Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
We always think of Islam in terms of the Arab world, forgetting millions of Muslims scattered elsewhere in the world. I remember a visit to the former Soviet Union during which I met the Soviet Grand Mufti dressed in the traditional attire of the Ulemas. I shall never forget the unequalled beauty of the mosques in Bukhara and Samarkand. On a visit to China, once again, I met the Chinese Grand Mufti. He lived like the caliphs, surrounded by exquisite samples of Islamic art.
I met Muslims in Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and, of course, on the Indian subcontinent. I use the term subcontinent because Islam reached India long before it was divided. In my opinion Islam's incredible efficient spread was the earliest experiment in globalisation. But unlike contemporary practises, the Muslims did not attempt to impose a particular way of life on the nations they reached. Nor did they try to obliterate the local cultures, as the imperial powers did.
Where they arrived, the Muslims gave the local people the choice to embrace the new faith or continue practising their original creed. Local cultures stayed intact, yet a process of fusion took place. This process can best be seen in India, where Hinduism and Islam met. And out of this particular fusion, of the two religions and their corresponding cultures, there emerged a unique culture unknown anywhere else.
One of the first landmarks visitors see in India is the Taj Mahal, an example of the aforementioned fusion that reflects the influence of the Muslim Mughal culture on Indian architecture. The Taj Mahal notwithstanding, a visitor to India would notice this fusion in almost every aspect of life. It can be heard in the music; the qawwali, the love chant of the Indian Sufi, reflects both the indigenous musical system and the new ideas brought over from the centres of Muslim culture in Persia and Central Asia. In itself the sitar, India's most famous instrument, is a combination of the Persian lute and the classical Indian viola.
But it is, perhaps, in architecture that the marriage of the two cultures is most clearly seen. In a book entitled Mughal Architecture by Ebba Koch, we receive a detailed account of what the author calls "India's greatest golden age". In this and another newly published book, The Mughal Throne, we get to know about the Mughal Empire and its zenith under the rule of Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. What characterised that great emperor was his ability to make the Mughal rule acceptable to the empire's overwhelmingly non-Muslim population. He himself married a Hindu woman and appointed a number of Hindus in high- ranking posts in the administration. He also ordered the translation of Sanskrit classics into Persian.
In a review of The Mughal Throne, William Dalrymple writes in the culture review of the Sunday Times, "In an age when ignorant commentators regularly talk of clashes of civilisations, and Samuel Huntington lectures us on what he believes to be the aggressive nature of Islam, it is good to be reminded that, for much of the past 500 years, Indian Muslim rulers presided over an empire whose traditions of religious tolerance and freedom had no counterpart in the West until the end of the 19th century."
Both books reveal the Akbar's thinking; he believed that all existence is one, "a manifestation", in Dalrymple's words, "of the underlying divine reality and that love of God and one's brethren was more important than narrow religious rituals."
What further emerges from the books is the stress the Mughal emperors placed on architecture. It was a means to assert their status. Koch contends that a ruler, "according to Mughal political thinking, was best represented by his buildings, and kings should, therefore erect great buildings as memorials to their fame." As Akbar's historian Qanahari puts it, "A good name for kings is achieved by means of lofty building... that is to say, the standard of the measure of men is assessed by the worth of their buildings." And the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan's celebrated monument to his wife is certainly a proof of this.
