October 5, 2012
www.malaysiakini.com
Islam is the brotherhood, not the nation,says Mobashar Jawed Akbar
COMMENT by Terence Netto: The theme of eminent Indian publisher Mobashar Jawed Akbar's speak during the Royal Lake Club last Tuesday was Pakistan not the domain of Rudyard Kipling's affectionate gawk in the novel 'Kim', though the violent present-day nicely connected with that Akbar had multiform coruscating observations to make.
Not least among these concerned the thought of an Islamic state as well as what that bodes for multi-confessional nations with Muslim majorities, an emanate of no tiny import to Malaysians, poised as we have been upon the hinge of fate, to borrow from the title of the single of Winston Churchill's books upon the Second World War.
The fact that the speak came in the context of the launch of Akbar's ultimate book, 'Tinderbox, The Past as well as Future of Pakistan', by Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, lent the occasion some-more than fortuitous stress because the nation-founding issues he would have to understanding with in the event he becomes Prime Minister, would not be unconnected to what Akbar pronounced during the speak as well as mulls over in the book.
But some-more engaging than what ostensibly was Akbar's theme matter was its subtext: ideas have consequences as well as the perplexed thought could very well proceed in grotesque realities.
'More Muslims have been murdering Muslims'
Akbar stopped reduced of job Pakistan the grotesquery yet he remarkable that "more Muslims have been murdering Muslims" there regularly over the last dual decades than in any ! alternat ive partial of the Islamic crescent.
He employed the lapidary plan to indicate the reason for this reality that's so mortifying to Islamists: "The thought of Pakistan is weaker than the Pakistani" since "The thought of India is stronger than the Indian."
To what would Akbar (left) charge this phenomenon?
To the coterie of intellectually challenging leaders, especially Hindu yet there were considerable numbers of Muslims, who led the transformation for autonomy from British order from the later decades of the 19th century until the country's assign in to eccentric India as well as Pakistan in 1947.
Though the internationally some-more eminent members of this group of leisure fighters were English-educated, multiform others did not have good of the western liberal education that made their eventual acceptance of the Westminister indication of parliamentary democracy remarkable.
Apart from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison as well as Benjamin Franklin (an insufficiently representative list, no doubt, of the American pantheon of national liberation), few colonial nations have been some-more privileged than India by its possession of an illustrious set of autonomy fighters in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Mualana Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru as well as Mohamed Ali Jinnah.
Akbar cited this quartet as his starting point for an learned disquisition upon the single of the last century's pivotal ideas: the thought that multi-confessional countries could not usually be liberated from carry out by the single of history's some-more puissant powers, the British Empire, but, also, that they could afterwards emerge as viable democracies.
No doubt, an engaging comment could be written upon the predestine of the nation-forging id! eas espo used by each of the four horsemen of the Indo-Pakistani apocalypse.
But Akbar, with the journalist's penchant for the revelation as well as mostly charming item that can have contribution sit up as well as breathe, joined to an intellectual's feel for the history of ideas as well as the ironies in their dialectical play, goes in for the kind of condensation that can begin the glow in your head.
Akbar's Muslim/Indian temperament
On the evidence of his speak last Tuesday, without as nonetheless the good of celebration of the mass his book, it could be pronounced that Akbar has pulled his egghead chestnuts out of the glow with considerable verve.
The tones in that Akbar direct that "I am the Muslim yet the single who does not necessarily pray 5 times the day" as well as "I am during the same time an Indian" to the crowd of the little hundred, customarily Muslim, PKR luminaries as well as supporters were aromatic of Gandhi's anguished cry, "Vivisect me, do not vivisect India" after the last Viceroy of the British Raj, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had decided upon assign in 1947, as the solution to the subcontinent's community furies.
Akbar's non-self paradoxical source of his Muslim/Indian temperament throws in to educational relief Mualana Azad's subject to the delegation of his co-religionists who visited to inform him of their preference to have the hejira (Arabic for migration) from their Indian homeland to what was going to be newly forged out Pakistan: "Where would we go should we find that Pakistan is not your home?"
What Akbar, author of an acclaimed biography of Nehru as well as other
notable functions as well as currently paper executive of the prestigious weekly India Today, is boldly asserting is that Islam is not the enough basement upon that! to shap e metal national identity.
Otherwise, he argued, there would not be "32 Arab nations" in the world as well as "Malaysia as well as Singapore would be the single instead of dual countries."
"Islam is the brotherhood, not the nation," asserted the writer, who was once the part of of the Indian Parliament.
Akbar described events as manifold as the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan, 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq and, even, such functions as the film, 'The Innocence of Muslims', as "attempts to fall short the possibility of co-existence between peoples of varying religious beliefs."
"The faith of Muslims cannot be destroyed," asserted Akbar. "It could not be broken even when there was once usually the single man, Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), who believed in it."
Akbar's book deserves to be widely review not just for what he pronounced in his speak about such enduringly engaging things as the unintended consequences grand ideas generate, though additionally for what he intimated about leaders of destiny who affect to be certain about where they have been taking their people, though who in reality transport in the fog upon the journey without maps.
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