Interview

31 May 2010, NewAgeIslam.Com

The Boy Said: “Kill Them, All Those Muslims Who Are Not Ahl-e-Hadees”

Sultan Shahin on Muslims and Islam

New Delhi-based veteran journalist Sultan Shahin is a noted commentator on Islam

ic and Muslim affairs. He runs the popular web-magazine www.NewAgeIslam.com. In
this interview with Yoginder Sikand, he talks about issues related to Muslims in
contemporary India and his own work.
Q: Could you tell us briefly about yourself?
A: I was born in a village in Aurangabad district in Bihar in 1949. My father, w
ho was a maulvi, worked as an Urdu teacher in a government middle school. We com
e from a family of maulvis, and my father,
carrying on in this family tradition, also served as the imam of a local mosque
and a teacher in a madrasa.
I studied at home for the first few years and then in a local Hindi-medium schoo
l till the eleventh standard. My father could not afford to send me to college,
so after this I began helping out at home, grazing cattle and cutting wood. One
day, my friends and I began to talk about what we felt was the most difficult th
ing in the world. After much debate, we arrived at a consensus. The most difficu
lt thing in the world, we decided, was to learn English. That very day I
decided that I must learn the language. My father bought me a dictionary, and I
began learning English myself.
Some years later, my family shifted to Aurangabad town, where I began giving tui
tions, earning just ten rupees a month from each student I taught. I enrolled fo
r a Bachelor’s degree in Patna University, and in 1972 came to Delhi. In Patna I w
rote for a paper called Searchlight, focusing on students’ issues. When I came to
Delhi, I took up a job with Radiance, the official English-language organ of the
Jamaat-e-Islami. This was the beginning of my journalistic career and my intere
st in writing on Muslim issues.
Q: Where did you go on from there?
A: I stayed with Radiance for just a few months. It was the first time I had wor
ked with an ideological group, and I soon began feeling uncomfortable and out of
place, although many of the people in the Radiance office were wonderful human
beings. Yet, I found some of their attitudes, such as to do with women, very sti
fling and narrow,
even absurd, even from the Islamic point of view as I understood it.
Gradually, it dawned on me that the agenda that Radiance was pursuing, one which
it shared with the Jamaat-e-Islami, was something that I could not subscribe to
. Hence, I left the magazine, and then worked for several years with various pap
ers and news agencies and also freelanced for a while, including in London. I ca
me back to Delhi in the early 1990s, where I worked for a year with the Nation a
nd the World, a magazine set up by a group of supposedly progressive Muslims, bu
t I had to leave within a year because the management could not
accept the fact that my wife, mother of my children, was a Hindu and had not con
verted to Islam! They even went to the extent of trying to coax me to get her to
become a Muslim, but I refused as I believe that religion is something very per
sonal. Because of my refusal, I was summarily sacked!
Q: For many years now, you have been writing against Islamist extremism and into
lerance. How did all this begin?
A: I have been writing on Muslim issues since the very beginning of my journalis
tic career in1972. But a note of urgency about the dangers from Islamic radicali
sm came into my thinking a little later. It began back in the mid-80s, when I wa
s staying at a Pakistani friend’s home in Nottingham in Britain. One day, I overhe
ard the kids of this family conversing with a friend of theirs about Islam. This
friend belonged to the Ahl-e Hadith sect, who are known for their stern literal
ism, being almost identical to the Saudi Wahhabis. This is a sect massively prom
oted by petrodollars and may even be termed Petrodollar Islam. I heard him telli
ng the kids that the Ahl-e Hadith alone were true Muslims and that the other Mus
lims were not just really non-Muslims but that, in fact, they were the biggest a
nd the first enemies of Islam. I asked him what he proposed to do with the “first
and the foremost enemies of Islam,” that is something like 99 percent of Muslims w
ho are not Ahl-e-Hadees. He said: “Kill them!!!”
You can imagine my horror at hearing this! Here was a bunch of Pakistani youth,
who could easily have a bright future in Nottingham University, but who, instead
, were discussing hatred, murder and
things like that. These children were not alone. By this time, many British mosq
ue communities and Muslim organizations in British universities had been radical
ized by Wahhabi and other extremist groups funded by tens of billions of petrodo
llars. The maverick hate-spewing Islamist Omar Bakri Mohammad was drawing huge c
rowds of
British Muslims wherever he spoke. Muslim bookstores were stocked with Wahhabi-i
nspired and Saudi-funded books, openly preaching hatred and contempt for non-Mus
lims.
All this made me suddenly wake up to the very real possibility that this hatred
in the name of Islam could easily spread elsewhere. It could easily come to our
very doorsteps, into our very homes, even in India, if it was not countered imme
diately and effectively. It would create even more destruction and terror for Mu
slims themselves than
for others. That is why I decided to start writing about these issues, to counte
r extremist and radical misinterpretations of Islam and to present what I felt w
ere the true teachings of the faith. I was fearful that if these radical teachin
gs were allowed to spread, they would destroy the Muslims themselves, consuming
them in the fires of hatred and violence. It was not simply to salvage the image
of Islam that I was doing this. Rather, it was also to protect Muslim parents
from allowing their children to be influenced and then destroyed by hate-driven
ideologues parading in the garb of Islamic authenticity . There were enough and
more provocations directed against Muslims happening all over the world to prov
oke them to be attracted by these wrong, militant interpretations of Islam as a
means for responding to the sense of siege that they felt.
In 1991, on being thrown out of the Nation and the World, I went into a deep dep
ression that lasted several months. What shocked me was that the men behind this
magazine were supposedly the ‘cream’ of Indian Muslim ‘progressive’ circles. If such pe
ople were to betray such narrow communalism and lack of understanding of Islamic
tenets, I asked myself, what would happen to our community in the days to come?
I remained bed-ridden for almost half a year. This was a period of great introsp
ection for me. When I got up finally, it was with a resolve to do whatever littl
e I could to combat extremism and hatred in the name of Islam, to articulate a m
ore relevant understanding of Islam in today’s context, and also to highlight vari
ous Muslim concerns and issues. Since then I have been regularly writing on thes
e issues—for various papers such as The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, The I
ndian Express, The Asian Age and for various websites and web-based papers.
My resolve to carry on this mission is strengthened every day when I look around
, on the Internet and in the print and electronic media, and see how ideologues
spewing hatred in the name of Islam, thereby sullying its name, are so deeply-en
trenched, and when I see that even in the locality around the shrine of one of I
ndia’s greatest Sufi saints Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, shops are selling b
ooks by Wahhabis and Muslim supremacists like Zakir Naik and by Ahl-e Hadith mul
lahs who claim that Sufis are kafirs and Sufism is sheer infidelity. Hardly anyo
ne is rebutting this poisonous propaganda.
Q: What made you set up your web-magazine NewAgeIslam.com?
A: In 2005, my wife was posted as the Indian cultural attaché to Suriname, and I a
ccompanied her there. We lived there for three years. I was a house-husband with
lots of time to spare, and so I began reading up books on Islam and Muslims fro
m a wide range of perspectives that I had bought much earlier but had not been a
ble to read properly. It was then that I came upon the idea of starting a web-jo
urnal to propagate progressive views on Islam and Muslims and to counter extremi
sm and hatred in the name of Islam, because starting a regular magazine or newsp
aper was simply too expensive. And that is how NewAgeIslam.com was set up, a lit
tle over two years ago, while I was still in Suriname.
Q: What is the basic purpose of your web-magazine?
A: NewAgeIslam.com seeks to promote rethinking on various aspects of traditional
Muslim thought so as to enable Muslims to integrate in today’s world. We are disc
ussing such fundamental issues as what Islam actually is, who or what a ‘Muslim’ is,
what the notion of a ‘practising Muslim’ is or should be, what Islam actually says
about such issues as women’s rights, freedom, democracy, nationalism, peace, justi
ce, war, politics and relations with the state. It discusses how Muslims living
as minorities should relate to the state and dominant non-Muslim majorities and
so on. It also seeks to highlight human rights abuses of minorities in both Musl
im-majority and
Muslim-minority countries.
Ours is an open forum, where divergent views on a wide range of issues are freel
y debated and contested. It seeks to urge Muslims to introspect, to cease blamin
g others for all their ills, to recognize where they have gone wrong, in terms o
f both thought and action.
In the particular Indian context, NewAgeIslam.com seeks to make Muslims realize
and recognize the fact that we do enjoy the very same rights in this country as
other citizens, and that our story is not just about unrelenting discrimination,
in contrast to the impression created by the Muslim media. We point out the fac
t that Muslims have much more freedom in India than non-Muslims in most Muslim c
ountries and even Muslims in such countries. We need to talk about all this, and
about supremacist, aggressive, intolerant and patriarchal interpretations of Is
lam because by and large the Muslim media simply refuses to deal with these issu
es.
We Indian Muslims need to rethink our position in India and in the Indian polity
. We need to be appreciative of what we have received in this country—which is a l
ot more than non-Muslim minorities in most Muslim countries, particularly in our
own neighbourhood. We need to combat the propaganda that India is an enemy of I
slam and is vociferously opposed to Muslims—which is the image that influential se
ctions of the Urdu press so sedulously create. We have to stress that we are an
integral part of this country, and although we also recognize that the Indian st
ate and system do not fully live up to their promises of true democracy and secu
larism, we must appreciate their positive aspects and express our gratitude. Isl
am teaches us to live with an attitude of gratitude even when we are in distress
. One can understand sections of Pakistani establishment having a vested interes
t in propagating this communal, confrontationist view. A Muslim community well-i
ntegrated in the Indian society and polity hurts their self-image and the very r
aison d’être of the creation of Pakistan. Those generals in Rawalpindi - I have met
some of them over the years, mostly in England – who dream of conquering India, un
furling the green flag over red fort and nurse other crazy ideas like that, cann
ot but promote strife in the Indian society, particularly involving Indian Musli
ms. But sections of Indian Muslim media and intellectuals themselves presenting
the Indian state as inimical to our interests and promoting a confrontationist a
ttitude among Muslims is the height of stupidity as much as it is contrary to fa
cts on the ground.
Most importantly, we need to develop progressive understandings of Islam that ar
e rooted in inter-community dialogue, friendship and solidarity. We need to lear
n how to live in harmony with our Hindu brethren, accepting them as our own, not
as ‘impure infidels’ and ‘enemies’, as some Muslims do. After all, we have to live and
die in this country, and we as a minority have no option but to try and earn the
goodwill of the Hindus. It is our Hindu neighbours who can protect us in the ev
ent of an attack, not our communal leaders nor for that matter even the Home Min
ister. Islam places great stress on the rights of neighbours, so one thing we ur
gently need to do is to build bridges of friendship and solidarity with our neig
hbours, the Hindus.
This, in turn, requires us to creatively reinterpret traditional Muslim understa
ndings of the term Ahl-e Kitab or ‘People of the Book’. After all, there are entire
passages in several Hindu scriptures that are identical to passages from the Qur
an. The Quran itself says that God has sent prophets to every people, and hence
it is obvious that India, too, has been blessed by prophets. There are many Hind
us who also believe in one, formless God.
Alongside this, we also need to challenge the notion of Muslim supremacism and r
edefine what we mean by ‘Muslim’, a ‘practising Muslim’ and the ‘Other’. The well-known Mun
r Commission set up several decades ago by the Government of Pakistan interviewe
d several Pakistani Muslim clerics from different sects and arrived at the concl
usion that no two clerics could even agree on the definition of the term ‘Muslim’, e
ach sect branding the others as deviant or even as wholly outside the pale of Is
lam. The clerics have given rituals andmarkers of identity such enormous stress
that they seem to have forgotten that belief in the one God and doing good deeds
, serving the rights of the creatures of God (huquq ul-ibad), are central bases
ofIslam and of what a true Muslim is.
Q: How has your web-magazine been doing? Has it made any sort of impact?
A: In the short while since we started, NewAgeIslam.ccom has been able to make q
uite a splash. We now have some 117,000 subscribers across the world, Muslims as
well as others, to whom we send out daily updates. We host some 2900 articles i
n our archives. Only some of these articles are by me as I don’t want the journal
to be seen as a personal propaganda site. Rather, it is an open forum for debate
and serious discussion. It welcomes dissenting views even on its main pages, no
t to speak of the widely popular comments section which is absolutely open to al
l views. I allow all sorts of criticism and comments, except, of course, downrig
ht abuse.
Q: How do you feel extremism and hatred in the name of religion (not just Islam,
but religion in general) can be best countered?
A: Radical Islamism or radical Hindutva, for that matter, are ideologies, and an
ideology cannot be countered by a ban. The RSS has been banned three times and
yet, as both an organization and as an ideology, it remains so powerful today. B
anning it served no purpose other than giving it even more publicity. Likewise,
hardly anyone knew of the Students Islamic Movement of India until it was banned
by the Government of India. An ideology is best countered by a counter-ideology
, and this holds true in the case of religiously-based extremism as well.
Q: What you seem to suggest is that it is not just media sensationalism or anti-
Muslim prejudice alone, as many Muslims argue, that is responsible for deeply-ro
oted prejudices against Muslims and Islam among non-Muslims. Rather, hate-driven
and Muslim supremacistinterpretations of Islam, as well as the actions of certa
in self-styled Islamist groups are also to blame. Is that what you are saying?
A: Exactly. And I would go so far as to say that we Muslims are more to blame fo
r our poor image than any non-Muslim media or whatever, although I must add that
, lamentably, the media loves to sensationalise and generalize about any small M
uslim aberration. Much of the poor image of Muslims has to do with their deep-ro
oted sense of Islam supremacism, which has no Islamic sanction really.
Let me cite a small but telling instance in this regard. Recently, I was in Patn
a, in the home of a Muslim friend. My friend’s son had a fight with a Hindu boy an
d complained about it to his maulvi. The maulvi’s response was, ‘Oh, he is a kafir!
You should have beaten him up!’
I would like to cite another personal instance to further clarify my point. Some
years ago I hired a local maulvi, a graduate of the Dar ul-Uloom Deoband, to te
ach my daughter Urdu and the Holy Quran. I gave him an Urdu primer prepared by t
he National Council for Educational Research and Training and requested him to u
se it for teaching my daughter. It is an excellent book and is probably the best
way I know to teach Urdu. The maulvi took the book in his hands and opened it,
only to see on the very first page the name of the editor, the renowned Urdu sch
olar and linguist of international repute, Gopi Chand Narang. I noted the revuls
ion that suddenly gripped the maulvi’s face, just because Narang was not a Muslim.
He slapped the book shut and refused to teach from it. If this is not a reflect
ion of a very narrow, communalized, indeed Talibanesque mindset, what is?
So, as I was saying, it is pointless saying that the media is biased, because an
ti-Islamic and anti-Muslim biases are not a new thing. They have been in existen
ce for a long time. Simply blaming the media and branding them as being engaged
in a conspiracy is not going to change things at all. What we Muslims should be
doing—which is what NewAgeIslam.com is trying to do in a humble, very limited way—is
to introspect, to see why this is happening, to identify where we have gone wro
ng, in terms of both thought and action, to examine our own role in creating neg
ative images of Islam and Muslims. Our focus should be constantly on trying to f
ind ways of promoting peace and harmony and asking ourselves: “Is there something
we can do to move beyond this conflict situation?” This cannot be done by calling
this land of ours “Kufristan”, as some of our Mullahs do, while knowing full well th
at the overwhelming majority of our countrymen are believers in God.
Q: But obviously you cannot deny the existence of forces inimical to Islam and M
uslims. One cannot expect Muslims not to be moved or to remain inert when thousa
nds of their co-religionists are slaughtered by Hindutva mobs, in league with th
e state, in Gujarat, by American imperialists in Iraq and Afghanistan or Zionist
occupiers in Palestine. All this and more are certainly contributing to the sen
se of Muslims being under attack and are definitely giving strength to advocates
of militancy.

A: You are quite right, of course. I recognize that Muslims are not entirely to
blame for their plight, and I admit that there are a hundred and more issues and
problems that Muslims face that are not of their own making. We do need to ackn
owledge that in the face of tremendous provocations by Hindutva forces and even
by some self-styled Muslim ‘leaders’, the Indian Muslim masses have, generally speak
ing, exercised considerable restraint.
We do need to criticize and oppose Hindutva, manifestations of American imperial
ism or Israeli terror wile all the time trying to engage in a dialogue with them
and seeking to at least understand their attitudes. However, my point is that o
nly by blaming others, we Muslims are not helping our cause. Also, our leaders a
nd intellectuals tend to exaggerate things quite a bit, seeking to find an Ameri
can, Zionist or Hindu conspiracy everywhere. Moreover, we cannot deny our own ro
le in exacerbating conflicts in some places, in propagating supremacist and aggr
essive understandings of Islam, in denying rights to women, to fellow Muslims an
d to people of other faiths living in scores of Muslim countries, and so on.
Q: In recent years, a number of Indian Muslim organizations as well as leading m
adrasas have openly condemned all forms of terrorism, including by Muslim groups
, as un-Islamic. How do you look at this
response of theirs?
A: I think this is a valuable step in the right direction, but it is not enough,
as is apparent from the fact it has failed to create much of an impact. What th
ey must also do is to explicitly name and condemn the individuals and self-style
d Islamic groups who are engaged in promoting terror in the name of Islam. They
must also critique, in a scholarly manner, radical and extremist interpretations
of specific Quranic verses and Hadith reports which these radical groups misuse
to promote and justify terrorism. This would also entail a proper contextual in
terpretation of these verses, pointing out that these verses applied to only a p
articular historical context.
For all this, of course, we need far more socially-engaged and progressive Islam
ic scholars than we have at present. Helping to develop such scholars is one of
the major aims of our web-journal NewAgeIslam.com.
URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamInterview_1.aspx?ArticleID=2924