the good muslim

by Tahmima Anam

i.

Religion throws me off balance. I have never really known how to confront it, or behave around it. Even the mildest expressions of religion that is in everybody's everyday life - lighting a diya, someone saying a prayer before their meal, people crossing themselves or closing their eyes when they're near a church or a temple, not eating meat on a Thursday, or a Friday, or no-rice-Saturdays. (Or even don't-cut-your-nails-at-night-or-during-dussehra-or-on-Tuesdays).

I'm always conscious of myself around religious people - sometimes my mother, when she decides to fast on a Friday or insists that I "at least see God" before I leave; sometimes my best friends, when they have to do a pooja, or go to Shirdi, or Tirupati. The smallest things about people next to me in buses or on the metro - I secretly count the number of people wearing too many rings on their hands, or tying threads on their hands (uh, Ekta Kapoor!) - only to wonder how much belief and strength they get from these little things, or what they think of people like me. 

I know that it's a bit politically incorrect of me to say this, but sometimes religious people also comfort me. If I have to take an auto after 8 or 9 in the night, I feel safer if the driver is wearing a cap, or there is a sticker of some God or the other in the auto. When I'm really nervous about something, or worried about something in my life, it makes me feel much more at ease if my best friend tells me she's praying for me. The same morality that startles me, also puts me at ease - and this isn't something I know how to reconcile. 

I write these things for two reasons - one, because of some events over the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to come to terms with Religion and what it might mean to me ('R'eligion - what people make of it, why they are religious in whatever ways they are religious, the morality that comes from being religious, the ability to believe in and trust something supernatural, and like I've already mentioned, the strength that one derives from religious faith). The other reason, obviously, is Tahmima Anam's 'The Good Muslim.'

ii. 

(I'm going to give away some details about the book in this section, so if, like me, you're not a fan of knowing anything about the book before you read it, you should skip this section.)

The book is set in two short periods of Bangladesh history, 1972 - 74 and 1984 - 85. One was immediately after the war, and the other is about ten years later. It follows Maya Haque through her time in Rajshahi, a village in North Bangladesh, and her return to Dhaka.

Through the book, Maya is struggling to come to terms with her brother changing from an Elvis loving, Rilke and Fitzgerald reading, guitar playing, rocking and rolling, sometimes drinking, having a favorite pair of old jeans brother - to a cap-wearing, religiously preaching, book-burning stranger whose transformation she can't even begin to understand or come to terms with. From being her oldest friend and most beloved older brother, he becomes nothing more than a stranger. In the beginning, she mocks him and taunts him for his finding his God and becoming a preacher, and then she runs away from it. When she comes back, she looks for the brother she used to know in the man who now stands in front of her, but doesn't see the man in front of her as someone who could be her brother. 

This was, for me, the greatest struggle that she has to go through. Her cynicism towards religion is founded in her experience of the riots, of people raping and burning and being raped and killed everywhere around her in the past  because they were Hindu, or Muslim (which is only a lingering shadow in the book - it only briefly mentions these pre-1972 events, may be in one or two sentences, but they make their definitive mark on the book). 

But her sense of unease around increasingly religious people is what kept me drawn to the book, and what I identified with the most. ("Maya perched on the edge of a tightly upholstered char, Saima's Alhamdulillah was bothering her; once upon a time they would have laughed at people referring to God between every other sentence. But now everyone had caught it; just this morning, she had been to the vegetable man, and after she had paid him and taken her leave he had said Allah Hafez. 'What's wrong with the old greeting?' she had replied sharply. 'Khoda Hafez not religious enough for you?' ")

iii.

If I was to have read this book, say, three years ago, I would have come out of it very differently. But I've grown to see how religion (and faith, mostly faith, but faith that comes from religion) gives people much to believe in and move forward with. I was going to mention field work, but I'm instead thinking of how much stability it gives even to my mother. C often refers to it as positive energy, and how it is this energy that one really draws from when one talks about faith and strength that comes from religion.  

But there are intolerances, small or big, of other people's beliefs (people refusing to let their children live with roommates of another religion, not letting houses out on rent to people of other religions, not wanting to marry someone because they're not religious or differently religious, refusing to attend weddings or important milestones in people's lives because of religion) that most religious people I know have at some level or the other.

And while I don't comprehend the first, I simply cannot sit and take the second. And it is these two things together that throw me off balance. 

Honestly, I just finished reading this a couple of hours ago, so I'm going to be stuck with these things in my head. But the best way to figure out what one is confused about is to write it, and so I did.