Before the second Gulf War begins (I)

Make no mistake about this- I am not a Shiite. But I am a proud partaker of the prodigious intellectual armoury and scholarly arsenal that Persian scholars including Imam al-Ghazalli have bequeathed to the Muslim world. One of my earliest readings in Islamic hermeneutics is al-Ghazalli’s Ihya. Over three decades ago, I learnt from him […]

Make no mistake about this- I am not a Shiite. But I am a proud partaker of the prodigious intellectual armoury and scholarly arsenal that Persian scholars including Imam al-Ghazalli have bequeathed to the Muslim world. One of my earliest readings in Islamic hermeneutics is al-Ghazalli’s Ihya. Over three decades ago, I learnt from him the  philosophico-theological arguments in support of moderation in my daily life. Al-Ghazalli it was who said that misanthropy is a catalyst for enmity and infamy while absolute philanthropy is a virtue that runs the risk of leading to companionship of evil.

But despite my learning, scholarship and the knowledge I have acquired and still acquiring from Western and Eastern scholars, the logic in the Shiite theology that constructs all other companions of Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) as impostors and therefore usurpers, remains for me extremely foggy and slippery. In other words, in the absence of explicit Quranic validation and credence for the claim that Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (r.a) and others were usurpers of the ‘crown’ of caliphacy that belonged, in Shiite theology, to Ali bn Abi Talib (r.a), all postures in favour of the latter have remained, for me, extremely challenging. Thus I take solace in my knowledge of that which reason and revelation have accorded no privilege; I bask in my ‘ignorance’ of whatever argument that warrant the carriage, by my Shiite brethren, of the ‘turbah’ everywhere they go. I constantly keep in mind that sometimes what we refer to as faith and belief are ideals and principles that are ordinarily imponderable; that our faith in the divine would remain invalid until we understand that there are certain beliefs and creeds that we cannot understand.

But am I ‘Ahl al-Sunnah’? No. I am not. I am not a ‘Ahl Sunnah’ the same way I am not a ‘Salafi’. Rather I figure my identity in that extremely stellar spiritual-ideological landscape upon which, among others, Salman al-Farisi (d. 656), was birthed. Let me skip the background and proceed to the foreground- the day Salman al-Farisi accepted the Din, after having previously practiced Zoroastrianism and Christianity, the companions of the Prophet were extremely happy. They all wanted to know and thereby locate his identity in some racial or ethnic space. They asked him: “Where are you from”? Others questioned him: ‘who are your parents?”. With faith and certainty radiating on his face, Salman al-Farisi calmly responded: “I am the son of Islam; I am of Islam”.

Thus I pooh-pooh all identities beside that of being a Muslim (Quran 22: 78). I attenuate and depreciate all characterizations that obviate the global communality and identity that Islam seeks to foster when the Almighty named believers Muslims and commanded His Prophets to deliver same message to their followers. To self-define as a Muslim is to privilege inclusion, to be receptive to difference, to see the world as a rainbow. To claim Islam is to preserve your humanity, to empathize with the oppressed all over the world, to feel for the poor and the downtrodden.  To side-step all other identity markers in favour of Islam is equally to be burdened by the scenes and images of the orphan whose parents were killed by the establishment, by pictures of the poor picking food from waste bins, by Muslims undergoing dehumanization and deprivation for no other reasons apart from being Muslims.

In actual fact, the politics in the above posture has, in the contemporary period, become urgent and self-evident. They are urgent particularly today when creedal differences, racial dissemblance and struggle for power have provided heinous platforms for the irruptions and invasions by Muslims and non-Muslims of Muslim lands across the world. They are self-evident in Libya that has become a wasteland after it was once a ‘paradise’. They are self-evident in Burma where Muslims have been massacred and their lands plundered not for any reason other being Muslims. They are self-evident in China (Xinjiang) where mosques belonging to the Uighur particularly the Keriya mosque in the southern region of Hotan are undergoing systematic demolition under the supervision of the State. This towering architectural monument, thought to date back to 1237 and extensively renovated in the 1980s and 1990s, was photographed on a festival day in 2016 with thousands of worshippers spilling out on to the streets. By 2018 the site had become a smooth patch of earth.

Thus to be Muslim in China today is to be subject of high-tech surveillance technology and to be profiled at checkpoints, to be subject of facial recognition software, mobile phone scanners and to play host to agents of State Security Services. To be Muslim in China today is to be deemed guilty of terror even before the terror is committed.

Chinese citizens who are deemed potential terrorists by State security services are being sent to what the Chinese authorities refer to as ‘vocational training centres, a euphemism for concentration camps like the Guantanamo Bay. A recent BBC documentary details the kind of training such potential ‘terrorists’ are being made to go through. Whoever enters the camp would come back to the Chinese society, if ever they do, as ‘better’ Chinese; Chinese citizens who would love the communist identity of China only and nothing else.

While these were going on, the world was jolted with the ‘news’ that the US government had unilaterally repudiated the agreement world powers had with Iran on the latter’s Nuclear development programme. The agreement dates as far back as 2015. The US government has gone further to increase series of economic sanctions it had put in place on Iran.