A Tale of Two Faisals

So, it turns out that Faisal Shahzad is just another spoilt brat from the developing world, with a massive sense of entitlement and and absolutely no self-awareness. "Why do you have to follow democracy?" asks Faisal, the well-funded son of a retired Pakistani airforce officer, in a long email to like-minded vipers. (Btw, someone needs to find out if the source of Faisal's father wealth is legit, or -as is common - just the well-known cornering of national resources by a corrupt power elite).

"Why do you have to follow democracy (Human-made laws) if you're already given Laws revealed from Allah, Quran and Sunnah?" asks the moron who went nightclubbing as an undergraduate at the University of Bridgetport, before he turned into the proverbial ungrateful viper. Why indeed, Faisal, why indeed? You answered that question very well, didn't you, you self-entitled jackass (can there be a hybrid viper-jackass)? In fact, if you have any more of such "divinely-revealed" laws for the world, well then, thank you very much, but no thanks. The world definitely does not need any more such laws as articulated by the babalog .



Half a world away, there is another Faisel. Dr. Shah Faisel, a resident of Indian Kashmir, lost his father to terrorism at a young age. An incident that might have broken him and his remaining family turned the young boy into something else. Instead of turning that rage into venom, and becoming a ticking timebomb against innocents, Dr. Faisel used the past seven years to turn himself into somebody worthy of celebration. He first studied to become a physician, then decided to take the extremely hard Indian Civil Services Exam, leaving home to study at the supportive Hamdard Study Circle in New Delhi. To give you an idea of just how hard it is to get through, in 2007 approximately 300,000 people took the exam, of which about 800 were finally selected. About the same numbers and proportions for this year too. And Dr. Shah Faisel was the topper, as in "stood first" in Indian English, the first Kashmiri to top the exam and to add to the pool of Indian Muslims within the ranks of India's policymakers.

Perhaps, it is because Dr. Shah Faisel was not one of the babalog, perhaps because his circumstances were so very different from his namesake buffoon in North America, perhaps because he had no one to give him regular cash infusions, perhaps because he didn't have an inflated sense of entitlement, that he was able to do something positive for himself, for the memory of his murdered father, and for his community. As he described the tragedy that struck him, "I had only two choices - to be bogged down, or to stand up and face the challenge." And unlike the cowardly Faisal of Bridgeport, the Faisel of Kashmir will be held up as a role model for other Indian Kashmiris to follow.

Easter

It's a perfect spring day here. Brilliant sunshine, mild temperatures, crocuses and daffodils out in full strength (not mine, thanks to the deer, another post about that). And it's Easter Sunday. We are going to have a nice Easter brunch, eggs, bacon, hash browns, and the works. And since we don't go to church, it's going to be a restful day for the most part, I hope.

As it's K.'s "holiday" (sort of), he has to organize the festivities. We went to an Easter egg hunt yesterday and the kids had a blast, running around picking up their candy, their faces alive with excitement and happiness. Then a quick dinner at Senor Salsa in Fairfield and the day concluded most satisfactorily.

I am more attached to my Indian/Hindu traditions than is K. to his own religious ones. So on Durga Puja and Diwali, I do include the religious aspects of my culture. But more and more, keeping our respective traditions alive involves food. So Thanksgiving and Christmas are about preparing huge meals together and eating them with each other and with friends (besides the gifts for Christmas). The turkey, the mashed potatoes, the sweet potatoes, the tian, the pasta salad, etc. Diwali is all vegetarian, saag paneer, alu-gobi, dal makhani, baingan sabzi, and other yummy Indian stuff.

And now Easter too is about eating. But I like this tradition. We celebrate these occasions as a time for us all to come together as a family, as a group of friends, and be happy in each other's company. A full table brings us all around it to joke and laugh and chat (and for me to have some prosecco). And if this is what my children can take away from the meaning of holidays, Christian, Hindu or whatever, then I will have considered my job well done. Recently, I stumbled across some ultra-religious blogs - Christian, Muslim, Hindu - and I am just saddened at the meaning given to faith in those writings - the "this is the only truth" meaning, the "everyone else is damned" message, the "I'm so superior" attitude. I keep telling my kids that ethics and moral values are not related to piety. I can teach my kids perfectly well the difference between right and wrong, without dragging them to temple or church or mosque. And I also warn them repeatedly to never marry a religious fanatic (you can never start too early with the warnings!). And the best way to reinforce positive values is around a dining table full of good food cooked lovingly by one's mother and father, and joined by good friends. This I truly believe.

Religion and Bollywood

There has been some commentary recently about Bollywood's take on Islamic terrorism. It did in fact occur to me too, that of all the major film industries in the world, it has been Bollywood, in all its overblown, screechy melodrama, that has had the guts to take on the most vexing question of our times - Islamic terrorism and Islamic identity post 9-11. Films like A Wednesday dealt with the problem of domestic terrorism in India and one man's (Naseeruddin Shah) quest to end it in the manner he knew best. More recently, at least three films have tackled the status of Muslims in post-9/11 America: New York, Kurbaan, and My Name is Khan.



I have seen (and liked, although I cannot endorse its solution) A Wednesday. Fast-paced drama and action with a central theme that lifts it way above the usual cop thriller genre. The manner in which the harmless, middle-class Naseeruddin Shah transforms himself into a ruthless killer (without firing a shot himself) was just amazing. I confess to not having watched the others, mainly because I dread the treatment of a serious issue such as Muslim profiling in a mainstream Bollywood fashion. I suppose I will rent and watch these films at some point, but I feel that all these movies will suffer from the same weakness - a director's temptation to take full advantage of a location shoot to throw in all kinds of things irrelevant to the main theme. Eyewitness reports for My Name is Khan confirm that, along with the central character's religious identity, the film also throws in Asperger's Syndrome, Hurricane Katrina and racial problems in the south. Can one film possibly be so many things to so many people?


But overall, what is interesting is that Bollywood films are trying to present these issues for discussion, in a manner in which Hollywood and western film industries are unable to do, except via exasperating acts of provocation like the Dutch filmaker, Geert Wilder's Fitna.

In India, in general, there is a meaningful discussion of Muslim identity in the news. What I found refreshing about the program on NDTV was that the panel included a range of Muslim opinion, including Bollywood stars like Shahrukh Khan and Soha Ali Khan but also verging-on-Taliban-type Dr. Zakir Naik. Perhaps, this is because there are so many Indian Muslims that one has to take their views into account, not just marginalize them.

Perhaps, the most interesting part of the program was the audience participation. There was a young Muslim woman in hijab who stated that she would try to "counsel" any potential hijab-less friend about the "correct" way. Another woman got up and said that if any young girl in her neighborhood suddenly started wearing a hijab, she would be "worried" about her. That, in my opinion, is at the heart of the differences between orthodox Muslims and others. The orthodox don't just consider that they are following their own path to God and please could the rest of us just leave them alone to do it. They do actually consider the unveiled and the unorthodox as "bad" or "misguided". Meanwhile, the unveiled and unorthodox consider the taking on of restrictive clothing and visible markers of identity (such as beards) as "abnormal" and "worrisome." Personally, I would side with the liberals and the progressives on this matter. I would never restrict the right of a woman to veil herself or that of a man to grow a beard and to wear a skull cap (as has done Nicolas Sarkozy of France). But, I am not sure whether the orthodox of any faith would respect my right to wear what I want and practise my faith freely, if they were in a position to influence public policy. That is the real difference between us.

Religion and Madness

I know there is so much going on here - the whole Sarah Palin thing, the crash of financial giants that has become almost an everyday occurrence. But I am going to write today on another kind of madness that seems to get people all riled up - the perceived intrusion of new religions on "their" turf.

Perhaps because I have the eye of an outsider here (despite years of living here and being very fond of the country and the people), I am more sensitive to the way that outsiders are perceived and treated everywhere. Call it the immigrant syndrome. Anyway, in just the last two days, the Washington Post's section on religion has reported that Hindus are persecuting Christians in India, Christians are harassing Muslims in Italy, the construction of a Hindu temple in suburban Washington D.C. is causing strained relations with the community, and that anti-Semitism is on the rise among Europeans .

I am less than convinced that any one religion holds the entire truth in its meager pouch. Events around the world have left me more convinced than ever that while religious traditions inspire much beauty (I can write pages and pages on the beauty inspired by religious devotional traditions), the practitoners of religion can do more harm to the reputations of their own faiths than any so-called "outsider religions."

There's Criticism and then there's Criticism

I finally read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, Infidel. It was troubling to read, both for its content and for the author's attitudes to her native land and faith. At one level, I completely understand her incredible anger against her own upbringing. We feel the oppressiveness of our own cultures far more than do outsiders to our cultures. The disillusioned Catholic or Lutheran has far more anger against his or her own faith than would a Hindu who has only a hazy idea of what Christian guilt or original sin is all about. Similarly, we as outsiders can only shudder at Hirsi Ali's childhood experience of circumcision and of the oppressive gender relations in Saudi Arabia. But our lives are not affected by it so we have only a partial understanding of these issues.
So why then am I not wholly persuaded of the utter horror of Islam, as Hirsi Ali would have us believe? Partly, because I am familiar with the work of other reformers of Islam. The most notable being Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. Now Badshah Khan was a Pashtun, a member of the same groups of people who live in Pakistan and Afghanistan, peoples now being pursued by NATO, the Pakistani armies (with lukewarm enthusiasam) as they are now great supporters of the Taliban. But less than a hundred years ago, these same Pashtuns became the best example of nonviolent resistance to the British, their leader the Frontier Gandhi, the living example of how any faith and any people can be harnessed for the cause of good.

The Frontier Gandhi worked tirelessly against medieval Pashtun practices as the veiling of women, their segregation from larger society, their powerlessness. He also campaigned against the daily violence and the gun culture that prevailed among his own people. He endured prison and torture for all these activities. But he was so powerful an influence among the Pashtuns that the day he died, hundreds of thousands of Pashtuns crossed the Afghan border to join other Pashtuns in mourning the passing of this great man. His Khudai Khidmatgars - red-shirted volunteers - have passed into legend as the reformist service-oriented league that captured the imagination of an entire generation of freedom fighters. Why did he succeed (albeit briefly, as after independence in 1947, he became a political prisoner of the Pakistani government)? Ghaffar Khan succeeded because his criticism was rooted in love for his country and his people, not in hate of these tribal people. This, I think, is the difference between him and the Hirsi Ali's and Irshad Manji's of the Islamic world. The Frontier Gandhi often said that it was difficult to love the Pashtuns, who are a notoriously violent and abrasive people. But in order to bring about change in these societies, he insisted that one has to love them. His whole life was a testimony of the power of love that enabled him to work amongst the worlds's most "unlovable" people.

Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji might make me nod in agreement at the plight of their status under Islam. But their ill-concealed hatred of their own people make me realize why they are not female avatars of the Frontier Gandhi. They have huge audiences among the non-Muslim western audience that applauds them but they have no standing at all among their own people, ironically, the very ones that they wish to change through the story of their lives. Are there any Muslim activists who do seem authentic to me? Yes, there are. For example there is Pervez Hoodbhoy, physicist in Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, who is a voice of reason. He is unafraid to criticize fundamentalists and their government patrons. So is Asma Jehangir, human rights activist in Pakistan. Why are they both more convincing to me than Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji? It is because they both live and work in the societies that they want to change and they have at the very least affection for the people to whom they want to bring change. Affection or even respect for Somalis or Muslims in general is not something that comes across in the books authored by either Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji.