What well-known English litterateur George Bernard Shaw commented years ago – “ISLAM is the best religion and Muslims are the worst followers” – may not be acceptable to many today, but it is quite logical that people generally form their opinion about Islam and Muslims after coming into contact with Muslims. If a Muslim is nice, dependable and upright in his dealings, he leaves behind a good impression about his community and the religion he follows. Maintaining personal contact definitely helps in removing misunderstandings which keep us apart.
In the circumstances prevailing in India when those indulging in hate crimes have found encouragement from the practitioners of divisive politics, promoting a culture of maintaining people-to-people contacts involving different religious groups appears to be a must for not only having a peace-loving society and harmonious living but also for creating an atmosphere in which each other’s beliefs and sentiments are respected.
Here are some personal experiences to prove how far this strategy can be effective in promoting an atmosphere of peace, progress and tolerance so that there is no ill will against any community, particularly Muslims, who have been suffering owing to a lot of misunderstandings about them as a community and their religious beliefs.
During my three-and-a-half-decade-long stay at Chandigarh, the City Beautiful, I had occasions to share my mornings and evenings with people who did not want to listen to anything positive about Muslims because of the misunderstandings they had about the community as a whole. In their opinion, formed mostly on the basis of their own bad experiences or the stories, right or wrong, they had been told, Muslims were quarrelsome, uneducated or least educated, not fond of cleanliness and never dependable, etc.
The first shock of my life in that city I got was when I began a search for a small house on rent. I, along with a colleague, a Brahmin, approached a landlady in a decent locality whose house was advertised for being given on rent. When the rent amount was settled and she had agreed to accept me as her tenant, I disclosed her that I was a Muslim, which should not be a problem for her. I thought it necessary to disclose my denominational identity as she told us that she was a migrant from the Pakistani part of Punjab where her husband had been killed during the post-Partition riots.
After she came to know of my identity her polite answer was: “No beta, no. I cannot give my house to you on rent. I get scared when I see a Muslim. You seem to be a nice person; you are like my children. Have tea and biscuits, but I am sorry I cannot help you. Try to understand my predicament.”
She also added, “Now after hearing nice words about you from your companion, I can realise that there are Muslims like you too. But, sorry beta, I am helpless.”
I could realise that she had a little change of heart after a brief interaction. This was a new and bitter experience for me in a well-planned city which had no parallels in India, but I took it in my stride.
My search for a modest house took me to a different locality where I was successful. But the landlady there told me that I should avoid eating eggs and meat. If at all I had non-vegetarian food in that house I should be careful about their sentiments, she cautioned me. The house belonged to a Jain family.
Within a few months we (me and my wife) started getting treatment as if we were part of their family. Sometimes they would discuss their family issues too with us. They forgot what we ate and what we did not eat. That was our problem.
Then a day came when we decided to shift to a better house owing to the rising family needs. We mentioned it to the Jain family members that within a month we would be moving to a different house in a nearby locality and, therefore, they should look for a new tenant. They got upset. “No, no, please don’t move out. Do you have any difficulty here? If you need an additional room, we will get it built soon. There is enough space on the first floor as you know. You can live here for as long as you desire. We are Jains and you are Muslims, but this factor will never affect our relationship.”
We had our own plans and left that house with apologies to the Jains. Our relationship is still intact with their children.
Now we rented a house where there were three tenants on different floors. One of the tenants, a Saini family, a Punjabi Hindu, hated Muslims like anything, we were told. We were, however, the least bothered about this factor as the house was owned by a Sikh, who lived in the Philippines.
Our interaction with the Saini family began through our children who would play together. Gradually, the Sainis realised that their children were quite safe in the apartment in our possession where they played freely owing to the availability of sufficient space. Soon a two-room set with a kitchen and a bathroom became vacant and we got it rented out to two Muslim boys.
Now the building had Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. The Sainis would observe closely whenever any bearded Muslim in the traditional kurta-pajama with a sherwani would visit us. One day a professor from Aligarh Muslim University, who was the head of a department, came to meet one of the Muslim boys living in our building. The Saini lady came rushing to us to know who this man was. She thought he might be an illiterate person and a dangerous character. This was during the late eighties. She was surprised to know that the person in a sherwani was a professor of mathematics.
She would often see with suspicion Muslims visiting us, some bearded, some clean-shaven. Their conduct was obviously very gentlemanly. When she came to know that none of these visitors was less than a postgraduate, she told us, “My opinion about Muslims has completely changed after you people came to live in this building.”
She no longer hated Muslims as she used to do earlier. She now realised that the Muslim community, too, had highly educated and well-behaved people like those belonging to other religious groups, and not mostly illiterate and quarrelsome as she previously thought.
A more interesting experience we had when we shifted to a house in a housing colony owned by the newspaper where I worked. Our house was adjacent to a house which had a woman who could not tolerate the sight of a Muslim. She told her husband to get me shifted to a different house as I was a Muslim and she had no good words to say about Muslims. Her husband, who knew me well, somehow succeeded in convincing her that she would be having a different kind of experience now.
Gradually, our family members started interacting with one another. After a few months she got metamorphosed. Whenever she had spare time she would spend it in our house. She would invariably leave the keys of her house with us when she had to go out for shopping in the absence of her husband. Once she told my wife that she had been fed with mostly negative stories about Muslims which had made her consider them as the worst people on earth. But now she was a changed person.