Desperately Seeking Paradise

Title: Desperately Seeking Paradise – Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim

Author: Ziauddin Sardar

Publisher: Granta Books, 2004 (First)

ISBN: 9781862077553

Pages: 354

The present-day world is reeling under the monstrosity of Islamic terror. By the term ‘world’, I don’t mean non-Muslims alone. In a sense, the Muslim community pays a far larger price for the misdeeds of a group of youths among them. The world is also astonished at the silence of moderate Muslims in condemning violence of any kind. A fundamental feature of the Orient, of which Islam sprung out in due course, is to be examined here. Individualism is deeply spurned in the East. The individual is just a cog in the society’s wheel. You have to conform to the fads and fancies currently circulating in your tribe or society. Blind obedience to medieval jurisprudence and ideas of religious association are keeping the Muslims from fully integrating themselves with the world society. For this, their individuals and communities has to ‘reclaim agency, which is the right to re-interpret their religious texts according to their time and context’. The author expresses the voice of the moderates, which the world so yearns to hear. Ziauddin Sardar is a London-based scholar of Pakistani origin, an award-winning writer and public intellectual who specializes in Muslim thought. In this book, he brings into focus the big questions facing Muslim individuals and communities and a silhouette of the suggested solutions. These solutions are not fully formed, hence the caveat ‘sceptical’ in the sub-title of the book.

Sardar’s life in Britain truly reflects that of many millions of refugees from Muslim countries who flee from their home states to escape persecution or poverty. The author, likewise, emigrated from Pakistan at a very young age. But once they take root in their adopted European homeland, they become restless at the egalitarian ideology and tolerant spirit of their new domicile, and take fantastic notions of the (laughable) supremacy of Islam into their heads. Some of them take to terrorism, while intellectuals of the writer’s genre attack the system ideologically. Such ungrateful guests eventually turn a heavy burden on Europe’s ordinary peace-loving citizens. The author joined FOSIS, an Islamic organization created for uniting Muslim students in Britain. We expect this association of youngsters to protest against injustices in the world as all ideological student groups tend to do anywhere. But not FOSIS and other Islamic organizations! Their sense of injustice is attuned to wake up only when Muslims are on the losing side. As the book amply indicates, they didn’t protest against the Vietnam war or the suppression of popular revolt in Eastern Europe. Instead, they organized rallies and seminars to remonstrate against the killing of Sayyid Qutb, the chief ideologue of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, the occupation of Palestine in 1967 and even against Hindu – Muslim communal riots that erupted in India in 1969. A common sentiment of the Muslim refugees in Europe is the wishful longing for the (supposed) former glory of the Muslim empires and its revival. One wonders why did they leave their Muslim states behind in the first place! But Sardar quickly saw through the charades of Jamaat e-Islami of Pakistan and the Muslim Brotherhood as their ‘pre-packaged unwisdom’ repulsed him.

Unable to blend with the British society that offered his family shelter, livelihood and a future to look forward to, the author courted many religious groups like Tabligh and mystics like Sufi practitioners. But everywhere, dissolution of one’s self and total submission to the preceptor was a precondition. Such authoritarianism was couched in elegant phrases like ‘purify the soul from impurities such as cynicism and cleanse the mind of doubt and sarcasm’. Observance of religious practices was a quid pro quo with the almighty for attaining paradise. Such an outlook naturally precludes a multiplicity of teachers for one individual. If one thought differently, either he should remain silent, or create a new religious order. Such strife was fairly common from the birth of Islam itself. Three of the four rightly-guided caliphs were assassinated as also eleven out of the twelve imams of Shiism. Such feuds extended into interpretations of theology and jurisprudence as well. Imam Shafi, who was the founder of the Shafi school of thought (one among the four principal schools) was beaten to death by the followers of Imam Malik, who expounded the Maliki school of thought (also one among the four principal schools). Sufism is touted as a syncretic system more in tune with the cosmopolitan spirit of the modern world. The book hints that Sufism involves much more surrender, as one of its dictum is that ‘there is too much information in the head of young seekers. You must empty your mind of all that you know’ (p.64). Any kind of individuality is shunned and sheepish accompaniment of the master is praised as seen in the example of the author’s own brother. He became the disciple of a Sufi teacher and resigned his job as an economist on the advice of the teacher to take up the position as a carpenter in order to work with his own hands, whose worth was extolled by the spiritual guide. He accepted a wife chosen by the teacher and submitted fully to the order, finally ending up in economic ruin. However, this episode convinced the author that mysticism was deeply flawed and that Sufism does not produce a viable, equitable social order. In the wide travels Sardar had made, he came across the tomb and life story of Mulla Nasruddin Hodja and longs that Muslims everywhere need a character like him to lean against, someone who can point out the absurdities of their situation, someone they can believe and laugh with (p.82). Readers are astonished at the shortsightedness of the author here. All people, not just Muslims, need such a character as Hodja! Sardar is painfully obsessed with Muslim concerns alone. If such is the worldview of the most educated among them, one can only recoil in horror at the ideology of the uneducated bigots!

The difficult and troublesome synthesis of the westernized Muslims to their adopted homeland has long been an issue of serious repercussions in Europe, on account of the participation of such people in heinous terrorist acts. Sardar remarks that Muslims seek liberation from the tyranny of the West and such notions as modernity and secularism. For them, the West is sheer evil – moderates grudgingly tolerate it, hardliners attack it physically. Isn’t it amazing to contemplate why then did they leave their Shariah-ruled home countries to seek refuge in the West? Once their hunger is sated, their need for a shelter is met and they find a living – all with the welfare benefits provided by Western nations – the refugees change colour and longs for Shariah! The author does not have a very high opinion of Shariah, as he states that it is not god-ordained, and made draconian by its oppressive treatment of women and minorities, its emphasis on extreme punishments and its fixation with ossified jurisprudence (p.217). His firm conviction is that acquiring all the trappings of modernity merely leaves the Muslim ummah going round in circles, but getting nowhere. Sardar denounces extremism in no uncertain terms. Islamic fundamentalism is said to be the idea of a state, rather than a god-centred life and thought.

So, what is the real problem the Muslims encounter in blending seamlessly to their adopted Western societies? If you read between the lines of the book, the answer is crystal clear – an overarching superiority complex! For reasons incomprehensible to rational minds, Muslims consider their religion to be at the pinnacle of religious thought and action and looks down on others. Muslims live across national boundaries in the world, but consider themselves to belong to a supra-national assembly called ummah. We see well-settled men getting deeply troubled by minor incursions in Palestine or Chechnya, where the local Muslims suffer a reverse. Even intellectuals harbour this trans-national allegiance which obfuscates the truth that Islam is going on under a fossilized tradition and religious obscurantism. The author never mentions even a single point that affected the British society, even though he had lived there for six decades! He remembers that he is British only when he courts with trouble in Iran, Saudi Arabia or Turkey where they treated him as only a Pakistani. At the first whiff of the slightest threat, out pops the British passport and indignant cries of maltreating a British citizen! A notable feature of Muslim intellectual organizations as seen in the book is the rich source of funds originating in the Middle East that can be used for propaganda or conversions. The 1970s oil crisis had made the gulf states immensely rich. There was no dearth of resources for the author’s many experiments, flowing in from Iran or Saudi Arabia.

The book is concise summary of the social position of a Muslim intellectual in western societies. His numerous travels crisscrossing the Muslim world has helped to bring to light the dilemmas and concerns of those societies. It is a record of the constant striving of the intellectuals to find a way in which Islam can be configured for the modern world and optimizing it to interface smoothly with modernity, science and secularism. The diction is easy on the reader and the personal experiences are narrated with a hearty sense of humour. However, some inferences of the author should be thought of as taking advantage from hindsight. Sardar describes about meeting Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in the 1980s in a conference of the Afghan Mujahideen and how he was shocked by the cold light in his eyes when he shut off the avenues of compromise one by one. He was also stunned by the fanatic spirit of students in a madrassah run by the Haqqania network in Pakistan. The book is gifted with a comprehensive index.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star