Islam and Blasphemy

A guest among strangers was also Taslima Nasrin. But she broke not only propriety of being guest but put the hosts into an embarrassing situation .She turned abusive and wanted to take upon the whole umma. The Muslims in India are part of the complex configuration of the society. As a foreigner her contemptuous, irreverent talk about god and his messenger and the message turned into a nightmare for her and threatened to divide the hosts. As if burning purda and renouncing the holy book was not enough of apostasy. She dared to say the abominable, nauzbilla, to mention the awfully unmentionable: “Such then has been the character of this rascal of a prophet; and concealed within the folds of his raiment is the hoax known as Allah” This caused the street protests in Kolkata as did “The Satanic Verses” of Salman Rushdie in Mumbai. Islam is practiced by a large number of people in the subcontinent as well as the Scandinavian countries. Blasphemy will have violent reaction because it dangerously challenges the believers and dares to test their belief.


But what about sharing the attributes of god with man, is that a lesser evil? Fiction is stranger than reality and reveals more. There is a novel of the Pakistani writer Tehmina Durrani called “Blasphemy”. A Muslim divine, the pir, marries Heer, an underage girl. Her parents offer her to him on a platter as an offering almost. He perpetrates cruelty upon her and rapes her whenever he likes and practices child abuse with others. This horrible practice results in the death of the abused children. He even makes video films of raping his wife and having friends raping her on the camera. He replays the films for perverted pleasure. Finally a victim kills him. Heer takes the films to the friends and shows how they had abused their pirni. They are stunned by the sacrilege. One even kills himself for what he had done with the better half of the divine! But then Heer’s own son turns against her. To maintain his fiefdom he incarcerates her. But by then the tabligi jamat has made appearance and Heer hopes for reform. This is a novel, of course, and cannot be taken as a testimony of a truth. But it lifts the cover a little and reveals much.


Child abuse is one evil and there are other practices that are anathema to religions, not just to Islam. Irshad Manji has no inhibition about her sexual orientation. She is a lesbian but still believes she is a Muslim. Although this explicit phenomenon is recent in the history of mankind, more time is needed to sort out what kind and degree of homoeroticism is violation of religion.


On the horizon of Islam the tabligi jamat appeared late, in the fifties in India. These are the people who have struggled against what is sacrilegious and blasphemous. They are totally unworldly in their endeavour to bring pristine practices of religion back in everyday life of Muslims by correcting what are not religious, but indigenous rites. They do not concern themselves with other religions and strictly keep within the fold and the parameters of Islam. It is one of the most refreshing events of post partition that the members of the tagli jamat went into Punjab. With the wounds of partion still raw they could not but get very hostile reception. They landed up with their founder in a police station. The police officer on duty had lost his family in the partition riots when they had tried to escape into India. He could have perpetrated any degree of torture on the tabligi jamat. But he was such a devout Hindu himself that he showed mercy to them and sheltered them rather than turning them out to the hostile crowd of people. Another incident is about a group of tabligi jamat from Malegaon that had gone to China where the group interacted with the Chinese Muslims and others peacefully despite official disdain. In both the cases the jamat steadfastly dealt with religious practices of the followers of Islam and how to make the believers stick to them. Margaret Metcalf of California University in write up on this in the special number on Islam in the American journal ANNALS argues that there is a peaceful aspect of Islam for which it attracts others to its teaching. It negates the popular misconception that sword rather than pen and preaching played major role. Among the jamat group was Hanif Mili whose travelogue she had read and remarked that he must have authored many books and must have been well read. If the prophet had asked Muslims to go to any distant place for seeking knowledge going to China was not carrying coal to Newcastle, the English Dhanbad. Traveling is humbling as well as enlightening and hence necessary according to the prophet. The tabligi jamat are the people you come across on roads with their bedding and suitcases on shoulders and heads marching in regular formation, strictly keeping to themselves and their side.