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Shoes in the mosque, villainy in the soul

Syed Badrul Ahsan
THERE arc places where you do not go for a demonstration of shoes, not even if it is an American president whose policies you are repelled by. And when it comes to mosques, or similar places of worship, it is your shoes that must stay in the right place. In cultures across the world, shoes arc often an apt symbol of disrespect that you must not demonstrate beyond what is absolutely necessary. Certainly, you will not, you must not use it in mosques. You take them off, until such time when your interaction with the Lord of the Universe is over and you are ready to go back home, shoes back on your feet.
That is the basic principle where shoes are concerned. But when on two Fridays, one immediately after the other, a group of faithful Muslims (that is what they are supposed to be, aren't they?) stumbled on the notion that much more important than Juma prayers was the matter of deciding who could or could not be the khatib of Baitul Mukarram mosque, theydid not quite realise that they were, consciously or otherwise, abandoning the call of faith.
It was a truth that soon made itself manifest the moment they took off their shoes, went looking for their enemies in faith and, discovering them within the sacred precincts of the mosque, gleefully plunged into a flinging of the shoes at them and so creating perfect mayhem.
The problem was a serious one: should those gathered for prayers remember God behind the new khatib or should they carry on as they had carried on with the p&h imam, or acting khatib, as the man leading the prayers? Interesting question, that. It makes you wonder why people who turn up
at Baitul Mukarran mosque, or any mosque for that matter, should at all be worried about who happens to be the khatib.
Ah, but once you go delving a bit into the politics that has been played out at Baitul Mukarram over the years, you will perhaps not be surprised that those shoes have actually been flying around the prayer hall of the mosque. There used to be a time when an earlier khatib of the mosque (he lives no more) once told a Friday congregation that in a country administered by women, it was inevitable that the wrath of Allah would fall. The prime minister, a woman named Khaleda Zia, said nothing. Neither did her government.
It was this same khatib who once demonstrated his umbrage at those who, he thought, had conspired to break up Pakistan in 1971 by going for a war of liberation for themselves. Even that audacity went unpunished. Meanwhile, through the years, adherents of a rightwing political party, notorious for its contribution to the genocide of Bengalis, undertook a program of a steady infiltration of the mosque through placing its cadres and its patrons there.
Recall, if you will, the sheer nefarious manner in which one of these men egged on some ruffians from the safety of the mosque into what he thought was a battle for faith. Those who died, he cried hoarse, would be shaheeds; and those who lived would be honoured as ghazis. That was on October 28, 2006. Where is that man today?
No one knows. But that is just a hint of how mosques have been made good use of by the unscrupulous and the sinful in a furtherance of their designs on the state. In the 1971 war, it was the Pakistanis who, in the name of Islam, went into the bad business of doing things un-Islamic. They razed
the Central Shaheed Minar to the ground in the early hours of their program of Bengali murder and swiftly put up a couple of bricks on the spot, to mark it off as space for a future mosque. In the late 1990s, human remains were recovered from the premises of a mosque in Mirpur, a potent sign of the murders that the Pakistanis and their local Bengali and Bihari collaborators had committed in 1971, even as the Mukti Bahini regained the country inch by difficult inch. There are other, similar stories. There will be time to talk about them some other day.
Faith is not for the weak of heart. Prayers
are not for those who do not see the spiritual beyond the temporal. Those who drive God away from hallowed spots in mosques and churches and temples through a villainous demonstration of ugliness are men and women who have led wasted lives. The trouble is that their presence in the sacred precincts of religious devotion sometimes leads to a wasting away of other lives, other dreams.
And then, everything palls, everything pales, everything falls.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, CurrentAffairs, The Daiy Star E-mail bahsantareq ©yahoo co uk
***It was a truth that soon made itself manifest the moment they took off their shoes, went looking for their enemies in faith and, discovering them within the sacred precincts of the mosque, gleefully plunged into a flinging of the shoes at them and so creating perfect mayhem.****