Agnostic Khushwant Read online

  Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

  A gushing fountain shall flow in each.

  Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

  Each planted with fruit-trees, the palm and the pomegranate.

  Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

  In each there shall be virgins chaste and fair.

  Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

  Dark-eyed virgins sheltered in their tents

  (Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?)

  whom neither man nor jinnee will have touched before.

  Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

  They shall recline on green cushions and rich carpets.

  Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

  Blessed by the name of your Lord, the Lord of majesty and glory!

  (N. J. Dawood)

  Another favourite is Sura Nissa (The Heights) with the admonition:

  Do not corrupt the earth after it has been purged of evil .... He sends forth the winds as harbingers of His mercy, and when they have gathered up a heavy cloud, He drives it on to some dead land and lets the water fall upon it, bringing forth all manner of fruit.

  Truth, assures the Quran, will always triumph over falsehood: God is the truthful one. ‘We will hurl the truth at falsehood and it shall smite it; and lo it will vanish.’ The retribution for falsehood and evil need not be sudden because people are given time for repentance. ‘I am with those who wait’, says the Quran. The time for repentance should not be frittered away. Repentance releases forces of mercy; every tear drop shed in contrition washes away the stains of sin. The Prophet himself gave the assurance that ‘one who repents sincerely is like one who never committed sin’.

  It should be noted that unlike Christianity, Islam does not ask people to love their enemies (which is contrary to nature) but only forgive them. Hate the sin but not the sinner. It also justifies retaliation but limits it to the damage suffered. Contrary to popular notion, the Quran does not exhort Muslims to wage instant war against unbelievers (kafirs). It is only against those who persecute believers or revile the Quran and the Prophet that violence is sanctioned. Otherwise every person is free to believe in what he or she thinks best. ‘To you, your way, and to me mine’, declare the revelations and give the assurance: ‘There is no compulsion in religion.’

  In Sura Maida (The Tablet Spread), Allah assured His Prophet that ‘this day have I perfected your religion for you.’ In this sura is a memorable verse illustrating the tolerance preached by Islam:

  ... that who ever killed a human being, except as a punishment for murder or other wicked crimes, should be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life should be regarded as though he had saved all mankind.

  (N. J. Dawood)

  There is lot more in the Quran than I can put in these pages. Numerous passages can be read for their moral messages or their literary excellence. Several of the shorter suras have powerful poetic imagery. To wit: ‘By the snorting war steeds, which strike fire with their hoofs as they gallop to the red at dawn and with a trail of dust split the foe in two; man is ungrateful to his Lord. To this he himself shall bear witness.’ And again: ‘I swear by the glory of sunset, by the night, and all that it brings together, by the moon, in her full perfection that you shall march onwards from state to state.’

  The Sura Al Dhariayat (The Winds) opens with the memorable lines:

  By the dust-scattering winds and the heavily-laden clouds, by the swiftly-gliding ships, and by the angels who deal out blessings to all men that with which you are threatened shall be fulfilled and the Last Judgement shall surely come to pass.

  A verse in Sura Luqman asserts:

  If all the trees in the earth were pens, and the sea, with seven more seas to replenish it, were ink, the writing of Allah’s words could never be finished.

  The message may be summed up in two lines from The Prophet: ‘We will hurl Truth at Falsehood, until Truth shall triumph and Falsehood be no more.’

  In all, Mohammed had 22 years to reveal the Quran till he died in Madina in A.D. 632 at the age of 62. To this day, the Quran continues to fire the imagination of Muslims the world over. You owe it to yourself to find out the reason why.

  In the wake of partition in August 1947, when millions of Muslims were compelled to leave their homes and properties in India to migrate to Pakistan, thousands had been butchered in the Hindu-Sikh versus Muslim riots, and many more forced to seek shelter in refugee camps, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad who had foreseen the consequences of dividing India on religious lines addressed a vast throng of disillusioned Muslims of Delhi from the steps of the Jama Masjid. He admonished them for not heeding the words of warning he had been speaking and writing his entire life. He said: ‘You may not remember that I told you about all this to come but you sliced away my tongue; when I picked up my pen you cut off my hands; when I tried to lead you along the right path, you broke my legs; when I tried to turn, you broke my back.’

  From the time Azad started his journalistic and political career in Calcutta in 1912, his message to his fellow-Muslims was consistently the same. He chided them for keeping away from the freedom movement and letting non-Muslims be in the forefront. Mohammad Ali Jinnah dubbed Azad as ‘the show-boy of the Congress’ and though the vast majority of Indian Muslims supported the Muslim League’s demand for a separate Muslim state, the Maulana remained a stolid supporter of the Indian National Congress. When Mahatma Gandhi (reluctantly), Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel acquiesced to the partition of the country, Azad stood alone among the leaders in opposing it. Where did he derive this strength to tread the lonely path and the courage to maintain that he was right? The inspiration came from only one source – the Quran.

  Azad was born in Makka (on 11 November 1888) of an Indian father and an Arab mother. His first language was the language of the Quran: Arabic. His father came from a line of Islamic theologians and he was expected to continue in the profession. The family migrated back to Calcutta where Azad picked up Urdu and Persian. He went through a short phase of agnosticism, rejecting all faith, and apparently indulged himself in pleasures of the flesh. Then he went back to Islam and from the very start of his career was convinced that it was the duty of the Indian Muslims to join Hindus in the struggle against colonialism. While still in his early twenties, he started to publish an Urdu weekly, Al Hilal. It rapidly picked up circulation, touching 29,000 (no mean figure for a journal in those days). Although he wrote mostly on religious topics, his nationalist views displeased the government and the paper was banned. Azad launched another one, Al Balagha. It was in an issue of Al Balagha in early 1916 that he announced that he had embarked on an Urdu translation of the Quran and had already rendered the first three chapters up to ‘Sura Al Imran’, and hoped to finish the entire book by the end of the year.

  That was not to be. On 3 March 1916, an order under the Defence of India Act compelled him to quit Calcutta. Most provincial governments refused him entry; his only choices were the Bombay Presidency or Bihar. He chose Bihar because it was nearer Calcutta and took up residence at Ranchi. He completed the translation of another chapter Sura al Nisa, when an order of internment was passed against him and all the papers were seized. He appealed to the governor, Lord S. P. Sinha. After a fortnight his papers were returned to him. This roused the ire of Sir Charles Cleveland, head of the CID, who travelled all the way from Delhi to Ranchi and reseized the papers to have them scrutinized lest they contain inflammatory material. Hoping to have the papers returned to him, Azad went ahead with his translation and commentaries and completed the work in 1918. On his relase he asked for his papers to be returned to him. After a long time they were, but before he could put them together he was rearrested in November 1921 when the Indian National Congress was declared unlawful. For the third time, his papers were seized and stuffed in gunny bags to be taken away. He was
released after 15 months in jail. The papers returned to him were jumbled up, torn and many pages destroyed. The Maulana lost heart and gave up the project as being ill-starred.

  In 1927, he began all over again. He finished the translation and commentaries on 20 July 1930 while in detention in Meerut Jail (now in Uttar Pradesh). The genesis of three volumes of the Tarjuman-ul Quran (translation of the Quran) shows the mettle of Maulana Azad.

  One may well ask: Why this passion to translate a book that had been translated several times into Urdu, English and most world languages? Azad was convinced that existing translations had missed the message of the Quran by introducing esoteric meanings to words that were simple and clear, so that even illiterate Arab tribesmen could understand them. This happened after the Prophet’s generation had died out and Islam had spread to non-Arab people. Greek, Iranian and Buddhist concepts found their way into interpretations of the revelations. Personal views of commentators (tafsir birrai) distorted meanings of simple Arabic words. Then there were the Sufis who looked for ‘hidden meanings’ when there was nothing hidden in the Quran. Azad’s motive was to ‘explain the Quran in the manner of the Quran’ – Fadhakkir bil Quran. He rarely goes beyond explaining the etymology of the words used and was very sparing in quoting traditions ascribed to the Prophet (Hadith) to shore up his arguments.

  Although young in years and with scanty knowledge of European languages, Azad read extensively on whatever he could find on religion or philosophy that was available to him. Inevitably, the influence of Muslim theologians weighed heavily on him. Foremost was Imam Mohammad Ghazali (twelfth century), who, like him, had passed through a period of disbelief before returning to religion. Ghazali turned to mysticism; Azad who had a Sufi background rejected mysticism. Nevertheless, he admired some Sufis, like the dervish Sarmad, who was condemned as a heretic by the Ulema and beheaded under orders of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1659. Sarmad’s green tomb is on the eastern end of the steps of Delhi’s Jama Masjid, close to where Maulana Azad is buried. Of Sarmad, Azad said: ‘He stood on the minaret of love from which the walls of the Kaaba and the temple appeared of equal height.’

  For inexplicable reasons, Azad was much impressed by Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan, the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University and the earliest propagator of Muslim separatism and aloofness from the freedom movement. More influential were Jamaluddin Afghani and Mohammed Abdul Shah Waliullah of Delhi, who stood for a Pan-Islamic union of Muslim communities. As early as 1912 Azad wrote: ‘The preoccupation with majority and minority has become the root of the problem …. Now the brotherhood of 80 million believers [meaning Muslims] in the unity of God are afraid of 220 million idol worshippers of India.’ Azad was a firm believer in ‘confident partnership’ with Hindu India.

  It is interesting to note that Azad’s contemporary, the poet Allama Iqbal, who was as deeply concerned with the future of his community and like Azad drew his inspiration from Islamic sources, took a completely different path. Between 1905 and 1910 both travelled abroad. Iqbal went to Europe and was deeply impressed with the vitality of Western civilization and became more conscious of the decadence that had overtaken the Islamic world. He gave expression of it in his famous poem Shikwa – complaint. Although addressed to Allah, he wrote of the glorious past of the idol-breaking conquerors, fired with Islamic zeal. Azad travelled to Muslim countries struggling for freedom from European colonial powers and felt that the only hope was to revive Islam by firing Muslims with the spirit that Allah had bequeathed to the Prophet through his revelations: the Quran. Iqbal was inspired by Islamic history; Azad by the Quran and the life of the Prophet. Iqbal came to the conclusion that Muslims were a people apart from the Hindus and their salvation lay in a state of their own. Azad totally rejected the two-nation theory and the concept of a separate Muslim state as against the teaching of the Quran.

  Of the three-volume translation of the Quran by Azad, the first, which deals with the opening (Sura-ul Fatiha), is the most significant. It consists of a bare seven lines of a few words each:

  In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful

  Praise is for Allah only, the Lord of all being

  The Benevolent, the Merciful

  Master of the Day of Recompense

  Thee only do we serve and

  Thee alone do we ask for help,

  Direct us to the straight path

  The path of those to whom

  Thou hast been gracious

  Not of those who have incurred

  Thy displeasure,

  Nor of those who have gone astray.

  This chapter has been described as the core or essence of the Quran (Umm-ul Quran), the sufficient (Al Kafia), and the treasure house (Al Kanz). Since it is much the most repeated part of the Quran, one of the revelations confirms: ‘O Prophet! It is fact that we have given these seven oft repated verses and the great Quran.’

  The Prophet never laid claims to propounding a new religion, but only to bringing back a people who had strayed from the straight path of worshipping the one God into animism, ancestor worship, totemism and idolatry. The two most commonly used names of God, Allah and Rabb, were both pre-Islamic. Allah is really an exclamation of wonder at the universe and its creator: hail God! The Sikhs’ Waheguru is exactly the same. Rabb is a portmanteau word meaning the provider (Al Razzaq) as well as teacher, master and Lord. The Quran begins with hamd (praise) to Allah (Bismillah) and His two great qualities, benevolence (Al Rahman) and mercy (Al Raheem). Thereafter it emphasizes His qualities as the provider-sustainer of the universe (Rabb-ul Alameen).

  Maulana Azad points out that the things most needed in life – air, water and earth (to provide food) – are free gifts of God given in abundance. The Quran emphasizes this fact: ‘And we send down water from the heavens in its due degree, and cause it to settle in the earth, and we have power for its withdrawal too. And by it, we cause gardens of palm trees and vineyards to spring forth for you, in which ye have plenteous fruits and whereof you eat.’ And again: ‘And no one thing is there, but … its store houses, and we send it not but in settled measure.’ God gives and God takes away: birth, growth, decay and death are ordained by Him. Says the Quran: ‘It is God who hath created you in weakness and given you strength. Then after strength, weakness and grey hair.’

  Azad points out the difference between Hindu and Islamic views on the purpose of creation. Hindus believe that the universe is God’s leela (sport) and unreal. Islam attributes deliberate purpose to creation. Says the Quran: ‘We have not created them but for a serious end.’ Azad produces a telling argument for the existence of God: ‘The nature of Man can hardly agree to believe that there can be an action without an actor, orderlineness without a director, a plan without a planner, a building without a builder, a design without a designer.’

  Proofs of God’s existence, says Azad, are there for everyone who cares to see them and quotes the Quran: ‘Let man look at his food; it was He who first rained down copious rains, then cleft the earth with clefts, and caused the upgrowth of the grain, and grapes and healing herbs, and fruits and herbage, for the service of yourselves and your cattle.’

  Why did God give us birth and sustenance? Azad answers this question with a query: ‘Shall the object in shaping of which nature has had to make such prolonged, careful arrangement be meant just to eat and drink for a little moment on earth and get extinguished forever?’

  An important attribute of God is adalat: justice. Maulana Azad emphasizes that divine justice is not dependent on the whim of God, but entirely based on the law of causation – what you sow, you reap. ‘He who doeth right – it is for himself, and he who doeth evil – it is for himself; and the Lord will not deal unfairly with his servants’, assures the Quran.

  Azad differs from other theologians in holding that the concept of one, almighty God is not an evolutionary process but the revival of one with which the world started: ‘Men were first of one religion only; then they fell to variance’, says the
Quran. Azad also believes that the Islamic concept of God is more advanced than the Jewish and the Christian because the Jews regarded Him as a tribal God of a ‘chosen people’ while the Christians humanized him inasmuch as they regarded Jesus as the Son of God. The Quran was close to the Upanishads in refusing to define God (neti, neti – not this, not this) but took a more positive attitude by making Him a repository of attributes – creativity, providence, justice, mercy and so on. The Prophet did his utmost to avoid his being treated as an incarnation or avataar of Allah. When he died, his father-in law, the first caliph, spoke to the gathering: ‘He who worshipped Mohammed is dead, and he who worshipped God, let him know that God ever lives. He has no death.’ In emphasizing God as the sole object of worship, the Quran specifically forbade ascribing partners to share his singular sovereignty.

  It is to this one rule of the universe that we (all mankind) must turn for guidance (hidayat) to lead us along the straight path, the one trodden by the righteous, not by evil doers.

  It was his firm conviction in the unity of God and the brotherhood of mankind revealed in the Quran that made Maulana Azad turn his face against the concept of separate states based on religious differences. ‘Whatever your so-called race, your homeland, your nationality, and whatever your circumstances in life or sphere of activity, if only you all resolve to serve but one God, all these will lose their sting. Your hearts will be united. You will begin to feel that the entire globe is your home and all mankind is but one people, and that you all form a single family – Ayaal Allah – the family of God.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ANTI-MUSLIM PREJUDICES

  Islam is more precise with its dos and don’ts than other religions. This gives the impression of uncompromising rigidity, which is not the same thing as fanaticism. For that matter, Sikhs are no less fanatic than Muslims.