It’s the tumult of 1857. The British, holding Muslims responsible for the Mutiny, bring untold misery to them. The honour of Muslim shorfa (gentry), who had backed a tottering Bahadur Shah Zafar to the hilt, goes for a toss. The blighted masses are paralysed, unable to rise.A middle-aged man rises from the ashes, and takes a vow: “I will not rest till I pull the Muslims out of this dreadful darkness.” Lighting a lamp at Aligarh, he puts a moribund community on the path of progressHe is Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan, the reformer, renaissance man of modern Islam.Contrast the story of this Sayyed with that of another — Hanif Sayyed Mohammed, an electrician who slummed in Andheri, a Mumbai suburb, before the devil entered his soul. After Narendra Modi presided over a state-sponsored pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat, some agitated youth formed the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force (GMRF). Hanif Sayyed cosied up with this recalcitrant group, hired a taxi on a Monday morning, packed in his family, including his four-year-old daughter Shakira, and a ticking bomb and sped off to the Gateway. By afternoon, blood and gore hit the global headlines.The story of the two Sayyeds is symptomatic of the “sea-change” Muslim society has undergone since 1857. Bereft of a sensible leadership, the community has been adrift for long. Left to the mechanics of the mullahs, it has groped in the dark, trying to find an anchor.No one tells its youth that, to defang a Modi or a Togadia, you don’t need to kill innocent people. Apply the method Sir Sayyed prescribed. Instead of rabble-rousing, he counselled Muslims to be pragmatic and forward-looking. He told them not to kill the British but to learn their language and the arts. They say injustice has been done to them. True. Injustice was done to the Jews too. By sheer hard work, they changed the course of history. Sir Sayyed dreamed the same for the Muslims. “Science in one hand, Quran in another and the tiara of kalima (faith) on your head,” was his credo.Clearly, the likes of Hanif Sayyed have rejected the call of the grand old man of Aligarh. To them, the fascist belief in hate and terror seems more attractive than the slow, painful process of reconstruction.And yet, there are some hidden heroes, the followers of Sir Sayyed’s formula, who react differently in times of crises. Haroon Mozawala, a tall, frail, bearded man in his sixties, runs a small trust at Mohammed Ali Road, Mumbai’s “mini-Pakistan”. When the twin blasts rocked the city, a Hindu staffer from J.J. Hospital, called up Haroon bhai, asking for medicine worth Rs 13,000 and 30 plain cloth sheets to cover the bodies. Within an hour Haroon bhai had the supplies sent to the hospital. Staying up all night, he attended to the injured and consoled the bereaved. No one asked if he was a Muslim, member of the community “harbouring” the Hanif Sayyeds.Sir Sayyed once said: “Hindus and Muslims are two luscious eyes of a bride (India). If one harms the other, the bride will become squint-eyed.” Indian Muslims must produce more Sir Sayyeds, and nip the Hanif Sayyeds in the bud.
