Islam is more precise with its dos and don’ts than other religions. This gives the impression of uncompromising rigidity, which is not the same thing as fanaticism. For that matter, Sikhs are no less fanatic than Muslims.
Prejudice has no factual or logical justification and is therefore very difficult to overcome. The most widespread are religious and ethnic prejudices; they are the basis of our communal problems. You have to first make the people admit what they are and then give rational answers to them in the hope that their prejudices will then disappear. I for one turned my back on religion after having studied most of them. I came to the conclusion that religious prejudices have done more harm than good to humanity. I accept ahimsa (non-violence) as paromo dharma (primary duty). One does not have to belong to any religion to believe that one must not hurt anyone; the rest is of marginal or no importance.
Years ago, an experiment was tried out by a lady teaching in a college in South India. She sensed that many of her Hindu students harboured undefined prejudices against Muslims. She asked them to spell them out in writing so that they could discuss them openly in the class. After she had received their views, she put them in serial form and opened the debate. My answers to the questions are as follows.
First prejudice: Muslims can marry many wives and consequently have large families. If they continue to indulge in polygamy and breed at the rate they are doing, they will soon outnumber the Hindus and make India a Muslim state.
Answer: Muslim men are indeed entitled to marry up to four wives but rarely do they exercise the right unless their wives are barren or physically or mentally impaired. On the other hand, Hindu males, though not legally allowed to have more than one wife, are also known to indulge in polygamy. Muslims do not have larger families than Hindus, Christians or Sikhs. This has been repeatedly brought out by market surveys, which show that, if anything, the Christian and Sikh birth rate is higher than that of the Muslims. Some years ago I had published names of members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha giving the sizes of their families. There was no difference in fecundity on communal lines. When talking of large families, I remember that the former president of India, V. V. Giri, had eleven children and former railway minister who was earlier chief minister of Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav, has nine. The list could carry on endlessly.
Second prejudice: Muslims are fanatics who try to impose their religions on other people.
Answer: Islam is more precise with its dos and don’ts than other religions. This gives the impression of uncompromising rigidity, which is not the same thing as fanaticism. For that matter, Sikhs are no less fanatic than Muslims. If bigoted Muslims in Kashmir try to impose purdah on their women, Sikh hotheads too try to impose dress code on Sikh and Hindu women in Punjab. There is nothing to choose between their respective forms of narrowmindedness. No community can impose its religion on others; whatever conversions take place these days are those of deprived people promised a better deal. That explains conversion to Islam or Christianity amongst Scheduled Castes and tribals.
Third prejudice: Muslims do not respect other religious places of worship. They desecrate Hindu and Sikh temples.
Answer: There is historical evidence of desecration of Hindu and Sikh temples by Muslim conquerors. However, Hindus and Sikhs, when they had the upper hand, did not lag behind in desecrating mosques. This contest in desecration almost came to an end with Independence. Since then hardly any places of worship have been tampered with on either side. It is a section of the Hindus that has been talking of demolishing mosques in Varanasi and Vrindavan (both in Uttar Pradesh) to settle centuries-old scores. And who can pardon the demolishing of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya (also in Uttar Pradesh) by Hindu fanatics on 6 December 1992?
Also, let us not forget that all religious systems everywhere in the world have engendered cults committed to violence and martyrdom. I recall years back one David Koresh, the leader of the Davidian Branch of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, defied the police for several days before he allegedly set fire to his headquarters killing many men, women and children.
I can’t give the exact numbers today, but at one stage, according to some estimates, there were over 2500 religious cults in America, of which over 900 believed in Armageddon or the Day of Judgement. The largest following was of a religious organization known as Church Universal and Triumphant, run by a woman, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. She and her husband and the vice-president of the group were estimated to have 5000 members who had been stockpiling arms for almost 20 years. In one police raid on the group’s headquarters, seven automatic rifles and 120,000 rounds of ammunition were seized.
More bizarre than Koresh’s was the case of Jim Jones of Guyana. In November 1978 he forced 900 of his followers including women and children to commit suicide.
True, Islam has generated more cults than Christianity. Many of them like the Muslim Brotherhood are committed to violence. They do not hesitate to defile holy precincts of mosques by shedding blood. In 1979 over 200 pilgrims were slain in the Kaaba. In November of the same year Shia followers of Mohammad Ali Qureshi seized the grand mosque of Mecca and proclaimed their leader as the Mahdi. It took the Saudi army equipped with tanks five days to evict the squatters after killing some of them. Some years ago a young Shia woman in Pakistan decided to take her followers over the waters on a pilgrimage to Karbala in Iraq. Over 40 of them were drowned in the sea off Karachi. Salman Rusdie fictionalized the tragic episode in his The Satanic Verses (1988).
We in India have similar groups of fanatics committed to violence. It is not a mere coincidence that leaders of these cults are men or women with diseased minds but mesmeric powers of speech. In the early 1980s, in Punjab, we had Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who ordered cold-blooded executions of his detractors. He and his militant followers were holed up in the Golden Temple at Amritsar. In early June 1984, the Indian Army entered this temple to evict the militants, and in the ensuing battle, brought about the destruction of the sacred Akal Takht. (Chapter 1.) Bhindranwale himself was killed. In the 1980s, thousands of lives were lost in Punjab, Haryana and Delhi.
Religious zealotry has also reared its ugly head among Hindus usually regarded as a peace-loving and tolerant people. A part of that myth was exploded at Ayodhya in December 1992 and also during the 2002 Gujarat riots, when Muslims were targeted by Hindu mobs. What remains of that myth will be demolished as soon as right-wing fanatics take over leadership of the community. Hence, beware of religion!
Fourth prejudice: Muslims are not loyal to India as they harbour pro-Pakistani feelings.
Answer: A large number of Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan in 1947-48 – some willingly, others forced to leave because of widespread anti-Muslim violence. Many families were divided. The desire to visit their relations across the border should not be construed as disloyalty to India; nor childish display of adulation of Pakistani cricketers in matches against India. There is no evidence whatsoever of Muslims’ disloyalty to India in times of Indo–Pak wars. The fact is that many Muslims laid down their lives fighting for India against Pakistan.