The majority of Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent live in denial of their origins, says Pakistani journalist Wusatullah Khan.
It’s a sort of ‘Extra Subcontinental Ethnic Syndrome,’ a condition that neither allows them to respect themselves nor be respected by others, he writes in an Urdu column posted on Humsub.com on 29 Oct. 2017.
Their cure lies in making a collective effort to rid themselves of this Syndrome by learning to take pride in their real identities, writes the Karachi-based journalist.
The following is my English translation of Wusatullah Khan’s column, a very insightful piece.
The parenthesized-italicized glosses are mine.
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http://www.humsub.com.pk/81786/wusatullah-khan-199/
Who are we?
By Wusatullah Khan
Fifteen hundred years before Christ, when the Aryans of Central Asia began to spread into Europe and western and southern Asia, they became people of the places they settled in.
The Aryans became Slavic and German in Europe, Irani in Asia, and Hindu in southern Asia.
As against the Aryans, the Jews of the Semitic race, being God’s pampered people, don’t care much about anybody even today despite three and a half millennia of unsettledness.
Over this time period, they have, however, been able to develop a constituency that believes that a Jew is first and foremost a Jew and then something else, no matter what country he lives in.
So a Jew hailing from anywhere in the world can settle in Israel – as well as move out at will and, having moved out, return at will.
The Arabs, another Semitic kind, have shown a similar state of mind. They were affected by Arab hubris before the advent of Islam and failed to rid themselves of that discriminatory state of mind after the birth of Islam.
Keep in mind that Arab identity is as much Syrian and Egyptian as it is Saudi; an Arab is as much a Palestinian and Lebanese Christian as he is a Muslim.
And an Arab is as much an Iraqi Shia as he is a Kuwaiti Sunni.
The Chaush, who first came to India from Yemen to work as military men for Deccan’s Osmania sultanate, may engage in a lot of ‘batan’ (talk), but their eighth generation continues to see Yemen in their dreams 250 years after the original migration.
Fourteen hundred years after Khutbah Hajjatul Wida (the farewell sermon of prophet of Islam), the Arabs continue to view the world as divided between the ‘Arabi’ (meaning ‘articulate’ and ‘eloquent’) and the ‘Ajmi’ (meaning ‘alien’ and ‘inarticulate’).
And the Arabs who deny having such a mentality take no more than 10 minutes of prodding to show you who they think they are (and who they think you are).
It’s not just about Arabs. A Berber of the Sahara or the Bilali Muslim of Nigeria, or the baptized son of a South Sudanese Christian, for instance, will rather sell himself but not his African identity.
As for southern Asia, the Bengalis, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, trace their roots only in Bengal; they take as much pride in being son of the soil as they do in being Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist.
The same can be said about the Malays and Indonesians. Whatever be their faith, they are certain that their life and death is closely linked to their own ‘bhoomi’; that their ancestors might have come from somewhere centuries ago is of no consequence to them.
But who are the Muslims of southern Asia (excluding Bengal)?
If they belong to this land, why do they look outside?
And if they belong elsewhere, why don’t the people of those lands acknowledge them as their own?
For how long are the Muslims of southern Asia going to be lost in the wilderness of identity? When will their spirits find repose?
When will their hearts and minds understand as to what soil they originally belong to?
Some people find answer to this quandary in Allama Iqbal’s works, but tend to forget that pan-Islamism of the writer of Tarana-e-Hindi was born of possible political unity and not racial pride.
When I look around, I find very few Muslims who say they belong here and who are not proud of looking for their identity outside.
Consider this: How many, at the most, of Turk, Pathan, Persian, Kurd, and Caucasian soldiers, noblemen, dervishes or people of skill would have migrated from Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia to settle in the Subcontinent, right from the time of Muhammad bin Qasim to that of Bahadur Shah Zafar?
(Muhammad bin Qasim was the Umayyad general who is said to have started the Muslim conquest of India by conquering in the early 8th century the Sindh and Multan regions along the Indus River. Bahadur Shah Zafar was the last Mughal emperor who died in 1862.)
Ten lakh? 20 lakh, 30 lakh, 50 lakh? A crore?
The total number of Muslims in today’s India and Pakistan is said to be between 38 crore and 40 crore. (This number is greater than the Muslim population of the entire Middle East and North Africa put together.)
The fact of the matter is the ancestors of 90 per cent of these 40 crore people became Muslim through Sufi influence.
And yet, excluding the Jat, Rajput and Bengalis Muslims, all of these people continue to look for their origins outside the Subcontinent.
So southern Asia has the most ‘Syeds’ of the world and family trees of all of them start and end in Iran, Bukhara, and Hejaz.
(Syed is an honorific title denoting people accepted as descendants of the Islamic prophet Muhammad through his grandsons.)
Following the Mongol invasions, people, especially from Bukahra and Samarkand, Iran and Arabistan, did indeed come to settle in the Subcontinent, but were all of them scholars, Sufis and the noblemen?
There must have been at least some carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths, labourers and farmers among them, mustn’t there?
Where are they today?
Muslims are said to have ruled India for a thousand years. From Slave Dynasty to the Mughals, they all came to settle here, accepting the influence of local customs and traditions and in turn influencing the natives with their ways.
They were also buried here, but until the last breath they continued to call themselves -- and (their descendants) still call themselves – a Turk, Mughal and Afghan child instead of an Indian.
Also curious is the fact that since the fall of the Mughal Sultanate most Mughals are found in Punjab. Why?
Why are they not found in significant numbers in other provinces of Pakistan? And why all of the surviving ‘Mughaliyat’ doesn’t go beyond the Mughlai cuisine?
Likewise, some Pashtuns believe that they are not the local Aryan race but are the twelfth ‘lost tribe’ of Bani Israel.
Fair enough, but why don’t the descendants of the other 11 ‘lost tribes’ acknowledge them as their brothers?
You might respond: Since this ‘lost tribe’ of Bani Israel became Muslims, why would Jews acknowledge them as their brothers?
If you do, you need to be reminded that the State of Israel has two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic, and Arab Muslims account for 20 per cent of Israel’s population (excluding the Palestinians of the occupied territories).
As I said earlier, the basis of Israeli citizenship is Jewish race. You may continue to hate Israel, but why don’t you get your DNA checked to satisfy yourself as to your origins?
Sindhis are nationalist enough to ‘Marson, marson, Sindh na deson’ (will die and die, but will not give up Sindh), but when it comes to the question of origins the Kalhoras and Daudpotas lose no time in linking themselves to the Abbasid Caliphate.
(Abbasid Caliphate was the third of the Islamic caliphates to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad).
Talpur, Chandio, Jatoi, Zardari, etc, are Baloch and Baloch consider themselves to be a Kurdish tribe.
Only Brahui say they belong here.
Soomras have been Sindhis for ages but talk to them and they never forget to tell you about their arrival from Arabistan. ‘Syed Association’ is also found only in Sindh.
The Samat tribes of Sindh say they belong here, but don’t like to say or hear that their forebears would have been the subjects or co-religionists of Raja Dahir.
(Raja Dahir is said to have ruled Sindh in a period between the 7th and 8th centuries and his kingdom was conquered by Muhammad bin Qasim, an Arab general of Umayyad Caliphate).
I have quite a few Sindhi friends who take pride in calling themselves Samat, and also claim in the next breath that their ancestors’ settlement here accompanied Mohammad bin Qasim or occurred immediately thereafter.
So we are finally left with Kohlis, Bheels, Meghwars, and Thakars who neither came to Sindh from anywhere nor went anywhere from here.
There was a time before Zia-ul-Haq’s term (1978-88) when Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Taxila would at least be considered a part of Pakistan’s cultural and racial heritage in the educational curriculum.
And now?
About five years ago when I asked a curator of the Mohenjo-daro Museum about the sorry state of the relics exhibited there, he said, “This is the heritage of the Hindus who have moved out. We are maintaining it as much as we can. What more can we do Saain…”
Whilst most of the Muslims of the Subcontinent believe that the blood in their veins belong to places ranging from Central Asia to Hejaz and Yemen, (which is also the reason why their reverence for these places is double than that of other Muslims of the world), an Irani, Turk or Arab, upon meeting the same Muslims, doesn’t consider them anything other than Indians or Pakistanis.
And far from granting citizenship to the people from the Subcontinent who are settled in their countries for as long as three generations, the Irani, Turk or Arab is not even ready to view them as anyone other than those who can help or need help, and to at least regard them as his brothers.
Despite all that, the Muslim of the Subcontinent continues to cherish and gloat over his foreign lineage rather than to look for his real identity and learn to be proud of that.
As long as people continue to look outside rather than inside, they can neither respect themselves nor be respected by others.
A stone is heavy in its own place, they say.
However, this dictum realizes its truth only if people make a collective effort to rid themselves of Extra-Subcontinental Ethnic Syndrome, learning a lesson from those Muslim communities who take pride in their identities and yet their Islam doesn’t become imperiled.
You belong here and will continue to belong here.
Whether you admit that or not, others acknowledge you as such.
(End of Matter)
It’s a sort of ‘Extra Subcontinental Ethnic Syndrome,’ a condition that neither allows them to respect themselves nor be respected by others, he writes in an Urdu column posted on Humsub.com on 29 Oct. 2017.
Their cure lies in making a collective effort to rid themselves of this Syndrome by learning to take pride in their real identities, writes the Karachi-based journalist.
The following is my English translation of Wusatullah Khan’s column, a very insightful piece.
The parenthesized-italicized glosses are mine.
-------
http://www.humsub.com.pk/81786/wusatullah-khan-199/
Who are we?
By Wusatullah Khan
Fifteen hundred years before Christ, when the Aryans of Central Asia began to spread into Europe and western and southern Asia, they became people of the places they settled in.
The Aryans became Slavic and German in Europe, Irani in Asia, and Hindu in southern Asia.
As against the Aryans, the Jews of the Semitic race, being God’s pampered people, don’t care much about anybody even today despite three and a half millennia of unsettledness.
Over this time period, they have, however, been able to develop a constituency that believes that a Jew is first and foremost a Jew and then something else, no matter what country he lives in.
So a Jew hailing from anywhere in the world can settle in Israel – as well as move out at will and, having moved out, return at will.
The Arabs, another Semitic kind, have shown a similar state of mind. They were affected by Arab hubris before the advent of Islam and failed to rid themselves of that discriminatory state of mind after the birth of Islam.
Keep in mind that Arab identity is as much Syrian and Egyptian as it is Saudi; an Arab is as much a Palestinian and Lebanese Christian as he is a Muslim.
And an Arab is as much an Iraqi Shia as he is a Kuwaiti Sunni.
The Chaush, who first came to India from Yemen to work as military men for Deccan’s Osmania sultanate, may engage in a lot of ‘batan’ (talk), but their eighth generation continues to see Yemen in their dreams 250 years after the original migration.
Fourteen hundred years after Khutbah Hajjatul Wida (the farewell sermon of prophet of Islam), the Arabs continue to view the world as divided between the ‘Arabi’ (meaning ‘articulate’ and ‘eloquent’) and the ‘Ajmi’ (meaning ‘alien’ and ‘inarticulate’).
And the Arabs who deny having such a mentality take no more than 10 minutes of prodding to show you who they think they are (and who they think you are).
It’s not just about Arabs. A Berber of the Sahara or the Bilali Muslim of Nigeria, or the baptized son of a South Sudanese Christian, for instance, will rather sell himself but not his African identity.
As for southern Asia, the Bengalis, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, trace their roots only in Bengal; they take as much pride in being son of the soil as they do in being Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist.
The same can be said about the Malays and Indonesians. Whatever be their faith, they are certain that their life and death is closely linked to their own ‘bhoomi’; that their ancestors might have come from somewhere centuries ago is of no consequence to them.
But who are the Muslims of southern Asia (excluding Bengal)?
If they belong to this land, why do they look outside?
And if they belong elsewhere, why don’t the people of those lands acknowledge them as their own?
For how long are the Muslims of southern Asia going to be lost in the wilderness of identity? When will their spirits find repose?
When will their hearts and minds understand as to what soil they originally belong to?
Some people find answer to this quandary in Allama Iqbal’s works, but tend to forget that pan-Islamism of the writer of Tarana-e-Hindi was born of possible political unity and not racial pride.
When I look around, I find very few Muslims who say they belong here and who are not proud of looking for their identity outside.
Consider this: How many, at the most, of Turk, Pathan, Persian, Kurd, and Caucasian soldiers, noblemen, dervishes or people of skill would have migrated from Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia to settle in the Subcontinent, right from the time of Muhammad bin Qasim to that of Bahadur Shah Zafar?
(Muhammad bin Qasim was the Umayyad general who is said to have started the Muslim conquest of India by conquering in the early 8th century the Sindh and Multan regions along the Indus River. Bahadur Shah Zafar was the last Mughal emperor who died in 1862.)
Ten lakh? 20 lakh, 30 lakh, 50 lakh? A crore?
The total number of Muslims in today’s India and Pakistan is said to be between 38 crore and 40 crore. (This number is greater than the Muslim population of the entire Middle East and North Africa put together.)
The fact of the matter is the ancestors of 90 per cent of these 40 crore people became Muslim through Sufi influence.
And yet, excluding the Jat, Rajput and Bengalis Muslims, all of these people continue to look for their origins outside the Subcontinent.
So southern Asia has the most ‘Syeds’ of the world and family trees of all of them start and end in Iran, Bukhara, and Hejaz.
(Syed is an honorific title denoting people accepted as descendants of the Islamic prophet Muhammad through his grandsons.)
Following the Mongol invasions, people, especially from Bukahra and Samarkand, Iran and Arabistan, did indeed come to settle in the Subcontinent, but were all of them scholars, Sufis and the noblemen?
There must have been at least some carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths, labourers and farmers among them, mustn’t there?
Where are they today?
Muslims are said to have ruled India for a thousand years. From Slave Dynasty to the Mughals, they all came to settle here, accepting the influence of local customs and traditions and in turn influencing the natives with their ways.
They were also buried here, but until the last breath they continued to call themselves -- and (their descendants) still call themselves – a Turk, Mughal and Afghan child instead of an Indian.
Also curious is the fact that since the fall of the Mughal Sultanate most Mughals are found in Punjab. Why?
Why are they not found in significant numbers in other provinces of Pakistan? And why all of the surviving ‘Mughaliyat’ doesn’t go beyond the Mughlai cuisine?
Likewise, some Pashtuns believe that they are not the local Aryan race but are the twelfth ‘lost tribe’ of Bani Israel.
Fair enough, but why don’t the descendants of the other 11 ‘lost tribes’ acknowledge them as their brothers?
You might respond: Since this ‘lost tribe’ of Bani Israel became Muslims, why would Jews acknowledge them as their brothers?
If you do, you need to be reminded that the State of Israel has two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic, and Arab Muslims account for 20 per cent of Israel’s population (excluding the Palestinians of the occupied territories).
As I said earlier, the basis of Israeli citizenship is Jewish race. You may continue to hate Israel, but why don’t you get your DNA checked to satisfy yourself as to your origins?
Sindhis are nationalist enough to ‘Marson, marson, Sindh na deson’ (will die and die, but will not give up Sindh), but when it comes to the question of origins the Kalhoras and Daudpotas lose no time in linking themselves to the Abbasid Caliphate.
(Abbasid Caliphate was the third of the Islamic caliphates to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad).
Talpur, Chandio, Jatoi, Zardari, etc, are Baloch and Baloch consider themselves to be a Kurdish tribe.
Only Brahui say they belong here.
Soomras have been Sindhis for ages but talk to them and they never forget to tell you about their arrival from Arabistan. ‘Syed Association’ is also found only in Sindh.
The Samat tribes of Sindh say they belong here, but don’t like to say or hear that their forebears would have been the subjects or co-religionists of Raja Dahir.
(Raja Dahir is said to have ruled Sindh in a period between the 7th and 8th centuries and his kingdom was conquered by Muhammad bin Qasim, an Arab general of Umayyad Caliphate).
I have quite a few Sindhi friends who take pride in calling themselves Samat, and also claim in the next breath that their ancestors’ settlement here accompanied Mohammad bin Qasim or occurred immediately thereafter.
So we are finally left with Kohlis, Bheels, Meghwars, and Thakars who neither came to Sindh from anywhere nor went anywhere from here.
There was a time before Zia-ul-Haq’s term (1978-88) when Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Taxila would at least be considered a part of Pakistan’s cultural and racial heritage in the educational curriculum.
And now?
About five years ago when I asked a curator of the Mohenjo-daro Museum about the sorry state of the relics exhibited there, he said, “This is the heritage of the Hindus who have moved out. We are maintaining it as much as we can. What more can we do Saain…”
Whilst most of the Muslims of the Subcontinent believe that the blood in their veins belong to places ranging from Central Asia to Hejaz and Yemen, (which is also the reason why their reverence for these places is double than that of other Muslims of the world), an Irani, Turk or Arab, upon meeting the same Muslims, doesn’t consider them anything other than Indians or Pakistanis.
And far from granting citizenship to the people from the Subcontinent who are settled in their countries for as long as three generations, the Irani, Turk or Arab is not even ready to view them as anyone other than those who can help or need help, and to at least regard them as his brothers.
Despite all that, the Muslim of the Subcontinent continues to cherish and gloat over his foreign lineage rather than to look for his real identity and learn to be proud of that.
As long as people continue to look outside rather than inside, they can neither respect themselves nor be respected by others.
A stone is heavy in its own place, they say.
However, this dictum realizes its truth only if people make a collective effort to rid themselves of Extra-Subcontinental Ethnic Syndrome, learning a lesson from those Muslim communities who take pride in their identities and yet their Islam doesn’t become imperiled.
You belong here and will continue to belong here.
Whether you admit that or not, others acknowledge you as such.
(End of Matter)