From The Hindu

February 22, 2014

Updated: February 22, 2014 02:19 IST

The forgotten inheritance of Azad

S. IRFAN HABIB

Maulana Azad’s Islam was much more accommodative than the contemporary rigid and combative Islam

It was on this day in 1958 that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad passed away. It was not merely the death of an extraordinary human being but also the death of an idea that sparkled for a few decades — the idea of an undivided India where Muslims could live happily with the Hindu majority. Muslims made India their home centuries ago, and according to Azad, they had a huge stake in the idea of India. However, Azad’s idea received a jolt in 1947 as the violence of partition ravaged India. Azad went on to live for another ten years, helping in healing and rebuilding the scarred and bruised new India.

Azad lived many lives. Some of them are well known, yet some have remained mysteriously unknown. Not much is known or written about them in public. There was a decade in his early days when he was disenchanted with the inherited faith and had to brazen out some difficult and uncomfortable questions about Islam.

Even before arriving at this situation, he was a rebel as a child who disagreed with his father’s faith, got enamoured of Sir Syed’s modernism that his father Maulvi Khairuddin hated, and decided to learn sitar on the quiet though his father did not approve of music. His dissent against the inherited belief went even further — he became an atheist (dehri) and reposed faith only in materialism and rationalism. Religion was reduced merely to a superstition. From the age of 14 to the mid-20s, he just put up a facade of belief in public but inwardly remained completely without faith.

A different Islam

This short phase in his life was ephemeral as he soon got back to Islam, yet his Islam remained qualitatively different. And it is on this count that Azad stands distinctly apart from everyone else. He was himself conscious of the fact that not many people went along with him when he said: “In religion, in literature, in politics, on the paths of philosophy, wherever I went, I went alone. The caravans of the times did not support me on any of my journeys.”

Azad emphasised all his life on the original spirit of engagement with the Quranic text, which was available to all believers of Islam. He refused to accept the canonised Islam; instead he called for independent reasoning or ijtihad to interpret the faith. He also warned against reading more than what was intended to be conveyed in the Quran. This sounds so prophetic in the contemporary context where Islam is invoked by many to speak what they want the Book to speak.

Ghubar-i-Khatir is a collection of letters written in the Ahmednagar Fort prison during three years of incarceration between 1942-45, where Maulana Azad opens his mind to some very unconventional and mundane issues. For example, one of the letters deals with his lifelong passion for tea. He began his day, he writes, with a freshly brewed cup of white Chinese jasmine tea that he consumed mostly alone as no one else could appreciate its taste. Most others were addicted to a concoction mixed with milk and sugar which the British had told them was tea. Only Jawaharlal Nehru, he wrote, used to have black tea, but not the real Chinese tea. In another letter he writes about happiness. He cites a Chinese person saying: “Who is the wisest man? The answer is: He who is the happiest.” Interestingly, he derides those who believe that men of religion and philosophy need to look serious and morose. This, he says, cannot be a pre-condition for respectability and learning.

Reforms in education

Azad also comments upon the education system and syllabi in the context of his own education in late 19th Century India, particularly the Islamic madrasas. He wrote: “It was an outdated system of education which had become barren from every point of view — teaching methods defective, worthless subjects of study, deficient in the selection of books, defective way of reading and calligraphy.” If this is what Azad felt about the Islamic madrasas more than hundred years ago, we can well imagine the urgency and necessity of radical reform in the contemporary system of education.

He is critical of even Al-Azhar University and calls its syllabus poor. Expressing a sense of relief at the fact that he did not have to depend on these madrasas for his early education, he writes: “Just imagine if I had stopped there and had not gone in search of new knowledge with a new curiosity, what would be my plight! Obviously my early education would not have given me anything except a stagnant mind, a total stranger to reality.”

The present day Islamic enthusiasts need to learn a lesson or two from the insights of a scholar like Azad — both from his writings against conformism and conservatism and his questioning of his own family’s intellectual and religious inheritance. He writes further in another letter: “Nothing is greater hindrance to the growth of a mind than its conservative beliefs. No other power binds it as do the shackles of conformity…At times so strong is the grip of inherited beliefs that education and environment also cannot loosen it. Education would give it a new paint but never enter the inner belief structure where the influence of race, family and centuries old traditions continue to operate.”

We need to reflect upon and recall Maulana Azad’s precious and mostly forgotten inheritance, which was based on free thinking and pluralism. In particular, Azad’s Islam was much more accommodative than the contemporary rigid and combative Islam.

That is why, at times like these, when religious fault lines threaten the very idea of India, we must pay heed to Azad’s inheritance.

(S. Irfan Habib holds the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad chair at Delhi’s National University of Educational Planning and Administration.)

http://www.ndtv.com/article/opinion/op-ed-does-it-make-sense-to-pulp-books-484605?pfrom=home-topstories

 Op-ed: Does it make sense to pulp books?

 Ashutosh Varshney

(The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and director of the India Initiative at Brown University; a contributing editor for the Indian Express; and author, most recently, of Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy.)

So another book has died a premature death in India. Or, has it?

To be precise, it is only a half death, for the book’s digital edition continues to be available to electronic users. A banned book often generates intensely greater curiosity than a book in normal circulation.

In the past, a ban often meant the end of a book’s life or a desperate search for it in foreign markets. Today, India has nearly 150 million Web users. If even a small proportion — their curiosity aroused by the ban and the charges of luridness — orders the digital edition, thousands more will have read the book. Unless India becomes a China or a Saudi Arabia, digital access to unwelcome materials simply cannot be eliminated. Dinanath Batra, the head of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, with links to the RSS, is operating in an old world. Banning a book today is self-defeating, at least in part.

But it is not the technologically induced flimsiness of bans that is the main issue. Nor is the issue that The Hindus is written by a famous scholar. It is the very principle of banning a book that needs careful scrutiny.

The ban yet again demonstrates the spectacularly ambivalent character of Indian democracy: an electoral political wonder sited in a rickety liberal legal order. On one hand, no democracy in the world has survived at low incomes, but elections in a low-income India have developed an enormous capacity to throw out incumbent governments. Despite their control over the bureaucracy and police, the incumbents are unable to resist, or undo, popular verdicts.

Yet, freedom of expression, a sine qua non of democracy, remains precariously perched in India. Politicians, judges and religious leaders can say anything with remarkable impunity, but the intellectuals cannot. A Salman Rushdie can be prevented from speaking and his book banned; an Ashis Nandy can be viciously attacked for speaking his mind and calls for his imprisonment made; but a Mayawati, a Jayalalithaa, a Mamata Bannerjee are rarely so troubled. They worry about electoral, not legal, risks. If only the powerful are free to speak, then the right to free expression is seriously abridged. The concept of rights does not depend on power.

Who, then, is to blame for pulping books?  Are publishers overly afraid?

Some indeed are, but others are not. My own experience with Penguin India, in the eye of the storm for withdrawing Wendy Doniger’s book, does not suggest cowardice. My volume, Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie (2009), was initially to be published in India by Oxford University Press (OUP). However, after signing a contract, OUP wanted some sentences withdrawn for fear of offending some powerful families or political parties, making the press perhaps legally liable. I refused to withdraw the sentences, asking Penguin instead whether it would publish the book. Unafraid and undeterred, Penguin offered a contract within a few weeks. An honorable principle was upheld. No harm visited the press, or me, after the book came out.

If after four years of publication Penguin is withdrawing Doniger’s book, our focus should be on laws, not on the courage or timidity of publishers. Publishers will have to pay attention to the law, or the commercial value of a book, or both. They don’t function in a legal or commercial vacuum.  In this case, the book was doing commercially well. The principal culprit is the law that disallows “offense” to religious communities.

India’s democracy is anchored in liberal principles, but many of India’s laws are not. That a book offends an entire religious community and India’s laws can be used to ban such a book is a thoroughly illiberal idea. One should, of course, note that religions have always been excessively sensitive to critiques. Only in the last two centuries have secular polities begun to rein them in.

But my basic point is not that secular modernity is always right, or religious faith is always wrong. Rather, the very idea of books has been de-sacralized in modern times.  Today, we fight a “distasteful” book, even one on religion, by critiquing it, by essaying a better one, by not reading it, or by encouraging others not to read it. A legal ban is a form of coercion on free expression and is awfully retrogressive. It is also partly unworkable in a digital age.

From: The Times of India

Wendy Doniger’s book: ‘You must tell us what terrified you’, Arundhati Roy writes to Penguin India

Feb 13, 2014, 03.52AM IST

A letter to Penguin India (my publishers)

Everybody is shocked at what you have gone and done—at your out-of-court settlement with an unknown Hindu fanatic outfit—in which you seem to have agreed to take Wendy Donniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History off the bookshelves of ‘Bharat’ and pulp it. There will soon no doubt be protestors gathered outside your office, expressing their dismay.

Tell us, please, what is it that scared you so? Have you forgotten who you are? You are part of one of the oldest, grandest publishing houses in the world. You existed long before publishing became just another business, and long before books became products like any other perishable product in the market—mosquito repellent or scented soap. You have published some of the greatest writers in history. You have stood by them as publishers should, you have fought for free speech against the most violent and terrifying odds. And now, even though there was no fatwa, no ban, not even a court order, you have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit by signing settlement. Why? You have all the resources anybody could possibly need to fight a legal battle. Had you stood your ground, you would have had the weight of enlightened public opinion behind you, and the support of most—if not all—of your writers. You must tell us what happened. What was it that terrified you? You owe us, your writers an explanation at the very least.

The elections are still a few months away. The fascists are, thus far, only campaigning. Yes, it’s looking bad, but they are not in power. Not yet. And you’ve already succumbed?

What are we to make of this? Must we now write only pro-Hindutva books? Or risk being pulled off the bookshelves in ‘Bharat’ (as your ‘settlement’ puts it) and pulped? Will there be some editorial guide-lines perhaps, for writers who publish with Penguin? Is there a policy statement?

Frankly I don’t believe this has happened. Tell us it’s just propaganda from a rival publishing house. Or an April Fool’s day prank that got leaked early. Please say something. Tell us it’s not true.

So far I have had been more than happy to be published by Penguin. But now?

What you have done affects us all.

Arundhati Roy

(Author of The God of Small Things, Listening to Grasshoppers, Broken Republic and other books all of which are published by Penguin India)

From The Hindu

February 12, 2014

Changing landscape of free speech

KENAN MALIK

Once we give up on the right to offend in the name of ‘tolerance’ or ‘respect,’ we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice

Twenty five years ago on February 14, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie, for the “blasphemies” of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. It is perhaps disturbingly apposite that this should also be the week in which Penguin, the publishers of The Satanic Verses, should so abjectly surrender to hardline Hindu groups over Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, agreeing to withdraw it from publication in India. The contrast between the attitude of the old Penguin and that of the new Penguin tells us much about how much the Rushdie affair itself has transformed the landscape of free speech.

Thanks to the Ayatollah’s fatwa, the Rushdie affair became the most important free speech controversy of modern times. It also became a watershed in our attitudes to freedom of expression. Rushdie’s critics lost the battle — The Satanic Verses continues to be published (though, of course, not in India). But they won the war. The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case — that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures — is now accepted almost as common sense.

In 1989, after the fatwa, Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade. Translators and publishers were assaulted and even murdered. In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese professor of literature and translator of The Satanic Verses, was knifed to death on the campus of Tsukuba University. That same month another translator of Rushdie’s novel, the Italian Ettore Capriolo, was beaten up and stabbed in his Milan apartment. In October 1993, William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, was shot three times and left for dead outside his home in Oslo. Bookshops were firebombed for stocking the novel. And yet, except where there were state bans, Penguin refused to withdraw the book.

Peter Mayer was the CEO of Penguin at the time. He was subject to a vicious campaign of hatred and intimidation. “I had letters delivered to me written in blood,” he remembered. “I had telephone calls in the middle of the night, saying not just that they would kill me but that they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall. Vile stuff.” Yet neither Mayer nor Penguin countenanced backing down. What was at stake, Mayer recognised, was “much more than simply the fate of this one book. How we responded to the controversy over The Satanic Verses would affect the future of free inquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we knew it, but also, by extension, no civil society as we knew it.”

It is an attitude that now seems to belong to a different age. The contrast with Penguin’s decision this week to withdraw all copies of Doniger’s The Hindus is striking. Unlike in the case of The Satanic Verses there has been so far no state ban. But, the publisher has crumbled in the face of groups shouting “offence.”

Peter Mayer and the old Penguin belonged to a world in which the defence of free speech was seen as an irrevocable duty. “We all came to agree,” Mayer told me, “that all we could do, as individuals or as a company, was to uphold the principles that underlay our profession. We were publishers. I thought that meant something. We all did.” He took his cue from Baal, the irreverent, satirical poet in The Satanic Verses. “A poet’s work,” Baal observes, “To name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”

Today’s Penguin, like many publishers, like many liberals, takes Baal’s observation to be not self-evident but shockingly offensive. To such an extent has the Rushdie affair transformed the landscape of free speech that what many fear today is precisely the starting of arguments. What they most want is for the world to go to sleep.

“Self-censorship,” the Muslim philosopher and spokesman for the Bradford Council of Mosques Shabbir Akhtar claimed at the height of the Rushdie affair, “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s — not least every Muslim’s — business.”

Cultural pain

Increasingly, politicians and policymakers, publishers and festival organisers, liberals and conservatives, in the East and in the West, have come to agree. Whatever may be right in principle, many now argue, in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities because such sensibilities are so deeply felt. We live in a world, so the argument runs, in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values. For such diverse societies to function and to be fair, we need to show respect for other peoples, cultures, and viewpoints. Social justice requires not just that individuals are treated as political equals, but also that their cultural beliefs are given equal recognition and respect. The avoidance of cultural pain has, therefore, come to be regarded as more important than the abstract right to freedom of expression. As the British sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, “If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism.”

The consequence of all this has been the creation not of a less conflicted world, but of one that is more sectarian, fragmented and tribal. As the novelist Monica Ali has put it, “If you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, ‘My feelings are more hurt than yours’.” The more that policymakers give licence for people to be offended, the more that people will seize the opportunity to feel offended. It leads to the encouragement of interest groups and the growth of sectarian conflict.

Nowhere is this trend clearer than in India. There is a long history, reaching back to British rule, of applying heavy-handed censorship supposedly to ease fraught relationships between different communities. It is a process that in recent decades has greatly intensified. Hand-in-hand with more oppressive censorship has come, however, not a more peaceful society, but one in which the sense of a common nation has increasingly broken down into sectarian rivalries, as every group demands its right not to be offended. The original confrontation over The Satanic Verses was a classic example of how in encouraging groups to feel offended, one simply intensifies sectarian conflict. Penguin’s capitulation over the Doniger book is another step down that road.

Plural societies and free speech

The “never give offence” brigade imagines that a more plural society requires a greater imposition of censorship. In fact it is precisely because we do live in plural societies that we need the fullest extension possible of free speech. In such societies, it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. It is inevitable, because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable; and we should deal with those clashes openly and robustly rather than suppress them. It is important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. Or to put it another way: “You can’t say that!” is all too often the response of those in power to having their power challenged. To accept that certain things cannot be said is to accept that certain forms of power cannot be challenged.

The notion of giving offence suggests that certain beliefs are so important or valuable to certain people that they should be put beyond the possibility of being insulted, or caricatured or even questioned. The importance of the principle of free speech is precisely that it provides a permanent challenge to the idea that some questions are beyond contention, and hence acts as a permanent challenge to authority. Once we give up on the right to offend in the name of “tolerance” or “respect,” we constrain our ability to challenge those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice. The right to “subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism” is, in other words, the bedrock of an open, diverse, just society.

Shabbir Akhtar was right: what Salman Rushdie says is everybody’s business. So is what Wendy Doniger says. It is everybody’s business to ensure that no one is deprived of their right to say what they wish, even if it is deemed by some to be offensive. If we want the pleasures of pluralism, we have to accept the pain of being offended.

(Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster.)