‘To err
is human, except by one who is destined by God to remain innocent’
Last time
when we looked at the working of the human mind in understanding what it needs
or wants for survival in the world, what sets him apart from the foolishness of
other people and what makes him an outcast, we left out a very important aspect
of the thought behind the exilic attire. Much is taken away from a man’s
personality when he is shunned to the outskirts with nothing to hold on to. To
question his cultural and religious affiliations and beliefs then is
problematic.
Ibn ul
Vaqt is a classic example of a person building a shield out of contemporary
ways of survival to protect whatever remains of his identity and belief system
besides protecting the ideology of his community and improving on its
contemporary status. Although quite different to what the text literally
portrays, nevertheless, this point of view is apparent to the eye. The very
arguments provided for the Anglicization of Ibn ul Vaqt in order to become more
open-minded and successful are the ones that lead us to a very different idea
of a person sacrificing his self for Muslim Modernism and Development. Merely
associating the protagonist with the irregularities of his prayers, and the
constant sharing of his meals with Englishmen doesn’t paint a picture of a
person who has abandoned his religious beliefs and has simply adopted a foreign
culture. Rather if one looks closely, it shows the desperation of a person
targeted towards revolutionizing the conditions of his community and making a
sacrifice of his integrity and image in the hope that in near future, Muslims
realize the importance of the presence of British in the sub-continent and as a
way out of oppression and dark shadows of social decline of morals and ethics.
However
his stubborn-transformed-into-adamant attitude also reveals the fact that he
has somehow lost the very motivation and the connection that was keeping him
associated with the ideology of his being, the religion. His decreasing
reluctance towards removing pictures or dogs for example to make his family
less repellent of him and to be able to say his prayers portray his
carelessness towards reconciling with his origin and center of existence. But
then again, one can perfectly justify these very acts of negligence and
repulsion to mean only one thing, a rebuttal for all those who made an effort
towards making him an outcast in the society he called home, with no one to
keep the familial association alive or worthy of importance. Further, on the
note of religion, Deputy Nazir Ahmad in his depiction of the contemporary
condition perfectly narrates the perception about religion in the eyes of the
Indians and the British. Where it defines the social norms for one, strict
adherence to religion is considered to be foolishness and a weakness of the
mind by the other. Strung between the two extremes of Rationality and Contemporary Thought,
Ibn ul Vaqt is seduced over to the side of the reason and science because of
the mere change in his lifestyle. In his conversation with Hujjat-ul-Islam, he
openly confesses:
“My dear
sir, gone are the days when people believed in the idle religious tales. These
are the days of reason. You will also not deny that the youth of today easily
outwit the old and it is difficult for religion to hold itself against reason.”
He
depended solely on the intellect in his new found life at the English bungalows
and all those who accepted his rationale were deluded by him into believing
that religion is a story of the past and science is the new big thing in the
pond. Here, a reader is caught in a perfect confusion whereby he strives to
justify the acts of Ibn ul Vaqt who is now devoid of all personal and social
senses of identity, dug deep into the abyss of exile and simultaneously tries
and understand his very acts of merely abstaining from alcohol because it would
make him a leper.
In a nutshell, the
instruments of exile marked by the very categories of religion, psychology of
an exilic and lifestyle, but not limited to these, have a very deep penetrating
root in the process of becoming an exile. Sometimes, the evolution of character
as in the case of Ibn ul Vaqt is simply the response to the people or an act
that make him an exile in the first place. Not everything is as simple as it
seems. Very obvious and a clichéd quote to be used in this context but one that
describes the story a little better.
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