THE essay emotes with two images: the phrase ‘sleeper spreaders’ and another image I came across on Twitter – of a man’s silhouette with ‘a green cap’, his body filled with bombs and hands with coronavirus. These representations are of Muslims who attended the Tabliqi Jamat’s annual conference at the Tabliqi Jamat headquarters in Nizamuddin, Delhi, that started on 3 March 2020 and continued until a few days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Janata Curfew on 23 March.¹

These representations are of the Muslim, seen through the eyes of a Hindu Nation, today’s New India.² As such representations spewed my social media feeds, I wondered if they were actually talking about the morally and civically irresponsible behaviour of the Tabliqis. The extrapolation of Tabliqis into the Muslim imagery of the New India narrates a different story to me, and the best way for me to make sense of the event was to engage with rhetorical refusal; I would deny to talk about the Hindutva spun category, the Indian Muslim, and therefore this essay is about the Muslims of India.³

It is impossible to talk about the latter in the current atmosphere of self-defence that Muslims have adopted against the rising hatred in their country, while the former belongs to debate. Owing to that self-defence, which also structures this essay, the essay alternates between the Indian Muslim, who has emerged as an epitome of the enactment of victimization in the New India, and Muslims of India which is more of an imagination for, as sociologist Shiv Visvanathan noted, a ‘creative Muslim’ social order in a political moment when imaginations and feelings are denied to the Indian Muslims.⁴ In such a way, this essay alternates between silence, a terrain of experience for Indian Muslims, and synaesthetic sensoria, a topia/place for Muslims of India.

 

Submerged under the spectre of the Muslim images are two things: the Covid-compelled dismantling of the Shaheen Bagh protest in Delhi, a place where Muslim women of India came together in December 2020 to protest the Citizenship Amendment Act, and the change in azan my mother made me listen to, once the lockdown came into place, saying it’s a once in a lifetime that a Muslim would hear a change in the azan. The azan, a call for Muslims to offer prayers, generally called out five times a day, was different this time, and was civically responsible in containing the spread of SARS-CoV 2. The phrase ‘Hayya ‘ala-l-Falah’ urges every follower, mostly men (as they are allowed to congregate for prayers at the mosque), to rush to their nearby mosques for prayer. In the light of the global spread of the SARS-CoV2, it was replaced with an advisory to all Muslims to pray at home and not to congregate.

‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Ashhadu an la ilahailla Allah. Ashhadu an la ilahailla Allah. Ashadu anna Muhammadan Rasool Allah. Ashadu anna Muhammadan Rasool Allah. Hayya ’ala s Salah. Hayya ’ala s Salah. (come for prayer) Hayya ’ala I Falah. Hayya ’ala I Falah. (come to prayer congregation).

Sallu Fi Beyootikum (or) Sallu Fi Rihalikkum (Offer prayer at home) Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! La ilahailla Allah.’

With at least 300,000 active mosques in every nook and cranny of India, hearing an azan on the loudspeaker is something every Indian would be used to. The submergence of a certain civically responsible behaviour of the Muslims of India, asking people to pray at home and not congregate, need not be juxtaposed against the morally irresponsible behaviour of the Tabliqi Jamat to showcase on the bloodstained roads of New India that there are ‘good Indian Muslims’. The submergence was indeed visible when the Allahabad High Court heard a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Afzal Ansari, Salman Khurshid and Wasim A. Quadri, around mid-May 2020, pleading the court to intervene in the state-ordered curfew on azans being broadcast through loudspeakers during the lockdown.⁵

 

The letter/petition written by senior advocate Salman Khurshid, which was later treated as a PIL, showed the extrajudicial actions, like unsigned notices issued to mosques, and threats leveraged against mosques, even on occasions where the azan was not called out, by the Uttar Pradesh police, who have become a machinery of Hindutva violence perpetuated by the state under the leadership of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.⁶

‘According to him [the petitioner], Azan is integral to religion and in no way undermines the society’s collective response to the pandemic. It has been further pleaded that local administration at Farrukhabad has been somewhat ambiguous about the recitation of Azan and the local police continues to threaten coercive steps against recitation of Azan. It was further pleaded that local police and administration have pasted unsigned notices on the entrances of several mosques in the city and all attempts made to seek redressal from the District Administration have been unsuccessful which has caused unnecessary disquiet and apprehension of violation of this religious right in the local Muslim populace.’⁷

 

The Uttar Pradesh state, with little interest in deciphering the rephrased azan call, which was by then adopted in many mosques across the world, put a curfew on the 1400-years-old Islamic tradition of observing the fasts on hearing the sunrise azan, Subhu, and breaking it with the sunset azan, Mahrib, during the month of Ramadan. This became blatant when the state Advocate General Manish Goyal’s only argument against the petitioners was that azan is ‘a call for congregating to offer prayers at the mosque’. The sense of community protection that haunts public concerns around the Coronavirus, conversed through the phrase ‘Sallu Fi Beyootikum’ (offer prayer at home), was eroded in the very fact that azan is an ‘Islamic tradition’. The court states:

‘Learned counsel for the petitioner has not been able to explain why Azan cannot be offered without the use of sound amplifying devices. It will be not out of place to mention that in the past, during old days when the loudspeaker was not invented, Azan used to be given by human voice. The use of loudspeakers is a practice developed by someone and not by the Prophet or his main disciples, and which was not there in the past, and that the loudspeaker is of recent origin and accordingly it could not be said that the use of loudspeakers and loudspeaker is essential and integral part of the Azan. There is no such religious order which prescribes that Azan can be recited only through loudspeakers or by any amplifiers. Azan is certainly an essential and integral part of Islam but use of loudspeakers and loudspeakers is not an essential and an integral part thereof. Loudspeakers is a gift of technological age, its adverse effect is well felt all over the world. It is not only a source of pollution but it is also a source which causes several health hazardous. Traditionally and according to the religious order, Azan has to be recited by the Imam or the person in-charge of the Mosques through their own voice. Right to religion, by no stretch of imagination, ought to be practised, professed and propagated saying that loudspeakers has become an essential part of the religion.’⁸

 

The architectonic of the court’s order emerges from the tension between the parochial, the religious, the traditional and the subjective, and the modern, the technological and objective. Such dualisms were produced as conditions that render modern scientific thinking possible by the writings of natural philosophers like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.⁹ The commitment to upholding Cartesian dualisms and teleological thinking is sedimented by the faith that the shift from traditional to technological, parochial to modern is indeed possible and as that which enables human progress. In such a way, religious practices that create new subjective possibilities for coexistence (a coexistence that’s anti-exclusionary) under Covid like the phrase ‘Sallu Fi Beyootikum’, is black-boxed as traditional and parochial while the technological, although recognized to have ‘adverse effects’, is considered progressive and hence can never be, to cite from the order, ‘an essential part of the religion’.

While at one level the essence of loudspeakers is denied its intermingling with the essence of Islam, at a second level, Islam is denied ‘the stretch of imagination’ to understand how its sensorial practices of listening can be redefined for, to borrow a phrase from Shiv Visvanathan, ‘a new contract, even a sacramental order between orality, textuality and digitality’.¹⁰

 

At a third level, the court in asserting that ‘no stretch of imagination ought to be practised, professed and propagated saying that loudspeakers has become an essential part of the religion’ not only commands Islam and talks against the reinvention of Islamic social contract by the Muslims of India, but in doing so confesses its own anxiety, layered under the Machiavellian text of the order, about the modernist Abrahamic tradition of Islam. This anxiety seeps through and haunts the everyday experience of the Hindu psyche, constituted today– through 50,000 daily Shakhas and political campaigns – to be anxious about the monotheistic allure of Abrahamic religions. While Moses, as Freud claims, gave Jews the monotheistic idea, Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj (a Hindu reform movement), gave his Hindus the monotheistic idea by refining Hinduism to desire one god. The monotheistic idea of Hinduism was further refined by the second supreme leader of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), M.S. Golwalkar, in A Bunch of Thoughts, which regarded the creation of a Hindu Nation as something to strive for.

‘In terms of the letter dated 28.04.2020, addressed by Mr. Salman Khurshid, which has been treated as Public Interest Litigation, that reciting of Azan is a call for the five times prayers, particularly the morning Fajr which is also the beginning of Roza fast as well as Maghrib which is the breaking of fast at sunset. It has been further pleaded that there has never been any restriction on recitation of Azan by the use of loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer. According to him, Covid-19 pandemic has necessitated stringent containment measures and Muslims across the country have promptly and willingly accepted that congregational prayer be suspended as long as the danger of spread of infection continues. Leading seminaries like Deoband and religious leaders have advised people to perform Namaz at home consistent with social distancing norms. According to him, Azan is integral to religion and in no way undermines the society’s collective response to the pandemic.

It has been further pleaded that local administration at Farrukhabad has been somewhat ambiguous about the recitation of Azan and the local police continues to threaten coercive steps against recitation of Azan. It was further pleaded that local police and administration have pasted unsigned notices on the entrances of several mosques in the city and all attempts made to seek redressal from the District Administration have been unsuccessful which has caused unnecessary disquiet and apprehension of violation of this religious right in the local Muslim populace. Similar issues have arisen from Ghazipur and Hathras that may require directions for uniform legal regime across the State of Uttar Pradesh.

Lastly, it has been pleaded to this Court to preserve the spiritual comfort and the wholesome spirit of constitutional right to worship of all citizens. One notice issued under Section 149 Cr.P.C. by the Officer-In-Charge (Prabhari Nirikshak), Police Station Dildar Nagar, Ghazipur has also been placed on record.’¹¹

 

Salman Khurshid remarked in his letter that azan was a matter of ‘spiritual comfort’ and demanded that the court preserve ‘the wholesome spirit of constitutional right to worship of all citizens’ by preserving Muslims’ spiritual comfort. How can the spirituality of a secular constitution warrant the preservation of the spiritual comfort of a religious group? In a manner of avoiding matters of spirituality, religion and the nation state, the order immediately moves onto saying: ‘One notice issued under Section 149 Cr.P.C. by the Officer-In-Charge (Prabhari Nirikshak), Police Station Dildar Nagar, Ghazipur, has also been placed on record’ – a move that distracts it from the ultimate question of the struggle for Indian Independence: how to understand secularism, or for that matter science, by not merely adopting western secularism (or science)?

The anxiety is captured in the order’s architectonic where the order distracts itself from matters of Islamic ‘spiritual comfort’ and the right to religious freedom that sediments the secular spirit of the Indian Constitution and proceeds to talk about the bureaucratic notice issued by the UP police to a mosque in Gazipur. Is it that the spiritual comfort of Muslims, and so the spirit of secularism, so impossible to reckon with for the imaginary of a secular state established after Partition as India that this distraction onto bureaucratic matters in the order’s script, was made necessary immediately after enlisting the spiritual comfort of Muslims and the secular spirit of the Indian Constitution? Can law understand the epistemological framing of Indian Muslim? Can one understand why the Indian Muslim, conflated with terrorism and Pakistani Muslims, continues to haunt the tumultuous political terrain of India?

 

Before we get into the haunting of Indian Muslims, the non-present presence looming over New India, I would like to offer a fourth level of interpretation. The court, by denying the benefits of modernity and technological progress like loudspeakers themselves to the Islamic tradition of azan, in its modernist thinking, temporalizes the Muslim as one who belongs to the parochiality of the traditional, or in the manner of teleological thinking, one who belongs to pre-modernity and the past.¹² The Muslim is also constructed as one who belongs to the past (to the times of Mughals, Ottomans and Nizams) in the acute need felt by Modi’s regime to ‘modernize madrasas’, an educational institute for Muslims and by Muslims.¹³ The Hindu Rastra’s Indian Muslim, like the White Man’s Indian or indigenous peoples of the Americas, under the monotheistic and modernist thinking of Hindutva, is nested in ‘his’ tradition, past and parochiality.¹⁴ Muslims as belonging to the past, frames the Hindutva imaginary that is required to make India into a Hindu Rashtra.

 

The Muslims of today’s India, those who live after the industrial revolution where sonic devices have flooded the market to amplify sound in environments of excessive white noise, are denied the reinvention of azan in digital ways, for a digital world, via this court order and the essential religious practices established in 1954. They are asked to rest in peace by imagining as though they are listening to the beautiful voice of the Ethiopian former slave, Bilal ibn Rabah (pbuh) one of the closest companions, Sahabahs, of Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) and emancipated by the Prophet (pbuh), which echoed through the silence of Arabian deserts the call for prayer, azan, in the 7th century.

The court order further constructs the azan called out via loudspeakers as ‘noise pollution’, while it is precisely the noise pollution of modernity and industrial revolution that demands azan to be called out via loudspeakers so it could reach the community – asking for them to stay quarantined and offer prayers at home in the time of coronavirus. The controversy around the Muslim and loudspeakers explicate a synesthesized sensorality of New India, where the act of listening to the other is framed, defined and conditioned by the seeable, the spectacle and the spectre.

 

The sensoriality of listening (amplified by the non-essential loudspeakers) conditions the act of listening amidst the spectacle of marginalization that is carefully assembled by a Hindu Nation for the Indian Muslim: to listen to the message of azan is conditioned by what is seen (spectacle) and the seeable, namely the (presence of) Muslim and ‘the invisible’ coronavirus through images like sleeper spreaders and the Twitter image. The inescapability of the modernist legal imagination that associates religion to the past, and its traditions as being parochial, confines the Allahabad HCs order from the fruitful exercise of what the theologian and philosopher Raimundo Panikkar calls diatopical hermeneutics.

Diatopical hermeneutics is a possibility that Panikkar offers to overcome ‘the gap existing between two human topoi, ‘places’ of understanding and self-understanding, between two – or more – cultures that have not developed their patterns of intelligibility… Diatopical hermeneutics stands for the thematic consideration of understanding the other without assuming that the other has the same basic self-understanding.’¹⁵ Such an act of deciphering the text of azan, an engagement with the other, in the times of coronavirus – Sallu Fi Beyootikum (or) pray at home – was circumvented by the Allahabad HC for a lecture on the significance of modernity to human progress (a problematic that a century worth of works in cultural critique of science and modernity has dismantled).¹⁶

 

As Levinas remarks, ‘addressing the other is inseparable from understanding the other.’¹⁷ The non-engagement in deciphering the text of the call for prayer during the pandemic stemming from a disinterest in understanding the Other, renders the HC order as one that does not address the Other (although it addresses the concern of the petitioners) thereby othering the Indian Muslim even further back to their religious pasts.

Shiv Visvanathan, in calling for an idea of secularism that is hospitable and dialogic, redefines secularism along the lines of alterity, as ‘the way we respond to other’, arguing against both Muslim fundamentalism and Hindu fanaticism. Rasel Ahmed, a journalist from Bangladesh and the editor of Roopbam, explicates that gayness and homosexuality are othered and tormented by Hindu fanaticism and Muslim fundamentalism by narrating his own experience of fleeing Bangladesh for being gay, and seeking refuge and possible citizenship in India, which has been rendered impossible, just for Muslims, by the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.¹⁸

 

My lived experiences of being an Indian Muslim also suggests the impossibility of talking about feminine sexuality or homosexuality within the frames of the households that middle class Indian Muslims emerge from. In not allowing for dialogues or engagement with those whom a culture considers as the other, the culture erects walls of alterity. First, as a way of seeing, the shift from Indian Muslims to Muslims of India comes with talking about that which is difficult to engage with, otherness – be it an engagement with the others of Muslim communities of India like those who are homosexuals or an engagement between Hindus, Muslims and peoples of other religions of India. Second, to engage with Muslims of India is to talk about Muslim-ness in India as it belongs to the present and to situate them in the topias (locations) of Hindutva. An engagement with Muslims of India, rather than the Indian Muslims, is necessary for the emergence of a creative Islamic social contract where the ontological experience of Muslim-ness in India enunciates a new ordering along orality, textuality and digitality and for reconciling social difference in India. Any act of interpreting such an ordering in itself should stem from Panikkar’s idea of diatopical hermeneutics where social groups, including the Muslim, have to be necessarily put in the difficult position of engaging with the others of its own selves.

 

It is to the effectuation of a creative Islamic social contract that Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of Nietzsche’s writings, and the material basis of the voices/noises he heard while writing, becomes useful.¹⁹ Kittler’s analysis of discourse networks of the 1800s or Romanticism, and the 1900s or Modernism, focused on how the materiality of technological ruptures, like the invention of the typewriter, telegram and other inscription devices, shaped writing and the production of the discourses of romanticism and modernity. For Nietzsche, Kittler explicates, the noise from the pen scratching against the paper, the sound from the typewriter as words get inscribed into text, are integral to the shaping of what’s spoken, written and thought. Hence, he claims that the very act of writing and typing empties the meaning from the words written as it gets lost in the white noise emerging from the materiality of writing with pen and paper or the typewriter.

Kittler remarks that the presence of voice, white noise or ‘deafening noise’ emerging from the materiality of sound from paper and typewriter and not the orally spoken word, for Nietzsche, ‘halted all erotic exchange between orality and writing, reducing writing to pure materiality.’²⁰ In such a way, the orality of the azan, namely that which offers spiritual comfort for Muslims and the textuality of azan that asks Muslims to quarantine at home and not congregate, are both circumvented and reduced to the problem of loudspeakers, that is, a problem of digital amplification. The court’s understanding of the problem is that azan involves noise pollution, but not an understanding that loudspeakers try to amplify the human voice of the imam amidst the white noise of modernism.²¹

 

In elucidating a creative possibility for Indian secularism, Shiv Visvanathan further notes that ‘Indian secularism cannot not engage with religion but must create a communicative relationship with it.’²² In trying to rescue the secular demeanour of the technological invention, loudspeaker, from the religious parochiality of Islamic tradition, the Allahabad HC fails to cultivate a ‘communicative relationship’ with the Islamic tradition of azan, thereby denying the engagement with orality and textuality of azan. The anxiety of the secularist modern court that prohibits the technological present for religious traditions simultaneously frames the Muslim as one who belongs to their past, reifying the Hindutva imaginary, and religion as something that doesn’t have a place under secularism.

John Cage’s musical piece, 4’33", explicates silence as (filled with) white noise after modernity. The piece has only one note in so much as it allows for the ambient noise produced in the opera house as that which exists and makes music possible – ‘what previously lay dormant outside the scope of our attention [i.e., white noise] becomes possibility [for music].’²³ Confronted by multiple legal, media and technological modalities of silencing, the silence of the Indian Muslim should necessarily be understood as (filled with) white noise of Hindutva, a project of modernizing Hinduism established with its claim to the Indic lands of the Indian subcontinent, Bharatvarsha.

 

In such a way, the need to silence the azan is not about rendering Indian Muslims unfamiliar or silencing them by restricting Islamic traditions from the roads and occupying it with newer traditions of New India such as lynching. But rather, the need felt by the Allahabad HC and many other proponents of reduced ‘noise pollution’, is about the existing sense of unfamiliarity with ‘communally responsible’ behaviour of the Muslims of India in the Hindu psyche that makes it impossible to deal with the text or the oral tradition of the azan. Noise pollution seems rational as against the text or the oral tradition of the azan.

Hence, the premise of this essay – in order to do the silencing and establish hegemony, Hindu Rashtra (and its liberals) needs ‘the Indian Muslim’ as an invisible presence that can continue to haunt the imaginary of partitioned India so a New India, along the lines of Hindutva, can be established. Without referring to the Indian Muslim and constant insistence on negating them, the self of Hindu Rashtra cannot be constituted.

 

The images using which this essay emotes, rigidifies what they refer to by multiple media enactments of alter-referentiality, i.e. encoding the other in order to constitute the self through a constant process of negation. Alter-referentiality particularly concerns itself with the process of encoding who the other is in order to establish alterity, the state of otherness. Hence, the images concretize who the Indian Muslim is – an image of the Muslim, the terrorist and the invisible presence unified into a monolith that continues to haunt the securitarian imaginary of partitioned India in an attempt to establish India as a Hindu Rashtra.

Such an image allows for political enactments of marginalization of the Other to render possible the New India, seen in the 2019 election manifesto of the BJP, and the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s grammar in the Constituent Assembly Debates. Indeed, it is the Indian Muslim who is allowed to exist in India and not the Muslims of India. The hermeneutics of collective experience in search of the multiple truths concerning alterity in India hence rests in the deeply fragmented nature of Muslim communities of India, namely, Tabliqis, Thowheedis and the more general Shia, Sunni and Sufi communities, rather than the image that haunts New India: the Indian Muslim. In such a way, the Muslims of India are the ones actually rendered invisible (to which Shaheen Bagh is an antithesis) while ‘Indian Muslim’ is retained as an invisible presence, a spectre, that haunts New India allowing for their bodies to be tormented on the roads to create the spectacle of the making of New India.

To that extent, the anxiety of an invisible coronavirus acquires a manifestation using the images of the Indian Muslim, concretized by the symbolism of the green cap – the Twitter image that inspired this essay. Second, the term sleeper spreaders dislocate the behaviour of the Tabliqi Jamat from matters of civil irresponsibility and locates it in the terrain of terrorism, thereby reifying the image of the Indian Muslim: the monolith that is produced through alter-referentiality and conflation of the Muslims, the terrorist and the invisible presence. The image of ‘Indian Muslim’ or the monolithic identity, occupies the painful voids of pulmonary spasm as it materializes into that which the Hindu Rashtra is anxious about, and in this case the invisible but very haunting presence of the coronavirus. In such a way, the spectre of Indian Muslim haunts India’s Covid experience.

 

First, for Derrida and Stiegler, spectre is ‘the invisible visible’ and ‘it is the visibility of the body that is not present in flesh and blood.’²⁴ That is not to say Indian Muslim is an abstract conceptual category that is immaterial or non-corporeal. The pain of being Indian Muslims is felt in flesh and blood on the roads of the New India that is being established as (or becoming) Hindu Rashtra (imagine mob lynching). In such a way, ‘the spectre’ of Indian Muslim ‘is already constituent of [the] material reality’ of Hindu Rashtra.²⁵ This conceptual category has material effects that shapes pasts, presents and futures of Muslims of India, their multiple and varied life worlds and livelihood, and the belongingness to the lands they occupy.

 

Second, the conflation of Muslims, terrorist and the invisible presence to produce the alter-referential category of Indian Muslim is subjectively objective. To say that is not to categorize the conflation as merely an act of bias, but as something that was achieved through a century-long mobilization of Hindu subjectivity through the process of alter-referentiality oriented towards the establishment of Hindu Rashtra, the objective. This involved the spectacle of the Partition and the state-induced genocide that accompanied it, India-Pakistan matches, mob lynchings, sermons at Shakhas and capital punishment for terrorists like Ajmal Kasab. The strangeness, the ghostly presence, and the invisible visibility of the Indian Muslims converge in the production of the image of the Indian Muslim so that Hindu Rashtra commits to sustaining the perpetual haunting of the Indian Muslim (making them the invisible visible that is what’s seeable) over the spectro-political landscapes of New India and/or Hindu Rashtra.

Spectralities and hauntology literature often discusses spectre or ghosts as the ‘invisible’ presence in the traumatic experience of the marginalized subject whom the spectre haunts (think of how holocaust haunts the Jews). However, the use of spectre in this paper suggests that the intentional manoeuvring and production of spectre to enable the recognition of subjecthood that experiences the manoeuvred spectre to be traumatizing so that new worlds like that of Hindu Rashtra can be formulated. Hence, trauma is not simply ‘the hidden core of memory’, a predetermined psychological explanation, but a product of deeply politicized and ideological memory work and anthropogenic production of pasts that undermines historicity.²⁶

 

Experiencing such a predetermined trauma, the Hindus of India have manoeuvred ‘the Indian Muslim’ to haunt their everydayness as the spectre – as prospective tenants, as Muslim merchants with Hindu names, and as the roadside ‘Sullas’ who are, quoting a Twitter post, ‘trained in vaginal oral sex’ waiting to ‘touch the g-spots’ of Hindu women who after ‘relaxation’ offered by Muslim men and in unison with him are ‘no more than hormonal female animals’.²⁷ The haunting-Indian-Muslim is tolerated until the manoeuvred trauma of the Muslim ghosts meets the threshold. Here again, the threshold of tolerance is not merely tested by sporadic and episodic irresponsible acts of the Indian Muslim like the Tabliqi Jamatis. Rather the threshold is predetermined to eventuate the time and circumstance that is appropriate for establishing Hindu Rashtra, the objective.

 

Shiv Visvanathan’s idea of cognitive justice, which demands the right of different knowledge systems, based on their commitment to sustaining diversity of life forms, to coexist, demands that such a plurality needs to ‘go beyond tolerance or liberalism to an active recognition of the need for diversity’. Hence, today, as the question of azan enters the courtroom in the times of Covid, I ask, is it to do with Covid at all?²⁸ I particularly ask this because of the reduction of the azan call to its digitality, that is loudspeaker. I also particularly ask this because the court refuses to engage with its textuality – ‘Sallu Fi Beyootikum’ or ‘Offer prayer at home’. On the textual level, this is a public health advisory that allows the Muslims of India to emerge as ‘civically responsible individuals’ – an aspect of Muslimness in India that remains submerged. The court’s reduction of the azan to an issue of the Muslim and the loudspeakers, the religious and the traditional vs. the modern and the technological, suppresses the civically responsible Muslims of India thereby allowing for the spectre of Indian Muslim, as one that needs to be tolerated until a predetermined threshold, to haunt the court’s order on the issue.

 

I also particularly ask this because of the discomfort expressed by the court in engaging with the difficult conversation of Muslim’s ‘spiritual comfort’ so much so that the bureaucratic order issued by the UP police is the next best thing it can talk about. But ultimately, I ask this because while the azan and Tabliqi Jamat, categorized as civically irresponsible acts amidst a global pandemic haunts India’s Covid experience as spectre, where can I get a chance to mourn the dismantling of Shaheen Bagh? Are protests impossible in the times of Covid? The Black Lives Matter movement and the protest that sparked after George Floyd was murdered by the racist police structure in the United States, which stems from systems that policed Black Slave bodies, suggests otherwise.

Nietzsche, who is haunted by the white noise of technological development, Kittler states, misses the feminine voice of the mother which teaches the child to speak – not a language but ‘to speak’. While teaching a language operates at the level of textuality, teaching how to speak as an act of engagement (with the other) operates at the level of orality. Kittler notes, ‘ever since [modernism], there has been only deathly stillness and white noise in the writing room; no woman or muse offers her kiss’. Kittler explains that towards the end of the 1800s, the alphabetization of the mother’s tongue, via mandating maternal instruction for the educational establishment of the modern nation state, allowed for the child to learn the language but not how to speak. Such an act of modernity premises the commitment of human reproduction to the progress of the nation state. It is the halting of ‘all erotic exchange between orality and writing’, Kittler notes, that haunted and traumatized Nietzsche while writing.

 

On an epistemological level, Shaheen Bagh is one that’s deeply oral, striving to be inscribed into text and mobilizing digitally against the white noise of a modernist Hindutva. Shaheen Bagh, with the sheer presence of Muslim women in hijab challenging patriarchal Hindutva, expressed the erotica of democracy that is empathy, community care and alterity, through dissent.²⁹ Shiv Visvanathan notes, ‘What was stunning about Shaheen Bagh, as a drama, was that in the digital age it emphasized orality. It spoke. It was an utterance of freedom. Orality has a drama which the textual and digital cannot match. Orality demands a return to memory and storytelling. Shaheen Bagh demonstrated that the social contract in India now has to link oral, textual, digital and give a sanctity to the oral, to a world without certification where one claims citizenship through an act of connectivity or storytelling.’³⁰

 

While in patriarchal orders of existence the woman with hijab is the one that’s oppressed (an outdated interpretation which Zizek reworks in Into the Archives of Islam, to show how women in Islam are the holders of subjective truth which Islam is deeply anxious about and so veils them), in xenophobic orders of existence the woman with hijab comes to be the beholder of truths.³¹ Wearing hijab, she becomes the absolute signifier that threatens the Islamophobic subjects. The potent power of so many women in hijab stood out as I watched the interviews, one after the other. Shaheen Bagh created the spectacle of democracy, enacted in the most ‘overwhelming’ manner, to render the invisible visibility of the spectre of Indian Muslim seeable and listenable, expressing a sensorial synaesthesia, though veiled under the hijab. It also, hence, expressed that visible invisibility is a difficult conversation about feminine sexuality and social contract within the communities of Muslims of India.

The communities of Muslims of India are fragmented – broader communities of Shia, Sunni and Sufi, and particular communities of Tabliqi, Thowheedis, Wahhabis (little to do with Arabian Wahhabism) to name a few. Yet, in an act of coming together, they came as they were to congregate against patriarchal Hindutva and performed art³² that expressed resistance, qawallis (a Thowheedi would otherwise oppose), sermons (which expresses the differences among Muslim sects) and the reading of the Indian Constitution (for its poetic power). In addition, the smell from Sikh langars added layers of sensorial synaesthesia to the epistemological enactment of feminine subjectivity at Shaheen Bagh ‘speaking out’ a mode for interreligious dialogue.

Shaheen Bagh spoke to the emergence of Muslims of India, where deeply bifurcated and divided Muslim communities came together to see, speak and listen to the narrative construction of dissentious democracy as it was enacted epistemologically, calling for a new social order of creative Muslims. While this paper demands the Hindus to engage with diatopical hermeneutic as an urgent and compelling task, it simultaneously allows for Muslims of India to engage in difficult conversations concerning sexuality, class and gender in Muslim communities. Let us stop talking about Tabliqi Jamat and start engaging with the epistemological possibility of Shaheen Bagh.

 

The mediocrity of juxtaposing the irresponsible behaviour of Tabliqi Jamat to the Rath Yatra or pre-dawn pooja carried out by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adiyanath, muffles any conversations about religion, science, alterity and modernity in India and reduces it to mere Hindu-Muslim divide by pointing at ‘the subjective bias’ of the Hindutva regime. In doing so it reifies modernist dualisms of religion vs science, faith vs truth, objective vs subjective, traditional vs modern, expert vs lay and modernity vs parochiality. To talk about issues that lie in between the dualistically established categories is to talk with difficulty. Towards more difficult conversations and the creative Muslim order that’s emergent, (lal) Salaam.

 

* The author thanks Kaushik Tekur, K12 Techno Services, Nishanth Kunnukattil Shaji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Parth Viswakarma for their comments on the article.

Footnotes:

1. On 13 March, the Delhi government had issued an advisory curbing congregation of over 200 people. The Tabiliqi Jamat conference was clearly in violation of it.

2. The 2019 General Elections manifesto of the BJP promised that the party will make a ‘New India’, via its plans to reform the nation if elected into power including the construction of the Ram Mandir.

3. John Schlib, Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences, Expectations. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2007.

4. Misria Shaik Ali, ‘What the Ayodhya Judgment Makes Evident: New India Is a Place of "No Muslim Things",’ FirstPost, 19 November 2019. https://www.firstpost.com/india/what-the-ayodhya-judgment-makes-evident-new-india-is-a-place-of-no-muslim-things-7660991.html.

5. Afzal Ansari and 2 Others Vs. State of U.P. and 2 Others. See http://elegalix.allahabad highcourt.in/elegalix/WebShowJudgment.do

6. Harsh Mander, John Dayal and Natasha Badhwar, Reconciliation: Karwan E Mohab-bat’s Journey of Solidarity through a Wounded India. Context (imprint of Westland Publications), Chennai, 2018.

7. Afzal Ansari and 2 Others Vs. State of U.P. and 2 Others. See http://elegalix.allahabadhighcourt.in/elegalix/WebShowJudgment.do

8. Ibid.

9. Ashis Nandy, Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. United Nations University, Tokyo, 1989.

10. Shiv Visvanathan, ‘Towards a New Ontology of South Asia’, Seminar 719, July 2019, pp. 87-91. http://www.india-seminar.com/2019/719/719_shiv_and_kanak_mani.htm.

11. Afzal Ansari and 2 Others Vs. State of U.P. and 2 Others. See http://elegalix. allahabadhighcourt.in/elegalix/WebShow Judgment.do

12. The seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, in 1954, established the practices that are essential part of a religion to encompass all practices that the ‘doctrines of that religion itself’ advocates for (Madras vs. Shri Lakshmindar Tirtha Swamiyar of Shri Shirur Mutt). This involves a constant return to the oral traditions of the religion and its texts. However, the command by the Allahabad High Court expresses the impossibility of interpreting religious practices for the digital world order that constitutes today’s social reality and hence, bounds religion to orality and textuality. Such a practice frames religion to the traditional and in the past and not to the modern and the present stemming from the modernist anxiety about the traditional.

13. ‘5cr Minority Students to Get Scholarship in 5 Years’, Times of India, 12 June 2019. Accessed 15 July 2020. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/5cr-minority-students-to-get-scholarships-in-5-years-govt/articleshow/69748292.cms.

14. I specifically use ‘his’ to point to the perversity of the Hindutva regime that constructs the Muslim men of our households as the perverse element it desires to jail under Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019. The fear that demands protecting Hindu women from the cusp of savage Muslim men if interpreted through Fanon’s analysis of the black man shows the emergent order of political alter(rity)-erotica where both the Muslim man and the Hindu women indulged in ‘Love Jihad’ are subjugated by the patriarchal order of Hindutva. On White Man’s Indian and the politics of subjugation of American Indians in the USA, see Sarah S. Kavanagh, ‘Haunting Remains: Educating a New American Citizenry at Indian Hill Cemetery’, in Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2011, pp. 151-78 and Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: The History of an Idea from Columbus to the Present. Knopf, New York, 1978.

15. Comment on ‘Diatopical Hermeneutics’. Search Results Web Results Diatopical Hermeneutics – Panikkar Written Words (blog). http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/gloss-diatopic.html

16. Such works include M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Soil and Health Library, Exeter, 1910; Jitendra Pal Singh Uberoi, Science and Culture. Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1971; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986; S. Irfan Habib, Jihad or Ijtihad? Religious Orthodoxy and Modern Science in Contemporary Islam. Harper-Collins Publishers India, New Delhi, 2012.

17. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-other. Athlone Press, London, 1998, p. 6.

18. Rasel Ahmed, ‘First Person: As a Persecuted Gay Muslim from Bangladesh Seeking Refuge, I Wasn’t Welcome in India’, Scoll.in, 25 December 2019. https://scroll.in/article/947811/first-person-as-a-persecuted-muslim-bangladeshi-seeking-refuge-i-wasn-t-welcome-in-india.

19. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800-1900. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990.

20. Ibid., p. 184.

21. Here I want the reader to understand that the argument goes beyond and against transhumanism that is the need for technological devices and apparatus, as inventions of human intelligence or the mind, to transcend the corporeal limitations of the body; so, it goes against the need to amplify the low decibels of human voices with human invention. Technology as that which enables the mind to transcend the limitation of human corporeality or body reifies the mind-body dualism of modernist thinking. Rather the argument is that the technological constitution of industrialized world where white noise has come to be a phenomenon that affects silence, voice and hearing, mandates such amplification if the Muslim is to live, with spiritual comfort, in the technological world that defines the present moment. For a critique of transhumanism and bodily limitation, see M. Hall, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics. Lexington Books, New York, 2016.

22. Shiv Visvanathan, ‘Confessions of a Troubled Secularist’, Asian Age, 23 August 2012. http://archive.asianage.com/columnists/confessions-troubled-secularist-053.

23. John Cage and Joan Retallack, ‘Introduction’ (essay), in Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1996, pp. xxxiii.

24. See Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, ‘Spectographies’, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghost and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2013, pp. 37-52. Here, I am reminded of Mirza Ghalib’s Ghazal ‘Ragon men daudte phirne ke hum nahin qaayal. Jab aankh hi se na tapka to phir lahu kya hai.’ I interpret it as Ghalib trying to point out the impossibility of thinking about blood which generally runs through the arteries if it is not expressed as tears. Hence, in this paper, I ask, ‘who is a real Muslim in flesh and blood and how does that Muslim manifest their identity in the context of New India?’ One answer this paper provides is that such an object without flesh and blood is the ‘Indian Muslim’. In fact, the bodies tormented on the roads are Indian Muslims and not, Muslims of India as the blood that drips from their flesh is made oblivious to any forms of diatopical seeing and sensing, in so much the act of lynching is to reinforce the spectre of Indian Muslim.

25. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai’, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghost and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2013, pp. 151-74.

26. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2013, p. 13.

27. I understand this is quite perverse for the readers but the perverse underground of every power, as Zizek claims, needs to be inquired into to understand the making of the self and the other, especially when they encounter (on the terrains of Love Jihad). See Slavoj Zizek, ‘Looking Awry’, October 50, Autumn 1989, pp. 30-55. doi:10.2307/778856. Hence, the problem of Love Jihad rests little in religious conversion (Islamic evangelicalism needs hermeneutical analysis by Muslims of India in all its forms) but rather stems from masculine anxiety which renders, between Hindu male subjectivity and Muslim male subjectivity, the women who loves (for every reason of fetishizing the Muslim as a cultural object) non-existent. Fanon asks, ‘Still on the genital level, when a white man hates black men, is he not yielding to a feeling of impotence or of sexual inferiority?’ See Frantz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, in Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press, London, 1986, pp. 109-40.

28. The author is ‘overwhelmed’ here and desires to provide a subscript to the text or stream of consciousness. The gross generalization in the previous paragraph about Hindus of India as ones who have been engaged in the manoeuvring of the monolith – Indian Muslim – in order to establish Hindu Rashtra has an anti-thesis I need to attend to. Here I am overwhelmed by the interreligious dialogue that happened in Tamil Nadu where many Hindus of Tamil Nadu participated in the anti-citizenship amendment act protest in the artful exercise of drawing anti-CAA kolam/Rangoli, a practice of Hindus. Julia Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves, states: ‘To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our ghosts.’ Bred by the uncanniness of Hindus of India, the decision to worry or to smile about my ‘Others’ is superseded by the emotion of overwhelm. In line with Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words’, I would argue, feeling overwhelmed (by anti-CAA Kolam) is theory, writing and critique. In seeking ‘proper words’, I leave this act of the critical insiders by few Hindus of Tamil Nadu to the fact that it indeed happened. See Virginia Woolf, and Anne Olivier. Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume One 1915-1919. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1980.

29. Shiv Visvanathan, ‘The Symbolism of Shaheen Bagh’, Seminar 729, May 2020. Accessed 20 June 2020. http://ww.india-seminar.com/2020/729/729_shiv_visvanathan.htm.

30. Ibid.

31. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Into the Archives of Islam’, in S. Zizek and B. Gunjevi, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. Seven Stories Press, New York, 2012, pp. 103-126.

32. Fearless Wall at Shaheen Bagh| Shilo Shiv Suleman. Performed by The Fearless Collective. Fearless Wall at Shaheen Bagh| Shilo Shiv Suleman, 1 April 2020. Accessed 21 June 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Y48uBRjGQvE.