The Invisible Muslim

I wrote this article a few days back for a competition of sorts. A few of you have already read this. I have been trying to think of new, interesting stuff for the blog but I feel strangely inept these days. Ah well. Since I want to continue with a good thing.

I realize that when you read my name at the top of this page, your brain takes special notice-for a second, but it does. No, don't feel guilty. Mine would have, too.

            It’s difficult for me to define my identity under one particular label but yes, Muslim is one which the world around me and I seem to relate to-at least, culturally. Perhaps the markers of the typical Muslim can’t be found in me. I wear skirts, I don’t cover my head or pray five times a day. But I also don’t drink alcohol or eat pork. The black taveez peeping through my collar, the surahs I find myself reciting unconsciously every night before I go to sleep, the way I pronounce kh from my epiglottis and yes, my name-the Muslim in me never leaves me.

Muslim intelligentsia is a shrinking class in today’s India and by virtue of studying in a “fancy’’ college and my above-average understanding of English, I can safely assume myself to be a member of the club and therefore, qualified to make a comment on the socio-cultural understanding of Muslim identity in contemporary India.

People have admitted to feeling uncomfortable talking about politics with me. Discussing Muslim identity is anathema. Their uneasiness is almost comical for me to observe. So often, I have come across friends who go, “It doesn’t matter to me that you are a Muslim, I think of you as any other person.’’ Perhaps, they don’t realize that I don’t mind being seen as one. I don’t want to erase that part of myself. However, I do mind, and vehemently so, if you develop a bias against me for being one. When I passionately declare how much Muslim weddings bore me, a few well-meaning friends are scandalized.
“But you mustn’t say that about your own people.’’

I find it annoying that people find my identity such a taboo, that they never want to engage with or debate on it. But it is not their fault, it is just the manifestation of the counterproductive response that society’s anxiety to paint everyone in one colour, to reassure itself, generates. The rhetoric of “unity in diversity” makes sense only when we acknowledge the diversity. This acknowledgement will make us more sensitive, thoughtful citizens. Maybe then you, my fellow well-meaning, secular Indian, will share my anger at the deliberate mis-representation of Mughal rulers in Hindi TV serials as 'pious' and 'religious' Muslims, proinde 'Islamically ordained' to committing evil and barbaric atrocities or be disgusted at the implicit communalism in your aunt’s statements that go, “Inke yahaan toh aise hi hotey hain sab’’. Only when we learn to celebrate these differences, do we truly understand each other. There is nothing wrong in thinking of me as a Muslim. In fact, accept and appreciate me, in all my distinctness, as one.