Through the Love Songs of the Sufi

By Eboo Patel, "India's 'Slumdog' Role Model" - The Washington Post - Washington, DC, USA
Monday, March 9, 2009

The first thing Allah Rakha (A R) Rahman did when he arrived back on Indian soil after picking up two Oscars in Hollywood was to offer prayers at a Sufi shrine.

Rahman, who won two Oscars for the music he created for "Slumdog Millionaire", accepted Islam in the late 1980s, after experiencing a dream sequence calling him into the faith. He has been on Haj multiple times and is regular in his five daily prayers. That he makes dance music for Indian beauties and seeks guidance at the mausoleums of Muslim saints only affirms his place in the mainstream of Indian Islam.

India has long been at the center of Muslim pluralism, a movement with three core elements:
1) A spiritual ethic defined by the Islamic concept of Tawheed, the idea that God is all-pervasive; 2) A social ethic that views those of other creeds as partners in the journey to serve God and humanity; 3) A cultural ethic that seeks to absorb the multiple identities of faith, nation, ethnicity and language, understanding this multiplicity as mutually enriching rather than mutually exclusive.

Artists like AR Rahman are not the only exemplars of Muslim pluralism in India. Many of India's most important historical figures embodied this ethic as well. The 16th Century Mughal Emperor Akbar once wrote, "Divine mercy attaches itself to every form of creed ... The eternal God is bounteous to all souls and conditions of men."

The famous freedom fighter and compatriot of Gandhi, Maulana Azad, said: "I am a Mussalman and proud of the fact. The spirit of Islam guides and helps me forward. I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of that indivisible unity that is the Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice and without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete. I am an essential element that has gone to build India."

On my recent trip to India, I found Muslim pluralism alive and well in both the civic and intellectual life in India. In Delhi, Dr. Syed Zafar Mahmood opened a meeting of the Interfaith Coalition for Peace by pointing out that the Qur'an says that God has sent messengers to every nation, and certainly would not have ignored a great nation like India.

"Therefore I conclude that Lord Krishna and Lord Buddha are part of the many messengers that God sent to humanity, and I worship and respect them along with the Prophet Muhammad." His organization has been organizing interfaith peace camps with religiously diverse young people and interfaith women's journeys across India.

In Mumbai, the tireless Dr. Zeenat Shaukat Ali's WISDOM Foundation, has been bringing together the religious leadership of that city to sponsor everything from interfaith sports programs to interfaith arts projects. These diverse religious leaders played an important role in keeping Mumbai peaceful after the attacks of 11/26.

Such projects exemplify Indian Islam, the scholar Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer told me. There are two reasons for this. First, though Islam might have entered India through the sword of the warrior, it spread through the love songs of the Sufi.

Islamic orthodoxy has never had a wide following in India. As proof, he pointed out that Indians of all faiths make pilgrimages to the shrines of Sufi saints, but there is not one popular monument to an orthodox Muslim scholar in the country.

Second, because Islam has always been a minority faith in India, it has long learned to accommodate itself, to get along with the majority, to strike alliances with those from different communities. Far from this flexibility compromising the faith, Indian Muslims consider it characteristic of their tradition.

The Indian Muslim writer MJ Akbar agrees. Over early evening snacks at a hotel in Delhi, he told me that the great idea of India is that different communities are meant to live together, and that such coexistence is actually the key to success and creativity.

The Hindu puritans and the Muslim puritans share a common belief not only in a narrow orthodoxy but also in a desire to dominate others -- from women to people of other faiths. But these movements have consistently met with failure, both in economics and at the ballot box. There are Muslim countries, Akbar told me, that are attempting to build themselves up on Islamic Puritanism and oil. Indian Muslims are building themselves on creativity and coexistence.

"They may have a temporary checkbook, but we will have a sustainable economy."

And, as the success of A R Rahman illustrates, a culture that can be embraced by the world.

Picture: Eboo Patel. Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together.