The woman trembled as I sat next to her. I thought it must have been pure hell for her having to sit next to a man for that long. I had changed the seats with a woman who wanted to sit with her husband and ended up sitting next to a hijab-clad young lady.
She was young, thin and pretty, as I saw when she finally lifted her veil sometime during the flight. She was from Manchester she told me. Well, she leaned to me mid-flight and asked if I knew the layout of the airport. That is how our conversation started. She spoke in a Highlands accent even though she carried a red passport with Arab lettering. I didn’t want to stare at it to figure out the country.
You see this often, the sight of Muslim women in developed countries voluntarily accepting the sartorial shackles of their religion. I think it is like child’s play. They could take it off anytime and join the mainstream. Or they could keep it on and assert their identity. To me, this is tricky. By volunteering to do this, they are asserting their right to their own culture and religious freedom. At the same time, they are minimizing the struggle for freedom for the millions of women in many Islamic countries where they have no right to choose. Whether they like it or not, they are prisoners of their culture and sartorial constraints.
During the flight, our hands and feet touched in that crammed space in spite of me trying very hard to avoid any contact. She seemed to be comfortable in the company of men and in airplanes. We avoided all conversations about anything that may sound controversial and stuck to the topics of airports, general dust allergies and shopping. I am not even sure if there is an accepted list of conversations between the civilizations. Everyone is afraid of offending the other.
I am no stranger to Muslims. But every Muslim I know, from every country, is what can only be called secularized. They are people for whom their religion is secondary to their life even when the follow their religion. Why is this important? Islam, from my limited reading of it, is one religion that is not compatible with secularism in that, it places itself above all other considerations. I think evangelical Christianity is like that. May be even fundamentalist Hinduism. Except, I am not aware of any evangelical Christian country in the world or a fundamentalist Hindu country. This is why, with the exception of Turkey, every Islamic country is defined by the central role of religion in the government even if it is not out and out theocratic.
People who do not understand the difference between a secular country populated by and informed by the values of a particular religion from a theocratic government implementing a religious framework have no business defining secularism to the rest of us. Nobody except the worst kind of fanatic would include Turkey, India or the United States as theocratic countries even though all three are strongly religious in their populace. I am not trying to pick a fight, just stating what is commonly accepted fact among the member countries of the UN.
What does all this have anything to do with this encounter? Sometimes you remember how different people are and can be from each other though these encounters. I know a lot of people from very many different countries, but they are culturally more similar than different; their differences act like icing on the cake, a small layer that makes them unique or interesting.
But when you meet a person fundamentally different, it forces you to sit up and take notice. I know I probably sound like a Midwestern hick. But I am fascinated with the current fight between the Christian world (lets not mince words, all the terminology they use to cover that is hogwash. Muslims are not buying it) and the Muslim world because it affects us all. And we all have a stake in its outcome.
And this fight is old. And every turn of this fight has produced ugly consequences and hidden benefits to all of us. To sit out this fight as if it is somebody else’s problem is foolish.
But to take sides, one has to know which side is right and whose victory would be good for the world you live in, your personal selfish world. That is where the trouble is with this fight.
The Marxist historians who looked at the Sepoy mutiny of 1857 ignored two important things that characterized the movement. In their hurry to rename is the First War of Independence, all the evidence that pointed to the contrary were brushed aside. First of all, the Sepoy mutiny was led by Wahabists who proclaimed that they were mujahideen leading a jihad against the Nasranis (Christians.) Document after document proclaims this fact. When the mutineers entered Delhi they not only slaughtered all the British they came across but they also did not spare any Indian who had converted. They, however, spared the life of all the British who had converted to Islam. Secondly, Indian independence was not really the reason behind the mutiny. In fact their faith in Islamic brotherhood was so strong, they believed that a Persian army will come to save them from the British.
The impetus for the mutiny, while precipitated by the pig-fat on the Enfield cartridge, was the change in attitudes of the British under the influence of Evangelical ministers. The minister in Delhi implied, even stated, to the Sepoys that they will be converted to Christianity, by force if necessary.
This was not the first war for independence. It was a religious struggle between Christians and Muslims. And they both behaved in alarmingly similar ways to how they behave now. The erstwhile Islamic powers in their complacency (remember Bahadur Shah Zafar and his ill-fated acceptance of the Emperorship of the Sepoys?) behaving without a cogent strategy and the new imperial powers in their absolute arrogance (the British disarmed and stripped the Mughal princes naked before shooting them in the head) deceiving their way to absolute power.
(If you are thinking of Saddam Hussain’s fate, the comparison is not accidental.)
Sounds familiar?
And yet, this is a terrible intellectual dilemma. To support the mutiny would have been to support a Wahabi-form of government in India (which is by no means acceptable) and to oppose it would mean to condone the atrocities committed by the British and their duplicity.
As they say, history repeats itself.
All of these thoughts were triggered by the presence of the Burkha-clad woman at the next seat. But then, what is a better symbol of this clash?
Whose side are you on?
