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I am very happy to have finally graduated from a reporter to an author. But in the process I have also discovered how much I have to explain why I chose Muhammad, the founder of Islam as a theme for my very first book especially when I claim not to be a very religious person?
This is a very good question but one that seems to cough up so many diverse thoughts that are often confusing even to myself. All I can say for the moment is that I am pleased to have discovered Muhammad this way, on my own while wading through volumes of information already available on the history of Islam. And as I got to know a little more I began to feel that it is not important whether I become even less or more religious in the process than I already am but that it is extremely urgent for me to be understanding Muhammad now more than at any other time. For at no other time have I been asked by so many what it is to be a Muslim?
Now that is an aspect of my life that was not given much thought for a great part of my life. Although I suppose I have been living with Muhammad since birth. After all I am born into a Muslim family that has always believed Muhammad to be the messenger of God and who is the first amongst all Muslims to surrender his being to Allah. But the image of Muhammad that I grew up with has been muddled with the mesmerising rituals of Muharram, the festivities at Eid, the feasts after Roza during Ramazan, the sacrifice of the lamb on Baqreed combined surely with a way of celebrating life that existed in the place of my birth much before Islam was institutionalised here as a formal religion.
As I understand it on reflection I find that my family does look to Mecca for spiritual inspiration even as it has remained firmly rooted in the lush, green garden of the Indian heartland where all of us have been blossoming for generations. The way we dress, what we eat, the language we speak and the climate that we cope with has little in common to the people and geography that surrounds the stark, rocky desert of Mecca, the home of Muhammad. What I choose to embrace of my religious heritage then is not the externalities that made up Muhammad but the music of his message that sings of universal brotherhood and peace upon all human beings despite the fact that all of us including two blood brothers often tend to smell, look and dress differently from each other.
Going back to my own past to be a Muslim in Lucknow meant to spend a childhood in Lawrence Terrace, an Anglo Indian colony named after Sir Henry Lawrence who was killed by Indian mutineers in the 1857 uprising against the British. Here most part of the parent’s salary was spent on paying for an education at an English medium school where Hindus and Christians became my best friends. To be a Muslim was to wear navy blue tunics to school and a skirt and blouse at home but also to drape oneself in silk and satin at a wedding or a formal ocassion full of woe when it was fun to pretend that I was a Begum. I was taught to welcome friends and relatives, especially at festival time and to spoil them with a hospitality that they were meant to remember for the rest of their life. The grandmother forever warned against turning away anyone who knocks at the door just incase they happen to be God in a disguise.
I do not recall being a Muslim ever prevented me from lighting up the home with oil lamps at Diwali or dancing in glee the day the rains came dyed in more than seven colours of the rainbow on Holi, the raunchy Hindu festival at Springtime.
To be a Muslim in Lucknow was to try and speak in a style that made the listener swoon before the sentence was finished and to use salt and saffron in such a way in the kitchen that many guests would be remembered for biting off parts of the finger along with the food served to them. To be a Muslim was to see the face of people anywhere in the world immediately light up at the very mention of Lucknow with such brilliance that modesty was immediately summoned if the moment was to be redeemed. And even as I gave of myself with much abandon to all those who helped me to grow up the rewards I reaped in return from relatives, friends and neighbours remain to this day my most precious possession from the praise showered upon me for singing the Christmas carol better than my Eurasian classmate to the sweet desire of the Hindu auntyji next door who wished to have me as a daughter in law while I was barely 15 years old.
I do not recall being a Muslim ever meant having to trumpet about the goodness of Muhammad in public or to pick a quarrel with friends over my religion being better than theirs? Infact religion was hardly an issue when I lived in Lucknow till the early 1980s. The bits and pieces of the conversation that I picked up between the elders in the house on my way to a game of hide and seek or an exhausting basketball match was invariably about the extent of poverty in the country and illiteracy. I recall Sucheta Kripalani coming home for dinner and my journalist/ politician father pondering for hours the fate of the farmer with Choudhary Charan Singh. I also recall opening the door often for Shia Muslim clerics who came dressed in robes and a turban similar to the one worn by Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. On one vacation in Nainital during the summertime I was annoyed with my father for spending all his time talking and laughing with a friend he called Feroz Gandhi.
Being sent to the convent was not a mere luxury for us, I realised much later in life. To be fluent in English was not just to keep up with the Jones’s. A formal education was expected to provide some kind of a decent career even to daughters so that as adults we would be atleast a few Indians less below that terrible line of poverty.
And when I was old enough to beable to think on my own it was not very difficult for me to look upon myself, an Indian Shia Muslim woman, as the most contented member of any minority community anywhere. I derived such special pleasure at the thought of having been nurtured in a multicultural, secular society and in a Muslim home where the practice of socialist values was most encouraged that I spent all my waking time feeling at the top of the world. It was with a feeling of similar smugness then that I left India to join my husband in Europe in 1982. After all I was leaving the mother land in the hands of souls I thought were the brightest in the world like Salman Khursheed, MJ Akbar, Seema Mustafa and Shabana Azmi joined later by Javed Akhtar . The rationale was that as long as these people are around not just the fate of the minorities but the country itself could only remain safe and secure till eternity.
Now I find it both frustrating and flattering to be suddenly questioned in between an opera performance, during long walks in the Vienna woods and invariably at most conversations in the legendary coffee houses of the city, what do Muslims want and why do they behave the way they are today?
More than all the questions posed by others the one that I have put before myself seems the most difficult one to answer. I would love to know what happened to my world? Why does my identity threaten these days to melt away like that of the snowman sculptured by giggling children playing outside in the first snowfall of the season and which has already lost its long nose to this morning’s single ray of sunshine?
I trace the bad news to the mid 1980s when I heard of the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi while my first born was barely a year old. The stories of the rape and murder of Sikhs and the torching of Delhi that followed was told to me in graphic detail by Andy Maleta, the Austrian Radio correspondent in India at that time. Then came the barbaric news of the fall of the Babri Masjid. I was horrified not because we Muslims now had one place less to pray but at the way we had allowed a very strange human being like Syed Shahabuddin to use the modest masjid as a symbol of all our yearnings even as it turned out that he was probably fulfilling some twisted agenda of his own.
The burning alive of Christian missionaries was an act full of shame and I wonder if there is any point in repeating how sad and gory the incidents of Gujarat remain. That is when I began to imagine what Muhammad would have said to the way we Muslims are today? One day I got so curious to find out what Muhammad was all about that I began to study Islam with an urgency I did not know I had in me.
And my conclusion is that if Muhammad were alive he would not have hesitated to say it loud and clear that the way we Muslims are practicing our religion today is not what he had meant Islam to be.
---Mehru Jaffer |
