Who Speaks For Islam..?

In the fall of 2006, I arranged to have a house warming celebration called Milad, a Muslim Friday evening gathering and prayer, to sanctify my newly built wooden house in my village in Morang. It hadtaken me months of running around to put together the materials and men for the house—wooden planks, beams and pillars salvaged from the two-story shack my father had built years ago; recycling of an old house bought and hauled from near the East-West Highway; corrugated tin, nails, bathroom materials from Biratnagar; and the carpenter-builders from near the border.
And the disruption of the unexpected late monsoon got worse when our young helper, a Rajbanshi girl, eloped with one of the young carpenters. The rest of the carpenters fled,fearing retribution from the girls’ folk. So, when the house finally rose into shape, I planned celebration. The week before the Muslim prayer, I had had a similar gathering of the village Bhajan Mandali. My Nepali-singing villagers came with musical instruments, danced, sang, and offered consecrated sweets. Now, we were ready to celebrate Milad.

Growing up, I had always carried a deep feeling of gratitude to the Muslims for my survival. My life would have taken a different course had a Muslim merchant not picked me up at midnight from a Calcutta-bound Toofan Mail, one of the fastest trains those days, where my father’s people had put me away in my parents’ absence. If not dead or maimed and made to beg, I might have grown up from age three as a street urchin, eventually graduating, if lucky, as a Calcutta gangster or worse. When my mother’s people drove her out of their community and caste for hitching her destiny to my father’s, her Muslim friend Hasina had given her shelter.

My mother had promised a Tajia, a paper temple, on Muharram if I would be found alive. And I was found alive and in time brought to her. Growing up among the Rajbanshis, Muslims and, later, Chhetri-Bahuns, I had taken part in the customs, rituals, and traditions of all three communities. My pundit father sent me to learn Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. And I regularly joined Milad and sang praises to Nabi, as Prophet Mohammad is called. Sanglu, my Rajbanshi dharma grandma’s sharecropper, had learned to decipher Bangla stories of the benevolent Hatimtai (whose dictum, “Do good without expectations,” was a lesson) and the brave early Khaliphs. Djinns, who visited him in his youth, had taught him reading, he said. So, Sanglu whom I called Mama, mother’s brother, taught me to read those stories and wept hearing me recite them. I could see how powerfully stories could move people.

On Muharram, I joined the roaming Tajia group—a motley crowd of drummers, one or two village gymnasts, young wannabe wresters, stick fighters, sword swingers and spear thrusters. By the time my mother fulfilled her promise of sponsoring a Tajia in my name, I had learned a few gymnastic moves—handwalking, flipflop—some wrestling (I always lost the bouts) and many stick swinging skills. And I never missed the Milad for its communal singing and, more importantly, for the rice pudding. So, now in 2006, back home for a year, I invited the entire village for Milad.

Some brought banana leaves; others dug holes in the courtyard to cook rice pudding. The Maulavi, the priest of the village mosque, came. In recent years, he had had the mosque built of brick and cement. When I was growing up, the mosque was made of bamboo and hay and the Maulavi never stayed because the village could barely feed him, let alone pay a salary. But now, the young Maulavi, from right across the border in India, had organised everything well. One of his brothers was being trained to be a Maulana somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, he said. We could smell the aroma of rice pudding. And now we all sat on jute and hay mat. The Maulavi began. He spoke of the significance of Milad. He commented on the fact that despite being a Hindu, I had arranged Milad to inaugurate my house. He said, “If Muslims follow the five pillars of Islam well—Kalmah (profession of faith), Namaz(prayer), Roja (fasting during the month of Ramadan), Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), and Zakat (charity), people will come to Islam on their own.” He also denounced Islamic extremists who had defamed Islam. He went on preaching.

I waited for the ritual singing to begin but in vain. I was eager to show how I could still join in the Arabic musical praise to the Prophet. When he wouldn’t stop the prosaic sermon, I asked him if there was going to be some singing. He said that singing in praise of the Prophet is not allowed in Islam. One or two villagers objected.

“Why not? We used to sing,” they said. “Look, you were Barelavis then! Because only Barelvis believe in singing but I have made the whole village Deobandi now,” the Maulavi said, proudly. “We followers of Deoband do not believe in singing. Our Prophet, peace be upon him, was just a human being. Why should we sing praises to a human being? That would be idolatry.”

“But that was so much fun—to sing the praise song even though we didn’t understand much of it,” people said.

Soon, I also came to know that the village no longer celebrated Muharram, either, because they were told that it was a Shia festival. I felt sad.

This year, Eid came within a day of 9/11. All over the world, the Muslim community has come under the scanner. Who has the ownership of Islam is the burning question before the community. Some rebel Muslims, like the Somali Ayaan Hirsi Ali, see Islam as unredeemable, thus playing into the hands of the Muslim baiters. Other more serious scholars like the Pakistani Akbar Ahmad find the Deobandi and Wahabi orthodoxy winning over the tolerant but mystical Sufi and the modernising but retreating Aligarh strains for a variety of reasons, including the West’s treatment of Islam and Muslims. The fight over the soul of Islam is at its peak. Who will take control of the ummah— the orthodox literalists who see only one way—their way—and no other way to faith and sanctity or those who believe in change, multiple paths, tolerance and common humanity?  But the Muslim intellectuals in the West alone can hardly be enough to rescue Islam because the real battle for its soul is taking place not in America or Europe but within Muslim societies.

Posted on: 2010-09-15 08:31--Link To Read In -The Kathmandu Post From Nepal