The death of Rumi
Tabish Khair | The Hindu | June 25, 2006
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2006/06/25/stories/2006062500160400.htm
THERE is something missing. I sit at the table surrounded by
about a dozen distant relatives. They are mostly doctors and engineers
and we are in the banquet room of a posh hotel in London, celebrating
a wedding. Almost all the people in the room have lived in the "West"
for decades ? though they have lived in different countries, mostly
England, the United States and Canada, but also occasionally Germany
or Denmark.
The table is loaded with delicious Indo-Pakistani food.
Conversation flows. It reminds me of many such occasions I have had in
India or Denmark, with Muslims and Christians, with atheists and
believers. And yet I keep feeling that there is something missing, at
least on my table. It is not the food. Waiters keep us well plied with
that.
It is only later that I manage to put my finger on the lack.
The conversation on my table was different from what I am accustomed
to in my circle of writers, artists and academics, Muslim or not.
The conversation embraced professional matters: salaries,
jobs, prospects. This was not unusual or surprising. Academics love to
complain about their jobs; writers worry about royalties. What was
surprising was that whenever the conversation moved away from
professional matters, it got stuck in Islam.
The recurring topic
There were people of my parents' generation and people younger
than me at my table. They came from at least four "Western" countries.
They had seen many different things, for, they were educated and
reasonably successful in their fields. They also shared a lot, as all
of them belonged to a larger and culturally rich Indo-Pakistani Muslim
community. But when they stopped talking jobs, they ended up talking
religion.
Only one of them was politically religious and felt that Islam
was under threat, and even he was frank in his admiration of what he
called the "tolerant and decent Englishman". Most of the others only
discussed religion in humane terms: one of them, for instance,
narrated the common story about Prophet Mohammad and an old woman who
would toss garbage on him every morning when he passed her house. His
companions noted that he never protested. One day when the woman
failed to throw garbage on him, he went into the house to discover the
old woman lying ill and alone. He nursed her back to health.
I remembered this story from my childhood, and appreciated it.
Many of the other stories were similar. They were religious, but not
necessarily fundamentalist. And yet something disturbed me. I was
shaken by the fact that in a group of a dozen educated Muslim
professionals, the conversation stayed stuck in religious areas,
quotations from sacred books and narratives of admirable actions by
admired religious personalities.
Free-ranging conversations
I was not used to such insular conversation. For example,
among the Muslims I knew in India, conversation could veer into
religion on such collective occasions, but it was more likely to
encompass local politics, social gossip and banter, fashion,
(Bollywood) films, TV programmes, cricket, even literature at times .
But since then I have remarked this tendency, especially among
professional Muslims in the West, to end up talking religion.
Not all of this is due to the rise of political Islamism. In
fact, the people I have in mind are not really Islamists, even though
they might be religious. They are people with technical and
professional education: rich enough in material terms, but sometimes
greatly impoverished in cultural terms.
Some of this has to do with the kind of education they chose,
or had forced upon them. In places like India, Pakistan or Egypt, you
do not choose to study history or literature or film. You study those
subjects only if you have no other choice. If you have the choice, you
study medicine, engineering, computers or at least business
management. The "muslim" world ? and actually all of the "East" ? is
in a rush to catch up with the "West". And the "West" has long told us
that our cultures and literatures are worthless ? as Babington, later
Lord, Macaulay put it in the recent 19th century, one shelf of a
European library is worth more than all the literatures of India and
Arabia. Our modernisers and conservatives share the realisation that
the Maxim gun ? and its later avatars ? speaks much louder than any
book can.
Colonial heritage
Hence, the desperation of the "East" to seek "modern"
education ? which means medicine, engineering, computers, management
techniques. Who cares about handicraft and sculpture, paintings (yes,
there are Muslim paintings) and literature, dance and drama? As long
as we stay in our own cultural spaces ? unless they are being blasted
by the Taliban or U.S. marines ? we still retain some sense of our
complex and changing cultural heritages. But once such modern
professionals move to the "West", they are confronted with a greater
impoverishment. To their professional training is added the
self-centredness of the "West", the fact that "non-Western" cultural
heritages are even less visible here (especially in public discourse
and basic education) than in their home spaces. They flail about for
some identity to hold on to, and the branch they often grasp is the
branch that is thrust at them both by Islamic fundamentalism and
dominant "Western" discourses ? it is the straight and narrow branch
of textual Islam, with its socio-historical leaves plucked and its
cultural blossoms crushed almost out of existence.
If on the one hand, "Islamic fundamentalism" is the result of
a certain kind of Islamic education (as among the Taliban) and a
genuine, if at times exaggerated, perception of Western imperialism
and double standards, on the other hand it is also a consequence of
this sort of cultural impoverishment. This is part of the explanation
why Abdel Bari Atwan, who interviewed Bin Laden in 1996 and stayed
with him, had this to say in his recent book, The Secret History of
Al-Qaida: "I found it remarkable that so many of the mujahidin
possessed the very highest academic qualifications. There were
doctors, engineers and teachers among them".
Not surprising
Remarkable perhaps, but given the uneven commerce between the
West and the rest and the almost constant dismissal of non-Western
cultures and heritages, not all that surprising. It is this factor
that complicates and adds to the other main branch of Islamic
fundamentalism ? best typified by the Taliban, those students of
Muslim madrassas who have a very different educational and class
background from the doctors and engineers depicted above. Even here
though, the West plays a part ? for, madrassas are basically schools
of theology that did not, unlike so many European "universities" in
the 17th and 18th centuries, develop into places of secular learning
as well. Partly due to European imperialism, so great a gulf was
created between "secular-modern" and "traditional" branches of
learning in Asia and Africa, that madrassas appear to have reduced the
secular content of their syllabi, such as classical Greek philosophy,
from the 18th century onwards. But then that is another story, and
just as sad.
Tabish Khair is the author of The Bus Stopped, published by Picador.
--
"There is nothing more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its
success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things
- because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under
the new."
"The Prince"
Nicolo Machiavelli
--
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