Evil Eye on Islam Light

Evil Eye on Islam Light


The perpetual internal battle in Islam is not just between the various sects of Sunnis and Shiites. This is, of course, an age-old animosity traceable to the very dawn of Islam. But even within the two main streams of the “true faith”, there is persistent conflict between what Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk calls “Islam Light,” and its hard-core adherents.

All progress, as it is generally understood, is made under the relatively liberal rule of Islam Light, but its votaries are under constant threat from the Mullah-led orthodox and their “God’s Warriors”.

The only way Islam Light sustains itself is by ruthless repression and periodic purges of the hard-core. This is true of every single Islamic country in the world dealing with its existential realities. And there is also a sharp rich/poor divide amongst Islamic monarchies, oligarchies, military and “benevolent” dictatorships, the uneasy republics, the jamahiriyas, the Loya jirgas, the pseudo-republics, the socialist Islamic republics, the rare and uneasy democracy. And this, notwithstanding traditional welfarism and charity.

The poor and illiterate in all these countries are generally prey to the radical element motivated by mullahs of a medieval bent of mind. And the rich, the educated elite, the powerful, do themselves no good with their corruption, debauchery, hypocrisy; their apostate western/dissolute/cynical ways; unashamedly thinking up ways to use the poor for their own political and strategic ends.

This is precisely the battle that is currently consuming Pakistan. Quite apart, that is, from fissiparous tensions between its dominant feudal Punjabi culture and its other, lesser, Sindhi, Baluchi, Pathan and Mohajir constituents. But even as the Pakistani elite live in denial of their fractured, fissured, failed and bankrupt nation; they continue to mine the internal conflict for all the money they can get from America.

This is an old habit now, maybe turned into an irresistible addiction. It has come down from the early days of Nixon and Kissinger’s anti-Soviet/India, pro-Pakistan/China tilt in the Seventies. It was widened and deepened by Zia Ul Haq’s US sponsored Mujahideen creating regime. It has continued through Benazir Bhutto’s time of smoke and mirrors; and that of Nawaz Sharif; and that of Pervez Musharraf. And now, it is floundering under the weak and awkward helmsmanship of Zardari/Gilani/Kayani.

The Pakistani establishment assures itself it is in full control of the situation. It refuses to see that a radical, impoverished, numerous, madrassa-bred horde, nurtured over fifty years, cannot be taken out of the box to use for monetary shake-downs and put back in forever. Not, that is, without both the serum and its antidote developing mutant side-effects of their own.

Right now, as US Congress prepares to vote on the Obama Administration’s proposals to generously fund Pakistan afresh; Pakistan is playing the picture-book vassal state, all obedience and attentive comprehension. It has demonstrated no hesitation in using some of those American supplied helicopter gun-ships to shoot up some fifty home-grown Taliban. Nor in nodding sudden agreement at US interlocutors when it came to agreeing that “internal threats,” and not “India” is Pakistan’s current Enemy No. 1.

But this sort of cooperation tends to fluctuate in line with pay-day. And, because of the embedded clash between Islam Light and the hordes of “true” believers outside the palace gates; this fancy fandango is turning increasingly precarious.

The fandango is a difficult dance to dance in an Islamic state, even in a somewhat Europeanised Turkey. The hard-core Islamist always holds the “light brigade” apostate, infidel, and as much the enemy as any other kind of non-believer. And the struggles of power politics tend to have some very hard, steel-tipped, bully-boy edges. An old Kashmiri proverb: “One man’s beard is on fire, and another warms his hands on it,” sums it up nicely.

The Turks, from the times of their Graeco-Roman past, have been entrenched in their rather pagan belief in the malefic effects of the “Evil Eye”. They’ve developed an elliptical talisman against it, and it is ubiquitous; embedded on walls and floors, in pendants, key chains, ear-rings.

And maybe it is this Evil Eye that has cast its baleful gaze upon the conflict engendered by the medievalism trapped in Islam struggling for its identity in a modern, westernised world.

Turkey, eternally astraddle Asia and Europe is literally hybridised. It is both Kamal Ataturk’s Europeanised finessing: no burkhas, no jubbas, no Ottoman Fezzes; but also, now, revisionist, ambivalent: Pamuk’s vision of a return-to-the-veilism battling with “universal ideas”. That is why populous Turkey waits interminably to clear continuous objections in its bid to join the European Union.

In India we call it the “bura nazar” that the back of any Indian truck will tell you, deserves to have its own face blackened. But who will erase the Evil Eye that has bedevilled our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Kashmir?

Perhaps the time has come to accept that we will never succeed in trying to democratise the Islamic majority in the Valley--no matter how many elections they participate in. Touch a raw nerve and the place will burn, going from a blessed “Paradise on Earth” to Hell—even by the fire of a single beard set alight.

We will eventually have to save Kashmir from itself by the very means we reject today as anathema. We will have to revoke Article 370 without expending any more vacuous sentimentality on the issue and fully integrate “paradise” with the rest of India --rather like China has seen to Tibet.

There will undoubtedly be howls of protest but it is better than the Pakistani prescription of death by a thousand cuts for Hindustan. Pakistan is busy with itself and America is unwilling, for the moment, to let it play its Kashmir card. Perhaps we should use this time to take a Muslim majority Kashmir out of its reach. This clear-headed action may, eventually, stop the blood-bath which has cost modern India more military and civilian casualties than all our other insurgencies and wars combined.

Meanwhile the Islamic paradox continues. Kamal Ataturk promulgated his law against the multiple marriages and divorces permitted by Islam in favour of one-at-a-time civil marriage and its due-process dissolution. But he took care to do so, just after divorcing his wife of many years, giving her a swift, traditional, and maintenance-free talaq; in order to marry a young and nubile replacement…

(1,053 words)

1st May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee