Skip to main content

When symbols replace values

Symbols

“Are you a good Muslim?” A student asked Ziauddin Sardar.

Ziauddin Sardar is a writer born in Pakistan and living in England. He is a multi-faceted personality who has made a mark as a scholar, cultural critic, and an intellectual who specialises in Muslim thought. [Now don’t ask me whether Muslims think. Some of them do, I assure you.]

The above question was hurled at Sardar when he visited a madrasa in Pakistan in 1985. Let me quote a part of that conversation from his book Desperately Seeking Paradise. [The quotes are not verbatim.]

Student: Are you a good Muslim?

Sardar: I am a Muslim. Good or not, I don’t know.

Student: If you are a Muslim, why don’t you grow your beard?

Sardar: A beard is not a necessary mark of a Muslim.

Student: The beard is an essential part of the Prophet’s Sunnah. Those who disregard the Sunnah are not good Muslims.

Sardar: Do you use a camel for your travels? Do you ride on a camel’s back?

Student: What do you mean?

Sardar: The camel is Sunnah because the Prophet used the camel for his travels.

Student: But we have cars and buses today. Why would I use a camel?

Sardar: Exactly. If there was a safety razor in those days, the Prophet would have shaved off his face hair too.

All gods and their scriptures belong to specific periods of history. What the Prophet said and did in his time is no more valid today than what Jesus or Krishna or the Buddha said and did in their times. The time has changed. The old gods and their prophets have become outdated. No scripture can ever be eternally valid. No religion can make sense to intelligent people unless it adapts itself to the changing times. Most parts of the Bible and the Koran and the Upanishads or the Gita or any scripture will be rubbished today by any thinking brain.

If those ancient and outdated and absurd scriptures continue to rule us today, it is because we haven’t learnt to think. We are still idiots. We are governed by idiots who love riots and wars. Idiots who wear fancy dresses. Idiots who want to capture nuclear stations. Some idiots have teashops to boast about. Some have Rasputin. Most have a god, one god, their own god, their own ego.

Egos of certain individuals replace the essential teachings of religions. That is how a religion dies. The hijab is a symbol. The saffron is a symbol. It is very easy to make people fight in the name of symbols. Idiotic leaders do just that: make people fight in the name of symbols.

Tail question: Why doesn’t the world ever go beyond stupid leaders?

Answer: No leader can be greater than their people.

Comments

  1. Religions are weapons. It achieve different things when different people handles it. Gandhi used to infuse a sanctify any tasks he was doing/he wanted others to practice. The same tool is being used now to deviate people from real time issues by relevant parties.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This post was written in some frustration and so there are exaggerations. Gandhi was a great leader who towered above the masses. But there are so few leaders like him in the entire human history.

      Delete
  2. Where the population doesn't evolve in thinking, past rules them and leaders become their Gods.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True. We make tremendous progress in science and technology, but not one step ahead in evolved thinking!

      Delete
  3. I think having an open mind and access to good education is key when it comes to changing the inert way we think and perceive things

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The problem with education is that the educators themselves may be perverse and bigoted!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

War and Meaning of Victory

In the summer of 1999, while the rest of India was soaked in monsoon and Cricket World Cup, the country’s soldiers were clawing up frozen cliffs daring the bullets that came shooting from above. India’s incorrigible neighbour had sent its soldiers and militants to capture the snow-covered peaks of Kargil. It was an act of deception, a capture of India’s land stealthily. The terrain was harsh and hostile, testing the limits of human courage with every jagged step. The Kargil War was not just against a human enemy, but against peaks of stones and snow where the air itself was an adversary. Three months of bitter conflict and subhuman killing ended in India’s victory over the invading Pakistan. Victory! July 26 is celebrated ever after as Kargil Vijay Diwas by India. What is victory, however? Philosophically, I mean. We are supposed to be rational (philosophical) creatures, after all. “ W ar does not determine who is right,” Bertrand Russell said famously, “but who is left.” Every...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke....