March 30, 2008

‘The problem is not whether Muslims are right or wrong in cases such as the controversy over the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) or the Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie, but whether there is a way out of the clash between those claiming freedom of expression in the west and others demanding respect for religion in the Muslim world. In the case of the Islam and the west, we are not experiencing a clash of civilizations as much as a clash of intolerances’.

This is from a book I am reading now. And I feel tempted to go on quoting from it without any comment from me. But I should first tell a few words about the book and its author.

The book titled The Spirit of India is in fact among the precious gifts I received from my newly won friends in India. This one came to me from Renuka Narayan, who is perhaps associated with Hindustan Times. She was trying to impress on me that the Jatak Tale offering a different version of the Ramayan betrays an anti-Ram and anti-Hindu trend on the part of Gautam Buddha. I on my part tried to convince her that the Mahatma did not harbour any animosity against Ramchandarji and the tale as told by him to his Bhikshus carries no such strand with it. She remained unconvinced, but was kind enough not to withhold the gift she had brought for me.

It, of course, is a thought-provoking book. To my pleasant surprise, its author is an Iranian scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo, who till recently, say from 2002 to 2006, was Director of Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran. But in April, 2006, he came under cloud. He was arrested and remained in prison for about four months. Immediately after his release he compiled the present work. And Oxford University Press in Delhi was prompt in bringing it out in the early months of this year.

Here in this book Ramin Jahanbegloo has discussed India in terms of personalities such as Rahindranath Tagore, Gandhiji, Dr Radha Krishnan, Anand Coomara Swamy, Sri Aurobindo, who in his opinion, represent the spirit of India and are custodians of its soul.

This galaxy of leading Indian minds includes two Muslims, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. I am concerned here with the two chapters devoted to these two personalities, more particularly the former one where the esteemed author has discussed terrorism, which, as he regrets, has come to be associated with the Muslims. ‘Islam’ he says ‘often seen as the West’s ‘other’ and depicted as a monocultural and intolerant religion, itself has centuries of experience of hosting and regulating a diverse cultural mosaic’.

Out of these centuries he picks out the one of Andusian experience, or to be more precise, ‘Corodoba paradigm’, which, according to him, is ‘one zenith of Islamic civilisation, where many of the principles of inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue could be fully realised’.

But he regrets that now Islamic civilisation has not only lost its past glory, ‘but has also lost the capacity to comprehend the virtues and the causes of its past glory’.

The singular reason for this, according to him, ‘is the transformation of Muslims from creators and animators of ideas to consumers of ideas’. Explaining his point, he says, ‘On the moral and spiritual front Muslims have been trying to recycle the ideas of their forefathers and on the material front they are just consumers of western instrumental rationality’.

Discussing terrorism he says that there is no use repeating in an apologistic way the oft-repeated phrase ‘Islam is the religion of peace’. He is frank in saying that ‘violence is a curse from which no major religion has been free historically. In the long run there is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ religions. There are only ‘hard readings’ and ‘soft readings’ of religious texts. Hard reading ends up with a hard doctrine of international politics. We can find in all religions a group of hardliners, who believe that hard religion is the only possible way to face the rough realities of our world’.

Jahanbegloo regards Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan as the products of the soft readings of religious texts. This explains their close relationship with Gandhiji. They ‘deepened Gandhi’s thoughts by demonstrating the point that Islam and non-violence were reconcilable.

‘Gandhi’ he says ‘had read also Amir Ali’s History of Saracens and had arrived at the conclusion that Islam had once been a tolerant and multicultural civilisation’. And he adds ‘when Gandhi said that for him Dharama meant firmness in upholding truth, he followed this affirmation by referring to the example of Hazrat Ali (RA) as a model of restraint’. And he quotes Gandhi saying ‘you must know how to restrain your anger if you desire to maintain non-violence in action for any length of time. Hazrat Ali (RA), the hero of Islam, was once spat upon by an adversary; and it is my conviction that if he had not restrained his anger at the time, Islam would not have maintained its unbroken career of progress up to the present time’.

Jahanbegloo also comes out as a defender of Maulana Azad. In reply to his critics, who smell out in his nationalism a changed attitude with regard to Islamic civilisation, he quotes him from his presidential address in the 1940s session of Congress, where he says ‘I am a Muslim and profoundly conscious of the fact that I have inherited Islam’s glorious traditions of the last thirteen hundred years. I am not prepared to lose even a small part of that legacy’.

So this is how Jahanbegloo has understood and interpreted the spirit of India and as a corollary to it, the spirit of Indian Muslims. Inspired by the idealistic thinking of the leading minds of India he likes to conceive India as a peaceful diversity. Diversity is of course there. But how far is the Indian society keen and able to transform this diversity into a peaceful diversity as dreamt by its idealist thinkers? This is the crucial issue.