An antidote to Islamophobia, within and beyond
The Muslim laity must shed its docility and challenge the ‘religious authorities’ to be open to Islam’s pluralistic teachings
A. Faizur Rahman
I
f Islamist terror is a major inter-
national issue today, so is the
response to it. For instance, the
UN ‘Special Rapporteur on free-
dom of religion or belief ’ flagged
the “epidemic proportions” of an-
ti-Muslim hatred with the lament
that member states responded to
security threats “by adopting mea-
sures which disproportionately
target Muslims and define Muslims
as both high risk and at risk of
radicalization”.
Exploring the reasons
In fact, the spread of Islamophobia
across the globe has been so ram-
pant over the last couple of de-
cades that it is now considered an
industry and a subject of study in
psychiatry. Springer, one of
world’s leading scientific publish-
ers, brought out a volume in 2019
titled Islamophobia and Psychia-
try: Recognition, Prevention, and
Treatment.
The Cambridge dictionary de-
scribes Islamophobia as an “un-
reasonable dislike or fear of, and
prejudice against, Muslims or Is-
lam.”But the All-Party Parliamen-
tary Group on British Muslims
(APPG) goes further and equates it
with racism that targets expres-
sions of Muslimness or perceived
Muslimness. The APPG has a point
because long before the term
gained currency, Frantz Fanon,
the celebrated anti-colonial writer
and psychoanalyst, had engaged
with Islamophobia without men-
tioning it, and saw it as an expres-
sion of religious racism of the colo-
nising West.
In The Wretched of the Earth,
which Fanon wrote in the context
of the French occupation of Mus-
AP
lim Algeria, he described “the
church in the colonies,” as “the
white people’s Church, the fo-
reigner’s Church. She does not call
the native to God’s ways but to the
ways of the white man, of the mas-
ter, of the oppressor.”
The West’s fear
Despite this depressing reality, the
West’s fear of Islam or Muslims has
little to do with religion and eve-
rything to do with cultural fric-
tions and political rivalries as Gra-
ham E. Fuller rightly concluded in
A World without Islam. In the case
of India too it was the tussle for
power that made people like Ban-
kim Chandra Chatterjee, Chandra-
nath Basu, Lala Lajpat Rai, and
Bhai Parmanand suspect the
Muslims.
If in Ananda Math, Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee fictionalised
Hindu nationalistic sentiments by
narrating how “everyone was an-
gry with the Muslims for the anar-
chy and lawlessness of their
reign”, in the early 1900s, Rai and
Parmanand floated the idea of ter-
ritorially separating Hindus and
Muslims long before Jinnah ima-
gined Pakistan.
Even B.R. Ambedkar was not
sure about the political stability of
an undivided India. In his book
Thoughts on Pakistan he wanted
the Hindus to concede Jinnah’s de-
mand for a separate Muslim state
because without Pakistan, India
would have to contend with 65
million Muslims, while after its
creation, this number would fall to
20 million thus greatly reducing
the proportion of Muslim to Hindu
seats in central and provincial le-
gislatures, which would further
fall once weightage was cancelled.
It is this same unfounded fear of
Muslim numbers that reflects in
the recent enactment of laws
against “love-jihad” by several In-
dian States, and raucous calls for a
population regulation law in India
to “tackle the problem of declining
Hindu population and to stop the
rise of non-Hindu population”.
The Muslim contribution
But what is inexplicable is, more
than seven decades after Partition,
anti-Muslim sentiment not just ex-
ists but continues to surge in India.
Why is this so if Muslims have con-
sciously stayed away from terro-
rism and never betrayed the faith
reposed in them by Prime Minister
Narendra Modi who in September
2014 had said, “Indian Muslims
will live for India. They will die for
India. They will not want anything
bad for India.”?
Apart from the aforementioned
reasons, the answer lies in the fact
that Muslim religious leaders have
done nothing to encourage the
community to win the trust of oth-
er people, a basic requirement for
peaceful coexistence. Unlike polit-
ical trust in liberal democracies
which according to British author
Marek Kohn is founded upon the
suspicion that the powerful will be
tempted to abuse power, social
trust (as argued by American polit-
ical scientist Eric Uslaner) is based
on the optimistic premise that
although people may follow diffe-
rent religions or secular ideolo-
gies, they hold fundamental va-
lues in common.
The Muslim clergy has misera-
bly failed on this front. It saw the
illegal demolition of the Babri Mas-
jid as condemnable act of religious
extremism but remained a mute
spectator when a Hindu temple
was burnt down in Pakistan a few
months ago. And when Pakistan’s
Supreme Court ordered its recon-
struction, no Muslim religious or-
ganisation welcomed the decision.
However, provocative televange-
list Zakir Naik issued a statement
that non-Muslims in a Muslim state
do not have the right to construct
their places of worship even with
their own funds. The unIslamic
conversion of Hagia Sophia into a
mosque was also greeted with
either deafening silence or quiet
support.
Similar clerical hypocrisy pre-
vails when it comes to condemn-
ing draconian laws in Muslim
countries such as those pertaining
to blasphemy and apostasy in Pa-
kistan whose blatant misuse has
resulted in the murder of both
Muslims and non-Muslims. The Is-
lamically baseless concept of ghaz-
wa al Hind (war against India) is
another issue on which the Indian
ulema are silent. The issue conti-
nues to be invoked by the Hindu
right to question the loyalty of
Muslims, and thus, is yet another
reason for Hindu-Muslim mistrust.
Overcoming the suspicion
If this climate of suspicion has to
be overcome, the Indian ulema
must emphatically declare the
concept of ghazwa al-Hind to be
unIslamic apart from clarifying
that India is not darul harb (abode
of war). They must also announce
that the word kafir has no pejora-
tive overtones and does not refer
to non-Muslims. Apostasy and
blasphemy have also got to be re-
moved from the list of capital
crimes under Islamic law.
In short, what is needed is a rad-
ical rethink of Muslim theology. As
this is not possible in India with
the outdated madrasa system in
existence, it is up to the Muslim lai-
ty to shed its deferential docility
and start challenging the self-pro-
claimed epistemological suprema-
cy of “religious authorities” and
pressurise them into completely
revamping the madrasa curricu-
lum to harmonise it with the plu-
ralistic teachings of Islam and mo-
dernity. There is no other antidote
to Islamophobia from within.
A. Faizur Rahman is Secretary-General of
the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of
Moderate Thought.
E-mail: themoderates2020@gmail.com