The Fire This Time - 2
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
It was a time that has long since disappeared, swallowed up by the unceasing march of technology. That was when men and women lived by a code of honor that had been developed and refined over centuries of living together. In that world, a man’s home was his citadel. It was designed and built to preserve the sanctity of its occupants and encourage politeness and humility on the part of outside visitors.
Our ancestral home in India was built of mud walls reinforced with straw. No one knew how old the house was. My grandma used to say it was at least two hundred years old. The mud walls had a thickness of more than three feet at the base and tapered off to about two feet at a height of ten feet. The inclined roof was a laced labyrinth of bamboo poles and was covered with neat rows of curved baked black tiles.
It was a spacious house with a large angan (courtyard), always cool in summer and warm in winter. My great-grandfather, Gulam Hussain had moved down from the Northwest with the British army, and after retirement as a soldier circa 1920, settled down in the South and had bought the house for sixty rupees. There was one characteristic of the house that was distinct. Every door cut low, less than the height of an average man, and tapered slightly as a cone to carry the weight above it; a larger door would have caused the mud walls to collapse.
A visitor would first say Salamu alaikum, seek permission to enter, take off his sandals and then bend down as he passed the low entrance door, naturally saluting those inside, as if with humility.
All the mud houses in the neighborhood were similarly constructed. It was culturally accepted that a visitor would bow as he entered your house. Once inside, the visitor would honor the sanctity of the owner. If it was prayer time, the man of the house always led the prayer, even if the visitor was an accomplished scholar.
Modern life provides no such sanctity for private living space. Technology beams in images, some wanted and some unwanted, right into your bedroom. What used to be an inner sanctum is now public space. Stand alone houses with mud walls and thatched roofs have given rise to high rise buildings, some large enough to accommodate a small town. It is not just the physical space that is invaded; it is also the social, intellectual, emotional and religious space. People are all exposed.
How does one conduct oneself in this private public space? What rules of etiquette and behavior are acceptable to the visitor and the visited?
The question becomes complex and extremely sensitive when one realizes that there is no accepted standard of what space is considered sanctified and what is not. This is particularly true of emotive and religious space. In a global village, each community, each religious group and each nation has its own distinct and separate ideas of what is sacred and what is not. The demarcation between public and private is largely a function of the group’s historical experience as well as its national socio-political-religious structure.
Jews, for instance, consider the holocaust to be a national tragedy and would consider it anti-Semitic if anyone dared question it. Christians are sensitive about the Trinity and the place of Jesus in it. Blacks in America are sensitive to issues of racism while the Hispanics are concerned about ethnic profiling. Each group has an emotive, religious, social space that is sensitive, perhaps even hallowed. For the Muslims, this hallowed emotive and religious space is occupied by the Qur’an and the love of the Prophet. These deeply held perceptions, while differing in their emotive intensity to those who hold them, illustrate the difficulty of civil communication in a shrunken world wherein the barriers have been knocked down by technology.
One can see that in a pluralistic society, even a discussion of what is sanctified and what is not becomes difficult. If a committee consisting of a Christian minister, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim alim, a Hindu priest and a Buddhist monk were to work on a common definition of what is to be considered sacred, there would emerge five different opinions. It would be a futile exercise. Their perceptions are differentiated not only by doctrinal issues but also by centuries of historical and collective social experiences. For the Jews, religion and people co-mingle. Most Christians accept a separation of the sacred and the secular. For the Hindus, all creation is sacred. For the Buddhists, it is the interconnectivity of creation, not the Creator that is important. The Muslims separate the Creator and creation and insist on the transcendence of God. And so on. Exhausted, the interfaith committee would agree that each faith must define its own sacred space and the others must honor that space.
A post-religious, secular world knowingly flaunts this manifest wisdom and insists on selectively imposing its diktat on everyone. While Germany bans any questioning of the holocaust, it permits the screening of a film offensive to Muslims. The British take down advertisements of a winking Jesus but defend freedom of speech when it comes to trespassing on Muslim sensibilities. America legislates that discrimination based on race, ethnicity and national origin is illegal but leaves out religion from this definition. This satisfies powerful electorates among Blacks, Hispanics and Jewish Americans but leaves the Muslims totally exposed. Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. But does this mean you have the freedom to walk into somebody else’s domain, insult, humiliate and denigrate him?
The world has not addressed these questions. A universal, religious code of etiquette is yet to evolve. Worse yet, a selective application of freedom of speech has stoked the perception that it is a hypocritical mask worn by some when it suits their sinister political or social agenda. The same groups that jealously guard their turf are the first to defend freedom of speech when it tramples upon and denigrates the sacred space of other groups. It is in this perception that one has to look for the origins of the sparks that have ignited the Muslim world.
Religion, however, does not exist in a vacuum. It is a living, breathing organism that exists in the economic-social-political domain. The major religions of humanity have been around for thousands of years. People of faith have learned to work with each other despite their differing views of the transcendent. So, why is there a global upheaval at this time? What are the economic, social and political factors that provide insights into the current upheavals shaking up the Muslim world, constituting one quarter of humanity? And what are the constructive alternatives that would help address these issues?
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