Indian Muslims’s expressions of solidarity towards their counterparts worldwide who face oppression and violence often trigger Hindu nationalists in India. The solidarity exhibited by muslims across national boundaries today is grounded in shared experiences of discrimination, rather than a rejection of their national affiliations. Their solidarity is crucial for effectively confronting the hate and oppression posed by Islamophobia.
We all are aware about Israel’s desperation for a full fledged regional war in the Middle East. For that only purpose Israel increased the scale of attacks from Southern suburbs of Lebanon to the Lebanese capital, Beirut and unleashed the terror. In these attacks Hezbollah’s Secretary General Syed Hasan Nasrallah was killed. When Indian Muslims, including J&K’s former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and JKNC MP Aga Syed Ruhullah Mahdi, condemned the politically-motivated murder of Hezbollah leader, Hindu right wing got triggered.
BJPs leader and Assam Chief Minister Hemanta Biswa Sarma raised the same question. Sarma said, “The president of Hezbollah was killed in Lebanon, and the INDIA alliance in India is mourning. But when Hindu people are killed by terrorists here, do they express the same sadness and remorse?”
The anxiety in Hindu right wing against the solidarity among the Muslims, particularly for Palestinians, is not new. During the month of Muharram, in July three persons were arrested by Bihar police in Nawada district of Bihar for waving Palestinian flag in a Muharram procession. Same thing happened in Jharkhand when a man waved Palestinian flag. BJP chief Babulal Marandi shared his video clip on X (formerly Twitter) calling for strict action against people with a “Talibani mindset”. Later that person was arrested. Triggering of Hindu right wing, from waving Palestinian flag and some words of solidarity for the victims of the most brutal violence in the 21st century, is so dystopian. Their hostility is not a recent phenomenon. It is widely acknowledged that the “War on Terror” following the events of 9/11, contributed to the rise of Islamophobia on a global scale. However, it is important to recognize that the dehumanization of Muslims as well as Islamophobia had existed in Western countries long before this period and was also prevalent within Indian society.
In Britain, during the last month of August, violence against Muslims flared up after three children were murdered linked to Muslim as a suspect, although later investigations revealed the accused was not a Muslim. In India, there is an immediate attempt to link every crime involving Muslims suspects, mostly by Hindu-right. During COVID, the hatred and stereotypes spread against Muslims intensified economic boycotts against them, similar to what is happening in Europe.
In Europe, incidents are frequently blamed on Muslim migrants without any investigation or inquiry. These are the Muslims from the countries in West Asia, which have been devastated by Western imperialism causing migration in the first place. Indian Muslims face very similar treatment in India, where every Muslim vendor, vegetable seller, or worker in Hindu-majority areas are often labelled as a Rohingya or Bangladeshi refugee and portrayed as the source of various problems.
Portrayal of Muslims as savages did not start in 2001. It existed in western societies previously. These people, including Semites (indigenous of West Asia) were subjected to rule, long before Prophet Muhammad. Indigenous Jewish people were Savages for whites during the Roman empire. During the rise of Muslim rule in West Asia, portrayal of Muslims as savages began. People belonging to the dominant religion in West Asia become savages by default for the West.
This dehumanization of Muslims over the centuries is so ingrained in the collective psyche of Western population that for their rulers it becomes a cake walk to tell their subjects, “Look those are some savages in that region who do not know how to live like us, so we are going to kill them and teach them how to do that”. Looting and maintaining control over oil, food supply chains, and other resources gets social sanction in the process of exporting civilization to these savage and backwards countries. Edward Said (1997) writes: “For most of the Middle Ages and during the early part of the Renaissance in Europe, Islam was believed to be a demonic religion of apostasy, blasphemy, and obscurity. It did not seem to matter that Muslims considered Muhammad a prophet and not a god; what mattered to Christians was that Muhammad was a false prophet, a sower of discord, a sensualist, a hypocrite, an agent of the devil. Nor was this view of Muhammad strictly a doctrinal one.”
So the West did not only see Prophet Muhammad from that angle but dehumanised his followers as savages, and ‘demonic’. Racialization of followers of ‘Islam’ continued. Western and American orientalist writers continued to push that propaganda for political purposes to justify the imperialism of west and America. Norman Daniel, in his book, Islam and the West, says, “shocked by the wild inaccuracy and patent hostility of what he found in the mediaeval texts – crude insults to the Prophet, gross caricatures of Muslim ritual, and scurrilous portrayals of Muslims as libidinous, gluttonous, savage, bloodthirsty and semi-human.”
There were many books written about Prophet Muhammad like ‘Rangeela Rasool’ in India as well. There were so many attempts to demonise Prophet Muhammad from West to India for the purpose of demonising all the Muslims. It was an easy way to portray Muslims as wild savages and paedophiles by portraying and vilifying their Prophet in such a manner. The project of hate against Muslims will thus be furthered.
In post-independence India, the image of a Muslim has been painted as that of a savage alien invader from far away lands. However, the fact remains that most of the Muslims are indigenous to India and those who came and migrated to India did not all come as invaders. Most were merchants and traders and among those who find their ancestry in these groups have been living here for centuries. Yet still, this portrayal as ‘others’ and ‘savages’ made its way to the mass psyche in post-independence India owing largely to increasing political and economic inequalities between the majority and minority communities.
A rich savarna man sitting in his luxury car has little reason to question the dehumanized portrayal of a Muslim puncture-wala who does not speak a polished language or eats the same food. So Muslims getting marginalised in all walks of life in India goes hand in hand with their dehumanization and portrayal as a savage alien. Where Indian Muslims are standing today has been a long journey to the extreme of their villainization as a danger to the majority and ultimately reduced to a mere shadow that practically has no equal rights in the society, polity and economy.
Meanwhile, in the post-9/11 scenario, Muslims worldwide started to recognize their dehumanisation and Islamophobia as a tool for their collective oppression and that it was just one more step in the ladder of pre-existing hate against Muslims around the world. Seeing the common roots of dehumanisation and oppression of Muslims in these different places gives a sense of shared pain, and not just a shared religious identity.
In a world where more than 17,000 children are killed and resisting this ethnic cleansing is termed terrorism, the least Muslims around the world can share with each other is solidarity. Humanity would have enabled you to cry at the sight of slaughtered Palestinian children, to ask us to not feel the pain which we know too well and not to express solidarity with their movement is cruel.
When Muslims around the world face the same experiences of Islamophobic violence and dehumanisation then why wouldn’t they show solidarity with each other in loss and pain against the imperialist forces of West and Hindutva forces in India or Buddhist militants in Myanmar. There is only one way for Muslims to fight against their collective dehumanisation, that is solidarity without borders among Muslims. This type of solidarity is also a form of psychological and non-violent resistance against the arrogance of Zionist butchering of innocents and tyranny of Hindutva nationalists in India.
