Secularism is a cruel joke in this country: both the opponents and (a section of) the proponents of this glaringly basic cornerstone of any sensible democracy, strive hard to render the concept essentially defunct and an insufferable parody. Not a surprise given that the person who rules this country is a self-proclaimed ‘Hindu Nationalist’ and an accused in one of the most gruesome genocides of our times, and the person who heads that party now is well-known for monitoring infamous extortion rackets and fake encounters among other embellishments in his not-so-long political journey. I will not be talking about these people.
I am going to spill my thoughts on, a particular section of, the upholders of this awe-inspiring ideology and their spurious addition to the vocabulary of the same: “Secular Muslim.”
How many of us have seen movies, mainstream/independent, where the only Muslim in a story filled with innumerable characters has to go through a rigorous procedure of proving his secular credentials before anyone takes him seriously for a fellow human? Adding to this dramatic masala, is the patronizing pride that this odd-man-out Muslim evokes in the other characters.
“ Yes, he is not like those bearded brats. Those Osamas, Those Hafizs’. He is a normal peace-loving, hair-shaving, person. Yes, he is a secular Muslim!”
Cut!
The audience pities this secular Muslim. “Poor guy, he is born to ‘those people’. But he is not anything like ‘them’. He could easily be one of ours’. Maybe we need to get him converted. Hmmm..”
The most disturbing , of course, is the eagerness with which this secular Muslim obliges to go through this degrading and condescending litmus-test of secularism.
After this, we all know the routine. Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai. In the climax, the Muslim probably sacrifices his life in the process of securing a happily-ever-after future for the poor hero and the rich heroine.
The other kind of Muslim that graces the screen with his bearded presence is our patented, clichéd Pakistani terrorist. The less said about his antics, the better.
The myth of self-marginalization of Muslims is a highly popular ’belief’ in certain secular, progressive circles. The argument goes like this: ‘Most of the Indian Muslims are mired in religious dogma and fundamentalism. That really is the cause of their backwardness and marginalization. These are self-inflicted wounds they like blaming others for. Look at how secular, well-educated Muslims are prospering, all the same!’
True, there are no “well-educated” Muslims in this country who are being denied housing time and again. There are no Muslim students from even the reputed colleges who are being locked up indeterminately on trumped-up charges, while the civil society, and its loyal and highly-selective pet called outrage, are snoring at some abandoned corner of the India Gate. There is no role played by the Indian Republic, by the communities that hold a disproportionate sway over the workings of the state, in denying us a life of dignity and in suppressing our resistance to expose the hardly acknowledged marginalization of Muslims on all fronts: social, political, economic and cultural. These theories of non self-inflicted oppression are ways to evade the self-critique of our regressive religious practices and our fundamentalism, that is at the root of our marginalization.
This, we need to concede, to preserve our tag of a secular Muslim.
The burden of proving that we are secular is a mill-stone we can’t dispose off in this country. There are, everywhere, invisible, subtle checkpoints slyly slipping into your conversations’, your suspicious gaze, at the behest of which we have to strip ourselves free of our beards, our skull-caps, our Quran to prove to you that the blood and flesh underneath is not raging with hatred (but only with stigma you cannot see, shame you cannot feel, anger you cannot bear). The manner in which secularism is deliberately constructed, manipulated, tampered with, and defined in this country is yet another ingenious trick to further normalize, and progressive-ze, our oppression and your prejudice. We know that every time you append ‘secular’ to a Muslim, you are carefully carving an exotic and a rare species for your amusement and amazement, namely “Secular Muslim.” We know that every time you use that word you are indirectly projecting the majority of the Muslims, out of the pale of your progressive spaces of interaction, as fundamentalists and extremists waiting to happen in their dilapidated ghettos, their cycle-repair shops, their fruit-vending carts, their butcher shops, their weaving colonies etc. But still we do not object. We do not resist or speak out. Because the moment we do, we cease to be secular and hence more vulnerable to the poison of your secularism. We are secular as long as we let you abuse our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, with the vicious weapon of secularism. Secularism, that should have been the refuge of the minorities being denied fundamental rights, ends up being a more palatable and a more liberal version of Islamophobia. In this deeply flawed problematization of our plight, their critique of Islam only serves to conceal their complicity in the subjugation of Muslims through the progressive tools of secularism and rationalism. Islam is portrayed as being anti-thetical to secularism and hence any believer would automatically come last in this hysterical race.
So, who really is this ‘Secular Muslim’?
Is he the non-believing type , always ranting against Islamic fundamentalism, but maintaining a calculated silence on the Hindutva terrorism?
Or is he the closeted believer who is forced to shield his religious inclinations from the realm of his progressive friends, with the fear of being ostracized from that haloed neighborhood?
Or is he the silent muslim who bears, with difficult calm and censored anger, the abuse being loaded on his religious practices and customs, and being impatiently lectured on how a believing muslim can never be secular?
Or Is he the upper-class-upper-caste-deadly-combo Muslim who gleefully dissociates himself from his plebian brothers and is more than glad to deliver a smug lecture to his friends, over a glass of rotten French wine, how it is the religious dogma of Muslims that is at the core of our misery, and finally sheds a tear thinking about the poverty-stricken life of his overworked Muslim maid, which sinks into his wine and is finally gulped down his throat?
Or is it the Muslim woman who marries into a progressive upper caste Hindu family and is compelled to tolerate in silence and complicity the insensitive jibes from her in-laws at her burqa-clad sister so as not to rattle the fabric of her complacent family?
Or is it the film-fanatic Muslim, who squanders his weekly wage to decorate the huge cut-out of his favorite hero with shining now, stinking tomorrow, garlands and blends into that cozy frenzy atmosphere comfortably, though some corner of his gaze keeps searching for a muslim character, in a way, for himself, in the film only to find himself in either a hideous terrorist or an alienating ‘secular muslim’, and who learns to suppress this thought involuntarily because he is scared of not belonging, he is scared of betrayal, after all he does not want to be reminded that he sacrificed his food, his sweat, his blood, his family, for a week only to be demeaned on a 70MM screen?
A more relevant question: a question I have answered for myself and for my friends after May 16 in a small note.
Who am I?
I am not a secular Muslim,
I am the one who invades and demolishes your holy places of worship,
I am the one who increases your population exponentially,
I am the one who rapes your Hindu mothers and sisters,
I am the illegal Bangladeshi migrant,
I am the ruthless Pakistani terrorist,
I am the caricature of your society,
I am just an Indian Muslim.
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The writer is a student at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.