When InSanity beckons

Samuel Becket had famously declared that he hadn’t taken sides in the primordial conflict between God and devil or good and evil simply because he hadn’t had the opportunity to listen to the devil’s side of the story.

In our own times ISIS has gone to the other extreme and taken the devil’s side, even while claiming to be God’s warriors. For its adherents, IS stands for Islamic State; for the rest of Muslims and the rest of humanity it incarnates nothing but InSanity. With its indomesticable barbarity, wanton cruelty and boorish Neanderthalism it represents the worst challenge to all sane versions of Islam. Voltaire had considered fanatics neuropaths. He warned against hating them, stating that they needed to be treated like people suffering from other illnesses.

What kind of treatment IS activists and sympathizers need is a question worth pondering. Theirs seems to be a madness that has no method to it. If they are fighting for Islam, why should they be the very antithesis of everything that Islam is? The prophet had indeed fought battles. But historians note that the fatalities in all his battles together were less than a thousand. His magnanimity in the aftermath of battles was so exemplary that many of his prisoners of war chose to return to his fold even after they were released. He entered Mecca, the city that had thirsted for his blood and hounded him out, a decade after being forced out of there, as a conqueror without letting an ounce of blood to be spilt. And to boot, he forbade his men even from claiming the encroached houses and properties they had been forced to leave behind in the city of their birth.

When his followers extended the domain of Islam after his death, they did not exactly follow his model of tolerance, but as the famous French Christian historian Amin Malouf pointed out, largely abstained from gratuitous violence. The example of the great Saladin (Salahuddin Ayyoubi) has been legendary. When his enemy commander King Richard lost his horse during the combat, Saladin immediately sent him a horse saying that a king like him should not be fighting on foot. When the English king fell ill, he sent his personal physician to treat him. In the aftermath of the Jerusalem victory, he was so magnanimous that he made it a point to make the city a true cosmopolitan centre by allowing Christians, Jews and Muslim to settle there on equitable terms. In gratitude many Christians chose to call their newborn sons Saladin.

Abubakr el Bagdadi is no Saladin, nor even his dark shadow. He is a monstrous incarnation, a Frankenstein organism on whose provenance and motives mystery abounds. Suspicions about his Zionist connection have been further amplified in recent times following the recovery of Israeli ammunition from IS bastions that recently fell. Earlier too there were reports of Israeli nurses and volunteers assisting his injured soldiers. Indeed IS has not even by mistake fired a cracker, let alone a missile, aimed at Israel.

Indeed modern Islam has no bigger enemy to confront than IS. Islam could survive history’s worst nightmares, including those unleashed by the US but IS seems to be a tumour of a more malignant species. Because of Islamic tolerance Muslim heartlands like Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Turkey are home to large number of Christians, Jews and even Yazidis. These counties are also home to some of the most sacred sites of these denominations. It was in these lands that European Jews sought refuge when they were persecuted and driven out of Europe during inquisition.

More than on their individual victims, IS is now inflicting an irreparable damage on this tradition. It is in this context that the disappearance of a few Keralite families allegedly to join IS becomes a worrying development. As yet there has been no confirmation of these reports and there are speculations that their port of call is actually Yemen and not Syria. If the latter is true, it would mean less alarm and a little less concern for leaders of Muslim community.

Some of the desolate Yemeni hills are home to a particularly orthodox sect of the Wahabi species who believe in renouncing all ways of modern living and embracing primitive simplicity by tending to their beards and goats. This is also a worrisome development and runs against the grain of Islamic principles which disapprove of asceticism.  As of now, India’s Muslim leadership and religious scholars have every reason to pat themselves on their backs because neither the toxic IS nor the non-toxic but regressive Wahabi schools have been able to make inroads into the Indian Muslim psyche. But changed times call for greater vigil and more concerted campaigns.

The rulers too have an added responsibility. More than at any point of time, Indian Muslims are now feeling besieged and beleaguered. Questions are being raised from quarters close to the ruling hierarchy about their belongingness and right to exist. As Bobby S Said put it in a similar but different context their very ontology is being challenged by a hauntology. The talk of a Muslim-free India by the likes of Sadhvi Prachi is a grim instance of this. Increasingly, minorities feel like being deprived of not only democratic spaces of protest and articulation but even air pockets to breathe. The government stance on Aligarh and the witch hunt against Zakir Naik are stark reminders of this.

It is a fact of nature that any organism threatened of living space, reacts in a suicidal and self-destructive manner. There won’t be none better to wise up Narendra Modi on this than the wisest and probably the wealthiest new cabinet inductee MJ Akbar. In his epochal work In the Shade of Swords, he describes how frustration expresses itself not only through poetry but finds vent in insane acts causing cumulative damage.

(Dr. Umer O Thasneem teaches English at the Department of English, University of Calicut. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)