Two steps back in Lucknow

All over the world there has been condemnation of US-led attacks on Muslim holy sites in Iraq. One fully understands the emotions that make ...

All over the world there has been condemnation of US-led attacks on Muslim holy sites in Iraq. One fully understands the emotions that make the Muslim interventions in the cacophony of worldwide protests distinct. For their non-Muslim allies the US attack is about violation of international diplomatic laws, human rights and erosion of UN authority. For Muslims it is that plus intense hurt over the damage to the Najaf and Karbala holy sites. Najaf and Karbala as the centres of Muslim identity have been immortalised by a range of Urdu poets including Allama Iqbal. Muslims could never shed their Islamic identity, he said, because they had the dust of Medina and Najaf in their eyes. Emanating from Najaf and Karbala this sense of the Muslim Self replicates itself annually through the re-enactment of martyrdom rituals associated with these sites and the replication of their monuments.

Lucknow has the privilege of housing two 18th century monuments that are replicas of the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala. The big (Barra) Imambara and the small (Chotta) Imambara were built by the pre-colonial, Shia nawabi political class that owed its origin to Iran. Both emerged as emblems of the cultural syncretism and cosmopolitanism associated with Lucknow. Annual funeral rituals enacted here were attended by Muslims from as far as Baghdad and Damascus. Hindus too participated and the British revered the sites.

Today these emblems of tolerance and peaceful co-existence are in the eye of a storm. Muslim clerics, incensed by the US-led attacks on Najaf and Karbala, have forbidden tourists from the US, Britain and Israel to enter these imambaras. This has prompted Britain to advise its citizens not to travel to Lucknow and the US is soon to follow suit. The extreme step of the clerics is unfortunate. The request to the clerics to lift this ban is not about tourism or economics. It is about upholding the city’s spirit of tolerance. It is about finetuning protest to the facts of the case. And the facts are that some of the best histories of Lucknow have been penned by US and UK historians: Juan Cole’s book on the history of the imambaras and Muharram celebrations; Chris Bayly’s influential publications on Awadh culture and society; Rosie Llewyn Jones’s descriptions of European-Indian interactions in nawabi Lucknow; American historians Mike Fisher and Richard Barnett’s chronicling of the intricate relations between the Shia nawabs and the British in colonial Lucknow. The list is endless.

The ban affects such healthy intellectual interaction. Banning those people whose history has enveloped the best and most productive parts of their lives is hurtful to them and painful to all those who uphold the values of tolerance and freedom of intellectual and cultural interaction. The fight against US aggression can be won by striking alliances within these societies, not by alienating those sensitive to our histories and politics.

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