The New Nation - Internet Edition

U.R.Ananthamurthy

I know how some of my Muslims friends have begun to feel these days. The media is largely responsible for this. When any arrest is made for suspected terrorism, you invariably hear a Muslim name. Then you are told that the arrested have confessed. Who will not confess under police torture? I do not know if I would not confess to acts that I am not guilty of if I am subjected to physical and mental torture. This so called "confession" is not valid evidence, however, in a court. By the time we learn that the arrested person is not guilty, the damage has been done. It is an assault on our psyche to be informed everyday that a Muslim has been caught by the police or killed in an 'encounter'. We never know whether the encounter could have been avoided. How can the dead speak of what really took place? There is a constitutional guarantee that every 'encounter' killing is homicide unless proved otherwise through an impartial and transparent enquiry. Our nation state does not seem to take this provision seriously for everything is okay if you can generate a mass hysteria.

In my state of Karnataka, I now hear everyday that the "master-mind" of the terror attacks has been caught. If we doubt the authenticity of the story we are considered unpatriotic and anti-national. This surely is the beginning of fascism.

As a citizen I want to ask this question: Why should the media give out names of all the arrested under suspicion before they are proved to be guilty? Some restraint is necessary in a civil society, for, even after they are cleared of their guilt, the damage is done. Many like me have begun to feel that we are living in a nightmarish Kafkaesque world.

The whole nation seems to be neurotic. The rulers have to prove that they are efficient and therefore I have a suspicion that they randomly pick someone to create an illusion of safety among the citizens. (Any party in power or in opposition desiring to capture power has the next election in view.)

This feeling "safe and secure" is also a momentary illusion, for, tomorrow you hear again of some terrorist attack and of more Muslim names getting arrested. We are also shown on TV channels dangerous explosive material supposed to be in their possession for bomb making. Do we believe in the much-hyped "Breaking News" of the TV channels? Yes and No. Feeling torn between belief and suspicion, even as one recognizes their need to sensationalize and closely compete for TRP ratings, is itself a mental harassment for common citizens like me. Don't we have children whom we want to return safely from school?

The harassed police are also under pressure from their nervous political bosses to find the guilty as quickly as they can. The inhuman terrorists, who abuse the word 'Islam', also know how poor the intelligence network in the country is; and the State seems to be serving their interest in arresting anybody who has a Muslim name, for, the terrorists hope to demoralize the rest of the Muslim community in the hope that they would join them, or at least sympathize with them. They carry such attacks in a Muslim country like Pakistan too. This is the story of powerful Bhasmasura, who tries to destroy his creator. This is true of the policy pursued by the USA for hegemony in the world; they have to now suffer for their karma.

The minorities are thus alienated from the mainstream of our nation. If you are a Muslim you can hardly get a rented house in a decent middle-class locality in the IT city of Bangalore. On learning the name, they are politely told that the house has already been taken.

With the elections round the corner, Hindu rioters - a safe word for the Hindu communalists to mark their difference from Islamic fundamentalists - are attacking churches. In a Kannada newspaper, one with the largest circulation and owned by a prominent Indian newspaper group, published a few days ago an irrational and abusive article on the evil designs of Christians to annihilate the Hindu religion, which had the full support of their leader Smt. Sonia Gandhi. The article was right in the front page, which continued in the inner pages. The excuse was that by publishing the article the issue of conversion had been opened for impartial debate. Some months ago, the same paper conducted a sms campaign against me for criticizing a communally poisonous novel against Islam by this very author, who has now launched himself against the Christians.

I must however observe here that despite such psychological war, thousands of our fellow citizens go about living their lives and caring for their children and the old. The truly religious - among both Muslims and Hindus - are pious and compassionate. Otherwise there would have been utter chaos and anarchy in our country.

I feel it is also time all of us, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, did a serious exploration of what constitutes the fundamentals of Islam. This is necessary to understand the core of Islam, and, more importantly, to extricate Islam and Muslims all over the world from the clutches of religious bigots; protect it from misrepresentations of the Western media and all its lackeys; and to highlight the dynamism of Islam as religion and philosophy. Great scholars like Maxime Rodinson, Edward Said, Mohammad Arakoun, Ziyauddin Sardar, Alam Khundmiri, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan and activists like Asghar Ali Engineer have all done this. Only such an attempt would ever resituate Islam for all concerned without which ugly stereotypes and distortions and misrepresentations about Islam and Muslims cannot be confronted.

It is also equally significant to erase the unfortunate gap that exists now between well-meaning secularists and traditional believers, often dubbed as religious fanatics. In difficult times such as ours the conflicts/tensions/ antagonism between genuine secularists and profoundly religious people have to be removed for the good of all. Our great crisis revolves round this aspect too. Otherwise, stereotypes and prejudices would make the situation almost impossible to deal with.

The Christians have at least the West to speak for them, but Indian Muslims have none. President Bush in a Freudian slip perhaps had declared a crusade against them with the support of feudally ruled Muslim states.

Hindus like me who have come under the influence of Gandhi, Ramana, and Paramahamsa who in search of a spiritual realm went beyond any organized religion, now feel threatened. The nature of Hindu civilization, nurtured for more than 2,000 years by disbelievers, for instance like the Buddha, may also be destroyed by cynical supporters of a majoritarian state.

There is a cynical calculation, more so in some parties, less so in others, in dividing Indian people on communal lines for the sake of creating safe vote-banks. It is difficult to create a solid Hindu vote bank for they are divided on caste lines. In the past, during the struggle for freedom and even earlier, there were many reformative movements to fight against casteist hegemony among the Hindus and unite them as a people. One of the greatest of them, Sri Narayana Guru of Kerala got self-esteem and dignity for what was then a semi-untouchable community of toddy tappers. The Guru was a great advaitin himself. For him the untouchable Chandala who brought about a change of heart in the great Adi Shankara was not Shiva in disguise as the myth tells us, but literally a Chandala. Thus he was a "literalist" advaitin. In Karnataka we had a great movement for social justice and unfettered search for spiritual truth in the 12th century. The great poet of that movement, Basava, thought of the dying human body as a temple of the living God which lasts, paradoxically, longer than the seeming solidity of the stone and mortar built temple. He also fought for social justice and equality and got a Brahman girl married to an untouchable. Gandhiji himself was a great reformer.

The paradox is this: now the unity of the Hindus is sought to make our state a majoritarian state. In this seeking of a united Hindu vote bank there is of course no spiritual purpose, although there is a show of festivals and pilgrimages (like the Datta Maala in Chikamagalur) .

Last year, in another great institution for which Gandhiji was the founder and Chancellor until his death, the Gujerath Vidyapeeth, I spoke of a genuine search for a spiritual realm, beyond the boundaries of organized religion. This is about the three urges --- I call them hungers of the soul following a great saint philosopher Simone Weil--- that animated the Gandhian era of our country. They are, hunger for equality, hunger for the spiritual, and hunger for modernity. Writers like me all over the country were inspired by these urges.

Solution to the merely physical hunger for equality appears to be within our reach today. But equality as hunger of the soul is not easily satiated unless it gets coupled, as it does in some great sages of all times - with the other hunger, the spiritual hunger. Both these hungers have their origin in the feeling that all forms of life are sacred and our routine quotidian existence in the temporal world is boring unless it glows with a transcendental meaning. Consumerist paradise can ultimately prove to be dull and tediously repetitive. Great writers of the West have shown how listless and nauseated the human person is in his civilization.

Therefore, when one is deeply animated by these two hungers, as if the two hungers were the same, one becomes profoundly impatient with the existing social system, the existing structures of religion as well as the developmental dreams unleashed by science and technology, for this world doesn't belong to man alone.

This twin-hunger is what distinguishes our great saint poets of mediaeval times - Basava, Tukaram, Kabir and Akka Mahadevi. In our own times, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Ambedkar - to take some examples at random - exemplify this hunger for equality as well as spiritual hunger. Spiritual hunger may be a better term than hunger for God because I can then include a fierce critic of organized religion like Ambedkar in it. Who is not familiar with the person of Ambedkar in European clothes (symbolizing modernity) who fought an incessant battle for equality and dignity of the Dalits? But it is the same Ambedkar who in his later years embraced the compassionate Buddha. This was not in contradiction to his social commitment but as a continuation of his struggle on another timeless dimension. There is a moving picture of him, although not so popular as the Ambedkar in western dress, in Buddhist robes and shaven head. Those who consider both these pictures of Ambedkar as intensely connected would understand how difficult, yet how beautiful, it is to connect the hunger for equality and human dignity which seeks ruthless political action in the temporal world outside, with spiritual hunger which seeks fulfillment in an inward silent struggle. This is what makes Gandhiji and Ambedkar complementary, despite their differences. I am not able to say the same about the contradiction between the ideas of Veer Savarkar for a strong nation state, and Gandhiji's dream of gram svaraj. They are irreconcilable, and we see enough proof of that in our troubled times in India.

The last point I wish to make is this: After such trauma and violence in Gujerath, the country seems to have forgotten the role played by Narendra Modi in making Gandhi's Gujerath almost a nightmare for Muslims. He is now a hero for all those who believe in Development. Every political party speaks of Development and the industrialists and multinationals know that a majoritarian state where dissent is curbed is the best site for development. No political party seems to speak of Gandhiji's ideal of Sarvodaya, an economic policy that would even benefit the last poor person. The suicides of agriculturists are not taken seriously; their death does not affect the senses.

(Taken from a recent convocation speech made at the Jamia Milia Islamia in Delhi)

Elaine Sciolino

The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce. She told the religious judge that her husband hit her, cursed her and wanted her dead.

But her husband was opposed, and the Islamic scholar adjudicating the case seemed determined to keep the couple together. So, sensing defeat, she brought our her secret weapon: her father.

In walked a bearded man in long robes who described his son-in-law as a hot-tempered man who had duped his daughter, evaded the police and humiliated his family.

The judge promptly reversed himself and recommended divorce. This is Islamic justice, British style. Despite a raucous national debate over the limits of religious tolerance and the pre-eminence of British law, the tenets of Shariah, or Islamic law, are increasingly being applied to everyday life in cities across the country.

The Church of England has its own ecclesiastical courts. British Jews have had their own "beth din" courts for more than a century.

But ever since the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, called in February for aspects of Islamic Shariah to be embraced alongside the traditional legal system, the government has been grappling with a public furor over the issue, assuaging critics while trying to reassure a wary and at times disaffected Muslim population that its traditions have a place in British society.

Boxed between the two, the government has taken a stance both cautious and confusing, a sign of how volatile almost any discussion of the role of Britain's nearly two million Muslims can become. "There is nothing whatever in English law that prevents people abiding by Shariah principles if they wish to, provided they do not come into conflict with English law," the justice minister, Jack Straw, said last month. But he added that British law would "always remain supreme," and that "regardless of religious belief, we are all equal before the law."

Conservatives and liberals alike - many of them unaware that the Islamic courts had been functioning at all, much less for years - have repeatedly denounced the courts as poor substitutes for British jurisprudence.

They argue that the Islamic tribunals' proceedings are secretive, with no accountability and no standards for judges' training or decisions.

Critics also point to cases of domestic violence in which Islamic scholars have tried to keep marriages together by ordering husbands to take classes in anger management, leaving the wives so intimidated that they have withdrawn their complaints from the police.

"They're hostages to fortune," said Parvin Ali, founding director of the Fatima Women's Network, a women's help group based in Leicester. Speaking of the courts, she said, "There is no outside monitoring, no protection, no records kept, no guarantee that justice will prevail."

But as the uproar continues, the popularity of the courts among Muslims has blossomed.

Some of the informal councils, as the courts are known, have been giving advice and handing down judgments to Muslims for more than two decades.

Yet the councils have expanded significantly in number and prominence in recent years, with some Islamic scholars reporting a 50 percent increase in cases since 2005.

Almost all of the cases involve women asking for divorce, and through word of mouth and an ambitious use of the Internet, courts like the small, unadorned building in London where the father stepped in to plead his daughter's case have become magnets for Muslim women seeking to escape loveless marriages - not only from Britain but sometimes also from Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany. Other cases involve disputes over property, labor, inheritances and physical injury. The tribunals stay away from criminal cases that might call for the imposition of punishments like lashing or stoning.

Indeed, most of the courts' judgments have no standing under British civil law. But for the parties who come before them, the courts offer something more important: the imprimatur of God.

"We do not want to give the impression that Muslims are an isolated community seeking a separate legal system in this country," said Shahid Raza, who adjudicates disputes from an Islamic center in the West London suburb of Ealing.

"We are not asking for criminal Shariah law - chopping of hands or stoning to death," he continued. "Ninety-nine percent of our cases are divorce cases in which women are seeking relief. We are helping women. We are doing a service."

Still, there is ample room for clashes with British custom. Three months ago, for example, a wealthy Bangladeshi family asked Dr. Raza's council to resolve an inheritance dispute. It was resolved according to Shariah, he said. That meant the male heirs received twice as much as the female heirs.

Courts in the United States have endorsed Islamic and other religious tribunals, as in 2003, when a Texas appeals court referred a divorce case to a local council called the Texas Islamic Court.

But Shariah has been rejected in the West as well.

The Canadian province of Ontario had allowed rabbinical courts and Christian courts to resolve some civil and family disputes with binding rulings under a 1991 law. But when the Islamic Institute on Civil Justice there tried to create a Shariah court, it was attacked as a violation of the rights of Muslim women.

As a result, Ontario changed the entire system in 2006 to strip the rulings of any religious arbitration of legal validity or enforceability.

In Britain, beth din courts do not decide whether a Jewish couple's marriage should end. They simply put their stamp of approval on the dissolution of the marriage when both parties agree to it. The beth din also adheres to the rules of Britain's 1996 Arbitration Act and can function as an official court of arbitration in the consensual resolution of other civil disputes, like inheritance or business conflicts.

"People often come to us for reasons of speed, cost and secrecy," said David Frei, registrar of the London Beth Din. "There's nothing to prevent Muslims from doing the same thing."

In Britain's Islamic councils, however, if a wife wants a divorce and the husband does not, the Shariah court can grant her unilateral request to dissolve the marriage.

Most Shariah councils do not recognize the Arbitration Act, although Straw has been pushing them in recent months to do so. The main reason for their opposition is that they do not want the state involved in what they consider to be matters of religion. The conflict over British Shariah courts comes at a time when Islamic principles are being extended to other areas of daily life in Britain.

There are now five wholly Islamic banks in the country and a score more that comply with Shariah.

An insurance company last summer began British advertising for "car insurance that's right for your faith" because it does not violate certain Islamic prohibitions, like the one against gambling.

Britain's first Shariah-compliant prepaid MasterCard was begun in August.

Here in London, Suhaib Hasan's "courtroom" is a sparsely furnished office of the Islamic Shariah Council in Leyton, a working-class neighborhood in the eastern corner of the city. It has no lawyers or court stenographer, no recording device or computer, so Hasan takes partial notes in longhand.

"Please, will you give him another chance?" he asked the woman in black who was seeking divorce - that is, before she brought in the weighty voice of her father.

"No, no!" the woman, a 24-year-old employment consultant who had come seeking justice from 200 miles away, replied. "I gave him too many chances. He is an evil, evil man." "I'll give you one month's time to try to reconcile," Hasan ruled. Then her father tipped the scales.

"He was not a cucumber that we could cut open to know that he was rotten inside," the father testified. "The only solution is divorce."

Apparently convinced, Hasan said he would recommend divorce at the London Central Mosque, where he and several other religious scholars meet once a month to give final approval to cases like this.

Hasan, a silver-bearded, Saudi-educated scholar of Pakistani origin, handles the Pakistani community; an Egyptian ministers to the ethnic Arab community, while a Bangladeshi and a Somali work with their own communities.

The council in Leyton is one of the oldest and largest courts in the country. It has been quietly resolving disputes since 1982 and has dealt with more than 7,000 divorce cases.

Under some interpretations of Islamic law, a woman needs the blessing of a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence to be divorced, while a man can simply say three times that he is divorcing his wife.

Hasan counsels women that they must have their civil marriages dissolved in the British civil system. "We always try to keep the marriages together, especially when there are children," said Hasan's wife, Shakila Qurashi, who works as an unofficial counselor for women.

If the husband beats her, she should go to the police and have a divorce, Qurashi said. "But if he's slapped her only once or something like that," she said, "and he admits he has made a mistake and promised not to do it again, then we say, 'You have to forgive.' "

One recent afternoon, the waiting room was full of women and their family members.

A Pakistan-born 33-year-old mother of five explained that her husband would beat her and her children. "He threatens to kill us," she said, as her daughter translated from Urdu. "He calls me a Jew and an infidel." Hasan told her to immediately get police protection and request an Islamic divorce.

Another woman, 25, wanted out of a two-year-old arranged marriage with a man who refused to consummate the relationship. Hasan counseled dialogue.

"Until we see the husband," he said, "we can't be sure that what you're saying is true."

(Source: IHT, Nov 19. Basil Katz contributed reporting.)