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RELIGION IN POLITICS
By Eqbal Ahmad
A DECADE ago I spent a couple of hours with
Morarji Desai, a well known politician and one-term prime minister of
India. I was researching the campaign by Hindu religious parties to build
a shrine to Lord Rama on the spot where then stood the 16th century Babri
mosque. They claimed that the site was the birthplace of Rama, an avatar
who lived, according to traditional Hindu belief, sometime in the years
3000BC.
During an earlier visit to Prime Minister Desai in 1977 I had been
impressed by his traditional style and his devotion to Hinduism. So I
thought he will be a good man to interview on the subject of Hindu
'fundamentalism'.
Mr Desai was critical of the BJP and its allies. He worried that they
would inflict damage to India's fragile unity and its secular
dispensation. As he fulminated in particular against the RSS, Vishwa Hindu
Parishad and the Shiv Sena, I was startled at one point when he said:
"They are distorting Hinduism out of shape. In effect, they are
un-circumcised Mussulman fanatics." What do you mean? I asked, and he
proceeded to talk about the 'imitation of monotheism in their singular
focus on Rama, their cult of violence, and their mobilization of a virtual
Jihad over 'Ram Janam Bhoomi' as un-Hindu attitudes and activities.
At the time I had felt uncomfortable with this remark as it smacked of a
communal outlook. Later, as I continued to research the Ram Janam Bhoomi
movement, I appreciated his comparison between contemporary Muslim and
Hindu militancy. But Morarji Desai was wrong in one respect. The
similarities were not an outcome of the parivar imitating their Muslim
counterparts. Rather, the distortion of a given religious tradition and
other shared patterns of attitude, behaviour and style are products of
common roots in the modern times and its unique tensions. I have argued
this point in an earlier essay. Here I discuss how these so-called
fundamentalists, in particular the Islamist variety, relate to the
religious tradition they claim to cherish and represent.
The religious idiom is greatly favoured in their discourse, its symbols
are deployed and rituals are observed. Yet no religio-political movement
or party has to my knowledge incorporated in a comprehensive fashion the
values or traditions of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism in their
programmes and activities, nor have they set examples of lives lived,
individually or collectively, in accordance with the cherished values of
the belief system they invoke. What they do is to pick out whatever suits
their political purposes, cast these in sacred terms, and invest them with
religious legitimacy. This is a deforming though easy thing to do.
All religious systems are made up of discourses which are, more often than
not, dialectically linked to each other as in light and darkness, peace
and war, evil and goodness. Hence, it is possible to detach and
expropriate a part from the whole, divest it of its original context and
purpose, and put it to political uses. Such an instrumentalist approach is
nearly always absolutist, that is, it entails an absolute assertion of
one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard
of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and
twists the political process wherever it unfolds. The idea of Jihad is a
case in point.
It is an Islamic precept with multiple meanings which include engagement
in warfare, social service, humanitarian work, intellectual effort, or
spiritual striving. The word is formed from an Arabic root jehd which
denotes an intense effort to achieve a positive goal. Jihad entails then a
striving to promote the good and overcome the bad, to bring light where
there is darkness, prosperity where there is poverty, remedy where there
is sickness, knowledge where there is ignorance, clarity where there is
confusion. Thus mujahada (as also jihad) in early Islamic usage was an
engagement with oneself for the achievement of moral and spiritual
perfection. A mujtahid is a religious scholar who does ijtihad, i.e.
strives to interpret religious texts in the light of new challenges and
circumstances.
In early Islamic history when the need to defend and also enlarge the
community of believers was deemed paramount, Jihad became widely
associated with engagement in warfare. Following a prophetic tradition,
some early theologians divided Jihad in two categories: The 'physical
jihad' - participation in religious wars of which the rules and conditions
were strictly laid down - was assigned the "Lesser Jihad"
category. Its premises were strictly defined.
As Muslim power and numbers increased and pluralistic patterns of life and
outlook emerged, there were clashes between points of view no less than
personal ambitions. Similarly, wars and dynastic conflicts frequently
involved convergences of interests and alliances between Muslims and
non-Muslims, and battles were fought. Traditionally, these were described
variously as harb, Jang, qital or muqatala but not as Jihad, a tradition
which has been all but jettisoned by contemporary Islamists.
The Greater Jihad was that which one undertook within the self and society
- to conquer greed and malice, hates and anger, ego and hubris, above all
to achieve piety, moral integrity, and spiritual perfection. The great
sufis invested in the concept an even deeper meaning of striving to
subjugate the Self (jihad bi nafsihi) to the service of the creator and
His creation. Many of them dedicated their lives to the service of the
weak and needy, by their example attracted millions to embrace Islam, and
in such places as India continue to be revered by Muslims and Hindus
alike.
It is a rare Islamist party today that devotes itself meaningfully to the
mission of helping peoples and communities. To the contrary contemporary
Islamists view with disfavour those who would follow the example of the
sufi saints who in their time had waged the Greater Jihad. Two such
figures in Pakistan today are Dr. Akhtar Hamid Khan and Maulana Abdul
Sattar Edhi. Both are deeply influenced by the Sufi tradition, both are
continuing to build social institutions that assist millions of people,
and both have been persecuted by those who claim to be champions of Islam.
Without a hint of doubt, contemporary Muslim ideologues and militants have
reduced the rich associations of jihad to the single meaning of engagement
in warfare, entirely divested of its conditions and rules. Thus the war
against a Marxist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally became the
most famous jihad of the 20th century even though it was armed and
financed by the United States, a non-Muslim superpower. Today, such
activities as terrorism, sectarian strife, and the killings of innocent
people are claimed as holy warfare. This reductionism is by no means
unique to the Muslim world.
Nextdoor in India, Hindu militancy is doing much the same despite their
very different religious tradition. They have cast Hinduism as a religion
of violence, warfare and force. There are of course elements of violence
in the Hindu tradition. Mahatma Gandhi was a reformer who recognized that
violence had a part in India's religious and cultural tradition but also
viewed ahimsa as the essence of Hinduism. In his study on Gandhi, Rajmohan
Gandhi mentions that when his friend C.F. Andrews observed that
"Indians had rejected 'bloodlust' in times past and non-violence had
become an unconscious instinct with them, Gandhi reminded Andrews that
'incarnations' in Indian legends were 'bloodthirsty, revengeful and
merciless to the enemy'." (The Good Boatman. P35)
But Gandhi was a humane and imaginative leader. So he understood the
essential lesson of the Mahabharata, which ends in a handful of survivors,
differently - that "violence was a delusion and a folly." By
contrast, in the discourse of militant Hindu parties one scarcely finds a
mention of ahimsa as a Hindu value while the emphases abound on violence,
force and power. The same obsessions occupy the Jewish and Christian
variants of religious-political movements. Not long ago, a ranking rabi of
Israel ruled that in the cause of expanding Israeli settlements in
Palestine the killing of Arabs was religiously ordained.
In the Islamist discourse I am unable to recognize the Islamic - religion,
society, culture, history, or politics - as lived and experienced by
Muslims through the ages. The Islamic has been in most respects a
pluralistic civilization marked with remarkable degrees of diversity and
patterns of antagonism and collaboration. The cultural life of the
traditional Muslim was formed by at least four sets of intellectual
legacies. Theology was but one such legacy. The others were philosophy and
science, aesthetics, and mysticism.
Contemporary Islamists seek to suppress all but a narrow view of the
theological legacy. Professor Fazlur Rahman was arguably the most eminent
scholar of Islamic philosophy in our time. I knew him to be a devout
Muslim who was more knowledgeable about classical Arabic, Persian and
Ottoman Turkish than any Islamist scholar I have known. When Mohammed Ayub
Khan proposed to establish an Institute of Islamic Studies in Pakistan, he
resigned his position at McGill University to lead this institution and
make it into a world class academy. A few years later, a sustained
campaign was launched against him and he was forced to leave the country.
Religious scholars, artists, poets and novelists, including Nobel Laureate
Naguib Mahfouz, have suffered persecution and assault at the hands of
self-appointed champions of Islam. Complexity and pluralism threaten most
- hopefully not all - contemporary Islamists, because they seek an Islamic
order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics,
intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion. Their agenda is simple,
therefore very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the
middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity.
Neither Muslims nor Jews nor Hindus are unique in this respect. All
variants of contemporary 'fundamentalism' reduce complex religious systems
and civilizations to one or another version of modern fascism. They are
concerned with power not with the soul, with the mobilization of people
for political purposes rather than with sharing or alleviating their
sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time bound
political agenda.
Source: Pakistani
Newspaper Dawn
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