aql
“That particular fear has a texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it is not the same. It is without analogy, for it is not comparable to the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor to the fear of the violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. It is the fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world—not language, not food, not music—it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.” From Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh).
Thirteen years ago on December 6, the Babri Masjid mosque was destroyed by Hindu right wingers in Ayodhya, who claimed it stood on the site of Ram’s temple. All hell broke loose then, and it’s still a sensitive day. So we got the day off! Like a snow day, but for riots. Our teachers are careful—they’re Muslim, so they have to be. There were some other issues that compounded the sensitivity, like the murder of a BJP MLA guy a couple weeks ago, and the wedding anniversary of Ram and Sita, which follows the lunar calendar. I bought some milk at the corner store, but stayed in otherwise. I felt just an inkling of the fear that Amitav Ghosh described above, a sort panicky disbelief.
I learned my lesson when Sadaf and I were followed the other night by two guys on a motorcycle, but escaped ok, and then what the heck, we got a police report filed against us for being out late at night. It was only 10:30, people. But the police report says 3 am, and other lies, which give me immense confidence in the rule of law in the city. The police woman said: ‘if you go at after 9:30 we can’t be responsible for you.’ Ay ya yay, great, the police are really looking out for us. They also claimed they stopped us on the road, at 3 am, and we told them our names and address. Oh my, what fiction. But slightly sinister: how did they get our names and phone number and address? So that is why I am writing this, all cozy at home, at 9:30 on a Friday night. I’ll lay low for a while.
There’s a phrase in Urdu that I learned today: Ganga-Jamuni tehezeeb. Ganga and Jamuna are two rivers that meet at Allahabad, a couple hundred kilometers east of Lucknow. The place where they meet, called the Sangam, is holy. The rivers are two different shades of green, and for a while after they meet there is a line in the middle of the joined river so you can see which water comes from which river. Then they get all mixed up. So Ganga Jamuni tehezeeb means a culture that is mixed together but with elements that have different sources. People say you can only say that about the Lucknow culture; that Muslims and Hindus live together here like nowhere else. The only time there were violent riots was during the Babri Masjid destruction, thirteen years ago. There certainly weren’t any riots day before yesterday.
Lucknow is also the home of Maulana Kalbe Sadiq, a Shia scholar. The night we got followed by the young goondas, Sadaf and I were coming home from a lecture the Maulana gave clearing up various issues concerning women in the Quran. He touched on everything that you hear about Islam that seems so backward. I could write pages and pages on it, I was so impressed! The main thing that I want to relate from it is this analogy: a doctor might tell you to take one brand of medicine over another, which makes sense because the medicines are made by different producers with different materials. But all people, men and women, are made by the same producer of the same materials. They have the same soul (and he used a Hindi word aatman as well as ruh); a new form of dress doesn’t change the soul. This was his very first statement, to clear the stage. It might not sound revolutionary to you, but think of the context. I was sitting there waiting for the riot to start. But no one blinked.
In response to a question from Sadaf about using a rational or emotional approach in making decisions, he said that God granted every person with aql, which translates to smartness, or sense, or something like that, (intellect, reason, knowledge) and by using it you can figure out for yourself what is right and what is wrong; what is just. And Islam isn’t contrary to justice, so if you think it sounds wrong, it probably is. This is my loose interpretation; I’m still struggling with the language! So marrying off daughters against their will is wrong, beating your wife is wrong (‘The Quran says beating dogs and slaves isn’t allowed, do you think you can beat your wife?! Only a vulgar man would’), the triple talak divorce is wrong. In response to the issue about needing two women witnesses in place of one man witness, he said, that’s only for financial matters, for rapes you need four men for every woman! And who knows why the Quran says the stuff it says? It might not be implying that women can’t count money as well as men, it might just be because women are not obliged to go immediately to the court if they see a crime. For every issue he had an example. For the issue about why only men can grant divorces, he pointed out that in Islam, the men are supposed to pay for everything: the wedding and the dowry. Brides have the right of refusal at the wedding itself, but maybe if they could just marry and divorce they would start a business out of it. Hmmm, maybe. He also addressed one passage that says something about men being rulers of women, and he went straight to the Arabic to show that ‘men’ ‘women’ and ‘ruler’ actually more likely should be ‘husband’ ‘wife’ and ‘caretaker.’
The most heartwarming part of it was that he is also upset and angry at the way things are interpreted in his own religion. He was speaking to Shias, Sunnis, Hindus and me, a Christian. ‘Use your aql, people!’ he would say. And: ‘I don’t know if I should laugh or cry when I hear these things.’ The lecture was outside on the lawn of a beautiful old mosque built in the time of the Nawabs. Right across the street a new mall has gone up, called Sahara Ganj. It just opened two weeks ago. India is changing really fast; hopefully the old and new will blend like the Ganga Jamuna. Some kinks need working out. Noise codes and police integrity would be a fine place to start.
