The Town Slowly Empties by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

Author:Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee [Bhattacharjee, Manash Firaq]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headpress
Published: 2020-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

“Trust Begets Trust”

Saturday, April 4

NORMALLY THE TABLIGHI JAMAAT PASSES EACH YEAR WITHOUT notice. This year the event is the hub of some controversy. The Tablighi Jamaat sees orthodox Islamic preachers coverge at the Nizamuddin Dargah but because of Covid-19 restrictions, and the presence of foreign nationals from hotspot countries, like Malaysia and Indonesia, it is believed the event has facilitated the spread of positive cases. Nearly one third of the spike in Covid-19 cases since the end of March are attributed to the Jamaat event. Authorities are trying to track down each attendee and quarantine them. It will be even tougher to identify each person’s travel history and fellow travellers who might be infected. Social media did not waste time in demonizing Muslims. Hashtags like #CoronaJihad and #TablighiJamatVirus quickly circulated on Twitter. The virus was the perfect conduit to merge paranoia with the pandemic. Why would people endanger their own lives and the lives of others? The Jamaat can be accused of stupidity but not conspiracy.

Religious followers live in another era, often refusing to accept advice or listen to commonsense. For believers, Covid-19 may well be divine punishment. But then, one expects people to observe certain norms when it comes to possible danger to life. Any religious congregation is untimely and risky at such an hour.

You can’t question or ridicule faith with a sense of superiority, however. Faith is not responsible for all the problems in the world. Often what appears to be a collective act of faith can be devoid of an inner spiritual quest. The spiritual is something personal, never collective. Faith is belief that offers meaning to life. It has both personal and collective dimensions. Religion includes discipline and the observance of traditional practices. These traditions are part of cultural habit. Religion also manifests in political structures. It becomes a code for subservience to certain political and social rules. Religion in this form is an ideology of power.

In the modern world, religion and political power often sit side by side. Colonialism, for instance, was/is a modern structure of power, in which religion is not essential. Colonialism is crudely based on exploitation for the sake of economic profit. There is nothing religious about it, though it can aid the propagation of a certain religion. Religion helps in the consolidation of state power. Theocracies are often run by corrupt men who rule in the name of a god. The modern era has shown us the blurry lines between what naïve, secular modernists consider as the rift between reason and religion.

With terrific accuracy and precision, the Romanian philosopher, E.M. Cioran, writes in A Short History of Decay: ‘We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.’99

In a single sentence, Cioran brings the medieval and modern worlds of power to the same table. The names have changed, but intention hasn’t. The secular world is as much a matter of belief as a religious one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.