It is unfortunate that some elements of the media want to
peddle the view of the Indian Muslim community as a homogeneous entity flirting
with terrorism, steeped in fundamentalism, struggling with a perpetual
victimhood complex, and eager for handouts. The truth is that there are all colours
of Muslims from the very pious to the agnostic to the atheistic and even within
these divisions there are so many shades in between that defy definition. The most
religious Muslim necessarily need not be the one flaunting a skull cap or a
Burqa. There are quieter modes of devotion and every spiritual Muslim does not
wear his heart on his sleeve. Such subtleties are entirely lost when we
constantly create group identities and cease to see the individual.
Now, I have very little knowledge about the post-Partition
mentality of North Indian Muslims but hailing from Kerala and that too from a
middle-class milieu and dedicated to Allah, I have usually found a number of
both the older and younger generation of Malayali Muslims to be unburdened by a
negative Muslim identity (at least the ones I have seen in my life). The idea
of “Indian Muslim” as a separate entity at odds with mainstream India is a
bogey that only rises with the occasional advent of religious riots or
terrorism. If a woman can at once be a mother and a wife, I don’t see why a
devout Muslim can also not be a patriotic Indian. Thus as far as the many Malayali Muslims that
I know are concerned, being simultaneously Indian, Malayali and Muslim without
any of these identities usurping the importance of the other is their natural state
irrespective of whether they are clean shaven and shorts-clad or bearded and
lungi-clad.
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