[Reader-list] Missing Humour in Religion-Jawed Naqvi(in Dawn)

[rashneek kher]

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/jawed-naqvi-missing-humour-in-religion-990

*Sartaj, the impish waif, would double as house help and resident clown when
one day my mother assigned him the onerous task of accompanying Zaheerun Bua
to her first and only movie.*

Zaheerun in her late 50s was her begum sahab’s treasured cook and proved to
be as pious a Muslim as she was illiterate. In fact, her cinema outing had a
religious purpose.

The 90-minute film called Khaana-i-Khuda, or house of God, was a pioneering
attempt in the 1970s to turn the joys of Haj into an audio-video spectacle
for many lacking the wherewithal to make the prescribed journey. To
Zaheerun, the film offered a chance to experience the mandated pilgrimage
without having the basic ability to read the Quran.

In his late teens, Sartaj had worked as an errand boy for Mrs Puri in the
Lucknow neighbourhood where he had masqueraded as a Hindu boy with the
universally respected name of Gopal. It remains a mystery whether Mrs Puri
gave him that name to pre-empt embarrassment with orthodox guests, or had
Sartaj adopted a nom de guerre to ward off imminent unemployment.

When her husband was transferred to Delhi, Mrs Puri handed over Gopal to my
mother’s care. The fact that he was a Muslim boy was revealed years later
when a marriage proposal arrived for Sartaj.

So off Zaheerun Bua went to watch Khana-i-Khuda at Ashok Talkies, a stuffy
hall with poor ventilation located in the decaying former Shia bastion of
old Lucknow. Sartaj loved the songs of leading ladies from the old Indian
cinema and was least interested in a movie without music. As the lights were
dimmed, Zaheerun covered her head in devout obeisance.

The first visual was a promotion for a popular frothy detergent. As soon the
bubbles mushroomed on the screen, Sartaj poked Zaheerun in the ribs and
whispered in mock Avadhi: “Arrey dekh le aab-i-jamjam.” His reference to the
holy water of Zam Zam was enough to send the cook into paroxysms of devout
exultation.

Zaheerun has since passed away and Sartaj is nursing his bad knees. Their
story continues to regale the family and the neighbourhood.

Religion without humour is a poisoned chalice. It has led to still
smouldering ethnic wars and spawned entrenched prejudices with tragic
consequences. Not without ironical help from secular technology, it has
evolved into the cult of the suicide bomber. And it is a mistake to believe
that the world has not had a duplicitous view of this.

When it liked them as suicidal missionaries it celebrated them as
mujahideen. When they fell foul of the dominant global worldview they were
condemned as jihadis. In an essential way mujahideen and jihadis not only
share a common etymology but also the fickle attention span of their
changing patrons.

It was not too long ago that Muslim poets and men of letters were open and
casually normal about religion. Ghalib defined his creed as half Muslim — he
drank wine but didn’t eat pork. Would he have survived in today’s Iran or
Saudi Arabia, or even India and Pakistan much less Afghanistan?

Allama Iqbal is celebrated as a great Muslim thinker. Sample his views on
the Muslim clerics he loathed in the widely quoted verse: “Main bhi haazir
tha wahaan zabt-i-sukhan kar na saka, haq se jab Hazrat-i-mulla ko mila
izn-i-behisht....” When God awarded the cleric his promised place in
paradise, Iqbal mocked the decision and wondered if the religious bigot
would be able to savour the Bacchus-like feast arranged for the humourless
mullah.

“Di muezzin ne shab-i-wasl azaan pichchli raat, Hai kambakht ko kis waqt
khuda yaad aaya.” It was Muslim rule in Delhi when Daagh Dehalvi wrote the
verse without any fear of reprisal. I have grown up with Hindu boys for whom
Ram Lila — a folk theatre form, which celebrates the exiled god’s journey
home — was all about ribald dialogues. Writer Khushwant Singh must have
earned millions publishing collections of Sikh jokes. After 1984 something
has changed. That was when thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered on the
streets of Delhi.

There is no dearth of Jewish jokes on Jewish websites. Some Christian
scholars are seriously pursuing the nagging doubt whether Jesus was in fact
a woman. They are chided by the church but hardly ever threatened.
Therefore, there is hardly anything seriously worrying about an insane
hate-monger in Florida who might want to burn the holy book of a rival
religion. Such people need psychiatric help not televised political
denunciations.

“I am heartened by the clear, unequivocal condemnation of this
disrespectful, disgraceful act that has come from American religious leaders
of all faiths, from evangelical Christians to Jewish rabbis, as well as
secular US leaders and opinion-makers,” declaimed Hillary Clinton after an
obviously hallucinating Florida pastor was condemned by everybody for his
threat to burn the Quran.

“Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of
our nation. Many of you know that in 1790, George Washington wrote to a
synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, that this country will give ‘to bigotry
no sanction, to persecution no assistance’,” the US secretary of state
asserted. Gen David Petraeus, the US commander in Afghanistan was more
practical. He expressed the fear that the sacrilege could ignite violence
against American troops in Kabul.

Clinton and Petraeus might wish to focus with greater sincerity on a policy
for a quick exit from Afghanistan and Iraq, as opposed to pitching
themselves as saviours of beleaguered Muslims. At present, given the
brouhaha over a proposed Islamic centre near ground zero in New York, there
is room for a nagging suspicion that both the Florida event and the proposed
monument to American secularism are handy tools for the Obama administration
to appear more agreeable at home than it ever could be abroad ahead of US
Senate polls.

Sartaj and Zaheerun Bua were both Muslims. They could sort out their own
differences, or not sort them out ever. It’s their business. If the world
wants to do Muslims or any other group a favour it should think of a
strategy to make ordinary people in places like Afghanistan laugh and smile,
not invade their countries in a deviously insatiable quest to usher their
controversial version of democracy or development.

What would help the world become less condescending towards those it claims
to comfort is the knowledge that before foreign troops pillaged Afghanistan
Pathans could tell a good Pathan joke. How many of those jokes does
President Obama know? A good one from him can make all the difference this
Eid.

*The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
*
*jawednaqvi at gmail.com* <jawednaqvi at gmail.com>

-- 
Rashneek Kher
http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com