‘Mothering A Muslim’ brings up what we all know but won’t acknowledge: Hate in the classroom

One often hears of “moderate” Muslims, the kind of Muslims who remain silent irrespective of the political developments around them and prefer to go on with their lives quietly like “normal” people.

Many of them, to borrow writer Mahmood Mamdani’s term in the Indian context, are “good Muslims,” who avoid raising uncomfortable questions. Some of them even proclaim they are not like “those Muslims” – the ignorant, uneducated troublemakers.

But in recent years, the distinction between good Muslim, bad Muslim, moderate Muslim, extremist Muslim, all other kinds of Muslim in India, is gone. If you are a Muslim, you are fair game for mockery, discrimination and violence. Even the privileges that money could once buy for many Muslims come at a higher cost now.

Playgrounds of hate

Nazia Erum started thinking about this shift when she had her first child. “The year was 2014. And our country stood divided along religious fault lines,” she writes in her book Mothering A Muslim. “Within the minority Muslim population, a fear was palpable.”

As a parent, it is natural to be worried about your child’s future when bigotry is so blatant and the leaders chosen by a democracy do not hide their contempt for a particular section of society. This concern led her to interview more than a hundred upper-middle class, well-to-do Muslim families across the country, and detail the experiences of their children who brought home harrowing stories from schools and often, colleges. A few samples: “Do your mum and dad make bombs?”, “Do you support al-Qaeda?”, “Is your father part of the Taliban? Will he shoot all of us?” and “Get away from the ball, you Paki.”

The aggressive questions and insults came from friends and classmates of children studying in some of the country’s best schools. As a parent, how do you tell your eight-year-old or twelve-year-old that in all likelihood the child who insulted them doesn’t even understand what Paki or ISIS means? Even if your child does not completely understand the words lobbed at her, there is no missing the sneer it carries. She can’t possibly reason with, what Erum calls, the “tormenter” or know how to respond at such a young age. The hurt remains bottled up and the child remains “tormented.”

Erum tells us in the book that most of the schools that she approached are clueless or indifferent about the behaviour of students towards their Muslims classmates. Parents of the aggrieved children do not know how to reason with schools or the bullying students, when it is the parents of the bullies who are the most likely source of a distorted understanding of the “other”. When it is the media shaping this perception, things get much worse.

What’s in a name?

One of the stories Erum narrates is of Azania, who is currently studying in university in the US. One day, Azania recounted to her mother how a schoolmate had called her a “Paki” when she was in Class 3.

Azania’s mother, Arshia Shah, does not conform to the popular stereotype of the “oppressed Muslim woman”. She is a highly educated woman, with a job in the corporate sector who knows her rights and how to assert them. Shah kept her own last name after marriage and when she and her husband were naming their daughter, they decided on Azania Safiya Khan, reviving the last name Khan, which their families had dropped many years ago for being too common. She also gave Azania a Hebrew first name, saying she “believed in giving her daughter a liberal upbringing and had never factored in her Muslim-ness being thrust upon her daughter”.

But Shah underestimated the power of a name. She may have “never publicly expressed her Muslim identity” but her daughter’s surname, Khan, gave her away.

Azania and her family were the “ideal Muslims” that majoritarian India yearns for. But after the “Paki” insult, Arshia Shah decided to change her daughter’s name. Azania however, refused to accept the proposal. “I have grown up with this name and I like it and I will not change it,” her mother recalled Azania saying. “If it means that I will be discriminated against it, I will take it.” The situation had forced an identity on the the identity-avoiding Muslim.

The peril of disillusionment

Erum’s documentation of this burning issue plaguing our schools is a more journalistic account than any other related work on the subject in the country. In one part of the book, she tries to unravel how we got to such a place, turns the lens inwards and details how a section of Muslims have themselves become intolerant of differing interpretations of Islam, thanks to the import of a Saudi Arabian form of the religion. But there is more to the story.

The ’80s and ’90s in India were a tumultuous time when the majority community started “showing Muslims their place.” Numerous riots took place across the country, often with the collusion of the administration. This was a period that saw the demolition of the Babri Masjid, an important juncture in the country’s contemporary history, when Indian democracy betrayed its promise to minority Muslims. The discrimination and violence led to a resistance – some saw answers in god, some in assertion.

Rushnae, currently a student in her first year in a Delhi University college tells Erum that her family were never really practising Muslims, mainly sharing a cultural connection with the community. “I didn’t think myself too much of a Muslim before. But when these things started happening I just got very angry. I just decided I am gonna do it. Wear a hijab now.” she says in the book. “If these people I grew up with in school are not accepting me completely, then I just as well might be what they think I am.”

The poet Paash would have said, “Sabse khatarnak hota hai hamarey sapno ka mar jana.” (The deadliest thing that can happen to you is disillusionment.)

Changing the discourse

What remains unsaid in the book is that Muslims as regular citizens are missing from general public discourse. They are either anti-nationals, animal-killers, or car-mechanics, but rarely beyond that, compunded by the fact that the contribution of Muslims to Indian society is missing from the media or textbooks. But it is this that forces Erum to tell us, in order to establish her credentials, that she comes from an erstwhile family of freedom-fighters who funded India’s revolt against the British in 1857 and, as a result, her relatives were hanged by them in her hometown Allahabad.

Mothering a Muslim is an important and timely book on the delicate subject of children’s experience with the “other,” more so because it has started a conversation on a subject that most of us knew about but did not bring out into the open. It could easily have been called “Parenting A Muslim” and is an equally important read for men, of all religions.

“This is not so much a reflection of the classrooms as of the society we have become,” Erum writes. This is what makes it necessary for the questions raised by Erum in this book to be answered urgently. Bigotry doesn’t stop at Karni Sena going on a rampage over a Padmaavat, it comes home in the form of a child who thinks nothing of bullying another merely for being a Muslim.

Mothering A Muslim, Nazia Erum, Juggernaut.