Skip to main content

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla


Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared.

Except O Abdulla.

Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala, a fundamentalist organisation.

Abdulla objected to Mohanlal’s prayer for Mammootty. Reason: A Muslim cannot seek the blessings of any god from other faiths even through people who profess that faith. That is, if you are a Muslim, you should not ask a Hindu or a Christian to pray for you. That is Abdulla’s contention. This Abdulla wanted Mammootty to apologise to Muslims by performing some ritual called tauba. I don’t know what that is except what Google tells me: repentance. Mammooty should repent for Mohanlal’s prayer for his good health!

How ridiculous can religion get! It is people like Abdulla who make religions so repulsive. Why blame others for Islamophobia when you have too many Abdullas around?

The irony is that Sabarimala temple has a Muslim shrine too. Vavar, a Muslim who was Lord Ayyappan’s [Sabarimala’s deity] beloved companion, is venerated at a shrine near the Ayyappan temple. Hindu pilgrims offer their homage to Vavar too. Will O Abdulla’s next demand be a tauba from Vavar Swami of Sabarimala? 


I have always been of the opinion that religion is a regressive force. People like Abdulla (there are others from other religions too, too many of them) are like ossified leftovers from the dark medieval ages, lingering on to cast their ghastly shadows on human civilisation that longs to move forward toward light.

Such people never learn the true meaning of religion. Religion, for them, is merely some rules and rituals without any soul. Love is the soul of any religion. As 17th-century Punjabi Sufi poet, Bulleh Shah, wrote:

Not in the Kaaba, not in Kailash,
Not in the mosque, nor in the temple.
I searched the whole world, my friend,
And found the Beloved in my heart.

The Beloved is his God. Your God should be your beloved, Abdulla, teaching you love, not hatred, giving you light instead of darkness. At least some good sense. Look inside your heart and see if your God is there. Find him there. Then you will be healed.

Gai Eaton, British diplomat, converted to Islam because of the Sufi mysticism. In his most famous book, Islam and the Destiny of Man, he wrote: “Truth is not the property of any one religion; rather, it is like light that shines in different colours through different lenses. Islam acknowledges that the divine truth has manifested in many ways, and it continues to do so.” I pray to my God to help O Abdulla to understand the meaning of such writings. Now O Abdulla can go and perform a tauba.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Murthy K v v sMarch 28, 2025 at 12:05 PM

    With the behaviour of this kind of fanatics, secularists left on the earth keep turning against Islam.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 28, 2025 at 1:02 PM

      Exactly, Murthy ji. I have lost the sympathy I had for this community because of people like this.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanMarch 28, 2025 at 1:23 PM

    Hari OM
    Hear! Hear! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 28, 2025 at 7:45 PM

      I'd love to see this Abdulla guy responding to this.

      Delete
  3. magiceyeMarch 28, 2025 at 5:43 PM

    This is like a Maulana damning Shami for drinking water on the cricket field during Ramzan!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Liz A.March 29, 2025 at 12:52 AM

    Deep sigh. There's nothing worse than the gatekeepers who have appointed themselves as the arbiters of what is "correct". People don't need to listen to them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 29, 2025 at 6:54 AM

      But people get swayed by rhetoric and group mentality. Group has no brain, only emotions.

      Delete
  5. Jose D. MaliekalMarch 29, 2025 at 6:03 AM

    The Hindu Sabarimala pilgrims visit not only Vavar, at the Muslim Mosque at Erumely. Lower down the terrain and their pilgrim trajectory, they also have a ritual visit to Veluthachan, at the St George'e Shrine at Arthungal, Alappuzha. A seamless web of religious harmony, knit into the religious tapestry of India, which breathes the oxygen of mystical pluralism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 29, 2025 at 6:56 AM

      Indeed Sabarimala is an eminent lesson in religious harmony. The truth is Hindus are by and large more open to other faiths. Certain leaders have perverted that openness with political motives and hence others are turning more reactionary. Bad leaders are a nemesis for any nation.

      Delete
  6. Zenobia MerchantApril 29, 2025 at 7:28 PM

    Wonderfully penned. Religious intolerance is a disease rampant in our country currently, sadly having no cure. Self professed afficianados make the rules and teachings of centuries old religion as to their liking and call.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 29, 2025 at 7:36 PM

      These self-proclaimed Messiahs are killing the gods, destroying culture, and turning people into mutual enemies.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more