Comment

Anyone who reads the email sent out by the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ minutes before the serial blasts in Ahmedabad on Saturday will have no difficulty in recognising that it is a rant, where Islamic scripture and history are quoted indiscriminately to evoke a sense of righteous anger on behalf of Gujarati Muslims.This is not the cry or an argument of an anguished and aggrieved ordinary Muslim in Gujarat or elsewhere in the country who constantly faces hurdles including discrimination based on his religious identity.

The ordinary Muslim copes with those problems in a sensible manner. He looks for legal and political means of expressing his plight. He ferrets out economic and social opportunities to make a place for himself. That is what people do in a real world. The authors of the email live in a world of a fevered imagination. That is why their rhetoric takes wing. No Muslim will ever agree with their worldview because it is simply untenable in a modern, pluralist world. That will remain the major problem of the self-styled jihadists. Muslims have no time for their fulminations.

The number of these jihadists though small is certainly significant. It is necessary to know their profile because they are out there and believe in all the things that the email contains. Are they the religious-minded ones, steeped in the Islamic traditions of doctrine and history? They are not, because had they been so they would not have time to fume and fret. Islamic learning in the traditional sense is a lifetime vocation. In the process, it makes the student gentle, cultured and learned. Many of the madrassa-educated clergy, even the most reactionary among them, show traces of learning and the sophistication, however pale, that religious learning brings with it. Never confuse the ulema with jihadists. The traditional scholar may be out of sync with the modern world, but he is not violent.

The jihadists just pick up bits and pieces of religion and history and spew them out with a lot of hatred. They are more like the skinheads of the British Nationalist Party. It is clear that they cannot be counted as Muslims in the first place though they use Islam as a standard even as the white neo-Nazis in Britain might invoke Christianity of some vague kind to attack people of other nationalities and faiths. But unlike the neo-Nazis in Britain, the jihadists seem to have acquired university education of a kind. They have learnt English, keep an eye on developments in the Western world. And they wallow in despair, anger and hatred.

How does then one deal with the challenge thrown up by the jihadists? It has to be dealt at social and political levels. Socially, it will be necessary to prevent them from terrorising ordinary Muslims as they do in Jammu and Kashmir. Muslims are doubly vulnerable to jihadists. They are not in a position to repulse them. Secondly, some of the innocent youth from the community are likely to be led astray by fanatics-cum-terrorists. Muslims themselves cannot make the demand. But there is need for state and society to evolve ways of guarding them from the marauders.

The more important thing is not to give them credence of being voices, however distorted and exaggerated, of the woes of the community. There are plenty of woes of the community but the jihadists have no concern for them. They have nothing to do with the sufferings of Muslims in Gujarat, Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine. They are on an apocalyptic trip of their own, trapped in a false past and in an equally false future.

They need to be isolated in the manner of a virus. This requires strategy more than force. One effective strategy would be to encourage Islamic scholarship because that serves as an effective shield against jihadi terrorists. The jihadists will not then be able to use Islam to pour out their poison. Once their Islamic credentials are discredited, they would have lost the little ground they now occupy.
r_parsa@dnaindia.net