by MANI SHANKAR AIYAR
MJ Akbar’s Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan was reviewed in London’s The Economist within days of its publication in India. It is difficult enough for British authors and publishers to worm their way into the review pages of The Economist; for an Indian author and publisher to do so on the morrow of publication is testimony indeed to Akbar’s high international reputation as much as the international importance of his latest offering.
…
Even more instructively, through the 666 years from 1192 to 1858, when Muslims and Muslims alone sat on the throne of Delhi, such a small part of the subject population adopted or were made to adopt the religion of the ruling class that, as Akbar points out (page 89), the first census of 1872 reported that under a fifth of Indians had taken to the religion of the Muslim ruling class. Nowhere else in the world did centuries of Muslim rule leave Muslims in such a small minority.
It is thus in the Indian Subcontinent that Islam learned to co-exist with other religions. And this profoundly impacted not only the Hindu mindset through the Bhakti Movement, but so significantly also the Indian Muslim mindset that Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the doyen of Aligarh, often considered the intellectual progenitor of Pakistan (in Pakistan), is quoted by Akbar as saying in a famous speech in 1883: “India is home to both of us. We both breathe the same air and take the water of the holy (!) Ganges and Jamuna.” (Page 90)
The exclamation mark is mine. There is no Quranic injunction that makes the waters of the Ganges holy. That is a deeply held Hindu belief. And yet the expression trips so lightly off the lips of a Muslim grandee a thousand years after the advent of Islam on the Subcontinent that one must pause to appreciate the profound impact of the composite intellectual and spiritual traditions of our country, significantly called in Urdu the Ganga-Jamuna tehzib, on both the Hindu and the Muslim mindset—the uniquely Indian synthesis that evolved not in the aftermath of India being declared a secular republic but over a millennium and more of the Hindu-Muslim encounter. It accounts for the ambiguities and inconsistencies, retreats and advances, clarifications and contradictions, in the meandering and tortured course that led from an idea’s early beginnings to the creation of Pakistan half a century later.
Open the Magazine for more