India's Current Blasphemy Battle Will Have Global Ramifications
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
16 June
2022
Illustration
by Manisha Yadav | ThePrint
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In India
blasphemy has a long history. In 1929, Jaipal Mahashay was assassinated by a
Muslim Ghazi Ilmuddin for his blasphemous book on the prophet of Islam. The
book presented the prophet as a lustful man. The detractors of Islam have found
a very good point, or so they think, in his marriage with a minor girl who was
six years old at the time of marriage and her marriage was consummated at the
age of 9. This was not an issue during that period because, as Mr Praveen Swami
points out, child marriages have not been unknown in Hindu tradition of India
and in the US, the age of sexual consent was ten years till rhe 19th century.
In the medieval Europe, girls as young as 5 were married off.
Still, the
Muslims are made to feel that their prophet was to be blamed and the Muslim reaction
is most often violent though the Quran has predicted that blasphemy will be
committed against their religion by the people of the book and from the
polytheists and has warned them against any kind of violent reaction. The Quran
says that when blasphemy is committed, the show of tolerance and self-restraint
is the right approach.
Hindus have
also reacted in the same way when their religious symbols, are criticised.
James Laine's Ramayana had to be removed from the curriculum of the Delhi
University. Ratan Lal was arrested for insulting Shivling. Painter M.F. Hussain
ad to leave his homeland India and obtain the citizenship of Qatar after
'blasphemous paintings' of Hindu goddesses.
However,
the recent case of blasphemy against the prophet of Islam was not the result of
any ideological differences but provoked by the media that regularly holds
unruly debates on communal issues during which f ** words are thrown against
one another and worse, this has been made to appear as the new normal.
This
routine unruly debates have cost India dearly as it has not only affected
India's economy already in tatters post lockdown, it has also damaged India's
image in the Islamic world. Terrorist outfits have always, wanted to capitalise
on the domestic issues of the Muslims to win their sympathy.
Praveen
Swami rightly points out in his, article that the blasphemy battles in India
will create new problems for India internationally if not dealt with in a
pragmatic and rational way.
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India’s
Blasphemy Battles—Hindu or Muslim—Show Reason Has Succumbed To Faith
By
Praveen Swami
12 June,
2022
The pious
Sheikh, so the lewd poem began, entered the Garden of Paradise, in search of
his divine reward: A Houri hanging from the Tree of the Black Eyed Damsels,
nestled inside a fruit. In early 2013, a pick-up truck piled with al-Qaeda
jihadists drove into the Syrian town of Ma’arat al-Numan to punish the man
responsible for the parody on male desire, scripture and God. Only, they had
arrived a thousand years late: All that remained to be beheaded was a statue of
Abu al-‘Ala Ahmad ibn ‘Abdallah al-Ma’arri, the great eleventh-century Arab
poet. So, they did just that.
The
frontlines of the global war on blasphemy moved to India this week, after two Bhartiya
Janata Party (BJP) leaders denounced
Prophet Muhammad.
Furious Middle-East regimes demanded an apology from India; angry protesters
battled police in Uttar Pradesh; al-Qaeda threatened
to unleash armies of child suicide bombers.
Fearing the
unravelling of ties with a region that sells India over half its oil and gas,
the BJP is seeking
to hush its strident anti-Islam polemicists. India’s violent conflicts over
religious identity—which have raged, unresolved, since well before the before
the colonial era—are
becoming entwined with a larger, global conflict.
India’s
blasphemy battles
Free speech
and religious offence began their battle in India in 1924 when Arya Samaj activist
Mahashe Rajpal published Rangila
Rasul—in Hindustani, ‘the colourful Prophet.’ The polemic reviled the
Prophet’s sexual life, contrasting it with Hindu ascetic ideals. The BJP
leaders who claimed Muhammad’s third wife was a child might have been unaware of the heritage of
their claims: Their taunt was a central theme in Rangila Rasul.
Lower
courts condemned Rajpal to prison for hate speech. Lahore High Court judge
Dalip Singh, though, demurred: “If the fact that Musalmans resent attacks on
the Prophet was to be the measure,” he reasoned, then “judgement passed on his
character by a serious historian might [also]”.
Aisha bint
Abi Bakr’s actual age at her wedding is, in fact, an issue of serious theological disputation. There could also be a serious conversation on religion and child
marriage. The practice is, of course, far from
unfamiliar in
Hindu tradition. The age
of sexual consent in
the US, “till late in the nineteenth century, was ten. In medieval Europe,
girls were sometimes married as young as five”.
The subject
of the debate—in Rajpal’s time, as in that of Nupur Sharma now—wasn’t the
rights of adolescent girls, though.
Ilm-ud-Din,
a Lahore carpenter, eventually murdered Rajpal in 1929—the third in a series of
assassination attempts targeting the blasphemous publisher. Even though the
assassin was hanged, his memory still fires
the imagination of Islamists in Pakistan.
Long before
Rajpal’s murder, though, the escalation of communal tensions in Punjab had led
colonial authorities to overrule the high court, and pass a new law that
proscribed speech that insults any religious belief, or incites hatred.
Free India
upheld the blasphemy laws. Lower courts, the Supreme Court said,, erred in acquitting Tamil leader E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker for destroying
an idol of Ganesha. Instead, courts ought to “pay due regard to the feelings
and religious emotions of different classes of persons with different beliefs.”
This ought to be done “whether those beliefs, in the opinion of the Court, were
rational or not.”
Faith, in
other words, was allowed to fail the test of reason.
A Tradition
of Insults
As the
Hindu nationalist movement gathered momentum, its protagonists began pushing
the State to guard their religion. In 1993, a
cultural presentation involving the Dashrath Jataka—a variant telling of the Ramayana, where
Ram and Sita are siblings—was subjected to prosecution. There were successful
mobilisations against James Laine’s historical account of the rise of Shivaji.
A.K. Ramanujan’s magisterial account of Ramayana had to be removed from the
Delhi University curricula.
The
campaign continues. Hindu religious-Right activists, just weeks ago, threatened
violence against Delhi University professor Ratan Lal, who mocked claims that a
Shivling had been found inside the Gyanvapi mosque.
Islamic
invective directed against Hindus is also common—though less politically
powerful. The cleric Illyas Sharafuddin has repeatedly railed
against Hindu worship of what he describes as ‘genitals’. Zakir
Naik’s proselytising programmes often featured a Hindu or Jew converting to Islamafter being persuaded of its
superior virtues—a theatrical device he borrowed from American televangelical
shows.
The
Republic of Hurt Sentiments, as journalist Mukund
Padmanabhan called India, has many martyrs to faith: Sanal Edamaruku, forced to leave the
country after he exposed the tears flowing from an icon of Jesus drain-pipe leakage; cricket star Mahendra Dhoni prosecuted for an advertisement invoking the
Hindu god Vishnu.
In general,
these conflicts have not had gentle endings: Muslims
have been killed; Muslims have been murdered for offending
Hindu beliefs;; purported sacrilege and heresies have led to lynchings by Sikhs.
Faiths in
Conflict
The
violence that erupted following
the publication of
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 marked the globalisation of the
blasphemy war. From anti-India riots
in Kashmir, to the massacre
of intellectuals,
the book came under sustained attack. The multiple jihadist strikes that followed the publication of purportedly
blasphemous cartoons by The Jyllands-Posten in Denmark, and the 2015 slaughter in Paris sparked off by the satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo, built on this project.
Little
imagination is needed to see why this happened. Across much of the developing
world, religious nationalism had emerged as a powerful political ideology, to
challenge authoritarian, venal regimes. The discourse over blasphemy,
fundamentally, is a debate about political power—not religious belief.
Fragile
nation-states responded by seeking to cloak themselves in the robes of the
pious. In Pakistan, Islamists had been cultivated by the military to undermine
democratic political parties. The religious Right, though, used the State’s purported
tolerance
of apostasyas a
weapon against the establishment. The clerics succeeded in marching the country
to the edge of theocratic abyss, riding the donkey cart the military had once
recruited them to pull.
Saudi
blogger Raif Badaai, jailed for insulting Islam, and Egyptian intellectual Ahmed
Abdo Maher, sentenced for refuting classical theology, were persecuted by
nation-states seeking to shore up their flagging legitimacy—not al-Qaeda or
Islamic State jihadists.
India,
through this period, witnessed its own blasphemy campaign. From 2014 to 2018,
an official United States government study notes, India ranked fourth, behind Pakistan, Iran and Russia, for the number of religious-offence
prosecutions it initiated. Instead of stilling religious tensions, scholar C.S.
Adcock has noted,
the law gave “strategic value to invoking or mobilising wounded religious
feelings.”
Laws to
curb hate speech, the argument goes, are necessary to keep the peace in
societies with varied, but passionately held, belief systems. The argument’s
proved deeply misguided.
Faith And
Democratic Values
For one
thing, as the philosopher Kenan
Malik points out, “hate speech restriction has become a means not of addressing specific
issues about intimidation or incitement, but of enforcing general social
regulation.” Legal restrictions on speech elide over that deeper problem of
large numbers of people finding contemptible ideas morally worthy. The Indian
government might prosecute some hate speech—but this covers up the
unwillingness to challenge the sentiments it expresses.
Importantly,
hate-speech prosecutions haven’t ensured communal peace in India; they’ve
engendered fear, censorship, and competitive mobilisation to control the State
system. The law has deterred few religious chauvinists. Few professors, though,
would risk teaching DN Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow or Wendy Doniger’s The
Hindus, Maxime Rodinson’s Muhammad or Reza Aslan’s Zealot.
The Indian
government’s action against hate speech might be geopolitically expedient, but
it will feed a cycle of competitive religious-nationalist mobilisation. Hindu
nationalists will seek to recover their hegemonic position, while Right-wing Muslims
will increasingly reach out to the global religious community for support. The
State and society will be mired in these competing, toxic currents.
Enlightenment
philosophers laid the foundations for modern democracies by asserting that
while human beings have rights, ideas do not. Gods, just like atheism,
communism, capitalism or psycho-babble, must make their case.
Al-Ma’arri,
centuries before the Europeans, invited us to consider a world where Gods might
be able to take a little mocking—and, perhaps, take some of the criticism on
board. The poet wasn’t an optimist, though. The human race, he wrote, was divided
into two:
One, man
intelligent without religion,
The second,
religious without intellect.
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Praveen Swami is National Security Editor, ThePrint.
He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
Source: India’s
Blasphemy Battles—Hindu or Muslim—Show Reason Has Succumbed To Faith
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/india-blasphemy-battle-global/d/127258
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