The Kerala Story—It’s time Muslims give up their mediaeval ideal of conquest, conversion

The liberal-secular patrons of the Islamic preachers neither talk about conversions nor let others do the talking. They are devoid of integrity and lack tools to analyse the phenomenon writes IBN KHALDUN BHARATI in The Print


 


The central issue of the movie, The Kerala Story, is religious conversion of Hindus and Christians to Islam — a subject few wanted to talk about. Though the Islamic preachers and narrative makers never hid their intention, their liberal-secular patrons would neither talk about it nor let others do the talking. They have a vested interest in Muslim communalism, and are happy with the electoral gains accruing from Islamic radicalism. Thus, devoid of the integrity to acknowledge the disturbing reality, they also lack the tools to analyse the phenomenon.

Expectedly, the movie has stirred a hornet’s nest. Exposé of an open secret always does that.

The main objection raised against The Kerala Story has been the now-retracted figure of 32,000 conversions of girls in the state to supply soldiers for ISIS. The film producers now mention three girls who converted and went to fight for ISIS. However, beyond this quibbling over numbers, there have been no serious imputation of falsehood. The core content of the movie has a kernel of truth and is not being disputed. There is no accusation of peddling falsehood. Instead, some are questioning the motives behind telling this truth. It’s a politically inconvenient movie that brings to light the topic of religious conversion and its consequences.

There is no denying the fact that conversions happened in Kerala — of girls too! And, neo-converts, even girls, were sent abroad on jihadi missions to fight for ISIS. Women were not recruited in these missions for combat roles. Jihadi men needed comfort girls, and these women were jihad-prostitutes. We learnt about the story when some of them, incarcerated in Taliban’s jails in Afghanistan, begged the Indian government to bring them home.

The point to ponder is, when this news broke, what was the reaction of the Muslim community and the liberal-secular intelligentsia? Were they shocked with disbelief or just embarrassed about the revelation? Did they dismiss it as a freak incident or knowing it to be the tip of iceberg tried to retrieve the situation from increasing radicalisation.

Is it a secret that converting a non-Muslim to Islam is considered the greatest of virtues? Could people, even girls, be converted and despatched on jihadi missions without a general acceptance of conversion and jihad in the Muslim society? Did the people react then the way they are doing now at the movie about it? No, they didn’t, and therefore, there is a need to introspect, and understand what is going on.
Why convert?

The underlying concept behind converting people is that one’s own religion is the only truth, all else is falsehood. Thus, it becomes one’s duty to persuade others to convert to the “true” religion. If persuasion fails, and circumstances allow, the unheeding could be converted by deceit, temptation, or force. Throughout history, most conversions — a supremacist idea — have occurred through force or conquest. With the exception of Southeast Asia, Islam has mainly spread in areas that were conquered by Muslims. While Sufi mystics played a major role in cultivating converts, they could not have succeeded without the protection of the Islamic sword, as they had to reconcile people to the Muslim rule and the ruler’s religion. This was Islam’s version of the “Cross following the Flag.”
The community of converts

Today, the descendants of converts — some 80-90% of Indian Muslims — may regard the conversion of their ancestors as a divine blessing that saved successive generations from hellfire and ensured eternal paradise. However, the process through which this blessing was obtained is also a fact of history. If the story were to be told, it could severely undermine the basis of identity politics. Communal consciousness is shaped by suppressing memory and obfuscating history.
History of conversion

In India, the issue of conversion will remain contentious because, historically, it has been a corollary of conquest. Whether through persuasion, temptation, or compulsion, both the conqueror and the conquered viewed it as an insult added to injury. The consequences of these conversions are still present in the form of ever-increasing religious radicalisation and separatist politics, even 75 years after the Partition.
Politics of conversion

Now that the age of Islamic conquest is over, and wholesale conversion is no longer feasible, there has been a shift in strategy — to Dawah, i.e., preaching and proselytising. Earlier, groups converted, now individuals do. Sometimes, girls in love convert too. Such conversion is seen as poaching by the community that loses a member. No one remains in doubt about its political meaning. A religious conversion in India is not only about changes in one’s conception of the divine, vocabulary of prayer and ritual of worship. More than anything else, it is a change of community; switching of loyalty from one to another. For the Muslim, a conversion is a validation of his religion’s truth and is celebrated as a communal conquest. Correspondingly, every such conversion makes the Hindu seethe at the unending series of defeat and humiliation. Such contrast in emotions on two sides is inevitable in a situation where communities are seen as historical antagonists, competing with each other for the supremacy of their respective religions.
Conversion from Islam

Islamic jurisprudence is the best guide to understand the political import of religious conversion. According to it, a Muslim’s conversion to another religion is an act of apostasy, which renders him liable to death. The reasoning behind it is that a change of religion is not merely a change of one’s personal faith. It is tantamount to treason to the Islamic state, and is as grave a matter as a soldier’s desertion to the enemy camp. In this worldview, religions are political ideologies, and faith communities are warring armies. Therefore, the campaign to convert is prosecution of war by another means. A new convert to Islam is a victory for the religion that the community celebrates. But the rare conversion of a Muslim to another religion is high treason that Muslims can’t take in their stride, and for which the prescribed punishment is execution.

In an ideological framework where a new convert is actually a newly recruited soldier, the progression from conversion to military jihad is natural.
Ethics of pluralism

A pluralist and secular society cannot allow one community to have such designs on the other. A minority community, particularly, can’t afford such continued incursions into the majority, as it may incite a reaction leading to reverse conversion.

After the Prophet, the Muslims didn’t remain a faith group. They became a religion-based ethnicity. Therefore, seeking to convert non-Muslims to Islam is as ridiculous as converting Indians into Arabs. It creates confusion of identity, which leads to extreme fanaticism.

In a pluralist society like India’s, the Muslims would do better to recognise that all religions are equally true. If they can’t bring themselves to it, they should, at least, recognise that to the people of other faiths, their religion is as true as Islam is to a Muslim. And so, trying to convert others is as unacceptable as changing someone’s gender or skin colour.

It’s time that, in their own interest, Muslims renounced the mediaeval ideal of conquest and conversion. If they didn’t, this fantasy could turn into a nightmare.

“Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you” is a maxim everyone should remember.

It seems black lives don't matter quite so much, now that we've got to the hard bit

Many who were quick to support Black Lives Matter protests are fading away as it becomes clear what real change demands writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian

 

Black Lives Matter mural in Shoreditch, London. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/REX/Shutterstock


It didn’t take long. The wheels of the Black Lives Matter movement are already starting to get stuck in the mire of doubt and suspicion. A few short weeks ago, politicians were eager to be photographed taking the knee in solidarity with the movement; now they’re desperate to distance themselves from what the movement demands – such as moving funds away from policing and into mental health services and youth work to prevent crime occurring in the first place. After a respectful period during which it would have been tone deaf to object to public support of the cause of the day, the BBC banned its hosts and presenters from wearing Black Lives Matter badges because it is seen as an expression of some sort of “political” opinion.

Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it “goes too far” – when it starts making “unreasonable demands” in the service of its “political agenda”. This moment, where sympathetic onlookers start shimmying away from their earlier expressions of solidarity, was always inevitable. It is easy to agree that black lives should matter. But it is hard to contemplate all the ways the world needs to change to make them matter – and for most people, it’s simpler to say that the goal is admirable, of course, but that these particular demands from these particular protests at this particular moment are just going too far. We project our failures of imagination on to the movement, and we decamp from the cheerleading stands into the peanut gallery. “Defund the police”? How about we come up with a less provocative slogan, for a start? These Black Lives Matter protesters, they don’t make things easy for themselves, do they?

We tend to think that protest is confrontational, and change is consensual – first, a painful moment with marches in the streets and impassioned orations, followed by something less dramatic, a softer path of negotiation and adaptation. But the opposite is true. Protest is the easy bit. More specifically, protest is a smooth part sandwiched between two very rough ones.

Before protest there is a oppression, lack of popular support, and the hard work of awareness-raising. After that comes the high-octane action, the moral clarity – and allies hop on board. But once the first blood rush of protest subsides, the people who are still on the streets are mocked by their erstwhile allies, impatient to find fault with the movement and get back to their lives without any further disruption. What was universally celebrated a few weeks ago is now faintly embarrassing: too radical, too combative, almost comically unrealistic. You might think of the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter protests so far as like that famous quote misattributed to Gandhi, but this time in reverse: first you win, then they fight you, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you.

We have a great knack for supporting victims once the injustices are out in the open – when David and Goliath have been clearly identified, and a particularly British sensibility of fair play has been assailed. In the Windrush scandal, popular anger and support for the victims of the Home Office is what put a stop to their deportations and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd. National fury, at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, managed to pressure an obstinate, bunkered government into scrapping the outrageous NHS surcharge for NHS staff, and extending residency rights to all the bereaved families of NHS victims of coronavirus. If it hadn’t been for Boris Johnson’s terror of losing him, the country’s disgust at Dominic Cummings would have turfed him out too, so mortally had he wounded the nation’s sense of justice.

But when it comes to the underlying injustice – to making the links between the deportation and death of a Windrush citizen, the NHS worker impoverished by Home Office fees and unsettled by cruel hostile environment policies, the unelected special adviser breaking lockdown rules, and the political party we keep voting in – we’re not so good.

The same is now happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone is on board with the principle, but when it comes to the change that is required, the idealistic passengers the movement picked up along the way suddenly come down with a case of extreme pragmatism.
Part of the reason for their belated reluctance is that the course of actual change is unflashy. After the first moment passes, the supportive ally has nothing to show for their continued backing for the cause: there are no public high-fives for your continuing solidarity. You can’t post it, you can’t hashtag it; most of the time you can’t even do it without jeopardising something, whether that’s your income, status, job prospects or even friendships.

But the main reason for the ebbing support is that change is just hard. If it wasn’t, the long arc of history that allegedly bends towards justice would be a very short one. And change is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be political.

Movements such as Black Lives Matter aren’t hobbies or social clubs or edgy pop culture moments to be accessorised with. Change is supposed to have an agenda, otherwise it’s just a trend. When we hear that liberal politicians think the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are nonsense, or that wearing a badge is political, or that support needs to be scaled back because it looks like there might be other, more nefarious forces at play, what we are really being told is: this is hard – and we are retreating to our comfort zones.

Was Greg Chappell really a terrible coach of India?

Chappell and India. You can't ask for a more compelling plot or cast of characters writes Karthik Krishnaswamy in Cricinfo 

The leaked email, the crowd that cheered the opposition, the punch at an airport: Greg Chappell's tumultuous, two-year tenure as India's head coach contains every ingredient you could wish for if you're writing cricket's version of The Damned Utd, the David Peace novel - later adapted into a movie - that tried to get inside Brian Clough's head during his ill-fated, 44-day spell as manager of Leeds United in 1974.

Chappell and India. You can't ask for a more compelling plot or cast of characters. The coach was one of the game's great batsmen and enigmas, upright and elegant but also cold and sneering, a man who once made his brother bowl underarm to kill a one-day game. This man takes over a team of superstars and attempts, perhaps hastily and certainly without a great deal of diplomacy, to remake them in his own image. He precipitates the removal of a long-serving captain who commands a great deal of adoration within the dressing room, and challenges other senior players to break out of their comfort zones without preparing, perhaps, for the inevitable resistance. There are successes, but there's one massive, glaring failure, and with that the entire project comes crashing down. 

If you wrote it well, there wouldn't be heroes or villains, just the universal story of proud and insecure men trying and failing to connect with each other. But it hasn't usually been told that way, certainly not in India, where Chappell remains a hugely polarising figure.

Of those who played under him, most of the prominent voices who have written or spoken about Chappell have had almost nothing good to say of him - Sourav Ganguly, needless to say, but others too. Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and Virender Sehwag have all stuck the knife in at various points, and all of them have laid one major charge at Chappell's feet, that he was a poor man-manager.

"Greg," Tendulkar wrote in his book Playing It My Way, "was like a ringmaster who imposed his ideas on the players without showing any signs of being concerned about whether they felt comfortable or not."

Perhaps there's some truth to the idea that Chappell didn't know how to get the best out of a diverse group of players, and that he lacked the instinct to be able to tell whom to cajole and whom to kick up the backside. But while one group of players has been unsparingly critical of Chappell's methods, other prominent voices - Anil Kumble, Yuvraj Singh, MS Dhoni, and above all Rahul Dravid - have largely stayed silent on the matter. Irfan Pathan has rejected, on multiple occasions, the widely held notion that Chappell was responsible for his decline as a swing bowler after a promising start to his career. Pathan was one of a group of younger players heavily backed by Chappell, alongside Yuvraj, Dhoni (whose leadership potential Chappell was one of the first to spot) and Suresh Raina.

Of course, players are the last people you would go to for a dispassionate appraisal of their coach's ideas and methods. If Chappell wanted Zaheer Khan dropped, you wouldn't ask Zaheer Khan if he thought it was a good idea. You wouldn't ask Harbhajan or Sehwag, two players whose early careers Ganguly had a major influence on, whether it was right to strip him of the captaincy.

Let's look, therefore, at some numbers.

The Ganguly question is the easiest to answer. Chappell put forward the idea that he step down from the captaincy during India's tour of Zimbabwe in September 2005. From the start of 2001 to that point, Ganguly had averaged 34.01 in 61 Test innings against all teams other than Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.

Excluding matches against Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and the Associates, his ODI numbers in the same period were just as poor: an average of 30.71, a strike rate of 72.32. Since the start of 2003, he had fared even worse against the top eight ODI teams: 1077 runs in 45 matches at an average of 25.04 and a strike rate of 67.39.

There were performance-related issues behind other players' disagreements with Chappell too. Take Khan, for instance. From the end of the Brisbane Test of December 2003, where he bagged a first-innings five-for, to the Karachi Test of January-February 2006, he took 39 wickets in 15 Tests at 42.41. In that Karachi Test and right through that tour of Pakistan, he was visibly pudgy, bowled off a short run-up, and struggled to move the speedometer needle past the 130kph mark.

Khan's fitness - and Sehwag's - had always been a sticking point with Chappell. Left out of India's next two Test series - against England at home and in the West Indies - Khan signed for Worcestershire and enjoyed a tremendous county season, during which he grew fitter and rediscovered his bowling form. He was a rejuvenated force when he returned to Test cricket on the 2006-07 tour of South Africa, and Chappell, writing in his book Fierce Focus, noted that Khan and Ganguly - who was also making a comeback - were two of India's best players on that tour. "Whether they had improved in order to spite me or prove me right, I didn't care. It cheered me greatly to see them in much better shape than they had been when I started in the job."

In ODIs, India were a poor chasing team when Chappell arrived - their last 20 completed chases before he took over had brought them just five wins, four of those against Zimbabwe or Bangladesh - and they realised the best way to become better at it was to keep doing it. They kept choosing to bowl when they won the toss, and eventually became so good at chasing that they won 17 successive matches batting second.

Before Chappell and Dravid joined forces, India had been hugely reluctant to play five bowlers even when conditions demanded it. Under them, it became a routine occurrence. India were lucky, perhaps, to have an allrounder who made it possible, but it's a telling statistic that the highest Pathan batted in 32 ODIs under Ganguly was No. 7, and that was just once, though he scored two half-centuries from those positions and regularly showed promise with the bat. Dravid regularly used Pathan at No. 3, suggesting either that this was his idea in the first place, or that he was far more willing than Ganguly to take on board one of Chappell's. (Pathan himself has suggested it was Tendulkar's idea.)While one group of players has been critical of Chappell's methods, the likes of Dravid largely stayed silent Getty Images

Under Chappell and Dravid, India often played five bowlers in Test cricket too, showing a willingness to risk losing in order to take 20 wickets and win games. It meant leaving out the sixth batsman, and while Ganguly was the first casualty, the rise of Yuvraj and Mohammad Kaif as ODI regulars knocking hard on the Test door put a bit of pressure on Laxman as well. He was left out of two home Tests against England in 2006, and also had to move up and down the order a fair bit, especially if the batsman left out was one of the regular openers.

This led to the insecurities that Laxman has since expressed in his book, 281 and Beyond, and Chappell, perhaps, didn't do enough to allay them. Chappell admits this failing himself in Fierce Focus, calling his mistakes the "same kinds […] I'd made as captain in my playing days. I didn't communicate my plans well enough to the senior players. I should have let guys like Tendulkar, Laxman and Sehwag know that although I was an agent of change, they were still part of our Test cricket future."

That old man-management thing again. But there was nothing fundamentally wrong with asking a senior player to occasionally sit out games or bat in unfamiliar positions, in order to execute a larger plan for the team's good.

Playing five bowlers, being willing to leave out established players, making fitness a non-negotiable, encouraging players to come out of their comfort zones: if the broad ideas of the Chappell-Dravid era, and the tensions that came out of implementing them, seem eerily familiar, it's because you've seen it all happen - though probably allied with better communication - under Ravi Shastri and Virat Kohli. And that, perhaps, is Chappell's biggest legacy.

Great coaches can get entire teams to buy in to their ideas, and even they - as Clough showed, either side of his Leeds misadventure, at Derby County and Nottingham Forest - need to be at the right place at the right time. Chappell and the India of 2005-07 weren't necessarily made for each other, and the early exit from the 2007 World Cup made that relationship untenable. It may not have lasted too much longer than that in any case, given the breakdown of trust within the dressing room that Chappell contributed to with his tendency to air his criticisms of players to the media.

There isn't a huge deal of evidence from the rest of his coaching career to suggest Chappell had the makings of a great coach anyway. But good ideas are good ideas, no matter how well they're communicated, and Indian cricket continues to benefit from the ones he left behind.

The secret to an enduring sex life - cups of tea

Making love with a long-term partner is less about sex toys and snatched passion and more about sharing time, intimate moments – and cups of tea, says the marital therapist Andrew G Marshall. He explains how couples can keep the spark alive

Celia Dodd in The Independent

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Sex life a bit lacking? Take heart: the answer lies not in scary-sounding toys or tantric techniques, but a nice cup of tea. That's the comforting view of leading marital therapist Andrew G Marshall. He explains how it works: "If you stop in the middle of love-making to have tea and talk to each other, it shows how desire comes and goes – that sex isn't just a race to the end. It allows you time to be intimate with each other. Sex which used to last 15 minutes suddenly lasts an hour and a half. Sex doesn't have to involve going out of your comfort zone – although challenging yourself is good."

Marshall is on a mission to reclaim monogamous sex for couples who are puzzling out how to feel sexy with the partner who shares the frankly unsexy business of domestic life and bringing up children. As a marital therapist with practices in London and Sussex, Marshall has enjoyed a rare insight into the love lives of ordinary people over the past 25 years. His latest book is, How to Make Love Like a Prairie Vole: Six Steps to Passionate, Plentiful and Monogamous Sex (Bloomsbury, £12.99), published both as a book and an app.

In his view, too many couples resign themselves to little or no sex after the first few years and pretend they don't mind while secretly yearning for better sex – or resorting to an affair. "Too often people leave a relationship at just the point when sex has the potential to get much better," Marshall says.

"One myth I particularly want to challenge is that after the first few years it's downhill all the way and once you get past 40 that's about it – you've got one last chance and you'd better grab it quickly. That encourages all sorts of stupid affairs.

"However, if couples make love rarely it leaves the relationship pretty vulnerable, because we don't lose our need for sex. It's a wonderful way of feeding a relationship. It's not just about orgasms: what's particularly restorative is that afterglow, where you hold each other and feel cared for. But if you don't feed your relationship it dies, or someone else comes along and feeds your partner. I don't think people get divorced because they have a bad sex life, but I certainly think it's a contributing factor."

Marshall encourages couples to reinvent their sex lives every few years. It's not about spicing things up superficially with new techniques and toys but about building confidence and openness. If couples can pull this off – in the face of undeniable pressures like kids and careers – sex gets better and better. Yet the very glue that binds long-term relationships can hamper progress, because individuals are naturally wary of suggesting changes for fear of rocking the emotional boat and as time goes on there's so much more at stake. And while it's all very well for sexperts to bang on about the importance of communication, most couples haven't got a clue where to begin.

Too often sex has become the elephant in the room; a subject far too scary to bring up because it feels like criticism. So much easier to bite your tongue and put up with things the way they are.

Marshall's advice is to avoid bringing up problems, which will make your partner feel defensive. Instead start by talking about what you like about your sex life and remembering what was wonderful in the past. That should to break the ice for further discussions about how to bring more good stuff into the relationship now.

Marshall is also keen to bust the myths about sex which hold couples back: that it has to be spontaneous and that both partners have to be equally turned on at the same time. "That puts people under extreme pressure," he says. "What's needed is a bit of give and take and accepting that sometimes one person is in the spotlight, sometimes the other. If you wait until you both feel in the mood you'd probably only have sex once a year, on holiday. That's not to say you can't have spontaneous sex, just that you can't rely on it. The rest of the time you need to plan."

And he urges couples to treat sex as a priority, rather than the last thing on the minds of two exhausted individuals. Parents, whether their children are teenagers or toddlers, should take note: "If anything is causing problems in our sex lives, it's the sense that we have to be super-parents who are available to our children 24/7," he says.

"I can't tell you how difficult it is to persuade couples to put a lock on their bedroom door, although they wouldn't dream of barging into their kids' bedrooms! If your kids hear you making love, Hurrah! It says you are sexual creatures and I think that's incredibly reassuring because it gives children the message that their parents love each other – and that is a wonderful bedrock for them to have."

SEXUAL HEALING

* Take the pressure off by having a break from sex for a few weeks. Focus on touching instead.
* Develop habits that give you a head start, such as going to bed at the same time as your partner and keeping distractions such as computers and phones away from the bedroom.
* Simple communication also helps: if you're going to bed, then make a point of telling your partner, so they know you haven't just gone for a bath or whatever.
* If you've got children, put a lock on your bedroom door. If you're worred about being overheard, play music.
* Don't wait to be in the mood. Sex doesn't always have to be spontaneous. Plan sex.
* Communicate. Bringing up the subject of sex can easily be taken as a criticism. Don't focus on problems but talk about what's good about your sex life and what you enjoyed in the past.