Wahabism in Islam 2

Similarities between Wahhabism and Sangh

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Apparently comparing the Sangh to Wahhabism may upset you as it is a comparison of a small model to a larger model but it is at the level of ideology, not on performance. If you assess it minutely, then you will understand, but for that, you will have to come out of your prejudices.

You go straight to the point that ‘Wahhabism is equal to terrorism’ but Wahhabism is an ideology, and terrorists may be of this ideology but they themselves are not the whole ideology. You can understand this with an example in a simple way.

Saudi Arabia promotes Wahhabism all over the world. The Crown Prince of that Arabia is Muhammad bin Salman and when he comes to India, the hero of your firebrand Hindutva welcomes him in a grand style. Do you even think for a second that how our Hindu icon is embracing him?

Obviously, you must have seen it as its outer face, that the heads of the two nations are meeting and talking… while as the inner face the two fundamentalist advocates of uniformity were meeting with each other. This is the similarity.

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For the spread of ideology, this outer-inner face theory is necessary. When Islam was spread, the outer face was put forward that was accepting each integrating culture with a warm heart. It was the stage of up-gradation and when it was completed, then they started a campaign to go back to the era of fourteen hundred years back by resetting the system.

The Sangh is still going through the initial phase of this up-gradation. It participates in riots in 1984 against Sikhs as well as against Muslims in 2000, but it also has wings like ‘Rashtriya Muslim Manch’ and ‘Rashtriya Sikh Sangat’. It will make Modi Prime minister and Yogi a chief minister those are considered as the hero of right-wing people on the basis of Muslim hatred and will also claim that Muslims are also our brothers.

Right now it is flexible in the outer face, but when it will get hold of all the states, all constitutional, non-constitutional institutions along with the centre, then perhaps there will be no freedom to insult Rama in the south, nor to deny the deities of north India, nor the tribal groups will be allowed to worship their gods. Tribes, Lingayat, Periyars, Ambedkarwadi will be their special target (there may be special provision for heretics) and then they will also give two options to either become like us or become ‘Gauri Lankesh’. They might give two options to the heretics or limit them to the only option in the name of centuries-old revenge… that is death.

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Up-gradation and resetting

The only difference between the two ideologies is that the up-gradation of Islam has been completed and it is in the reset mode in the form of Wahhabism, while the up-gradation of the Sangh has just begun.

You talk about the similarity between the Sangh and Wahhabism and any Hindu who has a soft corner for the Sangh will immediately argue against it with multiple examples that the Sangh is a cultural organization that accepts all the beliefs and gives freedom to follow what you believe. He will immediately deny the person or gang who has taken any violent action to be a part of it. If you will connect Wahhabism with terrorism, the person who has a soft corner for Wahhabism will immediately explain the same Quranic verses and Hadiths from a liberal and humanitarian perspective on which these terrorist organizations form their foundation… and he will also reject them from Islam immediately.

These two are sailing in the same boat, who deny the inner face of these ideologies in the fascination of their outer face, simply because they have a soft corner for them. However, unlike Muslims, a large section of this right-wing ideology also openly accepts this inner face and justifies it by calling it a reaction to action.

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But the victims of the reaction are not actually responsible for that action, rather they are the initiators of the reaction of that reaction in some way. However, this chain of action and reaction drag the society towards that direction where no one’s life remains safe. Many Islamic countries are living examples of this and if we do not show a comprehensive understanding in this regard, then we will be the next in this sequence.

Now let us see how the current era of terrorism got mixed with this global ideology that gives new dimensions to bigotry. Because after the initial phase, it has now included political interest and greed for power once again… You cannot give Al-Shabaab of East Africa, Boko Haram of West Africa or Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh a different identity than this.

Apart from these, organisations like Taliban, Al Qaeda, Sipah-e Sahaba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Al Khidmat Foundation, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, IS are also the bearers of the same ideology those are constantly playing bloody games. It cannot be denied that in its background you will also find those capitalist powers those not only encourage every such possible struggle with Muslims at its one end but also provide money and weapons to fulfil their political or economic interests. The root of the alliance between America and Al Saud is that this radical Islamic ideology serves many of its political and economic interests.

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A youth gets caught in the trap for two reasons. Either he himself has been a victim of such atrocities those are found in abundance in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria or Kashmir. As an Indian, you may find it difficult to digest about Kashmir, but this is the truth… or he is a person who struggles with poverty, unemployment, starvation and gets a salary to fight like this.

When both such people come in contact with them, they are brainwashed saying that their fight is ‘jihad’ in which even death is martyrdom from the perspective of Islam. You will enter into Jannat after death and killing the kafirs is not a crime… The verses that the alims here explain in other ways are applied to those youths in their own style and from a pure Islamic point of view, only those interpretations are right. They get the desired results as the person becomes ready to fire indiscriminately on the streets, becomes a suicide bomber, agrees to run a truck over the crowd.

Obviously, there can be many reasons for terrorism, but where the fight of other communities against oppressiveness or exploitation is never given a religious identity, the fight of Muslims, irrespective of the cause, is always connected with the religion because it has a global appeal… because it has the scope of getting support and cooperation of like-minded immediately.

This way or that… however, it is a fight to colour the whole world in the Wahhabi ideology. It acknowledges oneness and what is outside it is worthless. This ideology is a direct attack on the diverse inclusive culture that we have been accustomed to see. The beauty of a garden is only when there are flowers of every variety in it… If there is only one variety then it no longer remains a garden, it becomes like a farm. Wahhabism is an ideology that transforms the garden of Islam into a farm.

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How can you fight bigotry

Now the question is how to fight it… If we talk only in the context of India then the right-wing ideology of reaction to action to fight this is more problem creating. In Godhra, if some of the fanatic Muslims will burn the rail coach, the angry Hindus of Gujarat will kill more than two thousand Muslims in response who were not guilty of the incident. Then, the kith and kin of the victims of this massacre, will take up weapons and form an ‘Indian Mujahideen’. Outside the country, the merchants of death are ready with money and weapons to grab such angry youth.

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And then they will explode bombs… You will react again, and this series will continue… In this way, a state of anarchy will remain. In such a situation, hardcore Hindus compare it with Rohingya. The Rohingya belong to Myanmar where no one is interested but India is a superpower and many countries are interested in it… If there will be opportunities to destabilize it, then big countries will be interested in it. If the situation worsens here, it will become difficult to handle. Violence in the name of reaction cannot be a solution to fight this ideology.

For this, not only governmental but also social efforts will have to be made. Some steps should be initiated by the government and some by the people and institutions that have knowledge of all this… The goal should be freedom from the bigotry that pushes a person to take up arms in some weak moments. There is definitely a big section of hardcore Indian Muslims, but they are still not inclined towards this so-called ‘jihad’ at all… and efforts should be made to prevent this happen in future.

Even mentioning ‘jihad’ should be banned, no matter how lenient its interpretation as ‘jihad al-nafs’ is. Religious institutions should be monitored by the government. Madrasas should be made the centre of modern education and religious education should be introduced only when the child becomes a little mature. The influence of religious teachings from childhood pushes the child closer to Saudi Arabia than to India.

At the social level, the beauty of diversity over uniformity should be explained in majlis, meetings, events, etc. The importance and acceptance of inclusive culture should be emphasised… and this is not a difficult task. Education alone is not enough for Muslim youth but they should also be encouraged to develop an understanding of how to coordinate with other cultures and that they need to be tolerant to such an extent that nothing is beyond criticism. Neither God nor his prophets and nor religious books.

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Move away from the model of Ibn Taymiyya, Abd al Wahhab, Maulana Maududi and insist on accepting all the firqas found in India in the name of Islam along with their culture, customs, traditions, etc. as part of Islam… instead of declaring them kafir, mushrik, munafiq, Khariji, Rafzi, etc., then this fanaticism will be reduced itself. People need to understand that they are Indians, not Saudi Arabian and they need to look like Indians and not Arabic.

And this measure is only effective in India because the Muslims here are different from the Muslims of the rest of the world in many ways… It is difficult to suggest any remedy for the rest of the world. Either they will fight with each other like Pakistan, Afghanistan, or will be destroyed like Syria, Iraq by falling prey to the selfishness of America, Russia, Britain, Israel etc. because… it is the real Islam.

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Wahabism in Islam 1

Wahhabism is dangerous for other cultures

Though Islam has originated from Semitic, if you will go through the history, where it was a social reform movement in the early stage, it turned into a purely political movement after the demise of its founder Muhammad Sahab, where Muslim groups were fighting amongst themselves for power. All the battles that Rashidun Caliphate, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid or the Ottoman Empire fought and conquered princely states were aimed to achieve power and not to do the religious propaganda… But in spite of this, there were a large number of conversions and large populations got converted into Islamic structure.

But the point to understand here is that the definition of Islam that was created in the light of the Hadiths and Quran was appropriate for a certain geographical area but it was not suitable to integrate all the cultures outside of Arabia those embraced Islam but also maintained their own existences. You can understand this better by keeping your own country as a model rather than understanding this through any other region.

People in India were largely Hindus but were divided into castes/sub-castes and many of their customs were there since ages. They did adopt Islam, but still did not abandon those customs, traditions and brought them into Islam itself. You can find many traditions in Jat, Rajput Muslim societies that have no connection with Islam. Those who believed in the tradition of the gurus started following pirs… Those who had the habit of bowing before the idols started worshipping mausoleums.

This happened in almost all countries with their own cultural identity. They incorporated their cultural identity, their customs, traditions into Islam and it got a distinct identity as Sufi Islam. It was a series connecting human with human, which had a rapid impact from Turkey, Arab, Iran to India… The rituals associated with it were due to the integration of other cultures where people linked their ancestral traditions with Islam.

Whatever bloodshed by the Muslims in that period was done, was a result of power hunger but it had got nothing to do with that Islamic fundamentalism, perverted form of which we now see as extremism or terrorism. There was also an era when the Arabic language was dominated, Baghdad was called the centre of knowledge. The supremacy of the Arabic world over the knowledge was similar to that of the West today.

The tenth-century vizier Ibn Abbad had more than a lac books when there were not so many books in all libraries across Europe. Baghdad alone had thirty major research centres of scientific knowledge. In addition to Baghdad, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Damascus, Mosul, Tous and Nishapur were major centres of learning in the Arabic world and Islam was established in a different form.

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In India, at that time the Quran was confined to the Arabic language, which people used to read from the perspective of sawab, and the Hadiths had absolutely nothing to do much with ordinary people. Few Hadiths with good messages were sometimes used to be recited in mosques on Fridays or on Shab e Qadr… or there used to be events like ijtema and Milad among women where they used to recite some good Hadiths.

That is, the issues like shirk, biddat, etc. were on a very small and almost negligible scale and the majority of the Muslim population was living unaware of these in their own way. Integrating different cultures and traditions, Muslims had many faiths like Shia, Hanafi, Maliki, Saifi, Jafari, Baqaria, Basharia, Khalafia, Hanbali, Zahiri, Ashri, Muntazili, Murzia, Matroodi, Ismaili, Bohra, Ahmadiyya, etc. keeping their own identity while Deobandis, who claim purity, were also accepting this cultural diversity despite living with the identity of that ideology.

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Concept of pure Arabic Islam

This pure Arabic Islam was conceptualized by Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab (1703–1792) who started destroying the beautiful and progressive traditions that were developing within Islam. All those rituals, customs, traditions first began to be recognized as shirk and biddat in the light of the Quran and Hadiths and Islam was given such a narrow form that there should be no scope for any kind of freedom, openness and communion.

Abd al Wahhab, taking the initiative to eliminate whatever is outside the purview of the Quran and Hadith, declared the killing of every mushrik and plundering their property as halal and for this, he prepared an army of 600 people and deployed them in the name of jihad everywhere. He started killing people of all types of Islamic beliefs. He only kept propagating his ideology and whosoever refused to accept him was killed and their property was robbed. He personally attacked the tomb of the famous Islamic thinker Zaid ibn al Khattab and demolished it himself.

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He started attacking the Mazars and targeted Sufism. During this time he entered into an agreement with Muhammad bin Saud. Muhammad bin Saud was the ruler of Diriyyah and possessed both wealth and army. Together, both of them started using swords as well as modern weapons. The agreement of these two made it easy to reach out to remote areas to impose their ideology and destroy other faiths.

The burning of all books related to other faiths became a passion for Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab. Along with this, he issued another disgusting order to demolish all the Sufi Mazars, mausoleums or tombs and make urinals there. Saudi Arabia, a nation based on the Wahhabi faith apparently, continued the tradition of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab and for that reason the burial cemetery with the nabi and his family there was also destroyed. Al-Mukarramah, a part of the Kaaba was also demolished for the same reason…

The distorted form of jihad that we see today is originated of this concept. And it was not only started forcibly but also started as a mass awareness campaign where those Quranic verses and the Hadiths were widely disseminated with meanings that could be used to separate all those things as shirk and biddat from Islam, that were not related to the original form of Islam. Gradually, this ideology began to engulf all Muslim countries that were leading happy lives with their mixed cultures.

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You can see the changes under Erdogan’s leadership in Turkey. You can understand the changing form of Bangladesh living with a Hindu-Bengali culture from the writings of Taslima Nasrin. In Pakistan, Jinnah and Iqbal, who used to be considered as Pakistan’s builders and respectable figures, are being targeted by the new generation of Pakistanis because of things like Ahmadiyya, Khoja, pork, wine in the same way in which Gandhi is to new nationalists in India. To see this change in India look around, look at the Jat, Rajput Muslim societies of Western UP, Haryana, Rajasthan.

Wahhabism has been playing with the history of Islam, beliefs, mutual harmony and co-existence of identities. Hitler adopted the idea of racial purity as one identity, one type of people, one kind of thinking, one book from Wahhabism itself. Expelling firqas other than Wahhabism from Islam and their slaughter was justified. People of other religions were even declared wajib-ul-qatl (mandatory to kill) and the plunder of their property and the conversion of their women was justified. Pakistan and Bangladesh became their favourite playgrounds.

How this idea of ​​oneness is fatal to an inclusive and diverse society, you can understand it from the model of the Sangh, that wants to impose their ‘model of Hindutva’ equally on the whole of India with diverse cultures… Can tribals of Northeast, other tribal societies and Hindu societies of the south reconcile with the model in which ‘Rama’ is an ideal and superior God? Can the Ram Mandir movement of Hindi belt inspire the whole country? Can a cow be revered as the mother of all Indian people? If not, then is it reasonable to impose this on them…? Wahhabism also has the same track.

The Sangh has one or two countries with a Hindu population but the Wahhabis have a large number of countries as well as countries like Saudi promoting this ideology have huge money and scholars like Zakir Nayak as their brand ambassadors. The thinking of a new nationalist Indian about Gandhi and a newly nationalist Pakistani about Jinnah and Iqbal is the same, that they do not match their ‘model’.

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Maulana Maududi and Jamaat-e-Islami

The interpretation of Islam that was made by Ibn Taymiyya in the fourteenth century was later turned into a comprehensive campaign in the eighteenth century by Abd al Wahhab and despite disagreements on some points, Maulana Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami spread it in the Indian territory in his own way.
There were mainly four firqas in Islam as Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi and Maliki that were formed following the Imams, having many firqas within them but Sunni from all over India (pre-independence British India) belong to Hanafi firqa those got divided into Deobandi and Barelvi firqas in the nineteenth century following Ashraf Ali Thanwi and Ahmed Raza Khan.

The Arabs place themselves in the Hanbali firqa, while the people of the Middle East and Africa belong to the Shafi and Maliki firqas, but all of them are Sunnis (Shias are completely different from them) and have three ideologies as Salafi, Wahhabi and Ahl e Hadith prevalent among them… In terms of bigotry, you can place Ahl e Hadith, Wahhabi and Salafi from bottom to top. Salafi and Wahhabi don’t even consider other followers of Islam as Muslims.

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Maududi had spread this ideology in the Indian territory, and growing rapidly that has now reached the stage where you can see this change around you in the educated, modern-day Muslim (Deobandi) youths in the form of ankle-length pyjamas, beard, etc. Barelvi society is against all this.

There are two faces of this ideology… The one that has created a variety of organizations and has waged a war in the name of ‘jihad’ that will last until the whole world is coloured as they like and the other face that cleverly defends all those things with logic, on the basis of which these jihadi groups are flourishing.

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It is an art of changing oneself, defending one’s evils and flaws… The same way as the Sangh, that considers the concept of a Hindu nation as an ideal, has transformed itself into a cultural organization that makes the temple of Lord Rama in north India an issue to bring the BJP to the power, on the other hand, it teams up with the Periyar supporters in the south who curse Rama, at the same time it gets moulded to convince Lingayats who abuse the deity gods of north India.

It can also support mob lynching in the name of cow slaughter in north India and converts itself in some way to stand with the population eating it in the northeast or south. Flexibility is necessary for the spread of any ideology and they also know this. Therefore, to fit that which cannot be adjusted with the original idea, other ancillary organisations or armies are formed, that may look different from the outer side but have the same roots and from integrating the opposing idea to ‘shoot’ or ‘blast’, they do all the jobs well.

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