Jessica Bidgood | Political and Personal Islam in Kashmir | EXPOSURE-VII workshop in Kashmir

 EXPOSURE-VII workshop in Kashmir | Photo Gallery

Jessica Bidgood

Dal Lake is tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas near Srinagar. Illuminated by a waxing moon, it is still tonight, as it is most nights. But an aural current washes across the lily pads and echoes off of the mountains. It is the hum of nahmaz, of hundreds of men engaging in the chanted prayer of Kashmir’s Muslims. Everyone here can hear this, yet the sound is not intrusive.

The men are engaging in a lyrical expression of a tradition in Kashmir that is almost indistinguishable from the place itself. Nahmaz is built from the poetry of the Sufis, a group of gentle religious mystics who brought Islam to Kashmir 600 years ago. As the region’s predominant religion, Sufi-influenced Islam has been a quiet, day-to-day, unsensational Islam, the kind that rarely generates attention for the very reason that it is so important: its overarching beliefs in tolerance and peace.

But as the last two decades have progressed, Islam in Kashmir has caught itself in a snaggle-toothed struggle between its own past and the political present. On one end are the Sufi influences of the past and the population’s basic temperate nature; on the other, the cries of anger and frustration resulting from the conflict that continues to plague Kashmir, along with the global rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Religion possesses an unmatched power to uplift, to influence, to inspire action and controversy. An endeavor to study its presence in any region promises to be immensely complicated and easily mistaken. However, it is an endeavor that must be attempted. The religious situation in Kashmir can be taken as a specimen of the broader global circumstances surrounding Islam. If we can humanize this conflict, we can perhaps move one step closer to an accurate understanding of the seemingly overwhelming conflict between the Islamic world and the West.

The Shrine of Hazratbal, the sanctuary that sends nahmaz across Dal Lake, is an iconic pair of domed towers that stretches into Srinagar’s minimal skyline. During the day, it is difficult to tell whether the place is a house of God or a marketplace. Behind the building, families and single-sex groups of friends sit in the grass with picnics. Teenage boys perch on the wall that separates the lake from the sidewalk and fish. Shikara drivers look for tourists to charm into a ride on their canopied wooden boats.

This afternoon scene illustrates just how tightly religion is woven into daily life here. This shrine, one of many scattered across Srinagar, is the center of town. Here, commerce and socializing and worship, the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority, and the land and the water all cross each other and fuse together.
Waseem Ali is a Muslim boy of fifteen who comes here regularly to pay his respects to God. He remarks on a special quality of this shrine that is present in all of the city’s shrines: “It is a religious place for all. Everyone comes here—Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims.”

Tolerance and unity are overwhelmingly evident here, although the recent history of Kashmir suggests that this might not be the case. The violent inter- and intra-state conflict of the 1980’s and 1990’s that ripped apart families and neighbors and brought staggering numbers of soldiers and militants into the region also forced nearly all of the region’s Hindus, or Pandits, to leave the state.

Professor T.N. Ganjoo, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kashmir, was one of the few Pandits who stayed behind, and recognizes that the forced migration of the Pandits was more a result of convenient politicization of Islam than of the true nature of the people.

“The Kashmiri Muslim is not violent by nature,” he says, “his culture is very peaceful.” This may be why the region’s remaining Pandits have found it relatively easy to continue their lives here, living and worshipping alongside young Muslims like Waseem.

Pandit Raltan Shaku is a middle-aged businessman who stands in the middle of the small, quiet Sidhi Vinayek Temple. When most of his peers left, he says simply, “it was weird. But I stayed here because of my God.” Today, he says, “My neighbor is a Muslim, and if I have a problem, I will go to him. If he has a problem, he will come to me.” He prays alongside Muslims at shrines, despite the fact that, in terms of religion, “we are of two different minds.”

The widely tolerant attitude towards minority religions apparent at Srinagar’s shrines is probably derived from more than one place. Kashmiris themselves are said to be naturally peaceful, and many say that Islam as it ought to be practiced teaches this kind of attitude. However, there is little doubt that Sufis of Kashmir’s history are also responsible—indeed, they are the reason for the existence of the shrines themselves—and lend their distinctive flavoring in other ways to Kashmiri Islam.

In the 14th century, Sufi Muslims from Iran and Central Asia came to Kashmir, bringing with them a talent for spiritual healing and an overarching belief in universal equality. Eventually, the Buddhists and Hindus of the day came to follow this peaceful form of religion. Religious scholars in Kashmir emphasize the voluntary nature of the region’s conversion to Islam: “They were mystics, not missionaries”, says Syed Tahi Mousvi, one in a long line of spiritual healers, of the Sufis who first brought Islam to Kashmir with dialogue, rather than with the sword. Hindu and Buddhist influences still abound in the region’s Islam; nahmaz is a vestige of Buddhist chants, the words of which were changed to Sufi poetry upon Islam’s arrival here.

The simple beliefs practiced by those mystics continue to abound in Kashmir today. “What is the base belief of Sufism? Love of God. When you love God, you love humanity,” says Fida Muhammad Khan Hassnain, a scholar of religion who has written books like “The Sufi Alchemy of Peace” and “Kashmir: Beyond the Da Vinci Code”. “Let people believe who believe, let people who disbelieve disbelieve, you are not the guardian of the people. This is the order of God.”

Mir H. Muzter, a businessman waiting to see a Sufi healer, illustrates this attitude and shows how it differs Kashmir from another, more famous Islamic region. “Here, if I do not attend nahmaz, no one will bother me. In Saudi Arabia, I was in a taxi during call to prayer, and my taxi driver stopped. I told him that we were too busy to stop for prayer, but he made it clear that we had no choice but to stop.”

The shrine of Sheikh Nur-u-deen Noorami, the guardian saint, the torch-bearer, of Kashmir, sits high on a hill forty minutes from Hazratbal. Mohammad Ayub Takahuni, the caretaker of this shrine, watches men and woman kneel to kiss the doorframe of the shrine, and kneel at the base of the tomb that it holds. “His preachings are for everybody,” says Takuhani, of the Saint encased within it. “He told people not to make distinctions between themselves.”

A study of the history of this shrine reveals how the popularity of these teachings has little sway against the violence that has plagued Kashmir for so many years. In 1995, says Takuhani, Pakistani militants holed themselves up inside the shrine, which lead to a siege involving 90,000 security forces. After three months, a fight between the militants and the forces caused a fire that destroyed the shrine and allowed the militants to get away. Today, the shrine has been rebuilt (with support of local government), but imprints of that conflict exist in the security forces that still surround the premises, and in the stories of those who come to pray there.

Outside the shrine, an old housewife named Khatija discusses her tears. “This is where we come to ask God for what we need,” she says, describing how she has been visiting this shrine once every few years since her childhood. The decades-long conflict that has torn apart so many lives and deadened the local economy has left both of her sons unemployed, and she is asking God to help find her sons jobs. “Our prayers will be answered,” she says.

The shrine of Sheik Nur-u-deen Noorani is the most sanctified Shrine in the state. Due to a surreal collision of political circumstance and Kashmiri hospitality, a Western journalist who wanted to observe and photograph the shrine would probably find herself accompanied by four well-armed policemen, and would be besieged with offers to share tea and various meals with their lieutenant.

This is environment in which Islam in Kashmir is developing today. Shrines are trimmed with barbed wire, and men with guns patrol their way past the women who sob at the relics of their saints. The conflict that has scarred the region has not left religion unmarked.

When discussing the effect that Kashmir’s political conflict has had on the region’s religion, Professor Ganjoo points out a cultural shift before anything else. “Kashmiri culture was once a composite culture,” he says, referring to the cultural mix of Muslims and Pandits that he believes to have been present before the Kashmir Question arose in 1947. Simply due to the drastically reduced number of Hindus here, “now, it is a single culture, an Islamic culture,” adding that “this is not a bad thing—it is their birthright. This will be a new era in Kashmiri history.”

And so what is to become of a now-nearly-dominant religion that once flourished in heterogeny? Such a question elicits a variety of controversial responses from those to whom it is posed; in a world where individuals do not compartmentalize religion from the rest of their lives, it is difficult to find an unbiased opinion.

The most traditional of the Sufis believe that they are living through this because, for some reason, they have earned it. “ It’s all from God. He has created these circumstances,” says Dr. Hassnain, “He wanted us to suffer for our sins.” Syed Jawad Mousvi, the Sufi healer who Mr. Muzter was waiting so expectantly to see, chalks the people’s suffering up to the fact that they had, in some way, stopped following God as they should have. But he does not want to talk about the militancy, saying simply that one must “kill the enemy with good behaviors”.

At the same stime, however, a growing number of Kashmiri Muslims are moving away from their Sufi Roots. Asif Qureshi has been a journalist in Kashmir, with STAR news, for over 10 years. He has noticed a considerable increase in Ahl-hadis, a group of Muslims who do not associate with Sufism. He estimates that 10% of the population are Al-hadis. Professor Muhammad Ashraf Wani, a professor of history at the University of Kashmir in Srinagar who identifies with Ahl-hadism himself, estimates that that number is closer to 15 percent.

Both Asif and Professor Ashraf, as he is known to his students, believe Ahl-Hadism is partially a result of the development of technology in Kashmir, and it’s corresponding increase in communication with the rest of the world. “People here are much more aware of the outside than the outside realizes,” says Asif, of a world where more and more Muslims are connecting with radicalized beliefs.

At the Grand Mosque in Srinagar, two Muslims talk loudly about what they perceive to be Sufism’s obsolete nature in Kashmir’s contemporary Islamic atmosphere. “We do not believe in Sufism,” says Ali Mohammad, a businessman who has come to the mosque an hour before the next nahmaz because he finds it peaceful. “It was created by some person; Islam is about God, and God alone.”

“We don’t have to consult any other book if we follow the Koran,” says Omar, a 20-year-old university student who is frustrated with the amount of time his education requires him to consult historical and scientific texts. Omar’s childhood was ruined by conflict, and he becomes visibly incensed as he discusses it. When talk turns to current world politics, he is brief but clear. “If I saw George Bush right now, I would kill him,” he says, “I would have to.”

But as angry as he is, Omar is careful to qualify the source of his anger. “It’s a political crisis, religion is another question. I can’t use the Koran to solve my problem when there is a weapon [in the hands of the Indian troops],” he says, and leaves, too angry to continue to talk.

Other men in the group begin to whisper to each other, speaking in hushed, measured tones of how they don’t believe Ali and Omar’s claims about the illegitimacy of Sufism, and of how they don’t believe that violence is the answer to their political problems. Though these men outnumber Ali and Omar, they are keeping their opinion as quiet as they can. But these men represent what many belief to be the incorruptible core of the Kashmiri soul: those of peace and tolerance, whose commitment to such values has been handed down to them through 600 years of history.

Individuals like Ali and Omar are increasing in number, but it is important to recall that they still remain very much in the minority of the population here. Their anger is secular, but their identity as Muslims nevertheless serves to define their anger in the eyes of outsiders, like Western eyes and the Indian and foreign governments.

But the majority of Kashmiris have reacted to the conflict in the same context by which it arose: as a political, militaristic struggle between and against human beings. Anyone can react to that.

Frustration, anger, and hatred spread across the region. According to Waseem Raja, a young Kashmiri college student, the first few thousand militants in the 1990’s conflict were Muslim who believed in Sufism. They fought not on the platform of religious radicalism, but as scarred, oppressed human beings with a right to defend themselves. “Sufism does not advocate violence, but it does not mean that you have to be a coward,” says Asif.

But, in the context of the conflict, it was convenient to view politics as function of religion. “People from all communities were affected [by the conflict],” says a local judge who, due to the heightened tension of the region, wishes to remain unnamed. Though many outsiders have been quick to label the conflict as a religious struggle, “It has never been a religious affair. Certain politicians here marginalized it, and created a problem between Hindus and Muslims.”

In a way, the politicization of Kashmiri Islam appears to be self-fulfilling. “You look for partners so that you are not alone. There has to be a common link, and the common link is the current reaction of Muslims across the world,” says Asif. And so frustrated Muslims in Kashmir have found empathy in equally frustrated, angry Muslims across the world. Though these staunch, hardline Muslims constitute a minority of practicing Muslims, they attract the majority of attention paid towards the religion in today’s current political environment.

Today, the politicization of Islam in Kashmir continues. Raja cites the rebuilding of the Shrari Chreif temple as an example of the local government being quick to put money and resources into condoning Sufism as the “right” religion, while discouraging Ahl-hadism as a “wrong” religion. The relationship between Kashmir and the rest of India is fragile already, and a religious angle, says Asif, is convenient for the larger government of India. “India seeks aid from Israel as it is fighting ‘Muslims’. It’s not fighting ‘Muslims’—this is a conflict between people.”