Therer are two recent marriages of english writers Naipaul to Nadia &this dude Amitav Kumar english teacher/writer from india.Apparently both these have maarried non ahmedie sunni mosleeeeeeeeeeeeems from Pakiland not so called impure hindusthani muslims.If a pathan girl Samia can be murdered in the name of honor killing for lesser crime of marrying non pathan muslim ,how come muslim girl can marry HINDU BOYS WITHOUT CONVERSION?
Is there two sets of islamic rules one that declared Ahmedie non muslim & grants fulll muslim Passport to apparently declared non islamic acts of marrying infide; without ;losing passport & ciotizenship of preferred majority when thy are not evn muslims bt defenition!!
"I had never thought that I had
converted although, if folks wanted to talk
"
Outlook Magazine | March 19, 2001
‘We Are All Converts’
Amitava Kumar on his marriage to a Muslim, his ‘conversion’ and his
first visit to Karachi
Amitava Kumar
ON my arrival in Karachi, Nani asked me to sit beside her on the sofa.
Nani is my wife Mona’s maternal grandmother. She told me that she was
throwing a party that night in my honour. Nani wanted me to meet
everyone in the family. The guests, she said, had been informed of
Mona’s marriage to me the previous year. She said in Urdu: “I told them
that the groom is from Hindustan. And then I told them, ‘He has accepted
Islam.’”
Nani said that people had congratulated her. “Sabhi mujhe mubarakbad
dene lage. Kehne lage ki Mona ko jannat milegi (Everyone began
congratulating me. They began saying Mona will be assured a place in
heaven).” I think Nani knew that I did not think of myself as a Muslim.
Her account about the guests for the dinner that night was her way of
orienting me to her world.
Perhaps I use the word conversion to protest Naipaul’s dismissal of all
Muslims as converts. It ignores how communities have grown in dialogue
with each other." That evening, the people I met were polite and even
affectionate. Many of them did not call me by my usual name. They called
me Safdar. When dinner was over, one guest, my mother-in-law’s cousin,
turned in my direction and asked loudly, “Safdar, how did your parents
take the news of your conversion?”
It was difficult for me to tell her that I had never thought that I had
converted although, if folks wanted to talk about it, I was not opposed
to being considered a convert either. As to my parents, I didn’t know
what they thought. I hadn’t told them anything at all.
“Marriage among Hindus is no simple matter,” wrote Mahatma Gandhi in his
autobiography. But, in the case of my marriage, distance had made
matters very simple. My parents and most of my family were in India. I
was living in New Haven in the US. I was the only one making decisions.
It was only when I was at Mona’s parents’ home in Toronto, deep into the
discussion of dates suitable for our marriage, that I decided to inform
my parents of my decision to marry. I called them in India to give them
the news. At that time, Mona’s father was still in Karachi. When I went
up to Toronto, Mona’s father was visiting from Pakistan. Mona’s mother
had moved to Canada the previous year. She already had a teaching job
and was now waiting for her husband to join her. Mona’s family is a
well-to-do liberal family; Asma Jehangir, the human rights lawyer, is
her mother’s first cousin; on the father’s side, they are distant
relatives of General Pervez Musharraf.
Two years before that phone call from Toronto, I had told my parents in
a letter of my having met Mona in New York City. I had written that she
was a Muslim—and a Pakistani. Then, I had called my parents to talk to
them. My father had rightly anticipated that I might be concerned about
their opposition to my being in love with a Muslim. He came to the point
immediately. “You have our blessings,” he said. My mother too could not
say no. But she had been a bit reluctant. She said: “Yes…but can’t you
find anyone from…?”
Later, when I called them from Toronto, the war in Kargil had already
begun. My mother asked me what Mona’s family thought of the war. She
said: “Woh log us tarah ke Musalman to nahin hain na (They are not those
kind of Muslims, are they)?” A suitable gloss on that would perhaps be:
“They are not fanatical, are they?” On more than one occasion, I have
heard people close to me in my family say that Muslims are fanatics.
Ten days later, I was married. Several of Mona’s relatives came to the
wedding. I was alone on the groom’s side.
--------------------------------------
2 of 2)
It was a bright, warm day. Mona and I went to the marriage registrar’s
office. Inside the building, there were many offices. Mona, wearing a
blue silk sari, walked to the window marked ‘Tax and Water Inquiry’, and
then we were pointed in the right direction. An Irishman now settled in
Canada officiated. He filled out our religions, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’, on
the marriage form and asked: “Isn’t that a bit like a Catholic marrying
a Protestant back where I’m from?”
We also had a brief Islamic ceremony at Mona’s parents’ home. One of her
uncles officiated as the qazi. Both Mona and I were required to just say
“yes” thrice to the question about our intent to marry. There were two
lines from the Quran the qazi asked me to repeat after him. I did so,
haltingly. The name that was used for me during this ceremony was Safdar
Ali. The previous week, I had got a call from Toronto. Mona sounded a
little upset, and then her mother came on the line. I was asked to
choose a Muslim name. I was told that in Pakistan, the marriage of a
Muslim to a non-Muslim is not recognised. So, it was suggested that I
perhaps choose a name that could be used during an Islamic ceremony.
Mona’s mother thought the name ‘Aftaab’ would be suitable because it
resembled my present name. I said no. I chose the name ‘Safdar’ after
Safdar Hashmi, the dynamic, young theatre-activist who had been killed
on the streets outside Delhi by political goons.
I was a little disturbed by all this. Was this a conversion? No one from
Mona’s family had actually used the word. It is possible that they
didn’t want to think in those terms, just as I didn’t, though that is
what they wanted it to be.
But, I also had the opposite thought. In the subcontinent, we
increasingly identify ourselves in religious terms. The erosion of
pluralism means that we participate in a kind of negative
identification. As Eqbal Ahmad put it, this means saying that “we are
so-and-so because we are not the Other. We are what we are because we
are different from the West, or from the Muslims, or from the Hindus, or
from the Jews, or from the Christians.” In such a scenario, doesn’t
conversion promise the presence of more people in society who would have
roots in many communities?
During my visit to Karachi, a boy I met first apologised for posing a
personal question, and then asked me if I had converted. I repeated to
him the lines of poetry my friend Ajai Singh had written in Lucknow:
“Main aadha Hindu hoon, aadha Musalman hoon,/Main poora Hindustan hoon
(I’m half a Hindu, half a Muslim/I’m all of India)”. I told the boy
about Nani calling me Safdar. I was also the one who responded to the
name I’ve had since I was a boy. I wasn’t only one or the other; I was
prepared to be both.
Perhaps, conversion is not the right word for what I have in mind; it
has more to do with a notion of plural identities. But conversion does
help me attack the intransigent border between religions.Maybe my choice
of the word is also partly to protest V.S. Naipaul’s dismissal, in
Beyond Belief, of all Muslims who are not Arabs as “converts”. He writes
that Muslims in a country like India, because they are converts to
Islam, have an unreal sense of who they are. Their condition, Naipaul
writes, has “an element of neurosis and nihilism”. This implies that
Muslims have no local histories, they’re only tied to an elsewhere in
Arabia. It erases the centuries of adaptation and growth of Islam in
places like India; it also plays into the hands of the bigots in India
who don’t tire of calling present-day Muslims “outsiders” or “invaders”.
Against Naipaul’s idea of purity and fixity in religion, it’s necessary
to see how communities have grown historically in dialogue with each
other. Their influences are mixed and shared. If you go far back in
time, surely all of us are converts.
In recent years, in India at least, the idea of conversion has become a
political scandal. Right-wing Hindu fundamentalists have whipped up the
rhetoric of Hinduism under attack by saying that Muslims and Christian
minorities are converting poor Hindus. Theirs is a far cry from what
writer Intizar Husain said: “I’m a Muslim, but I always feel there is a
Hindu sitting inside me… I still feel I’m an exilé who wanders between
Karbala and Ayodhya.” Born in India, Husain migrated to Pakistan
post-Partition. I was struck by the beauty of his words, and his sense
of sublime rootlessness. In his worldview, the sense of belonging to
different, distant, places was not a sign of neurosis but humanity.
Unlike Naipaul—born in the diaspora, and repulsed by what he had once
considered home—Husain celebrates his ties to the places that are a part
of his past; even his exile’s a pleasant longing for the places he
belongs to.
After my return from Karachi, I visited poet and film director Gulzar in
Mumbai. Over dinner, Gulzar, a Hindu, told me he had been fasting for
Ramzan for several years. A Muslim friend of his had been advised by his
doctor to avoid the strain, and so Gulzar offered to keep a fast
instead. I wanted to tell Gulzar: “You should stop keeping the fast.
It’s my turn now.”
(Amitava Kumar is the author of Passport Photos, Penguin India.)
"jo kHat main kahte they apni jaan mujhko
aaj kHat likhne main unki jaan jaati hai …
[This message has been edited by FYI (edited March 10, 2001).]
poor guy’s really cofused with all his Safdar/Aftab identities he got, obviously naipul marrying an indian Muslim is different from author marrying a pakistani muslim…it brings out more confusion…