Religious vilification is disrespect, not disagreement

What Nupur Sharma blurted out a few days back has not been asked for the first time. The marital life of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) has always been put under high scrutiny by the critics of Islam who have every now and then raised allegations that are deemed blasphemous by the Muslim world.

When a law graduate from the London School of Economics, after gaining years of political experience in a country that is home to a dozen religions, is seen lowering herself in hatred towards Islam, this shows how a highly educated politician can have such ill-informed opinions.

A similar attempt was made in the first quarter of 20^th century when Rajpal & Sons published a blasphemous booklet in response to a Muslim faction abusing Hindu ideology’s goddess Sita. Protests, murder attempts followed which culminated in a young boy Ilm-ud-Din finally assassinating Mahashe Rajpal, the publisher, in Lahore. Ilm-ud-Din is revered to date, and many have followed and want to follow his lead and decimate all the elements harbouring the potential to blaspheme against Islam.

The lesser known yet the more effective reply to the booklet at that time, however, was a book named Muqaddas Rasool written to address all the questions raised in the blasphemous booklet. Though it can still be procured from internet and bookshops, the tendency to reciprocate idiocy with extremism indicates that human race is incapable of discerning dissent with disrespect. In fact, we have been unable to grasp a simple concept that dissent is not a mandate for disrespect.

Boycotting Indian goods is a collective response shown by Muslim countries around the world and can prove to be effective if we are only concerned with receiving short-lived apologies and sacking the mouths that blasphemed this time, but it would not guarantee that such incidents won’t happen in the future.

Such allegations have been and will continue to be made until scholars of our faith join heads and prepare such answers that are factually correct, comprehensive, conducive and consolidated.

Pandit Chamupati, Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Nupur Sharma along with many others have questioned the nature of the marriage of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) to his youngest wife, Mother Aisha. They have seen it through the lens of modern perspective in which feminism, independence, freedom to choose and consent are engraved. Yes, they have enough knowledge to know Mother Aisha’s age when she got married and when the marriage was consummated, but their knowledge, like their opinions, is insubstantial.

How many of the critics know that consent of the bride was held in high regard even at that time and the marriage under discussion was announced with consent of both the parties? How many of them know about the fruit this marriage bore in the form of fundamentals and practices of the religion being conveyed through young mind, sharp memory and articulate accounts of Mother Aisha, which was one of the main purposes behind the marriage?

How many of the critics are aware of old Arab traditions that include early marriages and polygamy? How many of them realise the fact that Islam, despite giving space to some traditions of the region in which it sprouted, does not compel Muslims of different regions and times to mandatorily follow each of it?

Has Geert Wilders forgotten about the notorious practice of the Western world known as slavery which was abolished by Islam many decades before the United States did it in 1865? Does Nupur Sharma need to be reminded of how her own religion prescribes burning of widows on the pyres of their husbands and how this brutal practice called sati had been in practice in India for several decades? Have the critics of Islam neglected a simple reality that Islam promulgated freedom and independence for women and their right to consent when the region it began in was burying girl children alive?

If all these allegations have to be addressed once and for all, this is the right time to sit together and answer them. Otherwise every other decade will see an apparently educated Nupur Sharma jabbering uneducated opinions, inciting a mob ready to avenge in the name of blasphemy.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 13^th, 2022.

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