A Sinner in Mecca

by Parvez Sharma

  “We are learning about ibn Taymiyyah,” he said. This, I knew, was treacherous territory. I asked him if he had been taught about Ayah 33 of al-Ma’aidah, the 5th Surah from the Quran. I quoted the Ayah. I had committed it to memory because I had been challenged about its specificity:

  “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter.”

  “I don’t think such punishment can be used in modern times,” the boy retorted, confidently. And he reminded me about the preceding (contentious) Ayah 32, which in part said: “We ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person—unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.” The entire Bush administration would have qualified!

  “Yes,” I said, “I am glad you pointed that out. Killing even one innocent human is like killing all of humanity.” It was one of my favorite Surahs and this young man’s retort could have been mine. I knew he was a rarity. Western scholars ranting about “context” had probably never been to a school like this, where the use of context was selective yet available to students like him. They wouldn’t find it in the Quran’s classical Arabic. Yet this young man had. I hoped he became an alim (a learned one) and was not swallowed up by extremism. This lived Islam was so different from the faraway quad of a US campus—where reality doesn’t really exist.

  Alim is singular for ulema, the closest Islam got to clergy. For many Sunnis, they are the highest authorities. They are guardians of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and sunnah (the traditions of the Prophet). Technically, Muhammad did not ordain a clergy.

  Two abaya-wearing women had emerged from nowhere in the corridor. The teen made a great show of averting his eyes, even though there was nothing to be seen in their shapeless black forms with slits for eyes. He retreated back into his all-male world.

  Nadhwa had a five-year curriculum such that after year one of Arabic, all teaching was in the language. Impoverished Muslims often see learning Arabic and the Quran as fortunate for their children, in a country where “English medium schools” proliferate but remain unreachable. A global network of charities based on da’wa (proselytizing) linked to zakat (charity), one of the five pillars of Islam, had always existed. It funded schools like Nadhwa and Deoband. It pre-dated al-Qaeda. But Muslims like me have long known that not all the moolah was sent to Islamic schools.

  In the fourteenth century, the biggest scholar of Hanbali Islam (extremist school) was a man named Ibn Taymiyyah. This man issued a fatwa saying that violent jihad against disbelievers was permissible and encouraged. He was speaking of the Mongol invaders of his time. Scholars say they were so called because they didn’t follow sharia. Centuries later Wahhab was a major fan. The puritanical Taymiyyah allegedly gave violent jihad a big thumbs up, saying:

  It is obligatory to take the initiative in fighting those people, as soon as the Prophet’s summons with the reasons for which they are fought has reached them. But if they first attack the Muslims then fighting them is even more urgent, as we have mentioned when dealing with the fighting against rebellious and aggressive bandits.

  For Daesh, who seem to have forgotten 9/11, this means neither Iraq nor Syria attacked the US or Western Europe first or at all. It was the other way around. In their perverted logic, Muslim land was attacked first.

  Taymiyyah was making violent jihad against all non-Muslims a duty for all Muslims. “Those people” clearly meant “non-Muslims.” It was a medieval time of banditry and mayhem in these deserts. They (the Mongols) were killing his people with highly trained armies. I wonder if a violence-loving imam in Islamabad can be convinced that because of ijtihad, independent reasoning, Taymiyyah’s opinions need to be read in context.

  Did the jihad al-nafs (struggle with the self) exist for him? I had always been intrigued by Taymiyyah’s never marrying or having even a female companion in his entire life. Was he homosexual? I had dangerously and privately wondered while studying accounts of his life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ibn Saud’s savage Ikhwans must have looked up to Taymiyyah as an emulatory figure. Ditto Daesh.

  It would be almost impossible to find a foot soldier of Daesh, sometimes even unschooled in the correct way to pray, who knows more than the name Taymiyyah or even the Islamic principles “really” favored by the Prophet and his companions. Those are the examples they claim to emulate. Yet their schooling has been quick. Your Islamic duty? Kill and Die. Your entire family gets salvation and so do you by ending up a shaheed (“martyr”) in heaven where the houris (virgins—some say seventy-two of them) and other delights await. On that day at Nadhwa, a teacher directed his students to open Ayah 191 of Surah Al Baqara (“The Cow”), which said:

  And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith.

  Soon the couple of hundred little boys were bobbing their heads up and down in repetition.

  “The Hindus don’t eat cows. So should we kill them?” asked a curious student.

  Aware of my presence, the teacher changed the topic. The question remained unanswered and the boy was reprimanded. Would he have answered with a yes were I not there?

  More than 70 percent of the world’s Muslims do not read, speak, write, or understand Arabic. They have learned the Quranic verses in classical Arabic by rote. Most have no idea what they say. The differences between classical and colloquial Arabic, with the latter coming in many regional forms, are enormous. The burden of learning placed on a student of the language is heavy. At a higher grade or probably further into this lesson itself, this teacher would possibly explain to his students what his idea of “they” was. He could arguably embellish his definition of kafirs by saying it was the Hindus, the Jews, and the Christians—pretty much the entire non-Muslim world, Dar al Harb (“House of War”). I am not sure he would engage in comparative theology to teach them what preceded this verse in Ayah 190: “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors.”

  Entering India in the seventh century, Indian Islam is as old as Islam itself. Most of the history of this time has been one of Hindus and Muslims coexisting peaceably, with both faiths even taking from each other. I was a product of that kind of doctrinal marriage, and in this room at Nadhwa, the ground beneath my feet seemed to slip.

  The call to prayer rang out. I had often admired the musical variety of muezzins’ azaan (call to prayer) in many countries. But here it felt strangely out of sync.

  Wahhab would be pleased to learn just how far his ideology had spread, from 96th Street in Manhattan to Nadhwa and Deoband in India, even though he saw its early split between violence and nonviolence. To the horror of India’s “secular” elite, the Wahhabi Deoband keeps on getting media attention with fatwas such as one declaring photography un-Islamic. India now has a right-wing Hindu government. Its influence on its Muslim citizens will be judged by time. During that 2006 trip, a Shia friend suggested being Muslim in India was like being black in America. Bang on, I remember thinking.

  As children we were taught to seek the ra’y of elders. In Urdu and in Arabic, the word means “opinion.” The elders included the scholars of sharia law, the mujtahid. They were qualified and led exemplary lives. Sahih Bukhari (the most influential Sunni canon of Muhammad’s hadith) talks about how difficult it is to become a mujtahid. In my twenties I questioned how it was possible for the fluid concept of ijtihad to describe Islam’s rigid and complex universe. Was pe
rsonal effort the best way to describe jihad, as with the self? And was it OK to draw semantic links amongst the terms jihad, mujtahid, and ijtihad? Did a mujtahid have enough ijtihad-ic credentials to become a vessel of sharia to ordinary Muslims? Learning the Wahhabi-ijtihad relationship, over years of study, has made the latter less attractive.

  Unfortunately, the majority of today’s Ummah use taqlid, blind following. And that’s perilous. The dangerous Hanbali school is only for al-Qaeda and Saudi types, some claim, wrongfully. But Wahhabi export has been so successful that most taqlid lands at Wahhabi/Hanbali doorsteps anyway.

  For a moment, Nadhwa seemed otherworldly. MSNBC and CNN could never penetrate these walls with their logic of “moderate Muslims.” America’s punditry was planets away.

  Was this curriculum a rehash of Deobandi, Wahhabi, and other dangerous theology? Were these elementary teachers adequately schooled? Ijtihad, to expand even further, needed a legal and scholarly interpretation of the Quran, of sharia, and of the canon. It was a lifetime of academic rigor. Achieving mujtahid-hood was as hard as getting into Harvard. Legal issues, for example, needed analogical reasoning and an ability to whip out a Surah or Ayah from the Quran as needed. Hafizs—those who memorize the Quran—were ideal. God’s sharia was just, immense, and divinely ordained.

  Unlike other religions, Islam decrees everything from how you clean your pubes post-heterosexual sex to how you arrange a table for iftar (Ramadan sunset meal) to what really is rightful jihad as the Prophet divinely understood and morally interpreted it. There needs to be ilm, or knowledge, of the precedent as well. Most important, every single thing a “good Muslim” does is rigidly prescribed in the canon and the Quran revealed to Muhammad. While almost none in the West has the qualifications to say so, many claim the doors to ijtihad closed in the tenth century. Others say no, with the Shia of Iran saying that they even allowed it through the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This makes them seem more in tune with the times than Sunni Muslims. The Saud-Wahhabi theology loves ijtihad. Hamas in Palestine favors ijtihad. Osama used it to invalidly claim mujtahid status.

  “More chai?” interrupted a teacher, breaking my train of thought. The gaggle of teachers said they were all mujtahids. We sat there and discussed the semantics of the words ijtihad and thus mujtahid, deriving from the verbal roots of the word jihad. They remained silent as I spoke about how Osama, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the Wahhabi establishment of Saudi all claimed ijtihad, as well. I told them how dictatorial regimes throughout the Muslim world fear it because they think it will strengthen pluralism while undermining political unity, the latter being a necessity to subjugate their populations. Their response was unanimous: India is a secular country, so none of this mattered here.

  My other thoughts I kept to myself. The dirty work of crafting a façade of “political unity” in the entire Arab Middle East is done by each country’s feared Mukhabarat or intelligence agency, basically a Second World War Stasi-style secret police. They are used with equal and terrifying consequences by a wide range of dictators like Sisi in Egypt, the battered Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and even the supposedly Westward-looking King Abdullah II of Jordan. For these regimes ijtihad is allegedly akin to bida. In the past fourteen centuries, opinions on whether ijtihad is a continuing Muslim calling or not have been equally debated. As an individual I feel my ability to use independent reasoning is sacred to me. I believe that ijtihad is not a novelty for the progressive age, because it has been around for centuries. But arguments for its being a “solution” for the “troubles with Islam” are specious at best.

  And who wants to sit in the same chair with al-Qaeda and the Wahhabis who condone the principle anyway? Not I.

  More chai and another green room with a different cast of teachers. They had made it clear we couldn’t film this conversation. One said that an Islamic caliphate was just around the corner.

  “On September 11, 2001,” said another teacher, “God’s will became reality.” A third argued that disbelievers like Jews and Christians created 9/11 as a conspiracy. Most of them bent over backward saying how they stressed “ijtihad” for their students from a very young age. Over endless cups of chai, this is the kind of hogwash these so-called ulema indulged in. And their bullshit homage to ijtihad was just that.

  It was around that time I began to start thinking that ijtihad was just not what it was hyped up to be. Islam didn’t just have one problem. And that’s because there was no one kind of Islam. There were many, and each would have to be dealt with differently. Warfare, it could certainly be argued, would be a rightful jihad to annihilate the “disbelievers” for, let’s say, an al-Qaeda “soldier”? I left them with a question: “So do you think America’s war against al-Qaeda and Iraq makes violent jihad a justifiable duty for all Muslims?” Disturbingly, all of them nodded.

  Pointing at me, one said, “Even upon you if you are a good Muslim.”

  I had come to Lucknow to film closeted but devout gay Muslims for A Jihad for Love. Lucknow had the largest Shia population in the entire Indian subcontinent. The gays called themselves koti (one who receives anal sex) zenana (one who acts like a woman), in a lighthearted, friendly way. Qasim, a Shia, was one of them.

  The UK’s Channel 4 had FedExed us press badges, thus granting us access to the mosque and home of Syed Kalbe Jawad, the most senior Shia cleric in South Asia, whose ante-room contained a giant portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. The Syed was notorious and I, like Qasim, felt trepidation. This was the man who had organized 1 million people into the largest-ever demonstration by Muslims against the US, Israel, and Denmark when the Danish cartoons controversy erupted. This was a man who in 2016 compared Wahhabi Saudi Arabia to “the Jews.” He went further to say that the Saudi execution of the venerable Saudi Shia Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was a plot hatched by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The Shia syeds claim direct lineage from the Prophet Muhammad. India’s many Islams were complicated and I had spent years studying them. Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the grand imam of one of the largest Sunni mosques on the subcontinent, Jama Masjid in Delhi, also claimed he was a syed. Neither of these men would ever reconcile their prejudices.

  I had been filming the pious Qasim. Spiritual violence is a real thing and he was a victim. I hoped to capture a confrontation between this young man and the cleric. Sure enough, when we were granted our on-camera audience, Qasim displayed surprising candor.

  “In Allah’s house, the doors of forgiveness are always open,” said the syed. The cleric wore a black turban and cloak, the uniform of his high rank. If he’d been Catholic, he’d have been wearing bright cardinal red.

  Qasim persisted with his questions. “What if I had prayed for forgiveness already? Would that absolve me?” and “What if my attraction to men persists, even after I’ve been forgiven?” The syed grew irritated. The always-open “doors of forgiveness” seemed to be closing shut as the conversation grew heated. Finally, the syed encouraged Qasim to see a psychologist.

  “You have a disease,” said the cleric, after about twenty minutes of filming. On our rickshaw ride back, Qasim said, “It is God’s will that I was born into this caste,” adding, “He put the heart of a woman in a man’s body, which is my misfortune.” I tried to comfort him. Though unusual, this was not surprising to me. Qasim had used the English word caste. But why? Islam ostensibly had no caste system—the Ummah was equal, one God under one law. But Islam was also adept at adoption and blending in. Thus, the caste system that people assume is uniquely Hindu exists sometimes in many kinds of Indian Islams, as well.

  Islamic da’wa (proselytizing) could only benefit from this unique ability of the religion, to both give to and take from other faiths. The Taj Mahal would not have existed if Hindus had been excluded from its creation, symbolically, culturally, or physically. More than two centuries of Islamic (Mughal) rule, which begun in the early sixteenth century, was initiated with violent warfare, like all including Christian civilizations and religions. But it did not lead to a constant st
ate of “Islamic war” in South Asia. The opposite happened. A rich musical, artistic, architectural, linguistic, literary, cultural, and cinematic history emerged from the Islam-Hinduism marriage. Pervasive Indian Islamophobia was reserved for the twenty-first century. In 1582, the Muslim Mughal Emperor Akbar developed a new religion called Din-I Ilahi (“the Religion of God”). It was said to have taken the principles of all the faiths that divided his empire—Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and Jainism—and brought them together into a cohesive new whole whose primary principle would be mutual tolerance. Akbar was unique. He cherished intense debates on philosophical and religious matters.

  “We are descended from the Mughals,” my aunt Khala often used to say. She never produced any proof. Whenever my mother lamented the loss of her favored language, she explained that the Urdu that she wrote in was a language born from the Hindi of the Hindus and the Persian of the Mughal courts.

  After our discussion with the syed, we rejoined Zainab. Over chai and biscuits in her meager apartment, we discussed the problems of contemporary Islam.

  “Have you ever had access to women within Nadhwa-trained families?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. At this point I asked her about the Ayah 31 of Surah 24, An Nur (“The Light”), which in some translations seemed to clearly include “homosexuality” in one of its verses. Women were allowed to “show their finery” amongst many others to “male attendants who do not have any need for women.”

  “There you have it! Evidence in the Quran!” I said, believing at the time that this referred to kotis like Qasim as much as it referred to me.

  “Most people you will meet on this journey will have little knowledge of the Quran,” she replied.

  I told her how every single “teacher” at Nadhwa had a zabiba—literally, “raisin,” but used to identify the forehead of the pious, a kind of prayer bump. We both agreed they were hypocrites. Praying frequently does not a good Muslim make.