Heresy can make sense
During a
National election in the seventies, I remember a British journalist sitting in
the Gymkhana club, absolutely at a loss as how to translate the extreme
vulgarity that had become the hallmark of political canvassing in
I suspect
there is a pattern here that needs to be understood in greater depth. Most
cultural paradoxes of our society are comprehensible only if you can recognise
a peculiarity. The whole approach to life and the manifestation of a value
system is divided across a sharp divide: Routine versus the Venerable
— For lack of any established diction, I am coining these terms.
Everything
here falls in one or the other category — events, people, institutions,
artefacts, traditions, beliefs and even imagination. Routine part of life is
open to manipulation in any way deemed fit or found necessary by anyone or
everyone where as the venerable part is out of bounds for everyone; it is cast
in stone, immutable. Why certain entities fall in one category and certain in
the other is not logically explainable. They seem to just happen to be so.
Transmutation of entities between the two domains is never discernible; if it
is there it is too slow for casual observation. Enough of abstractions let me
analogize the phenomenon.
There was a
time when Mr. Jinnah was a common mortal. Some people
revered him and some were sceptical of his stature. He belonged to the routine
part of life. You could criticise him or even poke fun at him. Maudoodi wrote about him, "Not a single leader of
the Muslim League from Jinnah himself to the rank and
file has an Islamic mentality or Islamic habits of thought, or looks at
political and social problems from the Islamic viewpoint . . . Their ignoble
role is to safe-guard merely the material interest of the Indian Muslims by
every possible political manoeuvre or trickery." These are words dipped
in arsenic, which certainly could not be used today to describe our
Quaid-e-Azam.
He has
become safely ensconced in the far reaches of the venerable domain of life. He
was a champion of the Muslim cause in the subcontinent, not necessarily that of
Islam but that distinction has been lost in our history. We have tried to Islamise
Jinnah progressively because the greatest venerations
that we can perceive are theological. Had Zia
continued to rule, the process would have been almost completed by now. Did you
notice that in portraits, how Mr. Jinnah was
gradually being stripped of his meticulous suits and clothed in Shalwar and Sherwani. In time, I
suspect, the Shalwar would have risen above the
ankles; then a chequered cloth would have appeared on the shoulders followed by
faint trace of a beard that would grow steadily to form a gracious white mane
eventually. The process would culminate in replacement of the Jinnah cap with a cane cap, the sort mullahs wear. And we
would have had Maulana Hazrat
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-e-Azam, the
Momin-e-Azeem. It was only Divine intervention that
saved Mr. Jinnah from that posthumous mutation of
character.
The
question is, at what exact point in time did he cross the line from the routine
world into the venerable world? I suspect it was sometimes soon after his
death. The venerable world that we nurture is deeply connected to obsession
with the past; ancestor-worship is a stark indicator of this phenomenon. When Manto was criticised for writing his collection of
character-portraits, Ganjey Farishtey, which is perhaps the only honest and candid
piece of character sketching in Urdu, he retorted in disgust that, "I
spit on the tradition that sends a man’s character to the laundry after his
death and when all his blemishes have been bleached off, it is hung on the hook
of ‘Rehmatul-Elleh.’ Manto
was a drinking heretic, so no one paid any heed to him. Today you could be hung
for saying something akin.
Worshipping
the past is a product of romanticism, which is intellectually a form of escape
from reality into a make believe world and when this habit hardens into a
common social mind set, it turns into chauvinism. The venerable part of life is
an embodiment of escape, romanticism and chauvinism. Therefore, it becomes a
sacred ground, not to be traversed, let alone desecrated by any suggestion of
review or change. This dichotomy exists in all cultures, to a varying degree.
The advance of social evolution narrows the gap between the routine and venerable
spheres of life. Gradually routine matters gain greater significance in terms
of governance, justice, fair play and rules of business, whereas more freedom
is given to question, evaluate, review and reform entities that were once in
the venerable domain.
Churchill
lost elections right after the Second World War and his militancy towards
global strategy was rejected by British people, even though many of his ideas
stood the test of time. Kennedy emerged as the champion of social agendas in
the
Here in
There is
something quite wrong here, but unfortunately I can’t say, "obviously." It is far from obvious to us. Whereas we
should be endeavouring to make routine matters more organised and venerable domains
more transparent and accessible, we are regressing to medieval times. We keep
stuffing the dictionary of national euphemisms with new venerables–
poverty alleviation, women empowerment, SMEs, 1973
constitution, LFO 2001, National defence imperatives, stand on
We seemed
to have locked ourselves in to a crumbling house and lost the key. Talking
sense is a routine matter that can be harassed into submission by rampant
fanaticism, whereas spouting sanctimonious nonsense has become the standard
measure of a public profile, protected by venerable security. We need some
heresy to make sense here today and that is the irony of our existential
situation.
Iqbal
Mustafa
1350 words