Arab Animosity

[I intended to shelve this post after I had written it for fear of being too judgmental. However, recent experiences on my travel to Istanbul through the Middle East have cemented my opinions and made me decide to publish this post]

What makes Arabs such a charged, hyper tensed race of people? Readers will rightly argue that I am generalizing here since there are bunches among the Arab race who are the calm-composed types. But having experienced the Middle East, during my growing up years, I have time and again come across Arabs who seem to have very little of  attributes like patience, composure and diplomacy. Don’t get me wrong; Arabs are in general, honest and hardworking people, but they lose their cool more often than not, bickering about the most trivial of things. It is no wonder that countries like England and U.S who descended upon the Middle East with imperialistic intentions regret it for the most part even to this day!!

Many Anti-islamists have blamed Islam to be the reason for such attributes citing evidences of how the religion spread through the sword. Whether Islam spread through the sword is a topic for another day but my view is that Arab animosity comes from a variety of related factors, religion contributing very little. A few years ago, shortly after the Danish cartoon incident, I ran an experiment with some friends who belonged to various ethnicities and religions. I showed them two cards, one with the picture of a silhouette holding a sword and the other of the exact same silhouette meditating- sort of in a saintly pose. I asked them to identify in their opinion which one represented the prophet of Islam (pbuh) more accurately. 90 percent (including a few muslims), chose the card with the sword! It demonstrated to me that often great people in history are misconstrued by popular belief rather than facts. Arabs today are seen through the eyes of the media portraying violence and chaos which may indeed be the case for some countries but not all. This has unconsciously fed the minds of people to think that an Arab prophet could be violent.

The fact is that Muhammed(Pbuh) was introduced to Islam in a cave while he was MEDITATING. The fact is that he never had intentions to fight where force was not required. The fact is he used his sword only where his near and dear ones needed protection and to these near and dear ones, he treated them with respect, honour, humility and kindness. If not anything, the religion he bought turned a race of barbarians into a people with substance whose expanse traversed from central Asia all the way to Europe. At the time, a muslim was identified as one who would leave an ownerless gold coin lying on the road untouched. Where then did these divine attributes disappear in the Arabs of today? 

 The truth is that these divine attributes turned human and thus came about divisions within the religion and a quest for power, fame and wealth. These characteristics passed on from generation to generation inciting hatred and disunity. The discovery of oil in the 19^th century created more chaos with imperialistic powers meddling in the affairs of the Arab folk. In the end, the Arab society who were identified by tribes at one point where now identified with wealth. Wealth disparity is so widespread in the middle east, it’s only natural for the common Arab man to be so pissed about everything! After all, while he struggles with unemployment to make ends meet, his tribe member who was once considered an equal, now owns oil fields and enjoys the finer things in life

How Islam reached the Indian Subcontinent?

India, a land mass comprising of 1.2 billion people today accounts for 17% of the world’s population with around 14% of Indians following Islam. What most people don’t realize from this statistic is that, it means that around 177 million Muslims live in India, making it the 3^rd largest Muslim populated country in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan.

Islam's route to India - Click to enlarge

Contrary to popular belief, there are not one but three main routes that brought Islam to India. The most well-known among these was the invasion coming in from Afghanistan and Uzbekistan around the 11^th century. These dynasties and their descendants form a large part of North India and Pakistan as we know it today. The Mughals of India also trace their lineage through Turkish-Mongol warriors who used this route. There are however lesser known routes that outdated the Northern occurrence of Islam and this was primarily through sea routes bordering the south western coast of India and South eastern coast of India (via Sri Lanka known as Ceylon at the time). Even before the advent of Islam, Arab and Middle Eastern sailors used to trade with Indian ports on the Western Coast for spices and other amenities.  Significant proof of this can be found in early maps and documents that mention ports in Western India such as Manjarur ( Mangalore), Qaliqut (Calicut) and Kawlam (Kollam). Thus the route to India was a well-known one. 

The Cheruman Perumal Mosque (7th century) as seen in 1905 on India's West Coast

Masjid Al-Abrar (7th century) in Sri Lanka

Shortly after the rise of Islam in Saudi Arabia, the Prophet (PBUH) sent missionaries to spread the word of Islam, and it is through this initiative that Malik Deenar, a close companion of the prophet set out to capturing the minds and hearts of Indians looking for an escape from the ugly face of the caste system that was prevalent at the time. But it was not only the lower castes who were mesmerized with the religion and its teaching. The Chera king Cheruman Perumar who ruled parts of modern day Kerala, is considered by many Islamic historians to be the first Muslim in India. The story of his miraculous conversion to Islam and his visit to see the holy prophet can only be speculated. However, historians relate that he changed his name to Tajuddin and died on his voyage back from Makkah when his ship sank near the coast of Oman due to severe weather. They support this theory by citing evidence relating to a tomb in Oman that bears his name. Other accounts of this episode state that Tajuddin was in fact a local Chieftain whose descendants would go on to form the Zamorins of Calicut. In either case, the contingent, who escaped the storm, reached the coasts of the Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka. From here the contingent split, one focusing on the western coast of India and another focusing on Ceylon, the name by which Sri Lanka was historically known.  In Sri Lanka, Masjid Al Abrar located in the town of Beruwala (loosely translated as ‘lower the sails’) is the first mosque that was built a few years after the Sri Lankan contingent arrived. The Western Indian contingent arrived on the Malabar plains and built their first mosque there, today called the Cheruman Perumal Mosque in honor of the Chera King Cheruman Perumal.  A small settlement of Yemeni Muslims also landed on the east coast of India during this time however, it was much later around the 12^th-13^th centuries that an influx of Muslims starting settling in the Eastern Coast of India primarily arriving from Sri Lanka and the North India. 

KilaKarai Masjid (8th century) on India's East coast built by Yemeni Merchants 

One of the best evidences in my opinion of understanding how Islam spread in any geographical area is to look at the Islamic schools of thought that Muslims in these regions follow as of today.  For the unaware, Sunni Muslims primarily follow one of four schools of thought founded by theologians who interpreted the holy books and put in place laws that govern Islamic society.  These are interesting anthropological indicators only because very rarely do Muslims over generations tend to change their school of thought as in most cases; the school of thought is associated with language, culture and customs. Accordingly, in the case of India and Sri Lanka, it is clearly seen that in land areas close to the sea such as the coastal belts of India, and Srilanka, ‘Shafism’ ,the school of thought propagated by Imam Shafi is prevalent while in North and Central parts of India, ‘Hanafism’, a school of thought propagated by Imam Abu Hanifa is the prevalent school of thought. Similarly, in the case of the other sect of Islam i.e Shiaism that was brought from Persia, it is widely prevalent in the Northern parts of India while being almost absent from coastal areas. This trend is also seen among other South East Asian Muslim countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. It follows from this that Indian Muslims who live along the coastal belt of India especially the west have high chances of having an Arab /Middle Eastern lineage whereas Muslims in the Northern part of India are most likely descendants of  Afghani – Uzbek or Persian Heritage.

In addition to the Northern Invasions and the sea trade routes, we must not forget the contributions of one more channel that spread Islam in India to a large extent i.e. Sufism. Sufism is said to have arrived in India from Turkey and Iran (Persia) early in the 10^th-11^th centuries and captured Indian audiences with its mysticism, peacefulness and simplicity. To prove the point on how influential Sufism is, historians point out that during the travels of Sufi Saint Moinuddin Chishti in the 12^th century, he is known to have convinced more than 90,000 followers to embrace Islam! To put that in perspective, that’s equivalent to the population of an entire city at the time!