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Contents i BREAKING THE MONOLITH ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND COLUMNS ON ISLAM, INDIA, TERROR AND OTHER THINGS THAT ANNOY ME ii Breaking the Monolith Contents iii BREAKING THE MONOLITH ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND COLUMNS ON ISLAM, INDIA, TERROR AND OTHER THINGS THAT ANNOY ME Ziauddin Sardar iv Breaking the Monolith First Published 2008 by ImprintOne C-562, Sushant Lok-1 Gurgaon-122002, Haryana © Copyright 2008 Ziauddin Sardar All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. ISBN: ??? Typeset by Print Services, B-17, Lajpat Nagar Part 2, New Delhi 110024 Printed at ??? Exclusively Distributed by Foundation Books Division Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. Delhi • Bangalore • Mumbai • Kolkata • Chennai • Hyderabad www.foundationbooksindia.com Contents v Contents Introduction: The Things That Annoy Me 1 Part One: The Sphere of Islam 15 The Agony of 21st Century Muslim 17 Can Islam Change? 25 The Struggle for Islam’s Soul 33 Reformist Ideas and Muslim Intellectuals 41 Islam and Science: Beyond the Troubled Relationship 57 Islam and Secularism 84 Three Cheers for Women Imams 91 My Fatwa on the Fanatics 95 Is Muslim Civilisation Set on a Course to Decline? 98 Waiting for Rain 107 The Puritan Formula 114 On the Culture of Martyrdom 118 Cultivating the Soil 122 Why Are Muslim So Boring? 126 vi Breaking the Monolith Part Two: The Circumference of Representation 131 The Qur’an: Lost in Translation 133 Of Monsters and Muslims 138 Al-Jazeera 1: A Voice of Reason 145 Al-Jazeera 2: Sultan of Spin? 149 The Blitcon Supremacy 153 Written Out of History 164 The Forgotten Inheritance 171 A New Year Resolution 177 Part Three: The Circle of Terror 181 The Fall Out From 9/11 183 God Save America! 191 Occidentalism: Is That Why They Hate Us? 199 Inside the Mind of Bin Laden 206 The Cosmic ‘War on Terror’ 210 Beyond Jihad and Crusade 218 Muslim Victims, Black Widows and Martyrs 222 The Party of Martyrs 227 Humans and Muslims 233 Hope and Resistance 237 Part Four: The Parameters of Culture 241 Multiculturalism is Dead, Long Live Multiculturalism 243 Hatred: The Next Holocuast 249 Contents vii Self-Assessment, Warts and All 258 Foreigners in Saudi Arabia 261 Nothing Left to Belong To 269 Same Again... 278 Things Traditional 294 Cultural Homicide, Ayoh! 303 Part Five: The Tangents of South Asian Experience 311 Sex, Lies and All the‘I’s in India 313 On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian Imagination 350 Qawwali 367 The Ambassador from India 382 What Our Left Hand is For 397 Part Six: Interviews 401 ‘The Beginning of Knowledge’ 403 ‘The West’, Islam and What It Means to be Human 421 ‘Muslim Societies Must Discover a Contemporary Meaning of Islam’ 436 Epilogue 441 A Garden of Possibilities 443 Acknowledgments 460 Introduction 1 Introduction The Things That Annoy Me uring my childhood in Britain, I was addicted to Dr Who. DThe good doctor’s evil adversaries came in all varieties and disguises—from the Cybermen to Zygons, Sea Devils, Ice Warriors, the Yeti to the Master, who like Dr Who, was a Time Lord himself but with a thirst for universal conquest. But of all the monstrous evil-doers, the ones that scared the kids of my generation witless were the Daleks. In their tank-like mechanical armour shell, and a plumber’s plunger for an eye, the Daleks travelled awkwardly through space and time conquering and subjugating anyone and anything that came their way. Indeed, in the great scheme of the universe, the Daleks had only one function, which they frequently announced in their metallic voice: ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ The nightmares of my childhood, it seems to me, have came back to haunt me. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have seen some horrific scenarios implode one after another. India and Pakistan, neighbours and brothers, have not only had three wars but have even made nuclear threats to each other. The terrorist atrocity of 11 September 2001 led to the invasion of Afghanistan, which was swiftly followed by the occupation of Iraq. Suicide bombings not just in war-torn countries but also in Pakistan, India and other places have become common place. Torture 2 Breaking the Monolith has become endemic: who can forget the television pictures from Guantanamo Bay, or the picture postcards from Abu Ghraib prison, or fail to imagine the horror of extraordinary rendition, which involves abducting civilians from their homelands and then transporting them to a country where they can be freely tortured? The ‘War on Terror’ has acquired a cosmic dimension and is not too far removed from the antics of the Daleks. If that wasn’t enough we have to contend with the devastation of climate change. Extermination seems to be the order of the day. The essays and articles collected here explore the Daleks- like powers out to terminate us. In their own way, they all look invincible but like the Daleks they have limited abilities and functions. They involve issues of terrorism and representation, American power and power of mass culture, and of monolithic thought in all its guises, from East and the West. And inevitably they deal with the loss of our innocence, mine and yours, of Islam and South Asia, and the failure of imagination we have suffered from the onslaught of global events. Needless to say, all this annoys me. Ostensibly, the business of extermination seems to involve two forces. Both, apparently, have been at loggerhead with each other for a millennium. Indeed, some scholars have argued that to a significant extent, the history of the world can be been as history of mutual hostilities and war between Islam the West. Starting from the crusades to the fall of Constantinople and the siege of Vienna, to the colonisation of the Muslim societies in Asia and Africa and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the Iranian revolution and the wave of anti-west sentiments it generated in Muslim countries, right down to the ‘War on Terror’—the relationship between Islam Introduction 3 and the West has been one of misunderstanding, mutual suspicion and open warfare. Johan Galtung, the Norwegian scholar of peace studies, has even argued that misunderstanding and mutual suspicion have locked Islam and the West in a cycle that generates benefit for one only at the expense of the other: when Islam is in the ascendance, as it was during the Medieval period, the West is in decline; when the West is in ascendance, Islam declines. When one of these mutually hostile civilisations occupies the centre of the international arena, the other is pushed out to the outer limits; and the centre always thrives at the expense and humiliation of the periphery. But history can always be interpreted in more ways than one. What annoys me is the fact that the common ground between the two civilisations is often overlooked; and the Islamic roots of the western civilisation are never acknowledged. Quite simply, there would be no ‘Europe’ as we know it without Islam. The science and learning of Europe has its origins in the Muslim civilisation. Western liberalism and humanism, it will come as a surprise to many, has its origins in Islamic thought and philosophy. Virtually all of Greek thought came to Europe via the Muslim world. The Enlightenment was shaped as much by Ibn Sina and ibn Rushd as it was by Voltaire and his cronies—although the later gave it a more instrumental twist. Instead of seeing Islam and the West as diametrically opposed civilisations, we can equally well see them as two siblings of the same historic parents. This however does not mean that we can ignore the stark reality of our present predicament. We cannot overlook a brutal fact: in the war on terror that shrouds the globe, the terrorists are Muslims. Hardly a day passes without Muslims being in the news. There is the spectre of al-Qaida and its savagery and 4 Breaking the Monolith declared intentions to world domination. There are the Taliban and their barbarity. The suicide bomber fighting a ‘jihad’. The hostage taker trying to make a point about ‘infidels’ who are occupying his land. The mad Mullah hell-bent on seizing power and using all means to justify his ends. The nostalgic puritan demonstrating for a return to some imagined and romanticised past. The monarch executing his opponents in the name of ‘Islamic law’. The colonels and the generals legitimising their illegitimate political authority to create an ‘Islamic state’. And numerous despots and dictators perpetuating naked injustices, human rights abuses, and exploitation of their own people in the name of Islam. The picture of Islam that emerges from all this is a creed knee-deep in obscurantism and terrorism, decay and darkness, with violence and extremism as its two hallmarks—explored in Part One, The Sphere of Islam. What annoys me is that these actions are never seen for what they are: power ploys of desperate men. No religion can condone or justify such actions let alone encourage them; to attribute them to Islam is simply disingenuous. To paint the entire Muslim world, teeming with 1.3 billion people, as ‘fundamentalist’, ‘fanatic’ and hell bent on aggression is the height of folly. This is similar to representing the entire Catholic world with the antics of the IRA—painting every Catholic with the IRA brush of violence and terrorism.

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