One
of India’s leading Muslim scholars, Asghar Ali Engineer, passed away on Tuesday,
May 14, 2013. Innaa Lillahi Wa Innaa Ilaihi Raajiuun...As a reformist scholar, Engineer’s was an important voice
in the debates on issues concerning Muslims in India in the last couple decades.
In
the post-partition India, the Muslims became a vulnerable minority in a sea of
Hindus. While the country’s secular Constitution and the Laws professed equality
before law and the equal protection of the laws in terms of status, rights and
opportunities for Muslims, these were not borne out by the facts of their
representation and visibility in the public sphere, including in education and employment
avenues in the country. Issues of identity and personal law have taken an
emotional dimension at a time when communal riots raised the physical security
and safety and protection of Muslims under a shadow of uncertainty. The members
of the community have ingrained a ‘siege’ mentality where by Muslims looked at
with suspicion on any reform proposals aimed at the community. The governments in
India were unable to bring about internal reforms to the Muslim personal law system
because of a credibility-deficit and resistance within the community.
In
the 1970’s, as a member of the Dawoodi Bohra (Shia Muslim) Community, Asghar
Ali Engineer stood for internal reforms and democratic deliberations and resisted
the authority of the Syedna Burhanuddin, the ‘Khalifa’ of the Community. In
later years, Engineer worked on several aspects of “social engineering,
dedicating himself to three things that defined his life — helping
interpret and explain Islam from a modern perspective, emphasising gender
justice within Islam, and working for inter-community harmony”. While Engineer
resisted the views of the Hindu right wing in India, which sought to treat the Muslims
as “second- class citizens”, as it were, he also stood up for reforms within
the Muslim community, including for the freedom of conscience of the Ahmadis in
Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Reproduced
below is an Op-Ed Article by Meena Menon, published on May 15,
2013, in The Hindu, one of India’s leading newspapers, paying
tribute to the memory of the departed soul.
All his life he tirelessly worked for
interfaith peace and harmony and religious reform in his own community
As a child in Wardha at the time of Partition, Asghar Ali heard
“horrible stories of people being killed and trains full of dead bodies.” Those
stories, he wrote in his autobiography, A Living Faith, disturbed
him so much that he began thinking very early in his life about why people
killed each other in the name of religion.
Then, as a student in 1961, he was deeply affected by the riots in
Jabalpur, the worst till then in independent India. For Engineer, those riots
were the beginning of his lifelong battle against the pathology of communalism
and the engagement with creating interfaith harmony.
Only last December, on the 20th anniversary of 1993 Mumbai riots in
Mumbai post the Babri Masjid demolition, he was part of a campaign to mark a
bloody phase in the city’s history. At the launch, though unwell, he was
spirited about the need to remember those riots: “Not for revenge but to ensure
that it does not happen again.”
All his life he spoke for peace and communal harmony, his other passion
being the democratisation and accountability of the religious establishment. He
was physically attacked six times for his beliefs and his advocacy of religious
reform. His family often worried about his safety, said his son Irfan.
Born on March 10, 1939, at Salumbar, a town near Udaipur, Rajasthan,
Engineer grew up in an orthodox atmosphere. His father was a priest and was
posted to different towns to provide religious guidance to the Bohra
communities there. But, as he recalled, he never spoke anything against other
religions.It was at school in Dewas, when he and other Muslim boys were teased as
being “pro Pakistani” that he became aware of religious and caste distinctions.
Engineer was already writing articles in school, mostly on Islam and the
problems of Muslims, something that he continued to do almost until the end.
In February, from his hospital bed, he typed out a keynote address on
his laptop for an interfaith meeting in Indonesia. Two years ago, he delivered
a speech, again from hospital, over the cell phone for one and a half hours,
for a conference. A commitment was a commitment for his father, said Irfan.
A scholar and writer of over 70 books and numerous articles, Engineer,
his son said, was a very humble person who could relate even to his critics,
arguing differences with patience. Irfan, who has taken up Engineer’s crusade,
remembers him to be a kind and understanding father who was also a friend.
Women’s rights
Women’s rights and equality was another of his missions. Engineer fought
for understanding the Koran which he believed had given women equal rights.
Medieval jurisprudence had cheated women and he wanted those rights restored.
To support religious reforms, a conference to launch a democratically-elected
Central Board of Dawoodi Bohras was held in February 1977 in Udaipur where he
was elected general secretary. He later set up the Institute of Islamic
Studies, in Mumbai and the Center for Study of Society and Secularism.
He counted Ghalib among his favourite Urdu poets and confessed to being
deeply influenced by the Sunni thinker Iqbal among others. Initially repelled
by Marxism because of its atheism, Engineer said he was later “won over” by
Marxist doctrines “as I found them close to Islamic values,” and that it was
not necessary to be an atheist to be a Marxist. Engineer’s father had decided
not to force him to continue the priesthood tradition. The first time he had
taken him to Bombay was for the ritual of kissing the feet of the Syedna, which
Engineer had found revolting.
Arriving in Bombay again in 1963, he found a job with the city municipal
corporation as an engineer but quit in 1983. He started writing against the
oppression of the Dawoodi Bohras in Udaipur. For this he faced threats and
demands for an apology. His family boycotted him. Some of the attacks on him
were serious enough for him to be hospitalised. His Center for Study of Society
and Secularism was vandalised.
Along with his intense participation in efforts to get to the bottom of
communal riots that affected India’s social fabric, and his interfaith
initiatives for harmony, Engineer was a scholar of Islam. In his Muslims
in India since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter Faith Relations,
Yoginder Sikand says Engineer’s principal concern was to evolve a theology of
Islam that seeks to grapple with the modern condition even while being rooted
in it. Engineer’s main contribution was in articulating a contextual
hermeneutics of the Koran one that he believed could help guide Muslims in
dealing with the challenges of contemporary life.
Engineer combined a passion for knowledge and religion with action on
the ground, taking along leading writers, journalists and members of
progressive movements of the day in his battle for religious reform and what he
believed was an “un-Islamic” imposition of the Syedna’s tenets.
Before he succumbed to diabetes-related complications on Tuesday, he had
partially recovered from a prolonged illness (of three months), and had
returned home from hospital on April 26. His passing comes at a time when many
of the issues he fought for and deeply cared about are still far from settled.
More than ever, we need the values of tolerance, communal harmony and
inter-faith dialogue that Engineer stood for all his life.