CROSS ROADS
This morning, in a rather hurry, I reached my shop at Muniwar in Srinagar. The modest dry fruits shop which provided for me and my family, inherited from my father who on his turn had inherited it, after a fierce property battle with his younger brother, from my grandfather. Next to my shop, there was a furniture outlet on the right side and a local grocery store on the left. Business had been slow since the recent Pahalgam attack on tourists two months ago and much of the day was spent either doing nothing or sometimes having a chat with the shopkeepers and locals from the neighbourhood.
Srinagar was reeling under extreme hot weather since a week. It had never been this hot and while my shop had an air conditioner, it was still warm as I kept the door open so that potential customers would not assume that the shop was closed.In a good month, after all expenses paid, I would take home a profit of around 80,000 Rupees which had now decreased to around 30,000 Rupees. Zainab, my wife, had taken some money from her father last month to make ends meet and two weeks ago we did not celebrate the birthday of my youngest son, Saad, with the same festive fervour as we used to.
A tradition which we kept alive despite family members and friends telling us that celebrating birthdays was haram. As if God’s universe would collapse if a young 19-years old boy would cut a cake and be happy with his friends having dinner somewhere outside. Faiza, my daughter who had completed her MA in English literature four years ago was smart and while she never uttered a word to me, I knew that she must have felt that we had to tighten our belts after tourists had started to flee the valley.
Bashir-ud-din, the Imam of the local mosque used to visit my shop quite often for a cup of tea and would spend some time, between prayers, talking about religion and politics.Always dressed as an Arab in a perfectly ironed Thawb and a cylindrical head wrap with the tail hanging behind, as if he and his forefathers had spent their lives in the Bayda desert and not Wadoora near Sopore, and would anytime have to fly back to the desert between Mecca and Madinah to ‘reclaim’ Arab ancestry.
It was around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, after Zuhr prayers that Bashir-ud-din, dressed in his usual way and with his flowing long grey beard, walked into my shop. However, this time he seemed in a hurry as he just stepped into the door, rabidly waving the index finger of his right hand and shouted,
“Did you hear it? Israel has backed off. The Americans were forced to broker a ceasefire between Iran and Israel as otherwise Iran would have annihilated the Jews. Wallahi, we would have crushed them and gotten rid of these bloody bastards once and for all. Alhamdulillah, we have won”.
Before I could say something sensible, Bashir-ud-din turned around and left. I stood up and walked out of my shop and saw him repeating identical gestures at Mushtaq’s furniture showroom next door before hastily moving on to the next shop, and then to the next.
I walked back to my chair and thought about what Bashir-ud-din had said. How had we won, I asked myself. Iran fought a limited war with Israel and somehow, we Kashmiris had miraculously won? It didn’t make any sense. Nevertheless, I was old enough and had seen enough of Kashmir to understand that whether Iran had won or not, we Kashmiris had no other choice than to claim victory.
Victory, not for the Iranian Shias of course, as many of us in Kashmir hold discriminative, utterly untrue and rather bizarre opinions about Shias like the notion that they spit in the food which they offer to Sunnis or the belief that they use blood instead of red chillies whenever a Sunni comes over for lunch or dinner, but victory for the Muslims. At such times, despite our biases, we ought to be one entity; The Muslim Ummah!
I was just eight years old, when in 1967, Israel annexed East-Jerusalem, and there were violent protests in Srinagar and two churches were burned. Two years later, when an Australian Jew set fire to Al-Aqsa, a complete strike was observed in Kashmir and a curfew was imposed for almost a week while one Kashmiri died and many others were injured.
I am not very educated, but I am pretty sure that nobody in Kashmir, including the well-read and educated ones, had seen, let alone read, ‘The Satanic Verses’, written by Salman Rushdie, ironically a Kashmiri-origin Muslim, but as soon as the book was published, Kashmir was one of the first places in the world where major protests took place.I, despite having no idea of what he had written, also joined these protests.
I vividly remember that Ayatollah Khomeini had banned the book, and the Jamaat-e-Islami had spread rumours that the Ayatollah’s ancestors had come to Kashmir and thus Kashmiri Muslims had to follow his Fatwa. At least one person was killed and dozens injured when protest broke out in the summer of 1988. Three decades later when Rushdie was knighted in the UK, Kashmir again witnessed protests for a week.By that time, still nobody in Kashmir had read Salman Rushdie’s book.
At some point, Ayatollah Khomeini declared that the last Friday of the month of Ramadan should be commemorated as Quds Day and since then, we Kashmiris, dutifully protest every last Friday of Ramadan in solidarity with the people of Palestine. I joined these protests for, I guess, five years and then stopped abruptly asking myself why Palestine never protested in solidarity with us Kashmiris? Or Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Bangladesh, Oman, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon?
Wasn’t our history of almost eighty years of division bloody enough? Hadn’t enough Kashmiris died on 22 October 1947 or since the advent of terrorism in the early nineties? Or were we not Muslims enough? Or was the Muslim Ummah a farce? Or was it that only converted Muslims had to show solidarity with Arab Muslims in order to prove their faith?
I was a mute spectator when in the early nineties almost every Kashmiri Muslim thought that ‘Azaadi’ and Pakistan were around the corner, and when for our own people, Kashmiri Pandits, our ancestors who were our neighbours, our teachers, our very own flesh and blood, and as much Kashmiri as us, perhaps even more, the loudspeakers of our mosques blared “Raliv, Galivya Chaliv”(Convert, Leave or Die) and “Asi gachi Pakistan, batten rostey, battanevsan”(We want Pakistan, with the Kashmiri Pandit women but without the Pandit men), while the same loudspeakers cried for distant Palestine with “Masjid Aqsa roteehai, Ummat-e-Muslim soteehai, Kyun ye tabahi hoteehai, Jago jago subah huee” (As Masjid Aqsa cries, the Ummah is sleeping. You are surprised at the destruction! Wake up, wake up, the dawn is here…).
As if the Ummah would suddenly wake if we Kashmiris kept putting other Kashmiris to their eternal sleep. Bullshit!
For us Kashmiris, somehow, it doesn’t stop with Iran, Quds, Palestine or Masjid Aqsa. Everything else is also our business. We keep believing that getting our own people killed in Kashmir and the burning of public property will solve faraway issues like Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey. We keep drinking poison in the hope that it will kill the enemies of those Muslims who have never cared about us.
In 1979, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged by military dictator Zia-ul Haq in Pakistan, and this sparked off large-scale violence in Kashmir. Houses of Jamaat-e-Islami activists and their offices were destroyed and burned. One of my uncles, part of the Jamaat-e-Islami then, was also victim of such violence. We Kashmiris held a massive protest in Hazratbal and paraded a donkey with a placard that read “I am Zia-ul Haq”.
Almost a decade later, 20.000 Kashmiris gathered at the very same Hazratbal Mosque, and offered prayers for Zia-ul-Haq, hailing him as a friend of Kashmiris and blaming the Communists for his death. Amusingly, the same uncle of mine whose house was burned when Bhutto was hanged by Zia, joined this protest as well.
We Kashmiris also have a strange tendency to offer funeral prayers in absentia for Muslim Terrorists and Dictators irrespective of what they did or stood for. Our university students, the youngsters who are our future, offered funeral prayers in absentia for 1993 Mumbai blasts convict Yaqub Memon and Taliban leader Mullah Omar inside the very University campus. Afterwards, flags of Islamic State, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Taliban were raised by us Kashmiris at Jama Masjid. We offered funeral prayers for Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
It didn’t matter to us that Saddam Hussein killed 200,000 Shia Marsh Arabs or thousands of Kurds by using chemical weapons in the Halabja massacre. We never protested in solidarity with the thousands of innocent Americans killed by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda during 9/11, or the 257 people who were killed in 1993 Mumbai blasts. Mullah Omar’s atrocities also did not make the smallest dent to our hypocrisy, which even Kalhana lamented almost a thousand years ago.
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s we supported Algerians against the French, PLO against the Jews, Afghans against the Soviets, and took out demonstrations in solidarity with them, but we never protested in support of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela or the Women’s Rights Movement.
Why? Because these were not Muslim struggles. And, we Kashmiris consider ourselves the ‘Thekedaars’ of Islam and all Muslims around the world.
So much so that we have now started naming our new-born babies after a fictional depiction of a Muslim warrior called Ertugrul, about whom nothing much is known in history except the fact that he was the father of Osman, long ago and faraway in Turkey. Social media accounts of young Kashmiris carry his picture as their profile picture and even a café in Srinagar has been named after him.
What the hell happened to our own heroes? Lal Ded, Nund Rishi, Kota Rani, Habba Khatoon, Yusuf Shah Chack, Zayn al-Abidin, Maharaja Hari Singh, Maqbool Sherwani and many others?
No matter where in the world, whenever something remotely happens to a Muslim, a Muslim country or anything that could be interpreted, even if a great amount of imagination and twisting of facts and history is required, as an attack on Islam or Muslims, we Kashmiris are the first to react, oftentimes violently, and with absolute disregard to our own problems, property and people.
Perhaps we Kashmiris, the majority of whom converted from Hinduism, somehow have this 500-years old intangible feeling in our hearts and minds that we need to be more loyal than the king in order to prove to the rest of the Muslims, especially the Arabs, that we are worthy of being called Muslims.Because of this intangible feeling, we have, from being Pro-Pakistan to Pro-Islam, now become Pan-Islamists.
It astonishes me.
Of course, one should not accept abuse or injustice, but should one only not accept abuse or injustice against Muslims? What about other human beings? Are they not creations of the Almighty? Why do we Kashmiris only demand justice based on the religion of either the victims or the culprits? Why are we so selectively selective?
Isn’t that an injustice to justice? An injustice to Allah?
Of course, for the first time in history, we protested against terrorism when the Pahalgam attack happened. But did we really protest because we suddenly opposed terrorism or did many of us protest because the attack had devastating consequences on our tourism industry and our pockets? Public display and the private conversations we have among ourselves in our living rooms suggest duplicity.
It was getting late, and dusk had set in when suddenly a young boy, about the age of my son Saad, entered the shop with a receipt book in his left hand and a green small container in his other hand. He looked like the younger version of Bashir-ud-din, also dressed in a Thawb and a headwrap with the tail hanging behind. He walked towards me and said that he was collecting donations for Palestine and asked, whether, as a true Muslim, I would like to contribute.
I quickly opened the drawer of my table and took out a 50 Rupees note, which I folded and carefully put inside his container while praising him for his devotion to this just cause of our Muslim brethren in Palestine.
After all, I am also a Kashmiri.
Equally hypocritical.
Like all of you.
(The Author is the Director of European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) and can be reached at: [email protected])
