Akeel Bilgrami on Shaheen Bagh

Tom Paine wrote of Edmund Burke that 'he pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird'. What of Akeel Bilgrami, who has written of the anti-CAA protests- e.g the one at Shaheen Bagh- in the Outlook magazine? His imagination has certainly soared like a falcon (which is what the word Shaheen means) into the empyrean, but has he noticed that the people protesting are poor Muslims, many of them women, who have been lied to and then abandoned? Just recently a four month old child died because of the cold weather during the night time sit-in. For what noble purpose was that innocent life sacrificed? It turns out, it was to give the BJP a few extra seats and to cause the Congress to collapse completely. The Left which was supposed to orchestrate and choreograph these protests does not seem to have shown up at all. As Modi said the only people you could see on your TV screens were, quite obviously, poorer Muslims. There were no farmers delegations or Coal Miners or Tribals or Bollywood Stars. Indeed, the thing was given a wide berth by not just Kejriwal's crew but even Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Kishore. The contrast with the Lok Pal agitation which catapulted Kejriwal to power could not be more stark. To mangle Ghalib- 'na tamasha hua na gila hua'- neither was there a spectacle nor did any complaint get registered.

Young Muslim intellectuals were outraged that the Left had demanded that they disguise their Islamic identity for the TV cameras so that the protest would appear 'Secular', but, when the cameras came, no Secularists were to be found! What were the women supposed to do- shed their burqas to appease the Secularists? Did the men have to shave their beards and give themselves Hindu names so as to save the blushes of the 'progressive' forces? Why couldn't these progressives come themselves and shown their Hindu credentials to the journalists? Why were the Muslims first stirred up and then abandoned? Look at the fate of JNU student and sometime Wire correspondent, Sharjeel Imam. He has been handed over to the Assam Police and may face a stiff prison sentence. How come people like him were hung out to dry by the Left?

The answer, I suppose, is that the Left has no grass-roots support any more. The intellectuals were not aware of this. They believed a 'Popular Front' would appear by magic. They would get a 'Secular' protest based on telling stupid lies to poor Muslims.

Akeel Bilgrami, of course, has a philosophical interest in 'enchantment'. He writes in Outlook-

Islam arrived in India from its classical origins in the Arabian lands via travels through Persia, Turkey, Central Asia and Afghanistan, acquiring a variety of accretions at each stage.

So this is a fairy story about pixies prancing across fabled lands acquiring all sorts of novel enchantments before making their home in the streets and alleyways of Indias.

But, Bilgrami Sahib, Islam's arrival in Mecca itself involved accretions and the stripping out of accretions. Indeed, there is more variation in Islam within the Jazirath than elsewhere. This variation diminishes, it does not increase, with distance. Of course, the degree of Islamization varies considerably from generation to generation and locality to locality. But this is also true of every other type of 'ization'.

And, having arrived, it accrued even greater variety through its regional dispersal (Punjabi, Bengali, Hindustani, Mappila, Gujarati, Odia…), and through a highly differentiated set of spiritual traditions of ­worship and scholarship that developed over some centuries.

Why does this cretin mention Mappila Islam? It didn't arrive via 'Persia, Turkey, Central Asia and Afghanistan'. It came directly. That is why most Kerala Muslims follow the Shafi school of jurisprudence. Bilgrami, who grew up in India, must know this. Why does he write something so blatantly false?

The answer is that Bilgrami arrived at his advanced state of mental decrepitude via all sorts of sewers of stupidity. This involved the accretion of all sorts of shite to his shitty little poopyhead.

To name just a very miscellaneous few, there were figures of influence such as Shah Wali Allah of the Naqshbandi tradition located in the courtly ethos of princes, more populist Chishti Sufi ­tradition consolidated by Shah Abdullah Latif Bhittai, Bulleh Shah, and the poets Mir and Dard,

Dard? He was a Pir of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddadi silsila.

the reformist strain of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan; Chiragh Ali, the Shia thinker Ameer Ali, the novelist Nazir Ahmad, Shibli Nomani of the Nadwatul Ulema, the famous Deoband school providing traditional learning, the even more ­orthodox Ahl-i-Hadith school favouring strict Hanafi law, down to the more ­relaxed Barelwi tradition stressing very local customary practices, the Ahmadi­yyas who claimed that their leader Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was all at once the Muslim Mahdi, the Christian Messiah and the avatar of Krishna, and in the 20th century the poet Muham­mad Iqbal and the refined and learned Maulana Azad, representing in the last few decades of his life the ‘composite culture’ of Hindus and Muslims.

There was no such 'composite culture'. There was merely incorrigible stupidity. Smart people, like Bilgrami, hightailed it to the truly composite culture of the technologically advanced West. That's how things have always worked. To be cultured, as opposed to retarded, involves a Tardean mimetics of those who are smarter, happier, richer and better able to protect themselves.

I begin with this remarkable ­accumulation of accretions that ­characterise Indian Islam

and Indian Christianity and Indian Marxism and Indian everything else as well as non Indian everything else

not only to point out what is often said—that Islam is many things in India, not one—

But, in political terms, it is one thing. You don't see a lot of Muslims clamoring for the CAA bill or the construction of a Ram Mandir and so forth.

but also to point to the vast conceptual distance of the content of the Islam that laid these diverse roots in India from the originary Islam of the Arabian lands.

There is no such distance. Arabs accept learned Indian Ulema as such and vice versa.

As a result, any group trying to assert a fundamentalism of faith (Maulana Maududi and his following in the Jamaat-i-Islami, for instance)

Such assertions had been made again and again in Muslim Ruled parts of India. Maududi saw the writing on the wall for his natal Hindu majority Hyderabad or Bhopal and shifted to Lahore before Partition. In effect, he was retracing the steps of his ancestors and returning to his roots. However, even more orthodox Ulema than Maududi chose to remain in India. Bilgrami, however, believes in fairies and 'roots'. A 'fundamentalism of faith' could only assert itself

by deracinating itself from these roots, and their broad and entrenched range of practices,

like untouchability? Interestingly, the Mappilah Muslims don't have this practice.

and by invoking in its place an Islam that—from the point of view of this pervasive and rooted Islam—is pure artifice, the rootless construct of a bookish, normative, deferential gaze upon some claims to an originary Islam of 7th-century Arabia.

By contrast, Bilgrami's own Jamaat-i-Ivy League  is not 'deracinated' at all. It instinctively appeals to ordinary Muslim women. Thus Bilgrami is stoked that the Shaheen bagh dadis (grannies) share his views and are putting his own political psilosophy into practice.

But let me turn first to more ­recent times, as the editors of Outlook have asked me to speak in particular to the conditions of Muslims in our time.

Coz Bilgrami- who has spent his adult life in Amrika- really knows about the problems faced by Indian Muslims.

It is widely known to all who have the capacity for honest perception ever since the hideous events of 2002 in Gujarat—and now the illegal interventions in Kashmir and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, not to mention the brutality of authoritarian state ­violence against honourable dissent—that we are faced with a wilfully ­ruthless and oppressive regime, ­presiding over the dismantling of achievements (however partial and however qualified) built up over half a century of democratic legislation and institution-building.

Bilgrami does not live in India. He believes 'the condition of Muslims in India, assuming they have 'the capacity for honest perception' is similar to that of the Jews under Hitler. This means any Muslim who isn't selling up and getting the fuck out of India is either stupid or suicidal. But, assuming Muslims had rational expectations, they should have- like Bilgrami himself- emigrated long before 2002. Why? It should have been obvious that India's 'achievements' would be 'dismantled' sooner or later.

However, if emigration is not possible, there is one other possibility- viz. conversion to Hinduism and enrollment in the R.S.S.

Suppose some ethical scruple against either of these two alternatives obtains. Then one could either make a bit of a nuisance before being killed or else, out of consideration to one's neighbors, not make that nuisance and wait for the official notice to attend your local gas chamber.

But these events of more recent years had their slow build-up since the late 1980s when Hindutva first emerged as a serious force in Indian public life and politics, and the effect it had on Muslims in that earlier period was far less stunning than it has been in the last ­decade. Proof of this lies in the fact that in the aftermath of the ­destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, Muslims showed some real agency and fought back.

But lost all down the line. Look what happened at Godhra in 2002. Some Muslims killed some Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya. This, led to a massacre of Muslims across the State. Who gained? Narendra Modi. The same thing can be said about the terrorist bombings of the previous decade. The fact is, if the Muslims hadn't shown real, but foolish, agency, the BJP would not have become the default National Party. Similarly, if the West now gets to drone strike the fuck out of Muslims across vast swathes of Islamic territory, it is because of the 'real agency' Muslims showed when they 'fought back' against imaginary threats.

It is this agency that was (until these past two months) withdrawn for about a decade as Muslims sank into an ­understandable funk by the repeatedly stunning blows dealt by the fascist complexion that Hindutva acquired with the political rise of Mr Narendra Modi and Mr Amit Shah.

But, if Modi and Shah win another term it will only be because anti CAA/NRC will be the new Ram Mandir issue enabling Hindu vote consolidation.

In politics, doing stupid shit on the basis of imaginary grievances leads to bad outcomes. Ask the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Libyans and so forth. If it comes to that, ask the Pakistanis.

All this is well known and plain to see. The interesting point, however, is that some of the agency Muslims showed after Ayodhya was deplorably violent, and even when it was not, much of it was voiced by leaders and organisations that sought to combat Hindu fundamentalism with fundamentalist Islamist claims, denying what Islam had come to be over centuries in the deep roots it lay in India. (sic)

So Bilgrami wasn't too utterly stupid to see that the Muslim reaction to the Babri issue was a self-inflicted wound. How come he can't see that the same thing is happening again? Also, how cum he kant rite Inglis gud like wot I kan?

There was a time when people were frightened of Muslims and Palestinians and so forth. Now the attitude is, get organized and destroy their lunatic fringe in a systematic manner. Screw Human Rights. Don't release knife wielding nutters halfway through their sentences. This, at any rate, is what is happening in post-Brexit Britain. If Trump gets a second term, Bilgrami's America may catch up with China with respect to 're-educating' Muslims.

What is remarkable about the high visibility of Muslim voices in the protests and rallies of the last two months is that they have precisely eschewed that rootless doctrinal artifice, resorting to the rhetoric, the poetry, the creativity and the practices of a centuries-long Indian Islam, continuous with the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and other traditions in a pluralism that was unsettled for the first time by the acrimonies around Partition, and revived in a concerted way again only as late as the 1980s.

So the thing did not exist in the Twenties, the Thirties, the Forties (otherwise there would have been no Partition) nor the Fifties, the Sixties or the Seventies. Only in the Eighties did Indian Islam become continuous with Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and other traditions. Except that didn't happen at all. The Eighties was when the Left began to rot from the head and the various Religions and Sects went their separate ways. It culminated in the throwing open of the Babri Masjid to Hindu worship, by Rajiv Gandhi, which, predictably, led to the destruction of that edifice for the construction of the Temple which Modi will build.

When was Islam continuous with Hinduism? It was when King Oberon and Queen Titania quarreled over a young Indian Prince who was Bilgrami himself as the site of the continuous cuddling of Islam with Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Brahmanism etc.

What is even more significant, however, is that this appeal, unafraid to give voice to the commitments and practices of popular religion of that longstanding pluralist tradition, is being seamlessly integrated by the movements of the past two months—in a way that has never happened ­before—with the most abstract commitments of the codes, rights and provisions of the law and of the Constitution.

But these grannies don't know the law or the Constitution. They have been lied to and are going to find out they have been lied to because the Supreme Court will uphold as constitutional and legal all the things Bilgrami thinks are unconstitutional and illegal.

No leader had managed to do this before in the history of 20th-century India. Gandhi, who almost single-handedly tapped the appeal of ­popular religion to generate the most ­prodigious of political mobilisations for some 30 years, also showed a studied indifference to the codes and rights that defined citizenship.

Indians were subjects, not citizens, during the entire course of Gandhi's life. Thus he was showing a studied indifference to something which only came into existence a couple of years after he died. But the very first Amendment to the Constitution pretty much restored the status quo ante. Codes and rights don't matter very much in India because of the unitary nature of the Constitution and the wide powers which remain with the executive.

He openly said at times that he did not think the heterogeneity of the ­people of India (in which he even sometimes included what he idealised naively as the more pure non-hierarchical differentiations allowed by the swadharma ideal of caste that were corrupted, as he insisted, by later developments that introduced ­hierarchy) should be undermined by making ordinary people over into some abstract, homogenous, codified form of being called ‘citizens’.

Gandhi openly said all types of shite. So what? He may have delayed Indian independence, he could not prevent it.

Nehru too had no inkling of how this integration might be made. The Nehru who wrote with deep affection in The Discovery of India of the ­un-self-conscious religious pluralism in Indian history entirely shifted gears when he articulated a very self-conscious set of secularist principles, which characterised the constitutional provisions that would, for ­instance, go into the formulation of the Hindu Code Bill. Nehru recognised the honour and worth in each, but in his thought these moved in different gears.

Nehru's family had been kotwals in Mughal Delhi. Later they served as the vakils of the East India Company. Their importance lay in the fact that were from Delhi and believed in the centralization of power- a valuable notion at a time when State borders needed to be redrawn from decade to decade.

Ambedkar too had no integrating vision that joined the long egalitarian, anti-caste pluralist traditions of popular religion, going back to the early Varkaris and such figures as Kabir, with his own remarkable innovations in constitutional affirmative action to empower the deprived castes. In fact, I suspect that is why he was partly suspicious of the eventual efficacy of the anti-caste Bhakti ideals.

Ambedkar dismissed his contribution to the Constitution as 'hack-work'. He knew the thing did not matter in the slightest. Every country got one on independence. None kept to what was originally envisaged.

The integration I am speaking of is, thus, simply without precedent.

It is wholly imaginary. Some silly fools are saying that things which are legal are not legal. The Supreme Court will eventually get round to explaining why precisely these fools were wrong. Their Judgement may be more 'extreme' than that of the Govt. In the Ram Mandir case, the Court decided that the Deity 'Ram Lalla' had rights which 'Allah' lacked.

It is being devised spontaneously, without the eminence of great leaders to shape it, and it is a remarkable achievement. In other words, these young men and women and the urban intelligentsia of large and small towns in India, though they are brilliantly effective activists, are much more than activists. They are, without any theoretical vanguard, fashioning through their struggles a theoretical framework that brings together practices and abstractions; and thereby instructing us into the habits and dispositions of democracy, which the Constitution’s abstractly formulated laws and principles always had as their deeper underlying historical source, and which were always formulated with a view to producing a cultivation and enactment of these habits and dispositions in the citizens of the future to whom they applied.

Baloney. The anti-corruption agitation did have some effect. Why? Because it focused on a bread and butter issue. It had a concrete demand- Lok Pal legislation- and a concrete result- the rise of the Aam Aadmi party currently ruling Delhi. By contrast, the CAA agitation is doomed to fail. I suppose JNU and Jamia Millia will lose out financially and some of their alumni may be demonized and dragged through the courts. But we already know- from the example of Kanhaiya Kumar- that the BJP benefits from such tactics. The Left looks more irrelevant than ever.

In this Muslim agency,

whose purpose appears to be to get the BJP re-elected.

embedded as it is in this particular integrated ideal of democracy I am emphasising, any Muslim voice that speaks with a fundamentalist strain sounds shrill and jarring, immediately inviting an internal correction.

The Popular Front of India seems to have done well out of it. Their superior English doesn't sound shrill and jarring. Bilgrami is out of touch.

That is no small achievement. Hindu fundamentalism is being opposed by Muslims qua Muslims, not merely Muslims qua abstract citizens

Muslims qua Muslims have been opposing every sensible thing under the Sun for centuries. That's why they are widely regarded as stupid losers. Muslims qua smart peeps with a strong work ethic, sound family values, revulsion against addiction and anarchic behavior, excellent entrepreneurial and professional skills etc, etc, are doing extremely well. Oddly, Islamic Scripture tells us this is what God wants them to do.

—but they are doing so by an insistent signing onto an abstract constitutional commitment to a secularist ideal of citizenship dictated to them from the point of view of reasons that flow from their own understanding of themselves as Muslims.

Fuck off! Are the grannies of Shaheen Bagh insistently signing on to the Indian Constitution's Directive Principles? Are they saying 'for scientific reasons we must all spend a lot of our time protecting cows?' Of course not. But the Indian 'secular ideal of citizenship', as expressed by the Constitution, says that Indians have a scientific, secular, socialist duty to protect cows- not eat them. This is because the Constituent Assembly accepted the notion that cows are like magic dude. If their numbers keep growing, Poverty will end. By contrast, if their numbers are kept down by us eating them then...urm... that would be like Capitalism? And Capitalism is evil? So don't kill cows. Say no to beef. Meat is murder.

We can see through the filter of these contemporary mass mobilisations that display this complex integration a retrospective illumination of a historical point of some importance.

No we can't. Bilgrami is lying.

Though some have denied it (Perry Anderson’s sloppy invective is a conspicuous recent example of this), many would grant that Gandhi and Nehru genuinely sought a nationalism that was inclusive of Muslims.

So did Savarkar. Indeed, so did Curzon and Kipling. But this was inclusion predicated on docility.

It must be granted at the same time, however, that the very fact of Partition amounted to a failure of that aspiration.

And Indian independence represented a failure of Churchill's aspiration to include Hindus and Muslims as docile subjects of a British Empire where people named Sajid Javid might at best clean the toilet of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

We have long and incessantly reflected on this failure and sought a diagnosis for it.

No we haven't. We have got better things to do with our time, mate.

Obviously, no short opinion piece can provide any such diagnosis, but one might find in what I have been describing about the present a very rough and general direction in which to seek it.

Is it up Bilgrami's butt?

What is very striking is that whenever Muslims were included in the struggle for independence in mass movements—in the way that they ¬presently are as well—their involvement was wholeheartedly nationalist and anti-imperialist, not sectarian or communal.

That is not the Indian experience.

The Khilafat movement that mobilised the mass of Muslims qua Muslims, even though it did ¬eccentrically appeal to an obscure Muslim cause related to the end of the Ottoman Empire, was not only through and through a nationalist-mobilisation, it had dynamic effects in many regions of the country that made Muslims more progressive than they ever had been, both on gender issues and on issues of political economy that affected the peasantry.

Yes, yes. The Moplah atrocities were very progressive and secular.

In fact, the more purely class struggle of the 1930s, over which the Congress did not always have control, could not have been possible without the antecedent inspirations of the Khilafat and non-cooperation mobilisations.

Nonsense! Neither Ceylon nor Burma had any 'Khilafat' or Gandhian non-cooperation. Yet, 'class struggle' was an element in the political ferment they experienced in the 1930's.

The effects of the Khilafat movement on Muslim consciousness had subsided by 1927-28 and there followed a decade in which Muslims were included in Indian nationalism by a quite different understanding of democratic inclusion—not via mass mobilisations, but more formal negotiations by its leaders with the Hindu leaders of the Congress in round table conferences and other such fora.

So Bilgrami thinks Jinnah was right. Muslims in Congress were just 'show-boys'.

In these more formal efforts at inclusion, the Muslim leaders always felt alienated and dominated by their Hindu counterparts.

So there was no 'inclusion'. The Brits had imposed the thing.

So much so that Nehru explicitly declared in the late 1930s that it was a wholly wrong method of inclusive nationalism and one would have to return to a mass movement to include Muslims in the nationalist cause.

In other words, there needed to be a grass-roots movement- similar to the Trade Union movement- to champion the peasant against the landlord. The problem here was that the dominant community would also grab land from minorities in the name of caste or creed.

It was with such a declared understanding that the Muslim Mass Contact Campaign was launched by the Congress under the leadership of the left-leaning Muslim leader K.M. Ashraf, and it was through these campaigns that a wide range of Muslims were brought again into the anti-imperialist nationalist campaign—the Khudai Khidmatgars, the Aligarh academics, many of the Deobandi leaders….

Bilgrami is confused. Everything he mentions predates the Muslim Mass Contact Campaign.  The reason 'inclusion' fails is because once the prizes of office are within grasp the nature of the game changes- more especially in a 'patrimonial' segmentary society.

The campaign was shorter-lived than the Khilafat movement and never really reached deep into the peasantry as the earlier campaign had. Still, these points, I believe, bring out something that the present campaigns in the squares and maidans are retrospectively making clear. The failure of Partition was the failure of formal methods of inclusion through negotiations between leaders. When ordinary Muslims had a genuinely participatory role in mass mobilisations, they never felt the tug of a sectarian, communal or separatist aspiration.

Quite true if you are speaking of bread and butter issues. But fantasies don't fit the bill. The problem with bread and butter issues is that, for Muslims- as for Christians or Jews or Hindus or us Liberals- the jam on top is the notion that our alterity will become like us. Only their backwardness- caused by poverty- holds them back. Thus the 'overlapping consensus' that mobilization is what will secure bread & butter yields to a factionalism which may appear 'communal' or 'ideological' but which is at heart the winner-take-all patrimonialism of a negative sum game.

Let us hope, then, that leaders don’t enter and ruin the political possibilities of resistance that have emerged in the participatory presence of Muslim women and men in the morale-boosting mass mobilisations that we are currently witnessing.

Whose morale has been boosted? The BJP's. They increased their vote share while Congress and the Left have lost their deposits.

Bilgrami speaks of 'Two Historic Deeds. The Common Muslim Has Done What Even Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar Or Azad Couldn’t.' What will History itself say. if it notices it at all, of the anti-CAA protest? The answer is that the 'Common Muslim' was deserted by 'the Common Man'. The Aam Aadmi Party stayed aloof from the protests. The Left either did not care to, or no longer had the organizational muscle to, give the protests a 'Secular' or 'Popular Front' - as opposed to Communal- complexion.

Thus the two historic deeds of the Indian Muslims who are protesting the CAA bill are
1) furnishing a death certificate for the Left so its rotting corpse can be hygienically disposed off.
2) hammering a few more nails into the coffin of the Congress party.

In this sense, we must give daad to the dadis of Shaheen Bagh. They have accomplished what Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar and Azad could not- viz. the burial of the Indian National Congress.