The Delhi blast of 10/11 is India’s 9/11. It brought down the ivory tower of the romantic view of terrorism. Dr Umar Nabi, the suicide bomber who blew himself in a car near Red Fort on 10 November, finally managed to change the traditional perception of terrorism as desperate action of the economically deprived, socially marginalised, politically disempowered, and religiously persecuted. He and his accomplices — all doctors, well educated, well placed, well regarded — have shaken off the lotus–eating experts from their hazy view of terrorists as victims of discrimination, injustice, and systemic apathy. Their analysis, in the end, virtually justified the phenomenon of terrorism as a just and moral, if not wholly rational, response to bottled up grievances which had no scope for redressal.
Dubious aetiology
At the root of this analysis has been the materialist view of Marxian economic determinism, which explains such acts of violence as motivated by hunger, deprivation, and exploitation of the weak and the marginalised. Add to this the litany of grievances of Muslim victimhood syndrome — of discrimination, oppression, under-representation — and you have the ideal Islamic-Left-Liberal cocktail of intellectual justification for terrorism. Islamic terrorism. Islamic, because it is perpetuated by Muslims, in the name of Islam, with unapologetic conviction and uncontested theological rationale derived from the heart of Islam — the Quran, the Hadees, the Fiqh.
They quote ayats from the Quran — such as the “Sword Verses” (9:5, 9:29) — which, prima facie, have no plausible alternative meaning than what they take. As for Hadees, there is a plethora, including the one about Ghazwa-e Hind. Regarding Fiqh, its division of the world between Darul Islam and Darul Harb remains unrevised. From this formulation flowed fatwas galore about the imperative of Jihad to re-establish the Muslim rule in India. Shah Abdul Aziz’s fatwa of 1803, declaring India a Darul Harb following the decrepitude of Mughal empire, has been the prototype of the lens through which Muslims have continued to look at post–Mughal India, both colonial and independent.
Though these terminologies have fallen in desuetude, the concepts that they embodied have gone into forming the deep structure of the Muslim mind. It makes them look at Hindus as their permanent rivals, if not always enemies; and in the Indian state, they see an entity, which is hostile to them. So what if, under the Constitution, they have every right that the Hindus have? If they can’t rule the country, they can’t regard it as theirs. The basis of nationhood, for them, is religion. Therefore, people of two religions living in the same land are two nations; or, at best, they can come together to form a composite nationalism, which is synthetic and conceptually contrived, and not quite the same as organic nationalism sans a qualifier or a prefix. It is this structure of thought which keeps them in a permanent state of war — an ever-present psychological reality, whose practical manifestation isn’t infrequent either. Terror attacks are a symptom of the disease whose aetiology goes deep into the political ideology of Islam — its power theology.
Terrorism is an ideology
Terrorism is a political act. An intimidation. A statement. It’s ideological. Always. Islamic terrorism, more so. Long ago, historian Bipan Chandra characterised communalism as an ideology. Communalism is the Indian term for religious antagonism. Terrorism is its violent manifestation. It’s ideological violence. Ideology is an intellectual exercise. It presupposes education, affluence, a sense of selfhood (identity), and the leisure to indulge in abstract and hypothetical thinking. One has to have freedom from the cares of life to think of the abstract other; entertain big thoughts — meta narratives — and conjure grievances to remain angry, agitated, and constantly on the boil. Not surprisingly, the Muslim victimhood syndrome is the function of the belly bulging with biryani.
Always white collar
Terrorism has always been white collar. Osama bin Laden, an engineer from a family of billionaires, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a doctor from an elite political family, exemplified a rule, not an exception. It took the white coats of medi-terrorists to be recognised for what it is. It’s not about poverty, unemployment, or under–representation in services and legislatures. It’s about supremacism — making Islam the supreme force, and bringing the entire world under Islamic rule.
Also read: Delhi bomber’s video can’t radicalise anyone. Umar Un Nabi isn’t a martyr
Madrasa? Yes, but…
In the conventional understanding, madrasas have been considered the hotbed of terrorism. They should certainly be implicated for teaching the antediluvian Dars-e–Nizami curriculum, which imparts the fossilised knowledge of the Islamic imperial age — the ideas of Jihad and conquest, and the vision of a world which has no place for any religion other than Islam. They produce maulvis with ossified attitudes, who are not only regressive, misogynist, and intolerant but also totally apathetic to India. In their knowledge system and mindscape, if India figures anywhere, it’s only as a field for proselytisation. Their intellectual concern and emotional connect with the country is limited to the cause of conversion. The madrasa education does little to promote a sense of belonging to India beyond the bare act of living.
Having said that, it should also be recognised that madrasa goers — coming as they do from the poorest sections of society, devoid of any practical skills, and living at the subsistence level as underpaid clerics in mosques and madrasas — can’t look beyond their livelihood concerns. They lack both material capability and intellectual wherewithal to think about ideology. Moreover, they are too badly exploited by the Muslim community to nurture the victimhood syndrome of the kind that fuels the ideology behind terrorism. They are conservative, regressive, and primitive, but they don’t possess the capability to fly aeroplanes into towers, or extract ricin poison from castor seeds as Dr Ahmed Mohiyuddin Saiyed was doing, or make IEDs from ammonium nitrate as Dr Umar Nabi and his accomplices, Dr Muzamil Shakeel and Dr Adeel Ahmad Rather, were engaged in.
The real culprits
The real devils are the suited-booted, mostly science educated, well–respected, English–speaking, doctors, engineers, and highly qualified professionals — the crème de la crème of society. The ones who received the best of education — subsidised by the government. Those who never faced any discrimination in life; or, if they did, it was a positive one in their favour. They are the ones who love to wallow in victimhood. On WhatsApp groups and social media, they can’t even breathe without the tales of tyranny that the Muslims face day in and day out. Victimhood is their addiction.
Amateurish hermeneutics
It’s strange that the newly educated Muslims — first and second generations of college goers, mostly from science stream, and proficient in English — began to dabble in the Islamic literature available online. The petrodollar–funded propaganda blitzkrieg definitely had a role in it; but the main reason behind it had been the consensus in Muslim society that modern education was just a necessary life skill, while the real knowledge was religious. Given the fact that most of the Islamic literature available online belonged to the genre of Salafi Wahhabism, and political Islam, whosoever delved into it, came out a hardliner.
This kind of unguided access to the canonical text, the Quran and the Hadees, unmediated by the 1,400 years of interpretive tradition, was akin to placing a razor in a monkey’s hand (bandar ke haath mein ustra). They behaved as if in the preceding millennium and a half, no one had ever understood the texts’ real meanings, and that they were the first ones to decipher them. Such amateur interpretation by juvenile readers, combined with the literalism of the Ghair Muqallid – Ahl-e-Hadees – Salafi Wahabi sect, turned Islamic scriptures into a crude bomb. It was inevitable that a doctor or an engineer, with no grounding whatsoever in Islamic interpretive tradition, gaining direct access to a fraught corpus, had to become a live bomb himself. Fraught, because there is something about the Islamic literature on the internet which is the recipe for radicalism. Even the traditional knowledge, stagnant as it has been, dumbs one down — a perfect formula for fanaticism.
Also read: Delhi blast marks return of terror. A red line breached, blind spots exposed
It’s about goals, not grievances
Now that it’s clear that Islamic terrorism is not about poverty, hunger, unemployment, and deprivation, another false diagnosis needs to be set aside — the one about under-representation in parliament, Assemblies, and government services. Every time one is drawn into a discussion on the subject with fellow Muslims, one gets to hear, “we are 15 per cent of the population, but look at our numbers in legislatures, and higher services; it’s not even 5 per cent”. When one asks, “Would your grievances disappear if you had 50 per cent share in legislatures and services?” The answer is silence, and the penny drops. It’s an ideological war, and it will go on till there is total victory. Jihadism has goals to achieve, not grievances to redress.
The difference
The difference between other violent political movements and Jihadism is that unlike others, the jihad would not come to an end after the stated problem of the day was resolved. Did the Hindu-Muslim dispute end after Partition? Would there be peace if the demands of Kashmiri separatists are conceded? Would they not, then, eye the rest of India? If it were just about a seething anger at the wrongs suffered, why don’t the Hindus exiled from Kashmir go back to seek revenge; and why didn’t the Vietnamese, instead of Muslims, bring down the Twin Towers? They couldn’t because they don’t have a theology of war.
Let it be understood that jihadism is a grand ideology for global domination of Islam (Ghalba-e-Islam), and not a petty movement to seek redressal for the day-to-day grievances of Muslims. It’s for a reason that some analysts call it global Islam.
Impossibility of internal critique
To every terrorist attack, there is a predictable response from Muslims — stunned and embarrassed silence, and proforma condemnation in words which sound hollow and unconvincing — such as Islam means peace, it’s not true Islam, and the terrorists are not true Muslims etc. The sad fact, however, is that this “not true Islam” can’t be convincingly belied by the proponents of “true Islam”. Religion is orthodoxy; and a moderate, liberal, and allegorical interpretation cannot displace the rigid, textual, and literal understanding of it. In the war of interpretations, the moderate inevitably comes the second best.
The thinking Muslims don’t have the intellectual tools to counter the Jihadi ideology. That’s because such tools haven’t been forged. They lack concepts, categories, and vocabulary to critique the theology of violence. Therefore, even the well meaning among them can’t denounce terrorism with credible conviction, because any criticism of the jihadi ideology would, inexorably, implicate the mainstream Islamic thought.
Good Islam, bad Islam
This vicious ideology — the mutation in the heart of Islam — can’t be fought with benign and benevolent Islam. The good and the bad in the Islamic tradition are so intertwined that there is no good Islam to fight the bad one. The way out is not the true Islam, but the true nationalisation of it. Islamic theology needs to be Indianised. The Muslims in general, and madrasas in particular, don’t need science and computers as much as they need courses in humanities; particularly, in Indian history and culture.
The imperative
To remain recognisable as a religion, Islam has to de-politicise, de-militarise, and, above all, indigenise. To be at home in India, Islam has to be Indian.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)