[Reader-list] Re: Prof Hoodbhoy on Muslims and the West

[pratap pandey]

Dear Prof Hoodbhoy, and other readers,

I divide your article in two parts in order to respond
to it. In the first part you have commented on Islam
and its place in the past, including the
transformations in history that have ocurred, Here,
you use Sept 11 as a point of departure. In the second
part, you opine on the question "whre do we go from
here?"

I cannot comment on your magisterial survey of Islam
since the "Golden Age" till today. I do not possess
your kind of knowledge. I just wish to say with
respect to the first part of your write-up: you will
be surprised (and then, perhaps not) at the manner in
which this idea of a return to a "Golden Age" has
gripped educated people in India. These people may be
Hindu, or Muslim. That is not the point. What is the
point is the manner in which the idea of the Golden
Age has gripped the everyday imagination today. I
believe scholars like you should find some other term,
for the moment one refers to "Golden Age" today one
finds oneself locked in a reactionary instrumental
petty bourgeosie discourse that is completely
difficult to contest or get out of. It is a discourse
that seeks to transform the groundswell of democracy,
appropriate it and give it its own image. Quell
democracy, in short.

[I hate this term "Golden Age". Today, in Delhi's
schools, history is being taught in a very funny
manner to students of class 8, 9 and 10. Teachers of
Delhi schools whom I know tell me that after teaching
the so-called Hindu Golden Age {4th to 10th century
AD} they have been told to switch to world history and
from there to 19th century nationalist history. They
tell me that this is a matter of policy. My friends
have told me that they say to the students in class
that the entire section of "Indian" history from the
10th to the end of the 18th century is a section from
which no exam questions will ever be put. Therefore,
they shouldn't read that section at all.

In other words: to all ends and purposes, we face in
India a generation today whose reading of history has
been extremely administered and selective. To speak of
a "golden Age" to such a generation means simply: you
are setting off a semantic bomb. You are relying on a
tradition of humanist thinking and rationalist
training (via educational institutions) that today
just does not exist anymore. In India, most
school-teachers are middle-class housewives doing a
job. They are least bothered about semantic
hair-splitting. They just want their salary so that
they buy the white goods they have sen advertised in
glossy magazines. Your use of the "Golden Age" will
just boys and girls off in a reactionary direction
that will completely bewilder you]

Now for the second part of your article. For some
reason, people like you who have the authority to
comment on Islam and on Muslims refuse to acnowledge
that, like society at large, Muslims too are split on
the basis of class. For some reasons I find that
Muslim scholars, commentators and culturally
authoritative individuals refuse to acknowledge the
existence of a class-divide in muslim societies.

Certainly in India this class divide exists. On the
one hand, there are the 4th, 5th, or 6th
generation-educated Muslims who rule the roost
(sub-roost?) in everything that has to do with
whatever is considered the horizon of Muslim activity,
agency, behaviour, subject-formation. On the other,
there is a seething majority of Indian Muslim citizens
who are simply trying to find their place in a complex
socius that heaps upon them, among other labels (such
as minority community), the "internal" label of not
belonging to a good family (of bureaucrats), not being
a Khan, or a Hussain, or a Qazi, or educated enough,
of being a riff-raff that can only understand its
place in the world in terms of absolute surrender to
those "who know", those who possess the knowledge,
including the sundry whims of Allah.

Islamic fundamentalism, wherever in the world, cannot
be analytically tackled until scholars like you admit
the oppression (economic, political and ideological)
that upper-class Muslims objectively unleash on those
who do not have the "good luck" to be a Hakim, or the
son/daughter of a Hakim. 

In this sense, the "east-west" logic serves other
purposes. Within Muslim societies, it serves the
purposes of the Higher Some to continuously re/present
the west as a threat. This takes the heat off from
larger issues closer home. In this scenario, the West
can even be an
equally-educated-though-perhaps-less-rational Other
(or, in sentimentalist dangerous terms, the society
that our society actually educated: after all, was it
not the Arabs who preserved Aristotle?). One way or
the other, a certain section of Muslim society (in
whichever place on earth Muslim societies exist) is
able to make sure that their "lessers" (sic) remain
trapped in a Gaze not of their own making, remain
bamboozled in a discourse that translates their
survival-energies into quasi-spiritualist
sublimations, remain caught in a web of opportunities
where evrything depends on connections and social
hierarchy.

Muslims would be a lot better off, I think, if the
upper-class, reactionary,
oppressive-to-the-point-of-using-fundamentalist-rhetoric-as-convenient-cushion-to-ensure-their-continuous-survival
social strata got down to solving internal
"fourth-world" economic or subsistence problems in a
social-democratic fashion.

Somewhere, in many ways, Prof Hoodbhoy, there is a
huge cover-up happening. Evasions, refusals. You are
one of those who would like to lift the veil
(tarpaulin, hijab, historical cloth), I gather. I want
to be part of that. Tell me, where do I begin?

yours,

pratap         

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