Arun Shourie Quotes

Several groups have several reasons for manufacturing calumny - from money to idelogy to the crassest kind of politics. Many of these are well-organized, some, as we shall see, have well-knit, world-wide networks. And they have honed expertise in manufacturing atrocity-stories, in broadcasting them round the globe, and in putting their manufactures to profitable use. (13)

Then we have our seedy Leftists busy abusing each other. And finally we have the liberals - busy rearranging furniture on the deck of theTitanic, nay busy holding seminars about rearranging furniture on the deck of the Titanic.

Not an enforced amnesia but an unsparing memory - that is what will build a nation.

First, our scholars have not spared time for this vital material for the same reason on account of which they have not spared time for other things vital to our existence as a country. Most of the intellectual work in India consists in writing footnotes to work being done in the West—this has been so in the case of Marxist intellectuals even more than it is in the case of the others. And when our intellectuals are not engaged in writing these footnotes, they are busy following the fashion of the day in Western circles, busy ‘applying’, as the phrase goes, to Indian material the notion or ‘thesis’ which has become fashionable in the West. In a word, our scholarly work is derivative. So the first reason there has been no substantial study of the fatwas in India is that they have not yet caught the eye of the West.

The earth is stationary. The sun revolves around it. The stars are stationary, hung as lamps by Allah to guide travellers, and to stone the Devil. To believe anything contrary to all this is to betray The Faith. Men are the masters. Each may keep up to four wives at a time and as many concubines ‘as the right hand holds’. The wives are fields which the husband may or may not ‘irrigate’ as he will. The husband can bind them to obeying his merest whim on pain of being divorced. If he is still not satisfied, he can throw them out with one word. Upon being thrown out they are to be entitled to bare sustenance—but only for three months, and nothing at all beyond that. To see any inequity in this, to demand anything more for the women is to question the wisdom of Allah, it is to strike at Islam. To urinate while standing, to fail to do istinja in the prescribed way, to fail to believe that the saliva of a dog is napaak and his body paak—these are grave sins. To ask for the well-being of a kafir, be he ever so saintly, even upon his death, to fail to believe that a Muslim, be he ever so sinful, is better than a kafir, be the latter ever so virtuous, is kufr itself. Such is the mindset of the ulema. It pervades their rulings on all aspects of life.

With elections upon them, the DMK and its allies announced in Tamil Nadu that, once in office, they will bring forth legislation to give reservations to Muslims and Christians.

The legacy of Narayan Guru is a society elevated, in accord, the lower castes educated and full of dignity and a feeling of self-worth. The legacy of Ambedkar is a bunch screaming at everyone, a bunch always demanding and denouncing, a bunch mired in self-pity and hatred, a society at war with itself. The legacy of Narayan Guru is a country rejuvenated. The legacy of Ambedkar is a country with a deepened sense of shame in its entire past. And thereby further disabled.

The fatwas reflect this belief in double standards. The differential attitude to conversion and apostasy illustrates this vividly. Islam regards it as a right and duty to convert persons from other religions. The ulema vehemently insist on it....Exactly the same position holds in regard to doing something or refraining from doing something out of regard for the other person’s religious sentiments.....An even more vivid instance is the stance in regard to the continuation of religious practices. It is the right and duty of a Muslim to carry on his religious rituals. ...Under no circumstances can the Islamic ruler give permission to kafirs to continue their religious rites, declares the Fatawa-i-Rizvia, and asks: shall he permit them to practise their kufr and thereby himself become a kafir?...It adds that there are several Hadis to the effect that no non-Muslim should remain in the Arab island...So, no non-Muslim shall be allowed to stay in the Arab island, but if a Bangladeshi who has entered India illegally is asked to leave, that is an assault on Islam!...Similarly, even today in no Islamic state can teachers in a school impart religious education of their faith to non-Muslim children...No restriction can be tolerated on teaching of the Quran and on religious instruction, declares Kifayatullah. ...And yet if we were to go by secularist discourse there is no religion which has abolished distinctions as Islam has, there is no religion which treats all equally as Islam does!

Upon going through the text the reader will notice how completely contrary to the facts are the cliches which are bandied about in public discourse in India, and which as a consequence so many have by now internalised.... (x)

Is an institution the Indian history course of which covers only the period from the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi to 1947, the geography course of which focuses on the Arabian peninsula, an institution of and for India?

But there is an even more potent cause for the near total erasure of such material from our public discourse and our instruction. And that is the form of “secularism” which we have practised these forty-five years: a “secularism” in which double-standards have been the norm, one in which everything that may remove the dross by which our national identity has been covered has become anathema.

The situation thus is as follows: the ones who have dominated and controlled and terrorised public discourse for half a century in India are now bereft of facts, of arguments. The evidence is available to anyone who has access to their internal ‘dialogues’ – they are talking to narrower and narrower circles; and in these ever-shrinking circles, they are just repeating the old cliches, there is not a new idea, there is not a new fact. And that is predictable, as we have seen: regurgitating those nostrums of the theory is not just necessary, it is sufficient.

“We should, in particular the Muslim liberal should speak the whole truth about the condition of Muslim society—for instance about the plight of women within it. And not flinch from tracing it back to its roots—the text, the laws, the ways of thinking. We should document the social practice of the Ulema [Muslim religious leaders] and of the fundamentalist politicians.…We should document what the Ulema etc. have been saying and decreeing on religious issues themselves.…We must, in particular the Muslim liberal must, take the consistently secular position on every matter—that is the only way to confront the fundamentalists, it is the surest way to bring home the alternative viewpoint to the community.…Fatwas and the rest which impinge upon the civil rights of a person are manifestly a criminal infringement of law; we should show them up as such; and join others in demanding that anyone who seeks to trample upon the rights of others by using…fatwas should be brought to book under the law. Similarly, we must expose, and work to thwart concessions by our opportunist politicians which are meant to appease, and will in the end strengthen the grip of these reactionary elements.…But it is not going to be enough to counter the Ulema, and their networks, or to show up their syllabi. As we have seen, what they proclaim, and regurgitate, and enforce is what the Koran and Hadith prescribe. Therefore, to really break the vice, liberals, and liberal Muslims in particular must examine and exhume the millenarian claims of Islam: the claims that there is only one truth, that it has been finally revealed to only one man, that it is enshrined in only one Book, that that Book is very difficult to comprehend, that the select few alone know its inner meaning, that therefore it is everyone's duty to heed them just as it is the duty of the select to make sure that everyone heeds them. In a word, the basic texts themselves have to be opened to examination.” (quoted in Bostom, A. G. (2015). Sharia versus freedom: The legacy of Islamic totalitarianism.)

Predictably, in Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan’s reckoning the Shias are not Muslims at all. Their ‘mosques’ are not mosques—and remember, as Mir Baqi and his descendants, the mutwallis of the mosque were Shias, the ‘Babri masjid’ was a Shia mosque.

And yet I find in the majority judgement a fatal innocence... The judgement quotes the proclamations from the Rig, Yajur and Atharva Vedas - about all human beings being one, about their being the children of the same Mother-Earth, about the yearnings that all of use be friends. But it does not note that less than a mile from its building volumes upon volumes of fatwas are being sold and distributed which exhort Muslims never to trust Kafirs, never to allow them into their confidence; which tell them that their first duty and allegiance is to their religion and not to sundry laws... It is not Gandhiji who needs to be convinced that Ishwar and Allah ar one. It is not Guru Gobind Singh who needs to be convinced that mandir and masjid, Puran and Quran are one. The ones who need to be convinced that they are one - say, the ulema, or the Shahi Iman... - have it as an article of faith that they are not one.