Ghalib would take it easy: Rehan Ansari

Random Outings

 

This cartoon controversy has me thinking about self-confidence, and self-censorship, as opposed to the confidence and censorship of others. My mamoo (uncle) Tariq, when he was young (in his twenties) and dynamic in Lahore, used to love Ghalib. And in his forties, still dynamic and in Mississauga (a suburban township outside Toronto), he loved the Quran. While Ghalib thrilled him, he was dedicated to the Quran. My point is not about Ghalib versus Quran, but about the state of mind you’re in when you’re reading a text (a book, a film, a cartoon) and all the difference that makes.

 

A few years ago I was sitting at Cooko’s cafe in Hira Mandi in Lahore, where you can still see painted women in doorways, and if you walk around in one of the piazzas in the area, older women will bring a young girl to sing for you. Right now, Dravid and company are enjoying the neighborhood, but I thought about how the great Badshahi Masjid has forever been adjacent to Hira Mandi, and when I say adjacent, I mean that you can’t help but see prayer, sex and music side by side. I remembered a Ghalib couplet that was a favourite of mamoo’s: Masjid ke zer-e saayah kharabaat chahiyay;/ bhon paas aankh qiblah-e haajat chahiyay. Now I’m not going to decimate this beauteous thing with an English ‘translation,’ but suffice it to say that it’s about the human need to have the sacred with the profane together like an eye and its brow.

 

So these cartoons I cannot defend as art, but the Satanic Verses I can and I did, with all the fizz of a twenty-year-old, with mamoo Tariq. When the book first came out, I was a student at Vassar, an American liberal arts college. I was excited about Rushdie because no two English novels had had more to say about my world than Midnight’s Children and Shame. Satanic Verses, on the other hand, was about identity and the immigrant experience and I was knee deep in mine.

 

One spring break in 1990, at mamoo’s Missisauga house, I was reading Rushdie in the basement, while he was reading the Quran in the living room above. Things were tense. He said to me once that it is one thing for a Muslim to question God, as Iqbal did in his Shikwa, but another to question the prophet. I replied that he didn’t read novels, so he shouldn’t talk about what novels can or cannot do. But since he loved poetry, I told him about the great modernist Urdu poet, NM Rashed’s (also from Lahore), Abu Lahb ki Shaadi, where he celebrates the wedding of the man who was a great foe of the prophet. Lahb was the brother of Hind (she features in Satanic Verses) who so hated the prophet that she ate his favourite mamoo’s liver after he had fallen in battle.

 

Mamoo was grimacing but I went on. Tariq mamoo didn’t tell me not to read, he would frown. Every evening we would watch the news together, for the Gulf War was exploding on giddy CNN. I would fall off my high horse and we would frown together. He turned to me and said, these are not times that inspire an Iqbal-like confidence, and to that I had nothing to say.

 

Email: ansari.rehan@gmail.com

 

Ayaz Memon will be back next week