Breaking the monolith: Essays, articles and columns on Islam, India, Terror and Other Things that Annoy Me
By Ziauddin Sardar, imprintOne, Rs 895

There are many things that annoy Ziauddin Sardar, but some obviously more than others. He is annoyed with terror (“power ploys of desperate men”), but is somewhat more irked by the war on terror (which America “cannot win”). He is annoyed with the current state of Islam, but a little more angry with what the West makes of it, or is allowed to make of it by the follies of co-religionists like Osama bin Laden. In fact, in his belligerence towards the West and to America in particular, Sardar matches the “mind of bin Laden”. It is only in his prescription for its cure that he differs. While bin Laden preaches bloody resistance, Sardar suggests dissent, which is all about “self-control” that enables dissenters to exercise informed supervision of “what we do and what can and is being done to us.”

A lot has been done and continues to be done to Muslims. One of the prime misdeeds against the community is to deny it “common ground” with the West by overlooking its contribution to the foundations of Western liberalism and humanism. The Greek thought that inspired the Enlightenment came to Europe via the Muslim world. So Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were as much integral to it as Voltaire and his men.

If the Muslim world now appears so bereft of intellect and scientific spirit, the West has to take some of the blame. It was the West’s colonial project, its systematic persecution of scientists and thinkers, that led to the waning of science in the Muslim world. It changed the structural framework of Islamic society, made it inward-looking and obsessed with religious thought. The “siege mentality” has now been intensified by America’s free-market liberalism that increases poverty in the Muslim world, by America’s foreign policy that increases suffering, and by its imposition of a mass culture that denies Muslims the “space” to live, think, act and reform themselves.

In Sardar’s scheme of things, reform and reconsideration of the Islamic legacy are the only way to fight this gross injustice. His short, crisp essays, written in response to a variety of local and international news and incidents — from the Beslan massacre to Abu Ghraib — and his reviews of books take a remorseless position on Islamic society. Sardar decries his society’s pandering of fanatics, its unthinking surrender to blackmail by imams, its culture of mindless violence, its silence on injustices against women, and its refusal to invest in higher education, science and economic welfare. He also examines the radicalization of Islam and finds Wahhabism, upheld by Saudi Arabia for furthering its political interests, responsible for the perversion.

For Sardar, there is no pristine Islam. The religion is based on the constant interpretation of a living text, but such an exercise has to be responsive to the time, locale and people’s needs. The sharia, which suited the times of the Prophet, cannot be imposed on the present society without its reinterpretation. It is time to rethink Islam and “rebuild the Muslim civilization brick by brick.” Which is all very well, but this, according to Sardar, is to be done by developing “Islamized disciplines” independent of Western disciplines, by encouraging science and intellectual pursuit in keeping with the “world-view of Islam”, by effecting a “transmodernism” that would allow a traditional society to change while remaining the same. And all this has to be achieved while respecting pluralism, while remembering how interconnected the world is, and by thwarting the zeal of the righteous and the fanatics which could end in another tyranny. This, admittedly, is a tougher call than simply picking up the bomb and hitting out at objects that symbolize Western power, which, both Sardar and bin Laden agree, is singularly responsible for Islam’s denouement.

There is no doubting Sardar’s sincerity in trying to find answers to problems that afflict not just the Islamic world but also global society: the problem of Western mass culture, for instance. Sardar’s solution appears too simplistic. Running away from the culture of sameness, he goes into the rainforests of Borneo, hoping to find an idyllic way of life. He lives in a house perched on a mountain, with 42 families who make soap and grow chillies. At the end of three days, he asks the depressed chief if his stay had upset him. The man answers that if Sardar “allowed them to be themselves to some extent”, he could live there as long as he wanted. Soon a generator is turned on to dispel the darkness, and it brings out families who decide to watch television first and, later, Terminator on video after a brief chat. Sardar is horrified but would his horror, at the progression of American culture, and grief, at the loss of an ancient way of life, have been less had the families decided to watch a film in the vernacular? Sardar should ask himself the question because that would help him understand what annoyed him more — the choice of technology or the choice of the film?

This is important because otherwise Sardar would be seen to be arguing for his world to disown the West completely. This would mean retracting from the giant strides mankind has taken. Sardar evades this issue when a member of his audience reminds him to wake up to the “human culture”, which owes as much to the Arabs, as to the Chinese, Greeks and Romans. Sardar should be reminded that in India, which draws much flak from him for forgetting its ancient roots and embracing Western mass culture, the wonders of the idiot box manage to make a fractious society sit and watch together indigenous masala films and soaps. No construct, however avowedly Western, has managed to escape indigenization in India. Does that annoy Sardar?