• Secularism itself emerged from within Christian and Biblical tradition. Secularism was not originally born as atheism or hatred of religion. It was the outcome of internal restructuring of authority within Christian civilization. Later, secularism gradually developed into an independent political philosophy.

Noor Muhammad Marri Advocate | Islamabad

In our society, it has become a strange fashion that whenever someone wants to appear “modern,” “progressive,” or intellectually superior, the first target becomes religion. Such people loudly claim that secularism, democracy, human rights, and modern political systems emerged through rebellion against religion, as if Europe one morning suddenly threw away the Bible, expelled the Church, and discovered civilization in empty streets. This narrative may sound attractive in drawing rooms, seminars, and donor-funded intellectual circles, but historically it is shallow, incomplete, and deeply misleading.

The reality is that secularism itself emerged from within Christian and Biblical tradition. To understand European political evolution without understanding Christianity is like trying to understand a tree while denying the existence of its roots. Secularism was not originally born as atheism or hatred of religion. In Biblical political thought, the distinction between priest and king, Church and Crown, spiritual authority and temporal authority, already existed. The Church dealt with spiritual matters while kings administered worldly affairs. When certain powers shifted from priests to monarchs or the state, those matters became “secular.” At that stage, secular simply meant worldly administration, not denial of God.

The famous Biblical phrase, “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God,” became one of the foundations for distinguishing political and religious authority in Europe. Later, centuries of conflict between Church and monarchy produced constitutionalism, courts, parliaments, and limitations on absolute power. Had this internal struggle not existed, Europe might have remained under permanent absolute monarchies.

In reality, the modern European state was not built upon the ashes of religion but upon the evolution of religious civilization itself. Secularism did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the outcome of internal restructuring of authority within Christian civilization. Later, secularism gradually developed into an independent political philosophy, but its historical roots remained deeply embedded in Biblical tradition. Ironically, the child later began denying its own parent.

The same applies to democracy. Democracy did not descend from the skies of modernity overnight. Christianity placed enormous importance upon individual salvation. Every human being stood individually before God, responsible for his own actions and conscience. This idea slowly strengthened the concept of individual worth, individual morality, and eventually individual political rights. Once the individual gained religious significance, political significance gradually followed. Voting rights, representation, citizenship, and equality before law were not born in empty philosophical laboratories; they evolved through centuries of religious and moral transformation.

In many ways, the modern citizen is the political descendant of the Christian believer standing individually before God. If every soul possesses value before divine judgment, then eventually every citizen begins demanding value before the state as well. Thus democracy itself carries traces of theological origins, whether modern intellectuals admit it or not.

Even European kings themselves ruled through religious legitimacy. The doctrine of the “Divine Right of Kings” dominated Europe for centuries. Monarchs ruled under Biblical sanction, took oaths upon holy books, and were crowned through religious ceremonies. Even today, constitutional traditions in countries like the United Kingdom continue carrying visible Christian influence beneath their modern political structures.

Yet in our region, many self-proclaimed intellectuals reduce centuries of European history into a few fashionable slogans. According to them, religion represents backwardness while secularism appears almost like divine revelation itself. They forget that the political concepts they worship also emerged from religious history. They abuse the roots while comfortably sitting under the shade of the same tree.

The real problem is perhaps not secularism or democracy themselves, but our shallow understanding of history. We have transformed historical processes into emotional slogans. We memorize conclusions without understanding the centuries of intellectual, theological, political, and social struggles that produced them. That is why our debates generate more noise than knowledge.

Even more interesting is the fact that Europe itself never completely abandoned religion. Its legal systems, ethical values, public holidays, ceremonies, family structures, and social morality still carry deep religious foundations. Modern states merely reorganized the role of religion; they did not erase its historical influence entirely. Yet many people in our societies speak as if hatred of religion itself is the first condition of modernity.

This attitude reflects intellectual insecurity more than intellectual depth. Nations that understand their own history do not reduce civilizations into slogans. Unfortunately, we imported Western vocabulary without understanding Western historical evolution. We copied terminology but ignored the painful historical journey behind it. We borrowed conclusions while remaining ignorant of the process that produced them.

Perhaps this is why our discussions contain more emotional excitement than serious understanding. Every second person wants to appear enlightened by mocking religion, while forgetting that modern political civilization itself emerged through centuries of religious evolution, conflict, compromise, and institutional transformation.

Therefore, the issue is not religion or secularism alone. The issue is our habit of speaking about history without studying it. Societies that lose connection with their roots often fail to understand even the borrowed ideas they proudly repeat. And half knowledge, throughout history, has always been more dangerous than ignorance itself.

Read: Moral Crisis of Modern Humanity

_____________

Noor Muhammad Marri Advocate & Mediator is based in Islamabad

The post From Divine Kings to People’s Voice first appeared on Sindh Courier.

MANI SHANKAR AIYAR

In the Introduction to her brilliant book, Hurt Sentiments, Professor Neeti Nair of the University of Virginia recalls that at the instance of Mahatma Gandhi, the All-India Congress Committee passed a resolution in December 1947 affirming that independent India would be “a secular state where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong”. Straightforward and simple, it was based on two fundamental principles: equality of rights for majority or minority; and “protection of the state” to all communities, but especially to the more vulnerable minorities.

But once it came to debating the place of the minorities in the Constituent Assembly, it became clear that there was no consensus on what special steps, if any, needed to be taken to afford the minority’s adequate representation to secure their due place in running the affairs of the Indian state. Back in March 1947, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar had argued in his publication States and Minorities, that: “Indian Nationalism has developed a new doctrine called the Divine Right of the Majority to rule the minorities according to the wishes of the majority. Any claim for sharing power by the minority is called communalism while the monopolizing of the whole power by the majority is called Nationalism.” Hence, he held, it was necessary to ensure “effective representation” through “weightage”.

Encouraged perhaps by this robust defense of the right of minorities to share power, their representatives in the Constituent Assembly—particularly Z.H. Lari of the United Provinces; Kazi Syed Karimuddin of the Central Provinces; Syed Hasan Imam of Bihar; and Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman (until he moved to Pakistan)—put forward a number of suggestions on how to ensure such adequate representation through “separate electorates”; “proportional representation by a single transferable vote”; “cumulative voting”; “proportional voting with multi-member constituencies and plural voting”; “multiple constituencies with cumulative voting”. There was, however, little traction for these proposals in the House. So, as the author shows, when the issue was remitted to the Minorities Sub-committee that convened in Simla on May 11, 1949, no minutes were kept (or, at any rate, revealed) and it was announced that proposals for “reserved seats for the minorities” had been dropped.

Reporting this to the Constituent Assembly a fortnight later, Sardar Patel affirmed that there was “nothing better for the minorities than to trust the good sense and sense of fair play of the majority and to place confidence in them”.

And what of Nehru? Nehru had lauded “the glory of India” as combining “infinite variety” with “unity in that variety” and sought reliance on that, instead of “creating barriers” that “permanently isolate” the minorities while “giving full opportunity to every minority.” He and Patel added, as an earnest of their intention, that “special efforts” would be made “to put up good Muslim candidates … We should try to give them representation in accordance with their numbers”. They urged the minorities, says the author, to “trust us and see what happens”.

Dr. Ambedkar, after arguing on the floor of the House that “it is wrong for the majority to deny the existence of minorities. It is equally wrong for the minorities to perpetuate themselves,” held out against “separate electorates” but favored “reservations”.

Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated; so, he was not there to remind the Constitution-makers that: “Minorities have rights for which they must fight unto death. They must not adopt an attitude of giving up rights or (be) made to purchase the good will of the majority.”

In consequence, Nair notes, the Muslim members “were unanimous, with varying emphases, in affirming their faith in the goodwill of the majority community”.

Under-represented minorities

The eventual outcome of reposing their “trust” in the majority is that at the end of the day, Muslims have never had anything like representation in the legislatures in proportion to their share of the population and the share has now, alas, sunk in the Lok Sabha to an abysmal 4 per cent, under a third of their ratio to India’s population. The Sikhs have fared marginally better largely because Punjab has been reconstituted and Sikhs are the dominant political force there. And if the Christians have done somewhat better than the Muslims, it is largely owing to their geographic concentration in parts of Kerala, some central Indian tribal communities, and the north-eastern hill States. Yet, the hard and sad fact is that the minorities are hopelessly under-represented in our electoral system.

In the services too, as well as in corporate ownership and governance, non-governmental organizations, academia, or journalism, Muslim representation has been far below their share of the population. Perhaps the one exception is top places in Bollywood and the arts generally. Some (but not all of this) is deliberate; principally the cause, except in legislatures, is that in education and general living standards, the Muslims have tended to fare worse than even the Scheduled Castes, as the Justice Sachar report of 2006 revealed. This, in turn, is explained by the leadership of the Muslim community, particularly in northern and western India, having decamped to Pakistan, leaving behind to India’s tender mercies the Pasmanda Muslims, that is, the economically, educationally, and culturally deprived elements of the Muslim community.

While the minorities were being urged to “trust” the “good sense and good will” of the majority, the argument over what is the definition of “secularism” and how it is to be implemented continued to be played out inside but mainly outside the Constituent Assembly. It was mainly outside because the Hindu Right was virtually unrepresented in the House, with the notable exception of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Minister for Industry. He was constrained by being a member of the Cabinet.

So K.R. Malkani, displaced from Sindh where the Hindu population of Karachi shrank from 51 per cent on the eve of Independence to 2 per cent by the first Pakistani census in 1951, took up cudgels against any “appeasement” of the Muslim minority. He thundered in the Organiser, which he edited, with reference to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh which was then in the offing: “The new party must adopt Hindu ideals and Hindu festivals, Hindu shrines and Hindu sacred cities, Hindu philosophy and Hindu culture, Hindu ceremonies and Hindu pujas, Hindu history and Hindu race experience—as its root foundations” (5/6/1950).

“For Mahatma Gandhi, secularism meant inalienable “rights” for the minorities for which they must “fight unto death”

That injunction appears now in 2023 to have reached its zenith.

In another article, under his pseudonym “Kamal” (lotus), Malkani proclaimed: “[T]he story of Islam is the story of violence, hate, murder, loot and rape.”

Meanwhile, the Hindu Mahasabha, condemning the “unscrupulous zealots of western secularism” asserted that: “Hindus have not only learnt it (secularism), but actually practiced it with success for centuries.”

However, another contributor to the Organizer demurred (while implicitly accepting that Hinduism was secular): “[E]qual respect for all religions has been the bane of Hinduism.”

What the Hindu Mahasabha aimed for was the “welding of conflicting elements in the state population into one homogenous nationalistic state based on the ancient culture of the land” (emphasis added).

Thus, Indian secularism, according to this school of thought, was to be secured through adherence to Hindu culture which was deemed to be essentially “secular” and aimed eventually at making the nation “homogenous” and founded in the “ancient culture” of the land.

This, shows Nair, led V.D. Savarkar to write letters to his followers to eschew “the mumbo-jumbo of Gandhian morals” and instead “take up the cause of Hindus for a Hindu India”. It also led Godse to argue in court that “because Gandhi appeased Muslims, Godse had to kill Gandhi” and that “retaliatory action” by Hindus was “at times also as spiritual and natural as kindness”.

But apart from some dissenting voices such as these, there was general agreement across the board that India would have to be “secular”—although there were wide and seemingly irreconcilable differences on the meaning and implications of secularism. Thus “secularism” as a word became, says Nair, “a means of papering over differences of opinion”. These differences were by no means confined to the ideological battle between the RSS/Hindu Mahasabha, on the one hand, and the “secular forces”, on the other. The word also “papered over” the numerous differences, sharp and subtle, in the secular camp on the meaning or definition and implications of “secularism”, and how it was to be implemented over the process of nation-building in Independent India.

Gandhiji reinforced his perception with the injunction: “I would not allow the Mussalmans to crawl on the streets in India. They must walk with self-respect.”

The most clear-eyed in the secular camp was Mahatma Gandhi. We have already seen that for him, secularism meant inalienable “rights” for the minorities for which they must “fight unto death”. For him, this meant “India would be a land where the people of every religion would live with equality, practice their religion fearlessly, and fully belong” (emphases added). Till date, the three key requirements for minorities to live in India is with their identity intact, their dignity unimpaired, their security assured. Without these three requirements being so much part of our composite nationhood that they may be taken for granted, the minorities, especially the large Muslim minority, will not feel they “belong” as they sense they are “not wanted”. That is the dilemma facing minorities everywhere in South Asia. Hence this book.

Gandhiji reinforced his perception with the injunction: “I would not allow the Mussalmans to crawl on the streets in India. They must walk with self-respect.”

In contrast to the wholesale denigration of Islam that characterized his ideological opponents on the Hindu Right, he held that “Islam stands for the unity and brotherhood of mankind, not for disrupting the oneness of the human family” (Harijan, 6/10/1946). While, therefore, emphasizing “equal regard for all religions” (Ishwar Allah Tero Naam) as the definition of secularism, and holding that “the preservation of pluralism was a public good” (Rochona Bajpai), Gandhiji elaborated that it ”entailed the freedom to practice religion, all religions, publicly”. The makers of the Constitution, on the other hand, while accepting this, stressed the right to freely practice religion, all religions, “privately”—as the State had no business to involve itself in religion. In opposition, others (even many within the ruling party) held that secularism “did mean the separation of religion from politics”, even if it was only the saffronites who went further to assert that “it most certainly did not mean equal respect for all religions”.

In consequence, both in theory and in practice, the author finds, there was a “steady chipping away at minority rights in the course of the drafting of the Indian constitution…political safeguards were whittled down and removed from the final draft of the Constitution”. It leads her to the somewhat exaggerated conclusion that in the end “little” remained to “distinguish between the Congress and the Hindu Right on their attitudes towards the Muslim minority problem”—somewhat exaggerated because while the Hindu Right sought to “nationalize” the minority in the name of “integration”, the Congress sought to reassure the minorities that the innate secularism of Indians, and particularly the Congress party, guaranteed an honorable and equitable place for the minorities in the life of the nation—an assurance that has often been breached and increasingly so since 2014.

The “minority problem” in Pakistan

Nair then moves, fascinatingly, to comparing and contrasting the process of dealing with the non-Muslim “minority problem” in united Pakistan (and, subsequently, in Bangladesh, after the secession of East Pakistan in 1971).

It was Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself who kicked off the debate with his inaugural address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, with a speech that might have been written by Nehru: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

Had Pakistan lived up to that proclamation, it would have become the poster boy of secularism in South Asia. Instead, over the last 75 years, the Quaid’s words have been ignored, denied, censored, and perverted. It only ignited a controversy that remains alive to this day: should Pakistan be an Islamic state with only a Muslim as head of state; if so, where do the non-Muslim minorities fit in? And now that the bulk of Pakistan’s Hindu community is Bangladeshi, how has Bangladesh dealt with its minorities?

In a word, the minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh have been treated in their respective Constitutions and laws much as in India: few specific, clear, concise, and justiciable Constitutional safeguards, especially with respect to representation in State/provincial and national legislatures proportionate in some measure to their population; some Constitutional measures such as protection to community personal laws and the running of minority educational institutions; some pro-minority legislative and administrative steps but offset by others blatantly aimed at the minorities; some backing to the minorities from the courts, especially when the legislative branch flinches from taking an unambiguous stand, preferring to hide behind the skirts of court judgments; and much discrimination in practice. In India, in a generalized sense, however, Chief Justice Gajendragadkar “and others…pointed out that the spirit of secularism permeated every page of the Constitution”.

Few of us Indians remember now, if we ever did note it at the time, that, as Nair shows, East Pakistan returned a number of Hindus to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly and West Pakistan returned some very important members of the Christian community, including the Deputy Speaker of the House, C. E. Gibbon.

They fought a valiant rearguard action in the debate on the Objectives Resolution (the equivalent of our Preamble), tabled in March 1949, against the labelling of Pakistan as an “Islamic state” in which only a Muslim could be “President”. The debate went on until the short-lived adoption of the 1956 Constitution—and has continued almost uninterrupted since then.

In the first phase, the most articulate of the minority representatives were the two Dattas, Bhupendra Kumar and Dhirendra Nath, and Basanta Kumar Das, ably supported by a host of others—Raj Kumar Chakravarty, Kamini Kumar Dutta, Sris Chandra Chattopadhyay, Bhabesh Chandra Nandy, Manoranjan Dhar and, from the Scheduled Caste Federation, Gour Chandra Bala, Rasa Raja Mandal, and Akshat Kumar Das.

The non-Muslim members were not so easily taken in about the validity of the essential philosophy of the idea of Pakistan as set out in the Objectives Resolution. Bhupendra Kumar Dutta argued that “if Pakistan is declared an Islamic republic”, it would “assign the near about a crore of non-Muslims in the State to a subordinate position to the limit of obliteration…To the common people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, ‘Islamic State’ has only one meaning. It has no place for non-Muslims”.

P.P. Gomez, a Christian representative from East Pakistan, poignantly asked: “Am I not a child of this soil?” Basant Kumar Das bemoaned that the Quaid-e-Azam’s inaugural address of August 11, 1947, was a “forgotten document”. He continued, “Is not Pakistan also the homeland of the persons who follow other religions? Do not the Muslims of India claim India as their homeland?” Dr. S.K. Sen asked, “tartly perhaps”, says the author, whether “the President would perform the duties of the imam of a mosque”; else what was the need to reserve the post only for a certified Muslim?

More to the point, it was underlined that the Basic Principles Committee set up by the Constituent Assembly had thoroughly examined the two related issues of Pakistan as an “Islamic state” and the President necessarily being Muslim and come to the conclusion that none of this was desirable.

Perhaps the most impassioned opposition came from the West Pakistan Christian member, C.E. Gibbon, whose intervention lasted several hours. He began by denouncing the “betrayal” of the “contract” between Jinnah and the Christian community, underlining that non-Muslim minorities could enjoy their rights in Pakistan only if in separate electorates they could elect representatives “who can reflect their deepest thoughts and feelings in their entirety and with the utmost sublimity, without let or hindrance from any quarter.” Poignantly describing the Christians as “a community within a nation”—an expression that we might appreciate applied equally to India’s minority communities—he conceded that while Pakistan might not be a theocratic state, it was an “experimental state” that should be “brought in line with the conception of political representation in an ordinary secular state”.

Significantly, virtually all East Pakistan non-Muslim League members, led by A.K.M. Fazlul Huq of the Krishak Sramik Party, H.S. Suhrawardy, who became Prime Minister in 1957, and, notably, Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, the future Bangabandhu, were supportive, albeit initially subdued in the first phase of the debate but subsequently vocal, especially after the Awami (Muslim) League trounced the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the provincial elections of 1954.  “It is their habit,” said Mujib in 1956 of Muslim League majoritarianism, “to give bluff to the people in the name of Islam”.

Some West Pakistan members like Shaukat Hayat Khan of Punjab presciently warned that if these East Pakistan voices were not listened to, Pakistan’s leaders might have to “preside over the funeral” of their country. Sardar Asadullah Khan of North West Frontier Province was also supportive of the Bengali view.

Another Awami League member, Ataur Rahman, raised a pertinent point while requesting the House “not to fall into the trap laid by the mullahs”. He pointed out “that there were seventy-two sects in Pakistan, and each called the others non-Muslim and kafir.” (A glancing reference to the anti-Ahmedia riots of 1953 that had rocked West Pakistan and the persisting Sunni-Shia differences.) He further argued that “the ideology of Pakistan was not the creation of an Islamic State… nor intended to make it impossible for the others to live in this State”. He held “the great ideology of a State” to be “the improvement of the lot of the common people”.

Some West Pakistan members like Shaukat Hayat Khan of Punjab presciently warned that if these East Pakistan voices were not listened to, Pakistan’s leaders might have to “preside over the funeral” of their country. Sardar Asadullah Khan of North West Frontier Province was also supportive of the Bengali view.

The government and Muslim League leaders argued that as the ideals of Pakistan “represent the very core of fair play and tolerance…adequate provision shall be made for the minorities to freely profess and practice their religion and develop their culture”. (Significantly, the Zia regime subsequently dropped the word “freely” from this formulation. It was restored by the 18th amendment in 2010.)

Mian Abdul Bari, who led the debate from the Muslim League, described as “terrible allegations” the claim “that we want to get rid of non-Muslims in the Muslim State of Pakistan”. Nur Ahmed of the Muslim League added that Pakistan was not going to be a “theocratic state” for “there is no priesthood, no Pope in Islam, and there is no mediator between God and Man in Islam”. A Minister, Pir Ali Mohammad Rashdi, supported Bari and Nur Ahmed in arguing that Islam was not being invoked “to worry them (the minorities) or to put them in a lower position”.

He added: “If the name of Islam is taken away then there will be nothing common between East Pakistan and West Pakistan…we have put that word in to keep the whole fabric together”. Yet the fabric was to be ripped apart a few years later.

Maulana Mufti Mahmood of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam quoted from the Quran “to show how fairly non-Muslims had been treated during the time of the Prophet”. Therefore, if Pakistani Hindus were assured of similar treatment, “they would be content to live in Pakistan”. Hence, precisely because Islam as a religion ordained the fair and just treatment of the minorities, Pakistan needed to be declared an “Islamic State that belongs to the Muslims”. The tenets of Islam would ensure that the country “is also the homeland of Hindus and Christians”.

The argument paralleled the Indian saffron argument that Hinduism was the best guarantee of the place of the minorities in a tolerant and compassionate Hindu Rashtra, more than the secularism of the “western zealots”.

The counterarguments to the Objectives Resolution made little impression on the overwhelmingly Muslim League-dominated Pakistan Constituent Assembly. The Prime Minister, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali, closing the debate, emphasized that “it would be un-Islamic to ignore the rights of non-Muslims”. He held that “the cardinal values of Islam were justice and brotherhood”; hence, Muslims are “tolerant and good”. Therefore, fear of “obscurantism” and “bigotry” was misplaced. He went on to affirm that non-Muslims are “an integral part of life in Pakistan” who would “judge us not by our professions but by our conduct.” He added: “If as a people we fail to live up to the highest teachings of Islam, we shall have failed utterly.”

Unimpressed, the entire Opposition walked out and in their absence, the 1956 Constitution was adopted, declaring Pakistan an “Islamic state” in which the head of state (president) would necessarily have to be a Muslim, but the minorities would be assured their rights.

In other words, as in India where the minorities were being urged to rely on the essential secularism of the Hindu religion and the Nehruvian “idea of India” to place their “trust” in the “goodwill” of the majority, so in Pakistan were the religious minorities being urged to place their faith in the Islamic tenets of “justice”, “brotherhood”, and “tolerance” of the Muslim majority. And as in India, the minorities were betrayed, but on a far worse scale.

Also, as in India so in Pakistan, much of the debate took place outside the formal chamber of the Constituent Assembly, as the author underlines.

Maulana Maudoodi of the Jama’at-e-Islami had initially opposed Jinnah and his Muslim League as Westernized secularists incapable of creating a genuine Islamic state. However, once Pakistan had come into existence, Maudoodi moved his headquarters from Pathankot (that had remained in India) to Lahore, the capital of Pakistani Punjab. Once there, he fought with increasing tenacity for an Islamic state.

He prevailed when the Basic Objectives resolution was placed before the Constituent Assembly. He then asserted his belief that as, in making the Constitution, Muslim members should remember that “sovereign in Islam” means God, “not man” as possessing “the real power of legislation”, the Objectives Resolution as drafted “assumes the complexion and characteristics of an Islamic state”. That is why he endorsed it.

For Altaf Husain, the editor of Dawn, however, it was “the (Muslim) League’s enemies (i.e., Maudoodi and his ilk) who had raised “the bogey of a theocratic state”. He went on to categorically affirm that “the application of Quranic principles does not mean the theocratisation of a state”. A joint editorial published simultaneously in several newspapers at the instance of the establishment argued that “the danger of a theocracy has been eliminated because no priesthood had been entrusted with any special authority”. At the same time, the Resolution reflected the “basic ideals which are common ground between all schools of Islamic thought”, thus ensuring that “Pakistan will develop an Islamic society free from dissensions and controversies”. That proved no more than a pious hope.

Javed Iqbal, son of the great litterateur, Allama Iqbal, president of the seminal session of the Muslim League in 1930, shone a quite different light on the 1956 Constitution and its Basic Objectives Resolution. He held that the position of Islam in the 1956 Constitution “reflected the attitude of hypocrisy and vagueness of the Muslim framers of that Constitution”. Pakistan, he stated, “came into being because the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent sought for a State in which to implement the social order of Islam”. And as the “ultimate aim of Islam” was to establish “a spiritual democracy…the modern Islamic State should offer more security to believers in other faiths than a secular state”. He concluded, “Only if minorities are preserved can the true ideal of the Islamic State be attained”. He believed it be “obligatory” for true Muslims “not only to tolerate non-Muslims but also to protect them and to defend their places of worship”.

For his part, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, on a state visit to the US, held that the Objectives Resolution made it “unequivocally clear” that there is no room for “theocracy” in Pakistan because “Islam stands for freedom of conscience, condemns coercion, has no priesthood and”, in a swipe at India, “abhors the caste system”. While Pakistan had “delivered millions of Muslims” from “the perpetual fear of the majority”, it had also “solemnly pledged” that “our minorities shall enjoy full rights of citizenship and shall freely profess and practice their religions and develop their cultures” while adequately safeguarding the interests of “the backward and depressed classes”.

This rather complacent explanation of the purport of the Objectives Resolution was challenged by a well-known Christian intellectual, Joshua Fazl-ud-Din, in The Civil and Military Gazette, published from Lahore. He faulted the Objectives Resolution for “according (to) non-Muslims a second-class status”. He demanded that the Muslim League “formally withdraw the ‘two-nation theory’” by “amending the Objectives Resolution”. After he became a member of the West Pakistan legislature in 1974, Joshua stressed that Christians, as the largest minority in West Pakistan, “required separate electorates to safeguard rights that only elected Christian representatives could be trusted to protect”— a reprisal of Gibbon’s argument—as “mere concessions” would always remain “subject to the personal discretion of the majority.”

He talked of a social contract under which “the Muslims were bound to respect the culture of the non-Muslim minorities, grant them religious freedom and give full economic rights”. If that happened, then, in return, the non-Muslims could accept that the Muslims (please note he excludes non-Muslims) could continue to have their ideology (that is, a Pakistani Muslim ideology, not an all-Pakistan ideology) in respect of the two-nation theory”. This was a more nuanced suggestion than his earlier demand that the two-nation theory be withdrawn by amending the Constitution.

Maulana Mufti Mahmood of the Jamiat-i-ulema-i-Islam to declare “in unequivocal terms” that the official religion of the State would be Islam. He would never agree to “turn the State into a secular State”

Ayub Khan went further. He finessed the entire 1956 Constitution through a military coup two years later, but the arguments in the Constituent Assembly were not effaced. They re-emerged in the debates of 1962 on the unresolved issues of Pakistani nationhood, particularly the vexed question of separate or joint electorates. While Ayub’s Law Minister, Muhammad Munir, Pakistan’s leading jurist, had pointed to the “slipperiness” of the word “Muslim” in his report on the anti-Ahmadi riots of 1953, he trimmed his sails in accordance with the prevailing winds to argue that inserting the word “Islamic” before “ideology” would not affect the religious freedom of the minorities.

This gave the opening for the more Islamist members like Maulana Mufti Mahmood of the Jamiat-i-ulema-i-Islam to declare “in unequivocal terms” that the official religion of the State would be Islam. He would never agree to “turn the State into a secular State”, but the minorities need have no fear since the Prophet himself had set the example of how minorities were to be treated. Mohammed Abdul Haque of East Pakistan retorted that the word “ideology” was “vague” and there was no assurance that those in power would interpret the word “in a progressive way”, to which Z.A. Bhutto, by then a Minister in Ayub’s cabinet, held that the Preamble meant Pakistan would be a “democratic state based on Islamic principles of social justice”.

Syed Abdus Sultan of East Pakistan then brought up a further consideration. He enquired whether the expression “Islamic ideology” would not bar non-Muslim citizens from joining any political party. Bhutto’s response was that Pakistan had to be an “ideological state” as it could not be a “territorial state”. The argument went on and was never resolved to the satisfaction of either the minorities or the eastern Bengali wing of the country. Shaukat Hayat Khan’s prediction that this would lead to Pakistan’s leaders “presiding over the funeral of their country” was fulfilled.

Click here for reading full article

_______________

Mani Shankar Aiyar is an author, politician and former diplomat. He also had served as Indian Consul General in Karachi  

Courtesy: The Hindu (Posted on June 19, 2023)  

The post Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Dariusz Pacak, Vienna, Austria

In relation to the indicated topic, it is very easy to observe that especially today, in this strange period. In order to continue the existence of our civilization, inward transgression should be the essential need of the human species, which will lead to the annihilation of current substrate recognized as ‘the ego’.

Only that way, the TRUE LOVE can come into being among us, and we will be rewarded with it.

And then as the righteous we will drink from a cup full of happiness*, fulfilled from the Spring of Shining. There is no other right path among the many paths.

A new vision of the next war will arise again, as it did many times in the past. And we will never be able to transform to the next, higher level of the existence, free from all pathologies, crimes, borders.

Only an act of moral and spiritual transgression can lead us to getting rid of all dualities, boundaries, fears, the dark side of the power of human character, and many other global problems created by human civilizations, including the abandonment of hidden wars between supporters of secularism and adherents of the church state.

But if our reason creates only ‘understanding’ of this subject, and feared spirit doesn’t follow the reason and will not free us from chains of the mental process of differentiating (where ‘I’ is always separate and always more important than ‘you’ and ‘they’, where science is treated in the same way as the Wisdom, and Wisdom and its experience are forgotten or effectively eliminated, and lies are more welcome than True is), nothing more will be done. Just another new veil of the projection of ego will be born – the cancer of modern humanity.

Cancer leads to destruction, extermination and death.

A new vision of the next war will arise again, as it did many times in the past. And we will never be able to transform to the next, higher level of the existence, free from all pathologies, crimes, borders. We won’t be able to live the REAL EXISTENCE, which is the opposite of the modern image of hell of diseases, of hatred, and sufferings inflicted on each other. Everything will remain a dream only, endlessly… still.

So, is it not Philosophy and Poetry (and not the dangerous politicians and their manipulative games) conceived as a part of the basic principles in the complex structure of the foundation of human beings, of the Homo Sapiens: Homo Eruditus, Artifex, and finally–  Homo Liber(!) are indispensable to experience life, TRUE LIFE, like it is in REALITY ?!

Real Law and Power on Earth, how can they be products of man’s reason and littleness, when he himself is a formation of dust and water, thus having no other power but the soul? The soul does not come from the world of human imaginations.

Then, should we not, rather try to follow the path of the Spirit? Should it not be the source of all structures of social life on this planet (which is also not from man), even the most important, greatest ones, such as the state or life in faith?

Should we not, then, do this together (while maintaining our inviolable separateness and human rights) in coexistence and humility, without fears and limits, boundaries, as ONE, as a multilateral WHOLE?

Then also the problem of balance / harmony between the secular state and the influence of religion in the construction of the state will cease to exist.

In conclusion, with these words I address both the clergy assuming the role of politicians and corrupt layers of the ruling:

18 Vide humilitatem meam et laborem meum, et dimitte universa delicta mea.

19 Respice inimicos meos, quoniam multiplicati sunt, et odio iniquo oderunt me.

20 Custodi animam meam, et erue me: non erubescam, quoniam speravi in te.

[Psalm 24:18-20.]

_______

*  […] As to the Righteous, they shall drink of a cup

          [Of vine] mixed with Kafur,

          – A Fountain where the Devotees of Allah do drink,

          Making it flow in unstinted abundance.

          They perform [their] vows, […]

Sura LXXVI, 5-7. [In:] The Holy Quran (Koran). King Fahd Holy Quran Printing Complex, Madinah1987, Saudi Arabia. Translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali.

____________________

About the Author

Dariusz Pacak is a poet & essayist, settled in Austria. He holds MFA Degree in Art (Poland 1998). Professional Studies (Austria 2000). Hon. Doctor Degree of Literature (USA 2011). Member of World Academy of Arts and Culture (USA), Union of Polish Writers Abroad (Great Britain), Maison Naaman pour la Culture (Lebanon), Association of the Romanian Writes in North America (Canada), World Nations Writers’ Union, (Kazakhstan), IG Autorinnen Autoren (Austria), etc. Authored books: Birds of Emanations (2001), In Shattered Course of Things (2003), The House of the Golden Fleece (2004), The Seasons (2006), literary sheet: Bulletin of Library &Culture Information dedicated to Dariusz Pacak (2011), Homo Viator (2018, 2021). Worldwide awarded, published in 14 languages. Author of the over 380 worldwide publications in literary magazines, anthologies and on web. He deals with the axioms of tradition, religion, socio-political systems, the diversity of the norms of human existence and in creations of realities, and beyond of the human dimensions, the transgression towards mysticism.

The post NEEDED HARMONY BETWEEN SECULARISM AND RELIGION first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Man throughout his life has achieved greatness through a purpose. Purpose is something that makes us alive. Some philosophers said life without purpose is like a bird without wings. The greatness of Rome, the glory of Sparta, the wisdom of Athens, art of Leonardo de Vinci, the kindness of mother Teresa, and the US quench of hegemony got manifested because there was a purpose behind it. History has shown again and again with the help of purpose that civilizations or nations have cultivated prosperity and made the impossible possible. But in the case of my dear homeland, the story is different. It has been 75th years since Pakistan got independence yet it is moving in an unknown direction with no purpose at all.

Pakistan’s story is unique in myriad ways political instability has proved a major havoc in its development. Whether it’s military intervention or civilian rule, roti kapra Makan or Naya Pakistan – still the people of Thar or any other area don’t have clean water to drink, and all citizens are devoid of prosperity. Being indulged in political turmoil and devastated floods with a broken economy it seems Pakistan is living its worse days. The time is here for Pakistan to achieve nirvana but the question raises here is ‘Is there a way out for Pakistan?’ Let’s break the ice and dig it out.

Pakistan is a child which learned to walk after 9 years of its birth when it got its first constitution. Quaid’s manifesto “You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or any other places of worship in the State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste, or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state,” – it made history and gave us the idea that Pakistan was created as a secular state. Later on, it was made an Islamic state by the regimes.

Then a vision was created and presented in front of the people that saw Pakistan as an ideal Islamic state and with its power, they started winning the elections. From Bhutto to Imran Khan everyone claimed that they will make Pakistan an ideal Islamic state but none ever tried to present a portfolio of what Pakistan wants. Because they were busy getting what they want. Even when a company is made it has an intended vision to achieve. Later on, even if the top tier got changed but the purpose remains the same. But in the case of Pakistan, every time the policies got changed from nationalization to privatization none presented a road to follow. Subsequently, it became a headache for Pakistan. When the whole world was moving in one direction Pakistan was moved to follow different directions each one with a new regime.

ABID ALI JUNEJO

Qasimabad, Hyderabad Sindh

The post Pakistan moving in an unknown direction first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Yanis Iqbal

With the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the intellectual defense of cultural nationalism has taken on a new significance. One of its sophisticated iterations consists of the following arguments: “Has the nation been created by the Constitution, or the nation adopted, enacted and gave itself the Constitution? In other words, is the emotional charge of nationalism a result of the euphoria created by a consensus over liberal values like liberty, equality and fraternity, or did the nation resolve to live by these ideals in its corporate life? To predicate nationhood on civic rather than cultural values is putting the cart before the horse.” These dichotomies are extremely simplistic. First, cultural nationalists consider universal values as mere ideas, which exist independently in an ethereal realm. In contrast, a materialist perspective acknowledges that Indians have real needs – for physical support, for accommodation and shelter – which do not emanate from peculiarities of their culture.

In fact, the existence of such needs is a precondition for the sustained reproduction of culture. As Vivek Chibber notes, “If agents do not perceive the need to find subsistence, then the elementary precondition for the cultures existence has not been met. Hence, every culture must have codes through which agents can recognize their basic needs as desires—for it to fail in this regard would consign the culture itself to oblivion.” This interest in physical well-being leads to the pursuit of ideals such as liberty, equality and fraternity because these conceptions of political rights — instantiated in various forms such the legalization of trade unions and the ban on property qualifications for the franchise – are demanded, in part, to enable workers to defend their basic physical well-being. Thus, in India, the constitutional vision of liberty, equality and fraternity was crafted semi-independently of culture, as the immiserating effects of British colonialism unleashed a substantive desire on the part of the subaltern classes to gain economic freedom.

Secondly, cultural nationalists’ denial of the materiality of basic needs and interests results in the opposite case, wherein culture is regarded as the fountainhead of all democratic worldviews. While admiring the traditions that define the essence of a nation, one should also recognize them as sites of major social contradictions between immediate producers and those who extracted unpaid labor in kind and in services. In “Ancient Treasures”, Rabindranath Tagore commented: “If we are to build up a nation, we must with all due respect and regret cast aside the load of the venerable rock-like tradition, which is suffocating our humanity, our strength and our manly independence”. In “Objectives and Education”, he reiterated: “It is no use repeating that our traditional society is the best training ground of man as man…we must at the outset mercilessly smash this illusion of ours. It is our own society that has tortured our humanity”.

Molded by the radical energies of the Independence struggle, the Indian constitution officially scrapped many precolonial customs and practices, such as untouchability and separate electorates for religious minorities. This indicates the fact that Indian nationalism had a highly important civic aspect that was opposed to the restoration of a supposedly idealized cultural sphere disrupted by colonialism. The cultural nationalist misunderstanding of the status of religion stems from a lack of attention to the historical determinations of this domain. Traditions have their basis in the persistence of pre-capitalist and non-commodified social relationships. Contrary to common assumptions, British colonial rule continued to provide such a basis. Vasant Kaiwar remarks that it “appears to have left significant areas of life in the colonies relatively autonomous, attempting to preserve or, more to the point, creating a traditional order replete with ranks, hierarchies, endogamous relationships and ascriptive identities, which would have unraveled had the full force of modernization been unleashed on it.” With the onset of the post-colonial period, “we see that traditionalism of the older variety has, to all intents and purposes, disappeared in most places with the onward rush of capitalism (modernization).” In the neoliberal age, it has been replaced by “neo-traditionalism” – founded upon the comparatively unstable structures of cultural production (television plays, computer images etc.) and the political invention of identities through mass public ritual.

From the above, it should be evident that cultural nationalists are trapped in a binary: either the valorization of “authentic” traditions or the danger of a complete evacuation of religion from social life. They remain ignorant of a third alternative – the reinterpretation and delimitation of religion from social life. This corresponds to secularism, the religious corollary of liberty, equality and fraternity. As such, it also has an element of practical necessity. Javeed Alam elaborates:

“Modernity, it does not matter even if it is colonially induced, when it begins to take roots in any preexisting society, generates unending contestations about the notion of the good. But when these contestations get intertwined with religious disputations and struggles for power, the historical tendency has been one of getting deflected into sectarian disputes as happened at the beginning of modernity in Europe. The combination of religion with politics was always a feature of social life in pre-capitalist societies, but such a combination in the phase of modernity is quite deadly, more often than not. When the two are separate and unconnected from each other they do not pose a threat to social life.”

Cultural nationalists do not explicitly reject secularism but they distort the term beyond recognition. As a consequence of their idealist culturalism, they crudely spiritualize secular thought through Hindu exceptionalism: “what we know as Indian secularism — religious coexistence and non-discrimination — is an Indian, read Hindu, civilizational feature, which might not have existed if India had experienced a more profound rupture in its history and culture during the medieval period.” This notion of Muslims as permanent aliens in the subcontinent necessarily leads to the following conclusion: “For Muslims to be fully at home in India, they would have to abandon the self-created binary between belief and belonging. The fetishisations of identity, phobia of assimilation and drift into self-alienation have to end for their cultural roots in the land to revive.” These views are based on a combination of selective historical facts and unfounded psychological anxieties.

According to Jamal Malik: “[H]eterodoxy and orthodoxy do not necessarily contradict but overlap at the level of life-worlds. Therefore, Islam in India is both formal and trans-local, because of its orientation towards normative Islamic texts and centers in the Arab and Persian lands, as well as ritual and local, because of its tendency to adjust to the life-structuring cultural environment or to reciprocate to local cosmologies…The net result is Islamicatization: the social and cultural complex, which evolved historically in the encounters among actors of different religious traditions.” Moreover, “different social groups, lifestyles and life-chances are not conducive to a unified Muslim definition of what is called a homogenous Muslim minority. Other interests, loyalties and affiliations such as economic, social, caste, etc. do indeed transcend religious barriers between Hindus and Muslims, and their plurality of social identities often is more important than their religious affinities.”

When we take into account the nature of Indian Islam, the cultural nationalist assertion about Muslims being overtly particularistic turns out be incorrect. To explore the current conjuncture, we don’t need to engage in the construction of false historical narratives and fantasies. We need to focus on how the secular legacy of the anti-colonial struggle was transformed into a form of secularism shaped by political expediency, by elections, leadership struggles and by narrow conflicts. While the Congress made secularism the policy of maintaining equipoise between concessions given to fundamentalist sections of religious communities, the BJP has instituted an arrangement of overt communalism systematically oriented toward the otherization of Muslims and the entrenchment of Hindu domination. These dynamics can only be understood when we start from a truly secular perspective.

__________________

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com.

Courtesy: Counter Currents 

The post The Civic Character of Indian Nationalism first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Kevin Butcher

How did the idea of a European secular society come about? In this startlingly original book, David Lloyd Dusenbury argues that the separation of politics and religion, of ‘church and state’, can be attributed to a thread of Christian thought rooted in the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate and in subsequent discourses over whether or not Pilate could be held guilty of having ordered ‘the death of God’.

This is not a book about Pontius Pilate, nor is it a book about what actually happened in the trial of Jesus. Both topics were of great interest to early Christian apologists, their pagan critics and a parade of later thinkers; and it is these rich intellectual traditions that the book exploits to make its case. Who condemned Jesus, and why, and did they have the right to do so? We encounter a patchwork of competing claims: for example, that Pilate refused to condemn Jesus; or that he condemned him, but believed him innocent; or that he condemned him as a criminal.

The Christian accommodation of the tradition that Pilate was guilty in one sense, but innocent in another, is the one that informs the main thrust of the book’s argument. Pilate was doing his duty as the representative of a secular power, but did not understand that Jesus was Christ: he was thus, through ignorance, innocent of the charge of deicide, but he nonetheless ordered Jesus’ execution.

Central to the thesis is the statement Jesus makes before Pilate in the Gospel of John (18:36): ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ References to Jesus’ renunciation of worldly kingdoms can also be found in other parts of the New Testament. The book argues that his refusal to claim this dominion or to save himself from crucifixion (even though his divine power could have enabled it) had important political consequences in the late antique Mediterranean and medieval Europe. St Augustine’s reading of the trial in John emerges as a kind of early manifesto for the division of the sacred realm from what we would call the ‘secular’. For Augustine, Jesus’ accusers and Pilate are innocent because they act in ignorance (‘they know not what they do’, Luke 23:34), but when Pilate sentences Jesus, he does so according to the justice of the saeculum (i.e. the temporal realm, as opposed to the eternal).

As the representative of temporal power, Pilate fulfilled his legal responsibility: this is his ‘innocence’. The justice of the saeculum is a form of justice, but imperfect compared to the justice of an all-knowing God. ‘Truth is not subject to human empire’, as the 17th-century legal theorist Samuel Pufendorf has it. From this partition of power and justice, between an imperfect worldly realm based on coercion and an eternal one based on the persuasive power of Christian religious truth, arises the idea of the secular.

This twofold partition of prerogatives had a practical aim: it helped the church to maintain its authority while avoiding conflict with political leaders who had military (coercive) power. After the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, church leaders strove to find a way to accommodate Roman imperial power without surrendering to it. Pope Gelasius I (492-96), who, like Augustine, hailed from North Africa, distinguished sacred from secular rule, reassuring the emperor Anastasius that the papacy had no interest in controlling the temporal realm. Yet six centuries later the papacy seemed to renege on this separation and persisted in its claim to worldly authority through medieval times. For critics like the scholar and priest Lorenzo Valla, who exposed as a forgery the Donation of Constantine, a central ‘ancient’ document used to support papal claims to earthly dominion, Jesus’ claim in John 18:36 was crucial counter-evidence. So too was it for Dante and Marsilius of Padua, who used Jesus’ renunciation to critique the papacy’s ‘perverse desire for government’. Rather than arguing for theocracy, these Christian intellectuals used the trial of Jesus to advance the cause of secular authority.

By tracing these lines of thought, the book argues that the New Testament contains statements that seem to define a sphere of authority that we would recognize as ‘secular’. Secular rule was certainly not a common feature of ancient states, where politics and religion – what Dusenbury calls a ‘temple-state’ – were normally indivisible, and while the word ‘secular’ would not gain its modern sense for more than 1,000 years, the use by early Christians of the concept of the ‘saeculum’ as a legitimate temporal realm separate from the eternal kingdom of God would seem to mark something revolutionary. The powerful image of Jesus renouncing any claim to rule in ‘this world’ helps to explain why some writers that we would normally associate with the secular, such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, emerge as inordinately interested in the Pilate trial.

These deliberations might seem very far from our own experiences of secularity. Like democracy, we tend to take it for granted as a natural state of affairs. The paradox, according to this book, is that the secular is in large part the offspring of theological argument and, without Jesus’ confession before Pontius Pilate we cannot know how our notions of secularity and tolerance might have developed.

___________________________

Kevin Butcher is Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick.

Courtesy: History Today

The post The separation of Politics and Religion first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Islamabad: Islam is as liberal to discuss and debate differences objectively as secularism claims to be, and questioning secularism as the only way to inclusiveness, peaceful coexistence and tolerance means the decolonization of thoughts and society.

This was the spirit of a discussion at a webinar titled ‘De-colonial Muslim Studies & Defending Muhammad (PBUH) in Modernity’, organized by the Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad (IPS) in collaboration with the international network of scholars ‘De-colonial Dialogue.’ The webinar was part of the Book Discussion series, a joint effort by the two organizations in bringing international scholarly debates to Pakistani academia.

Sher Ali Tareen, a professor at Franklin and Marshall College, USA, put forth the key themes of his book ‘Defending Muhammad in Modernity.’ Discussants included Dr. Humeira Iqtidar of King’s College London, Dr. Nauman Faizi of LUMS, and Dr. Anis Ahmed, vice-chancellor, Riphah International University (RIU), Islamabad. Nazeer Mahar from The Research Initiative and Zaigham Sarfaraz from Royal Hollaway University London also took part in the discussion.

Summarizing the key points of his book, Professor Tareen meticulously analyzed the Deobandi-Barelvi polemics and debates in the aftermath of the fall of Mughal Empire and the Muslims, and the rise of the British colonial empire.

Discussing the secular perceptions of 19th century Islam, Tareen termed these debates as ‘competing political theologies’ that cannot be understood through the Western Eurocentric binaries. Using the Deobandi and Barelvi theological assertions primarily, he challenged the binaries of traditional/moderate, progressive/conservative, and legal/mystical embedded often in secular perceptions of Islamic tradition.

He reflected on how the concepts of Divine sovereignty, prophetic authority of the Prophet (PBUH), and ritual practices gave birth to two intellectual streams in the Subcontinent in the 18th and 19th centuries. He regarded the understanding of modern constructions of religion and particularly the study of Islam through Eurocentric epistemology and world view in contradiction with decolonization. Secularizing or Westernizing religious concepts does not consider epistemological and ontological frames of thought of a particular religion, he added.

Dr. Humiera Iqtidar noted that much is lost in translation from the vernacular to the Western epistemes. She particularly highlighted the notion of ‘sovereign’ and ‘sovereignty’ that scholars borrow from the West to use as a synonym of ‘hukum’ or ‘hakimiyat’ in Islam.

She was of the view that believing in and exploring options other than secularism for ensuring peace and stability, tolerance and peaceful coexistence is tantamount to decolonization as the concept of secularism has its own history of how it developed in the West over the centuries. She maintained that criticism of the secular paradigm should not be taken as the total rejection of the secular idea, but as the valid criticism of considering secularism as the only solution to all the evils.

Dr. Anis Ahmed argued that both Deobandi and Barelvi schools of thought have the same origin and are not in contradiction with each other. They share many commonalities in principles and practices. However, the difference lies in the theological approach adopted by scholars of both streams. He said that there is coherence in all sects of Islam and it was the application of Western epistemology when applied to study the Muslims and their debates that particularly underscores divergences among the sects. He emphasized the need for adopting Islamic epistemology/methodology in place of Western epistemology and ontology to comprehend religious concepts and differences prevailing among various groups. He observed that Muslims have a rich corpus of words that can be explained and understood in their own context and from within the Islamic traditions, without comparing or contrasting them with the Western episteme.

Concluding the session, Vice-President IPS Syed Abrar Hussain acknowledged the efforts of Professor Tareen for highlighting convergences and divergences between the Deobandi and Barelvi traditions of the Hanafi school of thought. Citing from Hadith, the former ambassador explained that the dialectical debate or constructive argumentation is appreciated in Islam, and this adds to the flexibility and pluralist thoughts in its realm. (PR)

_________________________

The post Islam is as liberal as Secularism first appeared on Sindh Courier.

India’s soul is at stake. Bengalis will be voting this year, 2021 in a highly charged and divisive election. At its heart… this is a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting visions of India: Hindutva versus Secularism.

By Nazarul Islam

The similarities between Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee are uncanny. They share sharp political smarts, wear their heroic arrogance on their sleeve, don’t like naysayers and fully control their respective political parties.

West Bengal’s history, awaits its crucial trial. India’s scholars and journalists have voiced that a change at the societal level is almost in effect—provided that the BJP manages to form the government, in Bengal.

Have the Bhadrolok finally embraced Hindutva? Or, does the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise in the state reflect the dominance of anti-Bhadrolok sentiments among the rural masses? Is Bengal’s ‘party society’ finally breaking down? What triggered the rise of ‘subaltern Hindutva’?

These are some of the questions dominating the intellectual discourse around the Bengal Assembly elections 2021, which has already been pegged by the national and international media as a watershed election in the history of Bengal – often described as India’s cultural capital.

India’s soul is at stake. Bengalis will be voting this year, 2021 in a highly charged and divisive election. At its heart… this is a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting visions of India: Hindutva versus Secularism.

What became evident from the recent intellectual discussion around Bengal at the national level is the general perception of the state as one of the last bastions of secular and liberal socio-religious practices where a rise of the subaltern with the slogans of Hindutva had endangered the secular-liberal atmosphere patronized by the Bhadrolok.

Power and office is their strength. While Banerjee allows nephew “bhaipo” Abhishek Banerjee a small power share, Modi has his doppelganger Amit Shah. Both Modi and Mamata can get riled up quickly.

Mamata Banerjee likes to portray herself as a street fighter in “hawai chappals” (rubber slippers) who has repeatedly shed blood on the street in her ascent to the Writers building in Kolkata.

Modi on the other hand is extremely conscious of his attire and often dons expensive jamavar shawls. The long flowing white beard he currently sports has set off much political buzz if has he cultivated it for the Bengal elections, in a nod to the greatest son of Bengal — Gurudev Rabindra Nath Tagore.

The Late C R Irani, editor in The Statesman, once had shared how Banerjee visited his home for Diwali festivities in Kolkata. Seeing the genteel bhadralok elite, Mamata grabbed two pedas (sweet dish) and forced one in the startled Irani’s mouth, popped the other one inside her mouth, then said “….there I ate, now let me go Baba. I am a common person, I don’t belong here” and rushed out. Modi on the other hand has reveled in the company of the Bengali elite.

With the battle for Bengal just weeks away it will be Modi (the BJP still does not have a CM face) squaring off against Bengal ki Beti (Bengal’s daughter) Banerjee. Modi is expected to address a record number of rallies in Bengal and the TMC is totally banking on Banerjee to pull off the David versus Goliath battle.

The BJP is armed with the biggest war chest but makes huge missteps like Babul Supriyo’s retort to Bengal ki Beti as “Beti is paraya dhan” (daughter gets married off eventually) with a photograph of Amit Shah. It did not go over well in Bengal and got Supriya a sharp rap on the knuckles from Shah.

Ask the TMC leadership and they equate Banerjee with “Durga and “Kali” the feminine energy fighting alone to save her citadel. If — and it is a big if — Banerjee manages to win, she will be the pre-eminent leader in the opposition, a real contender for leading it, a woman leader who single-handedly saw off the Pax BJP of Modi and Shah.

I would have gone into a SWAT analysis of Modi and Banerjee’s governance which is equally idiosyncratic with teachable moments like the demonetization disaster of the BJP government but, governance gets you no votes in India.

The personality of the leader and following does. And, Modi and Shah have tapped a rich vein of majority disaffection in West Bengal. They portray Banerjee as a minority appeaser.

But, despite the effort, the BJP has taken on board nearly 19 TMC defectors including the minister Suvendu Adhikari. If you take in to account earlier TMC defector Mukul Roy then the Bengal BJP team looks like Banerjee team B.

Banerjee fights best as the underdog as she did in her epic struggle with the Left.

Here is a reliable assessment of West Bengal Assembly Elections Opinion Poll: Mamata Banerjee is set to return as the chief minister for the third consecutive term with a comfortable majority of 157 seats, 9 more than what is required to form the government in the 294-member Assembly of West Bengal. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on the other hand, will increase its tally by about 100 seats but would still fall short of majority, according to an opinion poll conducted by Times Now-C Voter.

The Trinamool Congress is predicted to get 42.2 per cent vote share and 157 seats, 57 less than what it had got in 2016. The BJP, the key challenger to TMC, is expected to get 37.5 per cent vote share and 107 seats, up by 104 seats from 2016, when it had got just 3. In the previous assembly elections, the saffron party’s vote share was just 10.16 per cent whereas the TMC had the largest vote share of nearly 45 per cent (44.91 to be precise).

The Third Front of Congress and Left is predicted to get just 33 seats, down by 43 than what it had got in 2016.

There are, however, 89 seats where the vote difference margin is very thin and polls suggest that even a 1.5 per cent vote shift can push the election results either side. Of these 89 seats, the TMC is leading on 42 seats while the BJP is ahead on 36 and Congress-Left has an edge on 11 seats.

The numbers predicted by the opinion poll suggest a setback for the BJP and Home Minister Amit Shah who have been claiming that the saffron party would form the next government in Bengal by winning over 200 seats.

The BJP and the TMC have been at odds with each other over a number of issues ever since the former came to power at the Centre in 2014. While Mamata Banerjee has held the BJP responsible for sowing seeds of communal disharmony, the BJP has accused her of Muslim appeasement and being anti-Hindu.

Eight-phase election in Bengal will begin from March 27 and end on April 29. The counting of votes and results will be declared on May 2.

Modi is self-centric, hence always makes it about himself and his own persecution he faces, despite being one of the most powerful PM’s India has had.

Curiously, the ideology-agnostic election strategist Prashant Kishor who came to the limelight managing Modi’s 2014 campaign before an epic fallout with Shah is helming Banerjee’s campaign.

And, as a very sharp leader from Maharashtra currently keeping a very sharp eye on the eight phase Bengal election (another record) points out — Modi and Mamata live and breathe politics 24/7.

He says “look at the deployment of the CBI and ED against Banerjee but she’s indomitable…still standing and fighting.” Bengal, as it has many times, will again tell India what to think.

For Trinamul to lose Bengal to the BJP will mean a shadow cast much wider. It will have a huge psychological impact beyond Bengal. It will put a question on the viability of putting up a challenge to the BJP. Many others will come under pressure or get demoralized…. That’s the battle we are fighting.”

That said, Kishor was certain Trinamul would retain power under Mamata.

“The only way the BJP could have won was if Trinamul had collapsed. That has not happened. The BJP was hoping Trinamul would come apart, but they did not contend with Didi and what she means.”

Expanding on the claim, Kishor added: “This BJP is a formidable force in Bengal today but there is no way they are going to win, absolutely not. For the BJP to win, they need at least 44 per cent of the vote, which means they will have to substantially up their Lok Sabha numbers.

“Barring a few small-state exceptions like Haryana and Tripura, the BJP’s Assembly vote share has always been lower than what they secure in Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP has an uphill task; I can tell you they are not winning this one.

_______________________

About the Author

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Modi vs Mamata: India’s battle for glory first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Flag flutters in the sky to remind us elders of our miserable failings, reminding us that the choice between right and wrong is easy if we want it to be.

By Nazarul Islam

Today’s young, have outnumbered the old in all countries of the Indian subcontinent. Are we not living through a time checkered by our deep divisions? Fact, fiction, half-truths! Nationalism pitted against patriotism (?) Whether we live in Bangladesh or Pakistan or India, we all go through intermittent waves of outrage, often conveniently selective, amidst a sustained campaign of othering those who yearn for sanity; those who want to believe and look for some sense, truth even, in the madness that surrounds us all.

But then, what is truth today? That what we see on television, read in newspapers and websites, or latch on to on twitter and WhatsApp forwards as mere reflections of what we want to believe? Or is there the other ‘truth’, the unsullied one, the old-fashioned one that we know deep down to be real, the kind we don’t need ancient scriptures and holy books to tell us about?

And just when we thought that the ‘truth’ had been buried for good, a teenager from Texas held up a beacon for us to see, as did a bunch of school kids in Calcutta, doing a deep dive into the introductory words of the Constitution to remind us what they stand for.

Jackson Reffitt assumed his father was planning something ‘unusually big’ that would lead-up to US President Joe Biden’s oath-taking. So, what did he do? He alerted the FBI even though he didn’t know what exactly his father, a gun-owning member of a far-Right militia, was going to do.

He found out, like the rest of his country and the world, via television images on January 6 when rioters stormed the Capitol in Washington. Two days later his father returned home and warned him: “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor. And you know what happens to traitors. Traitors get shot.”

We don’t know how Jackson might have reacted immediately after the threat. After all, it’s not normal for an 18-year-old to be faced with a death threat from his own father. Yet, Jackson’s later conversations reveal a self-assured young man, full of hope and faith in the inherent goodness within everyone. “I am afraid for him to know,” he said, unsure whether his father knew he’d turned him in. “Not for my life or anything, but for what he might think,” he clarified in the hope that his relationship with his father could be repaired. “It’ll get better over time. I know we will.”

For Reffitt Senior, who was subsequently arrested, the lesson has just begun. He’s lucky he has his son as teacher.

In Calcutta, a group of children not older than Jackson had their own lesson to impart in school.

After more than five decades, the people of India have renewed their focus on secularism, liberty and “we the people”, the three words with which the Preamble begins. India has to be a “secular society”, not just a secular state, said a 17-year-old during the online program. If the raison d’etre was to take the Preamble out of textbooks and have the children talk about it as a living document of ideas and ideals, the effort will be, well worth it.

For it was the elders’ back home, who were forced to take note when a class XI boy articulated them in succinct prose. The most important aspect of secularism, he noted, “Is mutual respect, acceptance and inclusion of every person in society despite religious beliefs”, his understanding coming from an earlier personal experience of having his tiffin thrown away because he had brought a chicken sandwich to a “vegetarian school.”

Amid the trying circumstances the citizens were faced with, long before the pandemic, schools across the country have not shied away from meaningful discourse on ideas that matter.

From a Third Theatre-style play on the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir to a pictorial depiction of human rights violations, these endeavors have done so much more than keep school children occupied during the lockdown.

It’s as though Reffitt in the US and the young adults of our own country (of origin) have together, unbeknownst to each other, spoken in unison. As the world lurches towards self-defeating extreme intolerance from one day to the next, these boys and girls have planted their own flag(s).

Our national flag symbolizes the soul of the nation, where we belong—that flutters in the sky to remind us elders of our miserable failings, reminding us that the choice between right and wrong is easy if we want it to be.

_______________________

About the Author

The Bengal-born writer is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America.

The post Secularism: Our fluttering flags remind us…. first appeared on Sindh Courier.