Continued from “Double Jeopardy”

Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife
A critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n more

The discovery, in 2,000 C.E., of a submerged city of 7,500 B.C.E. vintage, off the Gulf of Khambhat, would have made the 3,500 B.C.E’s Mohen jo daro ‘n Harappa seem modern in the ancient Arya Varta. As the North America and the Europe have proved in the modern times that economic well-being and social development are but the obverse and the reverse of the ‘national’ coin of healthy work ethics, it can be inferred that without a sound work culture, the Khambhats and the Harappas wouldn’t have happened in the Bharat Varsha in the antique era. But then, how come the Indians of the day bade goodbye to the moral values of yore and came to yearn for easy money in the corridors of corruption!

The Aryans, who emerged after Mohen jo daro, in spite of their emphasis on spirituality, didn’t seem to have hampered the work ethos of yore as would be evident from the ‘recorded’ prosperity of the populace in the bygone eras. Maybe the karma siddhaanta that exemplified the Brahmanical concept of linking the fate of men to the deeds of their past births could have even encouraged the have-nots to strive for bettering their lot in the birth to follow that is through good deeds in the life on hand. By the same token, the kaarmic theory guarded man from the debilitating effects of envying the better-off, and that helped one and all build a society of happy souls striving to better themselves in word and deed, never mind their economic lot, well, till the mid 20th Century or so, before the ‘why not me’ phenomenon began to boot out the age-old Hindu wisdom from its karma bhoomi.

That being the case, we might search for the possible influence of the Islamic religious credo on the Indian work culture exposed as it were to it for a millennium. The Islamic way of life is best described by Freeland Abbot in his Islam and Pakistan of Cornell University Press, New York, as quoted by Mayram Jameelah in her book, Islam and Orientalism (Adam Publishers & Distributors, Delhi).

“The community held that the important thing in life was not to improve one’s well-being but to get to heaven when one’s earthly life was over. And the road to heaven was chartered as a clear path. That path, preserved and sharply defined by the traditionalists, included prayers and creed but it did not include so living as to avoid measles and small pox. The basic premise of Islam is that the faithful are the servants of Allah who are ordained to pray Him five times a day. This concept of faith presupposes that Allah is the provider to the faithful He being their Master. As though to make the prayer regimen a viable proposition the Hereafter was advocated as the be all and end all of life. As though to keep up the morale of the faithful to stick to prayer at the cost of the benefits of life that hard work entails, their eternal existence in the Hereafter is made peaceable and enjoyable.”

If anything, the Tablighi Jamaatis’ total disregard for their, as well as the others’, lives at the outbreak of the ‘novel corona virus’ in the early 21st Century, would only prove that Musalmans’ stupidity of faith is an attendant feature of their life and times, in any age and time.

Be that as it may, in Martin Lings’ biography of Muhammad, the following account of his meeting with Moses, in the wake of his ascent, along with Archangel Gabriel, to The Lote Tree of the Uttermost End illustrates the stress on prayer in Islam.

“At the Lote Tree the Prophet received for his people the command of fifty prayers a day; and it was then that he received the Revelation which contains the creed of Islam: The messenger believeth, and the faithful believe, in what hath been revealed unto him from His Lord. Each one believeth in God and His angels and His books and His messengers; we made no distinction between any of His messengers. And they say; we hear and we obey; grant us, Thou our Lord, thy forgiveness; unto Thee is the ultimate becoming.

They made their descent through the seven Heavens even as they had ascended. The Prophet said:

“On my return, when I passed Moses – and what a good friend he was unto you! - he asked me: ‘How many prayers have been laid upon thee?’ I told him fifty prayers every day and he said: ‘The congregational prayer is a weighty thing, and thy people are weak. Return unto thy Lord, and ask Him to lighten the load for thee and thy people.’ So I returned and asked my Lord to make it lighter, and He took away ten. Then I passed Moses again, and he repeated what he had said before, so I returned again, and ten more prayers were taken from me.

But every time I returned unto Moses he sent me back until finally all the prayers had been taken from me except five for each day and night. Then I returned unto Moses, but still he said the same as before; and I said: ‘I have returned unto my Lord and asked Him until I am ashamed. I will not go again.’ And so it is that he who performeth the five in good faith and in trust of God’s bounty, unto him shall be given the meed of fifty prayers.”

What should make the Musalmans ponder over this extraordinary ‘divine encounter’ is that while Moses felt that even a five-prayer regimen is a weighty thing, their prophet, in the first place, didn’t even deem it fit to seek from his Lord any relief for them from the self-defeating, day in and day out burden of fifty prayers a day! Well, would fifty congregational prayers in a twenty-four hour cycle ‘here’ leave any time for them to sire their progeny to carry their faith forward? Even if they were to scrape through the procreative front with their libido, would there be any time left for them for some gainful occupation, so essential ‘here’ for tending their families? Surely it wouldn’t have occurred to Muhammad, as anyway, he was providing his followers their fair share of the ‘spoils of war’ to take care of themselves but how the All-Wise Allah Ta’ala failed to realize that His faithful wouldn’t be able to subsist for long on a daily diet of fifty prayers is the question. They should contrast this with the Hindu path to their gods; the Brahmans shoulder the burden of worship on behalf of their co-religionists to free them from their own religious chores, thereby letting them pursue their temporal endeavors for public good. Whether Brahmans were wise or vainglorious, and / or both may not the point ‘here’.

Be that as it may, it was Moses’ concern for the Musalmans – “the congregational prayer is a weighty thing, and thy people are weak” - and his advice to Muhammad to bring some sense into that abnormal order of their God that saved the day for them all for all times to come. Viewed in this context, the umma should be indebted to Moses, not only for the reduced namaazi burden on them but also for the well-being of Islam itself. Shouldn’t that make a case for the ‘indebted’ believers to concede a little more of His Promised Land to the Jews, Moses’ people!

Well, it’s as if to sustain the ‘five prayers a day’ regimen that Muhammad had continued his campaigns of plunder that satiated the need as well as the greed of his followers, and the Caliphs and the despots, who succeeded him, kept up the precedent set by their God’s own messenger, that is till all that could be plundered from the subdued nations was plundered. Just to cite one example, as a case study, the royal palaces in Hyderabad Deccan and the chest of the Nizam’s family jewels stand in stark contrast to the social backwardness and the abject poverty even of his Musalman subjects in the erstwhile State of His Royal Highness. So it was no wonder that the Nizams were the richest of men in the world well into the middle of the 20th century, when others overtook them with their innovation or enterprise, and / or both. And won’t their famed collection of the priceless jewels give a measure of the poverty into which they had pushed the hapless populace of their vast province?

If only the ‘Fortune 500’ was in compilation in the times of the Muhammadan rule in India, it would have been no surprise that the Muslim Nawabs would have taken the cake, leaving the Hindu Rajas a few crumbs to satiate themselves with. Why for the Muslim parasites Mother India, the Hindu land of milk and honey, became the Islamic paradise ‘here’ itself. And yet, the Musalmans are ever averse to having vande maataram as the Indian national anthem for it would require their veneration of her! What rank ingratitude for a land that contributed to Islam its Musalmans in their millions! But in catering to their Islamic whim, Gandhi’s Congress gave India a national anthem that salutes Sind, a province of the ‘conceded’ Pakistan! What should be India’s objection if its neighbour accuses her of hegemonic designs to set up an Akhand Bharat?

However, while the Quran had revealed how to share the ‘Spoils of War’ and Muhammad had stipulated the ‘Code de Distribution’ of the ransom amongst his followers, Islam has no clue about the generation of wealth. Added to the ingrained Arab belief in their moral right to loot, the religious sanction that Islam accords them to plunder the kafirs might have led the Muhammadan marauders to believe in their divine right to live off the wealth of the idolaters. It is another matter though; that the example set by Muhammad to distribute the loot among the faithful was diluted by the latter-day Sultans of Islam for the Muslim despots of the day to appropriate it all for themselves so as to indulge in a life of vile luxury.

Besides, preoccupied as it is with the ‘Hereafter’, Islam has no time to deal with the nation building ‘here’, and thus the Muslim rulers were at a loss as to how to bring the conquered countries back into economic well-being after their plunder rendered them into wastelands. What with the lands that came under their reign having become unyielding thus, and lacking the old jihadi zeal to embark upon plundering the European kingdoms, in time, the Islamic world sunk into economic decay and dissipation. That was the ‘moment in waiting’ for the West, industrialized in the meantime, for the wholesale colonization of the Muslim world that it coveted for so long. Well where the Christian crusades failed, the Western enterprise succeeded in subjugating the Musalmans!

Continued to "The Number Game"

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