Ilmuddin, the First Blasphemy Killer Remains the Source of Inspiration for Extremist Muslims
Ilmuddin
Had Killed Mahashey Rajpal For Blasphemy. Mahashay Had Published A Book Called Rangeela
Rasool
Main
Points:
1. Ilmuddin was
not a religious person.
2. He was
depressed and was contemplating suicide.
3. He killed
Mahashey to give a meaning to his death.
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By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
7 July 2022
Praveen Swami's article, reproduced below, shows how an uneducated Muslim named Ilmuddin killed a Hindu only to give his death a meaning as he knew his life was meaningless. Indian Ulema should, therefore, condemn such killings in the name of defending the honour of the prophet pbuh because such killings will only cause a cycle of violence and bloodshed in India and will be counterproductive for the community.
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The murder
of a Hindu tailor Kanhaiya Lal by an extremist Muslim Riaz Attari on he charges
of blasphemy in Udaipur, Rajasthan, is the first of its kind in India, though
the killing of Mahashey Rajpal by Ilmuddin before Independence is perhaps the
first blasphemy killing in the sub-continent. Mahashey Rajpal had written a
book on the marital life of the prophet pbuh and had made some objectionable
remarks on it. It had caused outrage among the Muslims but the court had
acquitted him. Ilmuddin, a semi-literate Muslim had killed Mahashey and become
a hero among the Muslims. Renowned Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal had praised his
bravery and Deen Mohamnad Taseer, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer's father had
led Ilmuddin's funeral procession not knowing that one day someone inspired by
Ilmuddin's act, will kill his son on the same charge.
Ilmuddin's
grave was made a revered place for Muslims as was the grave of Mumtaz Qadri,
the killer of Salman Taseer.
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Kanhaiya
Lal's killer, Riaz Attari may be inspired by Ilmuddin or by the fatwas of
killing blasphemers issued by a section of Ulema who believe that one who
insults the prophet pbuh must be killed without giving any thought to the law
of the land.
The killing
of Kanhaiya Lal therefore, should be a concern not only for non-Muslims of
India but also for the Muslims, as the definition of blasphemy includes Sunni
Muslims apart from Shias, Ahmadis and Christians. In Pakistan, a number of
Muslims have been killed for alleged blasphemy. A Hafiz-e-Quran was lynched and
burnt to death by angry Muslims in Pakistan. Rakhshanda, a college girl in
Kabul, Afghanistan, was lynched and burnt to death by an angry mob of Muslim
men for alleged blasphemy. A Muslim lady teacher of a madrasa in Pakistan was
recently killed by her lady colleagues for alleged blasphemy. If this trend
becomes popular in India, it will cause violence and bloodshed in the name of
blasphemy in India as it does in Pakistan. Sime Muslim organisations have been
demanding harsh anti- blasphemy laws in India. If such laws are passed in
India, it will become a tool of sectarian strife.
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How
India's First Blasphemy Killer Was Made Pakistan's Model Citizen
By
3 July,
2022
Etched on
to the pages of history in elegant cursive handwriting, the confession recorded
the story of the sensational 1929 murder, which tore apart late-colonial
Punjab: spurned by his teenage love, a young Lahore carpenter had walked into a
shop in Anarkali bazaar, and sought redemption by plunging his knife into a
man’s heart. In a gesture likely to delight Freudian forensic psychologists,
the killer took one rupee from his mother to buy the dagger, which he concealed
in the nefa, or waist-fold, of his Shalwar.
Locals
protest after the beheading of Kanhaiya Lal Teli by two Muslim men, in
Udaipur's Maldas street | Twitter/@ANI_MP_CG_RJ
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Today, the
murder is remembered somewhat differently. A mausoleum in Lahore’s Miani Sahib Graveyard
celebrates the sacrifice of Ghazi Ilm-ud-Din Shaheed, the holy warrior martyred
to avenge blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad.
Large
numbers of blasphemy murderers in Pakistan—among them, the assassin of Punjab
politician Salman Taseer—have invoked Ilm-ud-Din’s memory. His father, the
Left-wing poet Muhammad Din Taseer, was among those who led the funeral
procession that buried Ilm-ud-Din in Lahore.
As India
struggles to make sense of the murder of Kanhaiya Lal Teli, the confession
holds out an important lesson: The mind of the religious fanatic inhabits a
dark wilderness, at the frontiers of passion and insanity.
For
decades, the discomfiting Punjab Police case diary—recorded by police
inspectors Said Ahmad Shah, Sardar Partab Singh and Jowahar Lal—has lain inside
the Panjab Archives in Lahore, and is also available online. It is hard to
imagine that none of Ilm Din’s many hagiographers discovered this document, the
only legal document one in which the illiterate blasphemy-murderer’s own voice
may be heard.
In a
magisterial essay on how the myth of Ilm Din was manufactured, scholar Hashim
Rashid noted there were good reasons for hagiographers to ignore this text.
“From a political point of view,” he suggests, their contents “would cause a
scandal.” That’s true: the bizarre story, involving homoerotic passion, hacks
at cherished beliefs about the venerated national martyr.
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The Stage
for Murder
Little in
Ilm-ud-Din’s confession casts him as being engaged with the great communal
currents unleashed after Rangila Rasul — an incendiary tract attacking the
Prophet’s sexual morality — was published in 1924. Five months before communal
riots broke out at Lahore in 1927, in the wake of the author being acquitted by
the High Court, Ilm-ud-Din said he had left for Multan, to help his father make
furniture for a hospital. Then, after a brief one-week break in Lahore, he left
again, this time to work in Kohat.
Ilm-ud-Din
returned to Lahore in late 1928. There’s nothing in the confession to suggest
that he encountered religious instruction or movements before or after this
time.
The author
of Rangila Rasul, Mahashe Rajpal, had been arrested in 1924, after Muslim
protests. The case, however, dragged on until 1927, when he was acquitted by
the High Court. In response to large-scale communal violence, the government
enacted Section 295A, which proscribed speech with the “’deliberate and
malicious intentions of outraging the religious sentiments of any class.” The
earlier Section 153A only prohibited the promotion of enmity between
communities.
Hindu
politicians, historian Julia Stevens has recorded, were less-than-enthusiastic
about the new law. Lala Lajpat Rai supported it, but only as a “temporary
measure” to “satisfy some hyper-sensitive folk.”
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Ignoring
the Blasphemer
Large
numbers of pop-histories—blogs, books and movies, beginning with a 1978 hit
starring the impossibly good-looking Haider as the Lahore carpenter—all insist
Ilm-ud-Din had passionate religious convictions since childhood. These accounts
uniformly have learning of the blasphemy in 1929, and immediately deciding to
take vengeance. In his confession, though, there is evidence that Ilm-ud-Din
had long known of the blasphemy issue and even encountered Rajpal
personally—but wasn’t particularly interested.
During a
1927 visit to Lahore, Ilm-ud-Din recalled hearing that “a Hindu shopkeeper of
Anarkali had published a book called Rangila Rasul against the Holy Prophet for
which he was prosecuted but acquitted which excited the feelings of the whole
Mohammadan community.” This information, however, did not impel Ilm-ud-Din to
act.
“About 1¾
years ago,” Ilm-ud-Din went on, “I heard a news given in a newspaper, that
Khuda Baksh, [a] Kabab seller of Lahore, made an attempt to murder that Hindu,
who had escaped and Khuda Baksh was convicted.” Again, this information does
not seem to have impacted Ilm-ud-Din’s life significantly.
Indeed, the
confession suggests, Ilm-ud-Din had seen his victim several times before the
killing—and was unmoved by the sight. In
1928, Ilm-ud-Din had run into his friend Bassa Jatt, who had come to Anarkali
Bazaar to have posters printed announcing a wrestling competition at that
year’s Chiraghan fair. “Bassa pointed me
out that Hindu sitting in his shop where some constables were present in order
to keep watch,” he recorded.
Ilm-ud-Din
saw “the Hindu” several times again: on the evening of Shab-i-Baraat in 1928,
on the way to a visit to the Lahore zoo, and when he visited the studio of
Girdhari Lal, together with Deen Muhammad, to be photographed. The thought of
violence never seems to have crossed his mind.
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Also Read: Can Islamism Be
Regarded as The Root Cause of Extremism?
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A Crime of
Passion
Ilm-ud-Din’s
confessional account, instead, centred on his “friendly terms” with Sadiq
Kasab, nicknamed Haji, an adolescent boy living in Lahore’s Siranwali
bazaar. A few days before Eid, Haji
stopped speaking to Ilm-ud-Din, and also refused to accompany him to the famous
fair of Chiraghan, held to mark the death anniversary of the medieval Punjabi
poet and Sufi Shah Hussain. To his dismay, Ghulam Nabi, another carpenter living
in Siranwala, claimed “he had committed sodomy on Haji.”
The next
day, Ilm-ud-Din said, he confronted both Haji and Ghulam Nabi at a paan shop
owned by his friend, Din Mohammad.
“Ghulam Nabi denied to have told me any such story, whereupon I slapped
him [Sic., though out],” Ilm-ud-Din recalled. A brawl broke out.
“After the
quarrel had taken place, Haji had told me that he could not now bear my sight,
even he did not want to speak with me. This shocked me very much and I felt
myself tired of the world.”
The next
morning, Ilm-ud-Din and his friend Jatta, a painter, hired a Tonga, or
horse-cart, “with a red horse belonging to a Mohammedan of emaciated body.”
They visited Lahore’s Golden Mosque. Then, the two men visited Hira Mandi,
Lahore’s sex-work district, “whence we met with a person named Fauji of Yaki
Gate, Lahore, who had also called to us.”
In the
course of the tonga ride home, Ilm-ud-Din told Jatta he was considering killing
himself, and Haji. Although Jatta backed the idea of killing Haji, he observed
that “people would say I had destroyed my life for the sake of a villain.”
“The same
night, when I went home, I felt tired of life,” Ilm-ud-Din told the police. “I
thought that if I were to put an end to my life, I should better do it to
vindicate the Holy Prophet’s honour by doing away with the said Hindu (and thus
get martyrdom).”
In the
morning, Ilm-ud-Din washed, went to the barber for a shave, washed, and drank a
glass of Sattoo for breakfast. He met Din Mohammad and Haji in the
bazaar. “I told them that I was going to Kohat and that they should excuse me
if anything bad had been spoken by me.”
The Making
of a Martyr
“This young
son of a carpenter,” the poet-laureate of Pakistan Muhammad Iqbal would lament,
“has surpassed us, O educated ones”: Ilm-ud-Din, though, proved a reluctant
martyr. At his trial, the carpenter pleaded innocence, and his defence focussed
on contradictions in the statements of witnesses. Local notables hired Muhammad
Ali Jinnah for a fee of Rs18,000 to argue the appeal in the High Court—but
their case was that Ilm-ud-Din was wrongly-accused of the crime.
In the
months since Section 295A was passed, communal tensions had stilled—and many
feared Rajpal’s murder would ignite violence again.
Following
the hanging of Ilm-ud-Din, though, the blasphemy-murderer was appropriated by
intellectuals who supported the Pakistan movement. The era of Islamist-leaning
military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq saw Ilm-ud-Din’s reinvention as a
model citizen of the Islamic Republic, with his faith at the centre of his
being.
“When the
body of Ilm Din was exhumed from its grave,” one modern hagiography claims,
vesting in him the miraculous corporeal attributes of the martyr, “it was found
to be intact without any change whatsoever.”
For
centuries, asylum doctors and medical writers had discussed strange crimes they
thought were driven by ‘moral insanity’: the acts of otherwise clear-thinking
individuals impelled by their afflictions into desperate acts, beyond their
voluntary control. Today, a criminal defence lawyer might well have pointed to
the burden of sexual guilt and depression borne by Ilm-ud-Din, to argue he was
mentally-ill.
The
illness, though, would be one that implicated an entire society: Ilm-ud-Din’s
act would ignite fires which, a century on, still rage.
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Praveen
Swami is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are
personal.
(Edited by Anurag
Chaubey)
Source: How
India's First Blasphemy Killer Was Made Pakistan's Model Citizen
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/ilmuddin-blasphemy-extremist-muslims/d/127420
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