Bring the Heart Back to Religion

 

Shabnam Noorhajan on the magzine cover

We’re living in a time when religion has become a formidable perpetrator of crimes. It’s a delight then to see someone emerging to bring the heart back to her religion.

Shabnam Noorjahan is an assistant professor of Zoology at a college in Kerala. She has been in news recently because she is trying to humanise her religion, Islam, with the help of Sufism. She organised a women’s empowerment programme coupled with Sufism in her college and drew the ire of Muslim clerics who are by and large male chauvinists.

I happened to read an interview she gave to a Malayalam magazine which has put her on its cover this month. She discusses and critiques rigid religious frameworks, fundamentalist interpretations and sectarian dogmatism, contrasting them with a more humanistic, spiritual and inclusive perspective. It always thrills me to see people questioning religious straitjackets and fundamentalist tunnel visions.

Religious texts can be approached through narrow, literal or dogmatic lenses that reduce spirituality into rigid social and political rules, creating intolerance and exclusion. The mindset that “only our group is right” is engendered by this approach to religion, says Noorjahan in the interview.

She also argues that historical and institutional developments, including certain sociopolitical interpretations and patriarchal clerical mindsets, have sometimes obscured the more humane, compassionate and spiritual core of Islam. This is true of many religions today. It’s unfortunate that when the world is surging ahead with science and technology, our political leaders are stuck with antediluvian religious symbols and motifs.

Noorjahan falls back on Sufism for humanising Islam today. Sufism has a rich tradition of love, inner spiritual depth and universal human connection. Unlike orthodox Islam which is antagonistic to arts, Sufi philosophy views arts and devotion as pathways towards the divine and treats humanity (regardless of gender) with equality.

She also underscores that true spiritual understanding requires looking past superficial external differences and sectarian divides, urging that the true, life-giving essence of faith and Sufism needs to be reclaimed and presented to the modern world with its humanitarian face intact.

This is true not only of Islam. Hinduism which was a highly inclusive philosophy earlier has been converted into one of the most toxic religions today by India’s contemporary politicians. I hope someone like Shabnam Noorjahan emerges in Hinduism too.

Religion is not at all about mindless rituals and deafening slogans that degrade the human consciousness. Genuine religion should liberate the human spirit from base passions and help the believer to cultivate empathy, spiritual connection and collective responsibility. Instead what we have today is rising dogmatism which weaponises structure and literalism and turns living traditions into rigid instruments of exclusion and authority.

In very simple words, the human heart should be brought back to religions.

Vedanta of Hinduism, mysticism of Christianity, Kabbalah of Judaism and Zen in Buddhism tried to reveal the real light hidden within religions, says Noorjahan. Sufism does that job in Islam. All these major religions of the world seem to have lost their real light, the light that emanates from the human heart.

Let more Noorjahans emerge in every religion.