I had been meaning to write about the cowardice of Indian journalists while covering the Indian Muslim community and Muslim areas and pockets in various cities as we went to polls, phase after phase. Coverage after coverage I saw the usual suspects (Left-leaning media portals) dishing out the usual drivel of how Muslims were under a genocide in India, marginalised, discriminated against, etc.
In the rare event that some progressive Muslims were bold enough to state some things obvious and realistic, the footage got lost in the echo chambers of the liberal journos masquerading as objective media reporting from the ground. Or the clips were sensationalised for TRP ratings depending on which camp could get whatever mileage out of the vox pops.
I was waiting for a bold, fresh, analytical journalist or reporter to pose questions that “fact-checking” agenda activists never pose to the Muslim community. If those uncomfortable questions come from a reporter of Hindu heritage, the term ‘Islamophobia’ is conveniently flung around and the said media person backs off. If the critically demanding questions are posed by reformers and dissenters of Muslim heritage, they are easily labelled ‘Right-wing’ and dismissed.
In between all this, Sreemoy Talukdar, Senior Editor at Firstpost, posed a question on X (formerly Twitter), which I believe was rhetorical, “Why are liberals so scared of Islamists?” My answer was, “Because Islamists give the liberals cause for relevancy and a reason to exist on their moral high ground. Supporting Islamists openly or covertly massages their conscience into an oblivious state that they are doing all they can for ‘social justice’ without getting into dangerous territories of female genital mutilation (FGM), honour killing, child brides, wife beating, polygamy, and uncomfortable questions on discrepancies in the holy scriptures and reform in sharia laws.”
I included liberals from both Muslim and Hindu heritage in this convenient omission and selective outrage.
Farhan Jeffery, a counterterrorism expert and Depuy Director of the Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism (ITCT) based out of the UK, also joined the thread, saying “Another angle is that many Western hard leftists are spineless and spoiled bras who haven’t seen a day of harsh realities of life and who definitely won’t survive a week in Gaza. Many of them know exactly who Islamists are and what they are capable of. And they are genuinely scared of Islamists. So they figure that allying with them will save their skin. I mean that’s what Iranian leftists thought when they allied with the mullahs for a while – until the mullahs started butchering them.”
He further elaborated, “I have many friends among leftists. Some of them, who are public figures, are not at all like their public personas as they appear in private discussions. I suppose they have their reasons – some want to fit in while others want to keep intact old friendships in leftist media circles and still others are just generally weak people and cannot hold their own. So on and so forth.”
Farhan was talking in the context of the pro-Hamas protests on the US campuses which laid bare the anti-Semitism displayed by students, even incidents of assault and harassment of Jewish students. The ineffectual attempts of college management and authoritarian figures to call out the hatred against Jews and the contempt for the hostages in Hamas confinement, made it obvious to everyone around the world that insidious Islamism had spread via the Left-leaning liberal academicians.
Farhan’s insights are quite similar to my own experience when talking to the Indian liberals and the Left, offline or online. They do not walk their talk, preferring to maintain their secular credentials in their circles in the context of the Indian subcontinent’s post-independence scenario where for seven decades, Muslim appeasement and their participation in the oppression Olympics was encouraged, right down to whitewashing the Islamic invasions and conquest of Hind in history textbooks.
However, the motivation of Pakistani and Bangladeshi liberals is something I have not quite been able to fathom, considering they live in deadly conditions, as opposed to the complacency our liberals have due to the freedoms that India’s liberal democracy provides.
Working with some of the above-mentioned Left-leaning journalists who are liberal, it amuses me how some of these, who have a more relaxed approach to personal life and work style, are fiercely protective of moderate Muslims and Islamists. Their job is to question, yet they will never venture into dangerous areas of questioning them about religious-sanctioned domestic violence, sexual abuse, triple talaq, nikah-halala, muta marriages, child brides, FGM, honour killings, mandatory hijab and the burqa and scores of such regressive practices among Muslims.
These liberals never analyse the misogynist Sharia laws. They don’t question why daughters get less than sons, or why widows are disinherited if their fathers-in-law were alive when their husbands died and scores of such injustices which the male Muslim elite and mullahs uphold. The double standards of the liberals of Hindu heritage are obvious when they hail the reforms in the Hindu Marriage Act and the Hindu Code bills but resist any reform bringing in the UCC. They also inevitably end up supporting the moderates opposed to UCC under the pretext of attacks on ‘Muslim identity’.
Liberals, or let’s call them by their correct label, ‘fiberals’, never enquire why Iranian, Afghan, Turkish, and Egyptian women and men are usually protesting against their Islamist regimes. They never dive deeper into the causes of the 2011 Arab Spring protests nor do they follow up with enquiries about countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, and Bahrain, to see if the reforms brought in by the respective regimes and monarchs have made a difference to the lives of the people who were at the forefront of those protests.
To top it all, liberals who don’t dare to do what Muslim reformers do, won’t even let them do their work. Instead, they will leech on to the most scheming group i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood, which coined the word ‘Islamophobia’ to shut down criticism, and debate about these very regressive practices and join the Islamists in condemning the Muslim reformers as ‘Right-wing’ and ‘collaborators’.
The entire Left-liberal academia ecosystem lost its moorings completely when it praised the Taliban despite their treatment of school girls, women, musicians and anyone dissenting against their brand of Islam. They even term the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Kashmiri Pandits by Pakistan-sponsored Kashmiri terrorists as ‘decolonisation’, settler-colonialism and ‘occupation’, terms extended to the October 7 Hamas raids justifying the rape, executions, kidnappings and holding hostages of Israeli (Jews, Christians, Druze Muslims) women, men, children and babies.
So why are liberals scared of the Islamists? Well, the moderates have learned to be suave and speak the politically correct “incorrect” language of modernity, quality and inclusivity, hence it takes time to see them for their actual aspirations of Islamic or Muslim supremacy. But sooner or later, they inevitably trip while debating humanistic values and the masks come off. This back and forth is a civilisation discourse that modern cultural wars and modernity will have to put up with for the next millennium.
It is the Islamists who create this psychosis within the liberals with their boorish behaviour, their penchant for calling ‘heads off’ at a slight pretext (sar tan se juda) and the terror they inflict on their fellow Muslims via censorship, cancel culture and blatant threats of ‘wajib ul qatl’ (justification for murder) for not being Muslim enough (takfirism).
Any decent individual likes civility and abhors horror which comes with Islamists shrilly declaring people Islamophobic for so much as questioning or expressing dissent with radical political Islam. In today’s charged-up campus atmosphere, and with the Left going out of the way to appease the Muslim victimhood, being called ‘racist’ or a ‘hatemonger’ is not something a person who wants ‘social justice’ looks forward to. Hence, the road most travelled. It is easy to thrive in the anti-Semitic, anti-India or anti-Hindu ecosystem with Western funds and billionaires ready to sponsor you.
It takes courage to go and interview the women affected by instant triple talaq or Sharia laws or polygamy or as child brides. It is cowardice never to investigate the FGM prevailing in the Dawoodi Bohra communities, for the eradication of which Asghar Ali Engineer dedicated his life and for which Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the fiery author, is still lambasted while the liberals (Reza Aslan) intellectualise FGM as an African cultural and social evil that somehow infiltrated Islam.
It has become fashionable to appear contrarian and dismiss facts while appealing to the ‘secularism’ of the majority, and in the course of it, malign the reformers of Muslim heritage. Deracinated Hindus, Sikhs show solidarity with Islamists forgetting the bloody past and the Muslim-on-Muslim terror happening since 632 AD, which continues to this day. Some have personal rebellions with their families, nihilistic attitudes, non-conformity issues with their societies and alliance with Islamists or giving them cover fire is their way of finding meaning in their lives. Some are indeed paid agenda activists or anarchist disruptors!
What they do not realise is that their political correctness costs us Muslims and does a great disservice to the memories of those who lost their lives expressing their dissent against Islam, and while committing heresy, forever crushing the absent space for critical thinking and rationality.
The author is a writer and an educationist from Srinagar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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