IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS: ‘WAA ISLAMAH!’
Maryam Sakeenah
The rising death toll, the blood and the gore hurts_ but the
searing, tearing hurt like a thorn lodged in the very heart which will outlast
the last rotting corpse is when these and other enormities are committed in the
name of the faith of Islam: a faith that declares the sanctity of innocent life
to be greater than the sanctity of the Kaabah itself... And like the humiliated
Muslim woman from Madina 1400 years ago disrobed in the marketplace had
exclaimed in distress, the believer’s bloodied heart cries out, ‘Waa Islamah!’
(Alas, for my Islam!)
When indiscriminate violence uses religious beliefs and ideals
to seek cover under, it viciously defaces those. A grotesque wrong has been
committed against Islam by extremists and fanatics, and our collective inability
to reject it in clear terms has had grave consequences. Responses to Islamist
extremism from Islamic scholars have often been ambivalent and ‘politically
correct’ rather than passionately censorious of this being done in Islam’s
name. This is for two reasons: the clergy’s preoccupation with minutiae of
fiqh, denomination and sect; and sympathy for the original motives of religious
militants who launched a defensive struggle against unwarranted occupation and
oppression against Muslims.
By all means, selfless sacrifice for a higher cause
(justice and truth) is the most beautiful that the human being is capable of:
Islam assents, through the doctrine of Jihad and the esteem in which those who
undertake it are placed. But there is a lot of murkiness out there, especially
on this side of the Durand Line. The original impetus for the defensive
struggle has spiralled into no more than naked violence for an ideologized
power struggle, and the damage done by fanatical groups in the name of Islam is
irreparable in its psycho-social consequences.
It is these psycho-social consequences that
are the gnawing, deep hurt. I struggle as a teacher on Islam, with confused
young minds full of questions, confusions, bitterness. There is deep resentment
and unease over the failure of Muslim religious leadership to provide clarity
and answers. Among those still struggling to hang on to faith, there is a
seething, muted anger over traditionalist scholars’ failure to rescue the
narrative from politicized and ideologized contemporary Jihadism and Salafist
fanaticism. There is today a clear trend of disenchantment towards religion in
Pakistan’s middle and upper middle classes, the gravity of which is yet to be
recognized, and to meet which we are utterly unprepared.
The media has often played the role of Agent
Provocateur stoking controversy around serious subjects of Islamic
jurisprudence. Sensationalist talk-shows deal in half-truths and untruths,
relaying featherweight opinions on issues of gravity, by scatterbrained demagogues
and con artists. Clarity remains elusive as young minds are confused over these
matters of complexity. Given the fact that the source of all information for
most these days is primarily if not solely the popular media, it is not
surprising that many growing up post 9/11 have come to associate religion with
regression, backwardness and even evil, thinking we would do better without it.
When you pit a madrassah-graduate religious scholar against a squealing and
irate Liberated English Speaking Woman giving him a couple of minutes to
explain away the barrage of allegations of misogyny often born of a superficial
understanding of religion and society, you make Islam seem incapable of
withstanding the secular-liberal assault; you reinforce the idea that religion
being a thing of the past, needs to be cast off for a progress that apes the
Western model: Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's; Give unto God that
which is God's.
The struggle is not entirely about the
physical elimination of violent religious groups through military strategies.
There is a greater and more formidable challenge to face: to undo the terrible
damage that the religio-ideological underpinnings of extremist groups have done
to Muslim societies, and to hearts and minds.
Our failure to rescue the religious discourse
from its abusers who have the audacity to pose as its defenders is a huge
blemish on the pages of our history. History’s verdict shall be unrelenting and
merciless against us.
Islam in this society faces an unprecedented crisis.
And yet, hackneyed and simplistic as it may sound, in the heart of this
darkness there is a flicker of hope. At the heart of crisis is often
opportunity, if we learn the right lessons: that religious violence is a hydra
we created with our silence towards grave injustices against our own people on
the dictates of the Global Bully, thinking the unholy alliance would bring us
boons. We then nurtured this hydra and owned it with our silence towards the
crimes it committed against other innocents in the name of Islam. And now the
genie cannot be bottled back up again. Two wrongs do not make a right. Two
silences slowly kill us all, till all we hear is the haunting echo, 'Waa
Islaamah!'
A realization is slowly sinking in even
though we took far too long to learn- that extremists use religious sources to
justify their ideology, hence the responsibility on religious scholars to
spearhead a progressive interpretation of Islam rooted in its sources is great,
and that this has to come from the highest authorities on religion venerated by
the generality of Muslims. Traditional Muslim scholars need to assert, as
Sheikh Hamza Yusuf puts it, that indiscriminate violence in the name of Islam
is‘neither from religion nor sanctioned in any reading from our pre-modern
tradition. It is a modern phenomenon, and those practising it have learned it
from nihilistic elements in Western tradition who innovated from Marxism and
Asian philosophy like the kamikaze...’
The current crisis is also gradually bringing
the realization that denomination and sectarian orientation are secondary when
the attack is on the very soul of Islam, and that the reply has to be
proclaimed with a single voice. It is helping us understand- though the cost of
our unwillingness to learn has been too dear- that our condition cannot be
traced down to an externalized enemy to give us a comforting sense of ‘We the
good and true versus They the evil and false.’ Often it is more complex than
that, the evil more insidious and closer to home.
The pulpit has to assume responsibility to
set the record straight and disseminate the eclipsed tradition that has no
equivocation regarding the rejection of fanaticism and violence against
innocents, and the sanctity of human life. As the crescendo of the salvaging voice
for Islam rises, the narrative will be rescued from the unworthy and
undeserving. It has been a long, hard way but in Pakistan there is a clear
shift in public opinion against the TTP and other religious hardliners. With
their atrocious acts, these groups have dug up their own graves, as the human
heart’s innate moral criterion balks at such an inversion of basic
morality in the name of religion. In the Heart of Darkness, holding on to hope
is still possible.
