired a religious mooring. As Gandhi rightly pointed out, the burqa/purdah finds no direct mention in the Holy Quran. This needs to be stressed; yet for reasons best known to them, both those for and against burqa/purdah refuse to disengage the garment, and the practice it breeds, from its imaginary religious anchor. The Quranic injunction for preserving modesty and guarding chastity – an injunction applicable to both men and women – somehow over the years, has come to mean veiling for women and along with that seclusion and enforced segregation and, as a natural corollary, a violation of freedom. To link the need for preserving modesty to the need to have or establish a religious identity seems an essentially flawed position.

  Equally, to distrust or shun those Muslims, especially women, who disavow the burqa, by claiming that they are irreligious, is an even more erroneous position. The truth perhaps is that the religious zealots adopt these intractable positions not because they have substantiated proof for their belief – either in the Holy Quran or in the Sharia – but simply because they fear that those who ask for debate will challenge their hegemony. And who are these upholders of the faith who wish to retain hegemonic control over Muslim manners and mores, not to say religious beliefs and practices? In the complete absence of leadership at the national level in India, and the absence of ordained clergy or priests in Islam per se, the so-called representatives of the Muslims are semi-literate maulvis and imams who have little or no understanding of the modern world. The Muslim middle class - indifferent to community issues, engrossed in their pursuit of material acquisitions like members of the middle class anywhere in the world, or simply too scared to speak out against the mullahs’ obscurantist views – allow the mullahs to remain the undisputed upholders of the Muslim faith. As a result, many of their ideas on the position of women, women’s education, the nature of syllabi for women, the need for girls to study in segregated schools upon reaching puberty, etc. remain unchallenged.

  Over the years, the position on the burqa has become so intractable that those for it and those against speak from opposite ends of a Great Divide. The distance between them is so wide and the terrain so barren that there is no possibility of debate. At such a time, Gandhi’s Collected Works becomes valuable reading because it shows a time when debate was possible. What is more, a non-Muslim could claim as much right to be part of that debate as a Muslim – something that seems unimaginable today in the light of the furore created over Nicholas Sarkozy’s remarks during his presidency of France. To come back to Gandhi’s Collected Works, as one letter reveals, in a prayer meeting at Amishapur on 1 February 1947 a maulvi spoke up in protest of Gandhi’s remarks on the purdah system in vogue in Bengal. According to the maulvi, Gandhi had no right to speak on matters pertaining to Islamic Law. Denouncing the system of purdah, which varied from country to country, Gandhi took on the maulvi. Calling his a narrow view of rel
igion, Gandhi claimed the right to study and interpret the message of Islam. He also said that he was not inclined to believe that Islam was so susceptible to damage as to be confined within a narrow space beyond other people’s view.

  In another incident, recalling an incident when the Ali brothers (Mohamed and Shaukat, both leaders of the Khilafat Movement) had addressed a Muslim women’s meeting with a piece of cloth tied around their eyes, Gandhi said ‘real purdah was not of the body but of the mind.’ What was needed, he stressed, was real education among women, more so among Muslim women. If the darkness of their mind was not removed, they could not do anything with outward purdah.

  Gandhi’s words are as true today as they were over six decades ago. The outward purdah is bad enough; what is worse is the purdah of minds. And for that to be removed, we must disengage custom from faith and engage those who believe otherwise in a real dialogue. We must not be cowed down by the stridency of the retrogrades, nor be lulled into complacency by those who favour the status quo. There are many who concede that the all-enveloping black burqa, the object of much derision among people of different ilk, is an innovation, but unlike other innovations in Islam which are biddat (meaning innovations or latter-day additions that are reprehensible to the true spirit of Islam) and, therefore, not permissible, this, many Muslims believe, is an innovation for the good of society. And anyone who stands up to say that the burqa or veiling has no mooring in Islam or Sharia per se – being more a matter of interpretation than injunction - is immediately suspect, ironically enough both in the eyes of the traditionalists and the secularists!

  The scope of this essay does not permit a lengthy discourse on the purdah system in vogue in India from Vedic times or its prevalence until recent times among Hindu women of a certain class and station, or on its easy acceptance among certain sections of society due to the instant upward mobility it bestowed upon the wearer in an extremely class-conscious society. Nor do I possess the right scholarly credentials in Islamic jurisprudence to anchor my assertion in theology. All I wish to do here is: (a) establish that the Holy Quran speaks of modesty and chastity for both men and women, not for veiling, seclusion and segregation of women; and (b) assert that remarks such as Nicolas Sarkozy’s, ill-worded and ham-handed though they are, should evoke neither dismay nor glee; they should, in fact, be seized upon as occasions for debate, reflection and discourse.

  To end on a personal note, my own experiences of enforced burqa have simply strengthened my antipathy to the very notion of veiling and the ‘violation’ and ‘subservience’ that inevitably follow. I have come to believe the axiom: that which is separate is inherently unequal. And the segregated are invariably regarded as somehow inferior by the other. In the context of our own history, just as the colonial powers decreed a separate space for the ‘natives’ by segregating them from positions of power and relegating them to a state of subservience, in much the same way women have been isolated and marginalized by patriarchal systems. While, according to the tenets of Islam, women are equal to men – as believers – it is custom and practice that has made them inhabit a separate space. The Islamic discourse of ‘Separate but Equal’ has unfortunately come to be hijacked by the fundamentalist discourse of ‘Separate and Inferior’.

  In the year 2007, I was invited by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of a six-member delegation. Virtually from the time I – the only woman in the delegation – was asked to wear a scarf over my head and don the all-encompassing abaya before stepping off the plane and being shepherded into a women’s-only lounge at the airport to my experiences over the next five days, the fine line between discrimination and seclusion kept getting blurred. Soon, this began to give rise to a sense of being victimized and marginalized even among my own group. Much to the discomfiture of my male colleagues I began to feel slights were none were intended. The black, all-enveloping abaya and hijab – that one had to wear absolutely everywhere – were not merely a nuisance for one not accustomed to the numbing anonymity they bestow; they were also deeply annoying tools of exclusion. Every time our small group of six set off for a meeting, I would be lead to a screened-off space and given no opportunity whatsoever of interaction let alone fruitful discussion. After a while it began to seem futile if not outright offensive. To be an invited guest and yet face extreme seclusion when it came to interacting with male counterparts is not too conducive for fostering equality, integration and the easy equivalence one tends so much to take for granted as a working woman in India. Eating a ten-course meal in solitary splendour and eavesdropping on the conversation of one’s male colleagues from behind a screen, too, is less than appetizing. Less invigorating is the stifling blackness of the abaya and the hijab; it smothers and numbs. Worse still, its dense blackness turns it into a portable inferno. At such times, the only thought in my head was: I wish the men were to wear it occasionally; then, they might know how it feels.

  5

  NO IMAM BUT THE ‘SHAHI’ IMAM

  THE DECISION OF SYED AHMED Bukhari, the Imam of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, to ‘anoint’ his nineteen-year-old son, Shabaan, as the Naib Imam, or deputy, in November 2014, raised some fundamental questions about the very nature of imamat. Who or what is an imam? Islam has no ordained clergy nor does it bestow the right to any particular group of people to interpret religion or access religious sources. Every Muslim – man, woman, child – can read the Quran, which is believed to be a book complete in itself, and everyone can read and acquire knowledge from the Hadith, the corpus of traditions, teachings, sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. As for the five daily namaz, any pious Muslim can lead the congregation. The khutba or sermon delivered before the Friday namaz, however, must be given by a learned person as must be the two other big congregational namaz on the two Eids, the Eid-ul Fitr and the Eid-ul Azha.

  Literally meaning a leader, ‘one who stands before or in front’, the title ‘imam’ is generally used by Sunni Muslims for the person who leads the daily prayer. It has, however, been conferred as an honorific title to great religious scholars, such as Imam Ghazali for instance. The Shia Muslims might use it for a person who possesses a perfect understanding of the Quran and can, thus, be a spiritual guide as Hazrat Ali was whom the Shias claim as the first Imam. Both sects believe that the imamat – be it in a narrow sense of merely leading the prayer or its larger sense as in acting as a guide and mentor – cannot be passed on from father to son. Throughout the early history of Islam, consensus has been the sole criteria; the ummah, or the community, must decide who it wants as its imam. An imam can neither be thrust upon a community nor can an existing imam choose his own successor.

  Coming to present times and the curious case of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, it was meant to serve as the congregational mosque for the new city of Shahjahanabad. Commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shahjahan in 1650, construction was completed in 1656 and the first prayer was offered on 25 July 1656 on the day of Id-ul Fitr. The congregation – which included the emperor himself and his retinue as well as the ordinary citizens of Delhi – was led by Syed Abdul Ghafoor Shah who had been invited from Bukhara in Uzbekistan. Chosen for his wisdom and learning, he was subsequently conferred the title of ‘Imamul Sultan’ or the ‘emperor’s imam’. Defying all well-established principles of Islamic jurisprudence, he was succeeded by his son. And so it continued, for thirteen generations, with son following father in an unprecedented claim for imamat by virtue of no other quality save birth and lineage.

  That even Mecca and Medina, which house the holiest of mosques, have no such dynastic practice and where the imams must pass exams, acquire qualifications through strenuous and sustained processes of formal education and only then wait to be chosen to lead the congregation caused no small amount of discomfort to this family of imams that had appended the moniker ‘Bukhari’ to their name. Having largely confined their activities to leading daily prayer, giving khutbas and presiding over the coronation ceremonies of the Mughal emperors who ruled from the Red Fort or the Quila
-e-Moalla as it was called until the First War of Independence in 1857, they found their wings clipped after the Mutiny. In the tumultuous years leading up to Independence, the family played no significant role in the life of Indian Muslims. Equipped with neither learning nor training, unlike the alim of, say, Deoband or Firangi Mahal, they were ill-placed to make any contribution whatsoever to the intellectual life of those they led in prayer. They remained, at best, prayer leaders of the largest functional mosque located in the heart of Delhi, and no more.

  History, in fact, recalls many a rousing sermon issued from the pulpit of the Jama Masjid of Delhi by truly learned men. Allama Fazl-e Haq Khairabadi, a scholar, poet and freedom fighter, issued his famous fatwa of jihad against British rule in India from the Jama Masjid in July 1857. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, in his historic address to the Muslims of India after Partition, urged the Muslims to stay back in India and fight communal forces. And so it continued with the Jama Masjid continuing to be an emotionally charged space for Indian Muslims but with no especial religious-political authority attached to it.

  It was not until the early 1970s when the wily Abdullah Bukhari, then the Naib Imam, jostled for complete control and forced his father to appoint him imam. With him began a new chapter of fatwa politics, political alignments and the wooing of the imam by political parties of all hues. The Emergency saw the Imam, Abdullah Bukhari, supporting the Congress party’s infamous sterilization campaigns causing much resentment among the Muslims of Delhi. The Congress’s efforts to prop him as a leader of the Muslims met with widespread anger and condemnation from different sections of the Muslims: those who had been displaced by the harsh urban renewal schemes in the Old Delhi area were outraged by the imam’s closeness to the Congress-led government; others resented his taking upon himself the mantle of leadership. The Muslim intelligentsia, in particular, pointed out his complete lack of qualifications; neither an alim nor mufti nor even a hafiz of the Quran, his proclivity for courting controversy at the cost of good sense, evoked reactions ranging from outrage to embarrassment. His twenty-seven-year ‘reign’ as the imam saw the rise of the ‘Shahi imam’ as the bugbear of electoral politics: wooed by those who saw him as a ‘representative’ of the Indian Muslims but intensely detested by the great majority of those he allegedly represented. Abdullah Bukhari relinquished his post in favour of his son in 2000, the present imam Syed Ahmed Bukhari who organized a flamboyant dastar-bandi ceremony, a symbolic tying of the turban to mark the passing of the mantle of imamat, of his heir, Shaaban.