No tears for Indian Muslims

A senior friend of mine who spends much of his time online, passionately airing his strongly-held views on the issues and challenges facing India, its Muslims in particular, is surprisingly sprightly and sharp for his 80 plus years.

Obviously well-read and widely travelled, Ahmad Rashid Shervani sahib writes well and with effortless ease, often giving people like yours truly a huge complex. He is invariably swift in responding cogently and elaborately to my rants on some online groups.

More often than not, his missives raise uncomfortable, prickly questions demanding swift answers from their readers, especially on solutions to the continuing political and economic dispossession of Indian Muslims.

Responding to my latest piece on the US move on Jerusalem, Shervani Sahib wrote: “’Who are Americans and British to give away Palestine and Jerusalem’, asks Aijaz rightly. But this question should be asked by the countries around Palestine and Jerusalem. What are Indian Muslims to do about it? We have problems of our own. How many Muslim countries have shed tears on our plight, ever?”

“Only Indian Muslims kept singing: ‘Jaan beta Khilaafat pe denaaa...’ and sending precious funds to support the Khilafat in the last century. Indian Muslim women even took off their jewellery to contribute to the fund to ‘save’ the Ottoman caliphate in distant Turkey when the British deposed the caliph during the last century!”

Shervani Sahib recalled that the first major anti-Muslim riot in India’s Gujarat broke out just after massive demonstrations had been held against the grabbing of Al-Aqsa Mosque all over the state in 1969 or so. These protests by Gujarati Muslims were so powerful that many Hindus got terrified, thinking they were the target!

Questioning the Indian Muslims’ continuing preoccupation with the notion of the larger Ummah, especially with the suffering of Palestinians, Syrians, and Rohingya Muslims, Shervani Sahib argued: “Even according to Islam, the first responsibility of Indian Muslims is to mind their own business, to look after themselves. This does not seem to be such an easy task, does it? Saare jahan ka dard hamare jigar mein hai. Bohut hogaya! Ab apne dil o jigar men kuch apna dard hi hoe to behtar hai. [Our bleeding heart beats for the whole world. Enough! Now is the time to attend to our own pain, our own problems!]”

Shervani Sahib has on more than one occasion pulled me up for ‘crying’ about the Ummah and our distant brethren in Palestine, Syria and Burma, although one of my recent pieces about the Rohingya genocide forced him to contribute Rs50,000 to a relief fund set up by a Sikh charity.

He asks me to talk about our own ‘headache’ – the continuing deprivation and backwardness of Indian Muslims, especially their performance, or lack of it, on the educational front.

Apparently running his own schools, especially for Muslim girls, he remains obsessed with the issue, insisting time and time again that education is the only way forward, and the key to our progress.

Agreeing with him wholeheartedly about the panacea to our ills, I try to reason with him that we can’t remain indifferent to the suffering of our fellow travellers. After all, we are supposed to feel and act like one body, feeling the pain of each of our limbs, as the Prophet (pbuh), put it.

I pointed out that in the words of the inimitable Iqbal, we cannot judge our community on the criteria of Western nations:

Apni millat par qiyas aqwam-e-maghrib se na kar/Khas hai tarkeeb mein qaum-e-rasool-e-hashmi

“Besides, we South Asian Muslims are different from others. We are more sensitive and sentimental than others when it comes to the plight of our brethren”, I wrote back to Shervani Sahib.

He was far from convinced: “But why? Why should we feel all the pain all the time? Did you ever see the Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians or other Arabs come out in protest for us?”

That shut me up. Unfortunately, that remains the reality. While Muslim intellectuals and writers as well as ordinary Muslims in the Subcontinent remain obsessed with issues like the persecution of the Palestinians and the occupation of Al Quds, our Arab brothers and sisters have never exactly burnt midnight oil worrying about the future of Indian or Rohingya Muslims.

And this isn’t a new phenomenon. South Asian Muslims and their leaders and intellectuals have always been bound to their brethren in the Middle East and elsewhere through an emotional bond. Even our poets and writers have always pined for the lost glory of Muslim lands, rather than write about our more pressing, mundane reality at home.

Much of Iqbal’s poetry – although he paid fulsome tribute to the Subcontinent in his immortal anthem, saare jahan se achcha – remains truly pan-Islamic in nature and strives for the ideal of a resurgent Ummah, calling on the faithful to unite for the protection of the Holy Land:

Aik Hon Muslim Haram Ki Pasbani Ke Liye/Neel Ke Sahil Se Le Kar Ta Bakhak-e-Kashghar [May the Muslims unite in watching over the shrine (Kaaba)/From the banks of the Nile to the deserts of Kashgar (Xinjiang)]

Forever a hopeless romantic, the poet philosopher believed until his death that the movement for an Islamic revival could only begin from Arabia. Indeed, this continuing obsession of Indian Muslims with their distant holy land has always been a big stick in the hands of Hindutva fanatics led by the RSS and BJP. This is one reason why Indian Muslims are often accused of not being ‘Indian enough’ in their outlook.

Compared to this passionate, rather one-sided love affair, few of our fellow believers around the world seem to be familiar with the situation of the Subcontinent’s Muslims, let alone care for our issues and concerns.

One explanation for this state of affairs is the fact that much of the media in the Middle East, especially the Arabic press, has not been big on the coverage of South Asia, its Muslims in particular.

In the 1990s, the coverage improved when the media in the region compulsively followed the developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was mostly because of the Arab involvement in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet occupation, with thousands of Arab fighters, including one certain Osama bin Laden, joining the ‘holy war’ to liberate fellow faithfuls.

Today, however, when there is so much happening in South Asia, from the rising killings and hate attacks on Indian Muslims to the genocide of Rohingya Muslims unfolding on the world community’s watch, it is unfortunate that it barely creates a ripple in the media across the Muslim world. Hardly surprising then that much of the Islamic world remains blissfully ignorant of the plight of the Subcontinent’s Muslims or persecuted minorities like the Rohingya.

Imagine the impact if all 57 Muslim countries spoke in one, firm voice on the issue of the Rohingya or these spine-chilling killings and lynchings in the name of the cow in India. But when Arabs and Muslims cannot act like one global community on such burning issues as Palestine, Syria or Yemen, it is hardly realistic to expect them to speak up for the distant Indian or Rohingya Muslims.

Will this change for the better in the foreseeable future? Unlikely. While we cannot stop caring for others and identifying with our extended family across the globe, perhaps it’s time we reworked our priorities. We need to pay greater attention to setting our own house in order. We are totally on our own and cannot look to the outside world for support.

Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

The writer is an independent writer and former newspaper editor.