By: Rehan Ansari
part one
October 25,2001

Deeply disappointed by the writings of our very own,and New York-based, culture abas - Salman Rushdie andAmitav Ghosh - on What is Happening (a title that embraces for me the phenomenon that is the attack on America, which is also the attack on Afghanistan, which is also the crisis in Pakistan and a crisis for Kashmiri militants, which will mean something in India, as for example Prime Minister Vajpayee's speech to kick off the Bharatiya Janata Party's election campaign in Uttar Pradesh) my sister and I went to meet Akeel Bilgrami at Columbia University. I first met Akeel Bilgrami at a conference at Yale 10years ago. He was chairing a discussion on Ayodhya.
Earlier that year I had spent a magical time in Delhi and Bombay, my first time to those cities and I found both wonderful alternatives to my Lahore and Karachi existences. Simply put: in Lahore I was sick of print media, and the decline of the most interesting paper in town, The Frontier Post, whereas Delhi seemed to be where television journalism was bubbling. I was wondering why it was that I should not just start living and working there. By December I was visiting in New York and Ayodhya happened. It shook me out of my reverie.
My first trip to India, particularly Delhi, surpriseof surprises, was my first encounter with a feeling of Islam that was non-Zia. In fact my first impression of Delhi was that it looked, with the forts, the tombs,the old city, more Muslim than Karachi, the city of my birth. I could see Muslim history in the not-that-big things as well. I could see it in Hussain Ahmed Madni library, near the ITO (the ITO is the building where Pakistanis go to register themselves). This maulvi sahib, a Deobandi personality, had parhaoed my taya's nikah, and slowly I put it together that we were after all from Sahranpur district. I wondered if there was a connection between the facts that my elders don't pray anymore and that they don't tell stories of India.
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In the years of living through Zia's time you justi gnored people who said Islam Islam too much. Perhaps I was used to living under Zia's Islam, where you turned something off in you so Islam was so much background noise. Islam was talked of everywhere. It was also meaningless because it was everywhere; Rooh Afza was somehow Islamic, going to single sex school was somehow more Islamic than coed, salwar kameez was Islamic, the militant enforcement of rozain Karachi was Islamic. Perhaps it broke my heart: the realisation that India was not a simple alternative to Pakistan.
It's not the conference I will talk about but the dinner afterwards where I saw Akeel up close. Great hair, great nose and sharp wit. He said provocative things about V S Naipaul, Ashis Nandy, Agha ShahidAli. When I told him I was from Pakistan, he remembered that so that over the course of dinner when something about Pakistan came up he called it a third-rate country, and looked at me.
The comment I thought rich, knowing the reason we had all assembled at Yale. Over the course of the next couple of years I found out that Akeel had studied at Bombay University, had been there at the same time as Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appadurai. He taught philosophy and was chair of the department at Columbia. I also read an essay by him called What is a Muslim? in a book edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr and somebody else.
When you go through these anthologies, as an undergraduate in the Eurocentric American academy,then you look for desi names in anthologies puttogether by clever Americans. The essay was too difficult for me to read; he is a philosopher, and hewas referring to so many Europeans I felt vertigo. But I remember two footnotes! In one he said that he had read 500 years of Ottoman theology on which the sharia is based and didn't think anything of it. Inanother footnote he told the story that he was raised secular, and was a communist, but once in a neighbourhood in Delhi, which had a Hindu majority and had recently suffered a riot, he described himself as a Muslim to the desk clerk in a hotel. I found both those stands in those footnotes to be moral and stylish.
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part two
AKEEL Bilgrami is a philosopher who is interested in reform in Islam. His writing about how Muslims should regard themselves caught my interest 10 years ago,post Persian Gulf War and Ayodhya. In an essay called‘What is a Muslim Fundamental Commitment and Identity’, he argued that behind the defensiveness ofMuslim moderates lies a philosophical sickness.Moderates he defines as people who are fundamentally Muslim but are also opposed to the absolutist andanti-secular forces in their countries. The sickness has to do with us Muslims thinking ofourselves in the third person.
Understanding a phenomenon, he says, occurs in the third person. We are correct in our sense of historical wrong. Say Israel intransigence, or American(un)evenhandedness. For sympathetic others this should be the only stance to take, says Akeel.But we Muslims must not allow ourselves to be dominated by this history, which is the same as taking a third-person stance towards ourselves. We must be able to think of other futures or the past will always be our future.
Or, as I say in Pakistan, let’s forget about Kashmir,so we can think about something else. I argue that mine is an active voice, as opposed to passive.Kashmir has brought Pakistan nothing but ruin. I want us to get out of the ruinous state.
My sister Saniya had set up the meeting as she had been in more recent touch with him. She had interviewed Akeel for a show on Zee called NR Eyes. NREyes ran for a year on Zee News and it had the host, Saniya, interviewing mega-successful North American non-resident Indians. When the show had run out of ideas about whom to interview, having interviewed 55tycoons — the spare parts king from Cleveland, the Hotmail guy, some medical systems maharajah — all droning like each other, she managed to squeeze in some of her choices of people living in New York: Agha Shahid Ali, Amitav Ghosh and Akeel Bilgrami.
Saniya told me that she wanted to meet Akeel because she wanted to see if he was talking about the same things we were. Whether, in her words, our table of contents matched. I wanted to ask him if he thought New York was still the centre of the world. Or deserved to be. We met at Henry’s, a restaurant on Broadway and 108th.“How are you?” he asked, and then when our smiles expressed that we had too much to talk about, he said, “It is impossible to think of anything else these days.” He sat down, folding a newspaper on the table that was not the New York Times. America doesn’t know how to handle this, he said. Forthe first time in a hundred years they have come across an enemy that is incorruptible. They are failing to buy off the Taliban. I am not going to say who said what for it was an afternoon of much blasphemous talk.
Will Wall St remain in New York? New York is really about Wall St. There is some money in publishing but New York is all about Wall St. What do you think? Will they move to Wisconsin and operate out of single-storeyed offices?
As for Osama, omigod, the man employs no rhetoric at all. In his messages he keeps hitting the same points.He wants to do for the entire Middle East what the Iranians did for Iran. I think Christopher Hitchens(of The Nation) is wrong when he talks of the false consciousness of bin Laden’s message. Bin Laden’s goals are clearly political and understood as such. Asfor employing the language of religion how many leaders do we know who don’t do that? Gandhi did it for his politics.
The above comments represent an hour of light-heartedrelevancy.
We also all laughed at the comment that Al Jazeera network was the greatest institution in the world.Imagine! Their motto is our point of view and the other point of view! There was talk of Rushdie. He had written something very disappointing on The Happening. Saniya and I confessed to wondering whether he would even write at all, that he may be shocked by the realisation that they were not after him. Akeel cracked a smile. His and my eyes met as all of us talked about how much we liked Shame.
Akeel said to me: you know there is an Akeel Bilgramiin Karachi as well? I said yes, the architect and oneof the founders of the Indus Valley school, the onlyliberal arts college in Karachi. “That is my cousin,”he responded. “Someone once told me that if you search for Akeel Bilgrami on the net there is a page on the Karachi Akeel and on me there is a one line and that says he was married to a Hindu.”