Here are my 2 US cents spread over three pages.

Following is what happened for me with “Chasing A Mirage”.

The book taxied to the runway with chapter one. It took off with Chapter 2 (“Pakistan – Failure of an Islamic State”). There was a minor hiccup with the retraction of landing gears after the take-off. Then the book rose sharply with Chapter 3 (“Saudi Arabia – Sponsor of Islamic States”) and started to level off in Chapter 4 (“Iran – The Islamic State”). It reached its intended height with Chapter 5 (“Palestine – Future Islamic State”) and sailed majestically over the clouds. I sat back and started to enjoy. Then suddenly, it hit turbulence in Chapter 6 (“The Prophet is Dead”) and had to make an emergency landing in Chapter 7 (“Medina – The Politics of the Rightly Guided Caliphs”). And there it sits. I can’t read another page. I have tried but I just can’t. I’m having a “reader’s block”.

Start with the premises of the book. Does Islam require its adherents to constitute an Islamic state? Obviously Mr. Fatah thinks not which leaves me wondering how in the name of Zeus the laws stated in Quran can be implemented. You know, the laws like killing the dude who kills other dudes and chopping the paws of the thieves etc. Well, maybe the part of the book after chapter 7 deals with that, which means I will I have to wait till my readers block is finished for my answers.

Let me explain the landing gear retraction problem. Allama Iqbal was one lucky cat. Everyone in Pakistan claims that Iqbal was in their corner.  GA Parvaiz and Maulana Maududi hated each other’s guts/thoughts but both claimed to take inspiration from the message of Iqbal. Even socialists and Ahmedies stake their claims on Iqbal when no one’s watching. And the funny thing is, they are all right. Iqbal was adventurous in that way. When it came to ideological positions, Iqbal was try-sexual. He tried everything.

So, Mr. Fatah doesn’t resist the temptation of decades-old strategy of claiming to have Iqbal in his corner. According to Mr. Fatah, Iqbal was not in favor of an Islamic state. Couple of small problems with that:

Juda ho deen siyasat se to reh jaati hai changezi

Rings any bells?

Also, Mr. Fatah portrays Iqbal and Maududi as having opposite positions. But hang on. When Iqbal thought of setting up an Islamic research institution in Pathankot in mid-30’s, who did he ask to head that institution? You guessed it. Maualna Maududi. Go figure!

Let’s talk about the turbulent part of this book’s flight. Mr. Fatah informs his readers that as soon as the prophet died, a bitter power struggle ensued, the kind of fight where all the principles of Islam were thrown out the nafiza. There is something troubling, turbulent, there. Wasn’t there anyone in the Medina who, sort of, shouted “Yo people! That’s not cool man. That’s not Islamic.” In fact there should have been many such voices proclaiming the racist tug of war uncool. Mr. Fatah doesn’t report any such occurrences which leads one to wonder that maybe the companions, personally trained by the prophet himself, knew what’s cool with Islam a bit better than Mr. Fatah. If they didn’t then what kind of commentary would that be on the prophet, the trainer, himself?

The problem with this part of the book is some of the remarks Mr. Fatah makes after describing the horrific proceedings and those remarks seem attempts to justify those very proceedings.

Example: The prophet is dead and people who were so close to him leave his house as soon as they can. The Ansars hold kind of a convention, asserting their majority and deciding who would succeed the prophet. They are talking but mid-speeches, Abu-Bakr and Umar gatecrash the party and Abu-Bakr tells them that the racial superiority dictates that the successor would be from Quraysh. Abu-Bakr indulges in divide and rule and then Umar vows to kill the host of the convention for  having the nerve but Abu-Bakr holds him back. Next day (or maybe later) Umar drags Ali out of his house and tells him to pledge his allegiance to Abu-Bakr or get killed. And then Mr. Fatah, on page 113, characterizes the above process as “debate and discussion”. Can’t buy that, not happening, that dog won’t hunt.

 

Example: Mr. Fatah informs his reader that Abu-Bakr

-          Disinherited Prophet’s daughter.

-          Waged wars on the tribes that refused to get on with the program simply because they were sore that they weren’t consulted before settling the question of who would sit on the throne.

-          Waged war on the tribe that had a “self-proclaimed” prophet.

-          Called Khaled’s beheading of a guy “a mistake” and refused to punish Khaled.

-          And so and so forth.

But all that seems to be OK with Mr. Fatah in the name of “consolidating the community”. On page 110, Mr. Fatah writes, “There is much to be said in defense of Abu-Bakr”. What?!? If Mr. Fatah looks at Abu-Bakr’s profile that Mr. Fatah himself has built in the book with the help of historic accounts, Abu-Bakr neatly fits the bill of an Islamist. Most of us know what Mr. Fatah’s feelings are about Islamists. I wonder if Mr. Fatah can write, “There is much to be said in defense of Osama Bin Laden,” with a straight pen.

By the way, Mr. Fatah calls Musaylima a “self-proclaimed” prophet. I guess Mr.Fatah has the skinny on this one, otherwise how would he know that this prophet-man was not getting the transmission direct from the Big Guy in the Sky and the prophet he believes in was not self-proclaimed. I mean, if you are God and you see that the people who you have called “Rohama-o-bainahum” (huggy-kissy with one another) in The Book are popping each other’s noggins with swords and using the detached appendages to support cooking pots with the caliph calling such incidents “mishtakes”, wouldn’t you be in a hurry to send another prophet to convey that you had made a serious error in judging these peoples’ characters and you would like to take your words back?

Example: We have visited the events unfolding right after prophet’s death. We have seen how Abu-Bakr and Umar dealt with dissent and then we read on page 110: “For that era in the history, it was remarkable time of democratic rule.” Kinda statement Musharraf made saying that as Pakistan goes, we have enough human rights. I’m so happy that I didn’t live in those “democratic” times because I’m the kind of person who usually doesn’t get on with the program.

I can give you more examples but I think I have made my point. I wonder why Mr. Fatah feels that he has to apologize for these people who, he tells us, did horrible, horrible things. In the preface, Mr. Fatah calls himself “one of Salman Rushdie’s many Midnight’s Children”. I hope he is the one that can travel through time so he can go back and take these concessions out of the book so I can read this book further and resume enjoying it.

And one final note somewhat relevant to the book. There are Muslims, a big, big, big majority of them who think that Sunnah can be a source of legislation. And then there is a small Quran-only crowd that rejects the notion. This latter group will keep telling you that this or that is not in Quran and hence not Islamic. Mr. Fatah tells us that Quran says that there is no compulsion in religion. Right, that verse is there but that is one verse, just one, among thousands (and God bless God to have included that verse otherwise it would have been quite a difficult life for Quranists) and those thousands of the others contain quite scary injunctions. To these Quranists, I say this: no scripture or a value system works like a cut-and-dry instrument. That’s too simplistic an approach. What Stalin did was not in the Communist Manifesto. Maududi never wrote in any of his books that Muslims should smash the windscreens of the cars parked outside a hotel in Lahore on a new year’s eve. So should we absolve Maududi of the acts of hooligan followers? Don’t think so. What Maududi, Quran or any other value system does is to create a mindset, an attitude, a mode of interacting with the rest of the world. If Maududi tells you that you are right and since you are right, resorting to violence to make your point is OK. Remember the Qutb-dude? He wrote that if Islam only allows defensive wars, we will have to change the definition of defense.

If I stand up in a Muslim congregation and say that all Muslims are deaf, dumb and blind. They have eyes that can’t see and ears that can’t hear, I would be dubbed an Islamophobe, an arrogant-f’ing-atheist and the disciple of Satan incarnate Richard Dawkins. And yet, that’s exactly how The Book describes the non-believers. It is full of contempt, violent contempt, towards dissenters. You can’t claim that reading The Book and absorbing it will not create a certain contempt, a latent hatred, towards non-believers. And when this mindset is stoked properly by a genius like Maududi, trust me, that one verse, “there is no compulsion in deen”, would not pose any hurdle. Just like injunction against suicide has never stopped a suicide bomber. Um-Hassan, the new figurehead of Lal Masjid said just the other day that you can’t compare the two because suicide is cowardly while suicide bombing is extreme bravery.

That’s all from me. Hope I haven’t offended anyone and if I have, feel free to offend me back.  

"Any belief worth having must survive doubt."