I
fast for some days every week of this month of Ramadan. At an
ifthar (breaking of
fast) gathering last week, Rahim, a handsome young Muslim doctor and I chatted
about this and that, and the end of our world: "Do you think refined and
educated Muslims will survive this century? Or will we become
extinct? I feel I don't know who I am any more. My parents, too,
say the same. Barbaric Muslims are stronger than us, more stupid and
ignorant, but stronger, you know."
You
hear these outpourings of grief and hopelessness a lot these days.
Ignorance is not bliss, it is oblivion, wrote the American novelist
Philip Wylie. Ill-educated, volatile, easily led, despised by millions,
Muslims the world over are falling into that void, into oblivion. Some
are and will be annihilated by external foes and enemies within, including the
demon cheerleaders inside the heads of suicide bombers, but many more will be
consumed by their own terror of the modern world.
Look
today at India and Pakistan, neighbours, twin nations with identical histories
and values. While the former is poised to challenge the economic and
cultural power of the West, the latter is imploding and joins the ever-growing
club of failed Muslim states. India has shameful problems – extreme
poverty, corruption, greed, the caste system, Islamophobia and misogynist
cultural practices – but, unlike Pakistan, it also has a free press and
democracy, and its population understands the importance of education and
enlightenment.
Come
to our isles and the same stark contrast emerges. British Asians of
Indian background (including Muslims from India) are top of the league tables
in schools, universities, business and the professions. They are mentally
agile, inquisitive, and encouraged to strive by their families. With some
individual exceptions, British Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds
languish at the bottom of all indicator tables. It is heartbreaking.
Some
of this failure to catch up is to do with discrimination, no doubt about
that. Some, though, is the result of self-limitation. In the past
decade, there has been a sharp increase in British Muslims entering higher and
further education, but even this good news has a depressing undertow. In
nearly all universities in this country, including the elite establishments,
there are cells of well organised Muslim obscurantists who entice or bully
fellow Muslim scholars seeking to liberate their minds.
They
write to me, bright and ambitious students, who feel spied on, coerced, hounded
and tormented because they do not wear a
hijab,
or are seen meeting diverse mates in the student union bars, or choose
"haram" subjects such as creative writing, art, drama or even
European languages. One young Muslim woman at the LSE actually had a
novel snatched from her hand, and says she was then held and harangued by her
hijabi assailant who
left a bruise on her arm. I pity both. What makes a university
undergraduate this appallingly afraid of fiction? Who got into her head
to distort it so?
It
wasn't always thus. The fanatics who want to take us into their version
of the holy past don't know and don't care about inconvenient truths.
Allah commands us to seek knowledge and intellectual engagement. The best
of past Muslim civilisations nurtured enquiry, debate, love, desire, words,
music, dance, art, philosophy, science and beauty. The effusive Michael
Wood's BBC programme on the Mughal Emperor Akbar last week was a wonderful
reminder of that enlightened period of our history,
Today,
creative, imaginative, dissenting and innovative Muslims have to wear virtual
body armour, hunker down, just in case someone decides to get offended (and
someone always does), inciting an uproar on the web, on the media, on the
streets bringing out the mobs in Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, South Africa, Somalia
and on and on. Inevitably some die for a cause they never really
understood and the restless army of discontents shuffles off until the next
noisy and bloody march.
I
know of talented painters and poets in Pakistan who have just given up or
fled. Arab artists, activists and thinkers unafraid of the truth are in
actual prisons or enclosed behind limitations built by their fearful societies.
Explosive
episodes are always gathering round the corner. We witnessed the
organised outrage over the Channel 4 programmes exposing some of the vile imams
still controlling some mosques. The film of the Khaled Hosseini's novel
The Kite Runner, about a young boy in Afghanistan, is causing much anger.
One of the pivotal scenes involves a homosexual rape of a Shia boy. They
won't have that, it is a slur, an insult. Muslims don't do such things.
The same protests met Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, in which a young
Bangladeshi wife in Tower Hamlets has an affair. Muslims don't do such
things etc, etc. Of course there is no rape and adultery in Saudi Arabia
or Pakistan, those are bad "western" behaviours. The
controversy will be reheated when the film of Brick Lane is released in a few
weeks.
Now
I didn't rate the book much; the film, which I have been sent pre-release,
actually moved me more. The more voluble East End Bangladeshis are not bothered
about considered judgements of literary or critical merit. They will cry
foul because the story taints their honour and culture, it reflects back to
them what they would rather not see.
When
cultures get this coarse, they can only give rise to the worst, most
unaccountable and violent leaders. This is what we see all through the Muslim
world. In good societies, people build up sense and sensibilities,
acquire communication skills, learn intelligent engagement with written and
spoken words and with diverse views, open their minds to new ideas and
images. And the formally uneducated are as capable of this expansiveness
as those with degrees.
The
poorest Londoners loved Dickens, and he changed the way they imagined their
lives; peasants were drawn to Gandhi because he helped them break out of mental
bondage. These men brought political and personal awakening to the rough
and wretched, and enabled them to understand subtleties and nuances and what it
is to be human. Britain and India have strong democracies because their
populations have been acculturated and sensitised over centuries. In
Muslim states and communities, you find the people fast becoming deculturalised
and desensitised; shutting down and withdrawing into paranoia.
I
write this not to encourage Islamophobes, but because I care. Ramadan is
a time for sober reflection. It should bring peace, but doesn't.
Many of us tremble with trepidation at the bleak future ahead. The
savages are taking over and, as Rahim says, they are stronger and will drag all
the faithful down into the pits of hell.