Skip to main content

Being Muslim in India



Book Review

Title: Being Muslim in Hindu India: A critical view

Author: Ziya Us Salam

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023

Pages: 313

The greatest disservice that Narendra Modi has done to India is to divide the country into two sects: Hindus versus the rest, particularly Muslims. There are concerted efforts to strip the Muslims of their very citizenship. The Muslims have been victimised in many ways. Their food is blocked, their dress-choice is questioned, their jobs are made illegal, their history is distorted, their places of worship are attacked, their residences are bulldozed… This book takes a hard look at these painful truths.

The book is divided into seven parts with 30 chapters in all. The titles of the seven parts will give you a clear and comprehensive idea about the contents of the book: Political Marginalization; Rubbishing Medieval History; Kill a Muslim a Day; Wrath on Houses of Worship; Matters of Love, the Jamaat and the Hijab; Looks and Beyond; and Finding Their Voice.

Muslims in India are portrayed as antinational terrorists, religious fundamentalists, breeders of children and stealers of Hindu women. “The largest political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), steadfastly marginalized the community,” the Preface asserts. In 2014, BJP gave only 7 tickets to Muslims out of the 482 seats the party contested, the percentage of representation coming to an abysmal 1.45. For the first time since Independence, the ruling party had no Muslim Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha.

Muslims are disappearing from India, the author says. They are removed from political power and even the voters’ lists. A little before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the National Herlad carried a telling a headline: Lok Sabha Elections 2019: 3 crore Muslims, 4 crore Dalits among 12.7 crore voters missing from electoral rolls.

The book is based entirely on such revealing data and facts. Only the last chapter offers some hope. Titled ‘Muslims Move Past Their Clerics,’ the last chapter discusses the revolt by some Muslims against the Shahi Imam of the Delhi Jama Masjid. The Muslims bluntly refused to follow the counsels given by their religious leaders about the Citizenship Amendment Act and related issues. The Muslim women who protested using some ingenious methods at Shaheen Bagh were the beacons of hope for a different kind of Islam, the author thinks. The semi-literate, conservative religious leaders may not now find it easy to control their people. “It was time for the masses to be heard. And the imams to listen.”

The final message is that the Muslims need to reform themselves too. It’s no use to play the victim card. Certain reforms are necessary from within. The going won’t be easy even then, the author knows. “It is dark, very dark still,” he knows. But “a new dawn may just beckon.” Let a new dawn break out. Let India rise above ancient religious savagery and modernise itself, humanise itself.

If you are interested in knowing how India has treated her Muslim citizens in the past ten years, this book is an ideal read. But it offers little more than the painful data and facts.

PS. Related Post: Being Hindu in Bangladesh

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanAugust 17, 2024 at 2:16 AM

    Hari Om
    As ever, your review is lucid, pertinent, and encouraging. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Liz A.August 17, 2024 at 6:48 AM

    Very troubling.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 17, 2024 at 6:53 AM

      When humankind must be moving beyond the primitivity of religions, we're being taken back to their savagery by a man who thinks too highly of himself.

      Delete
  3. peppylady (Dora)August 18, 2024 at 8:08 AM

    I don't think we have any muslim here my community.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 18, 2024 at 9:05 AM

      If they remain far from you, so much the better. But I don't endorse any persecution in the name of any religion.

      Delete
  4. vanderloostAugust 23, 2024 at 9:55 PM

    This is the alternate perspective we do not care to know about.

    ReplyDelete

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
44 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more