Why I Am Not A Postmodernist

Most of those in my generation and in the earlier generation including my teachers in the college and the university where I studied are postmodernists. And most of those teaching in the humanities departments in the universities in our part of the world are also postmodernists grooming their students to become next generation of postmodernists. When I was in the university learning English Literature, I was also a postmodernist of some sort , thinking about names I was beginning to know, such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and many other respectable French souls. In those heady days of poststructuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, most of us students in the English Department spent most of the time struggling to read materials we didn't understand and we blamed ourselves for our failure to understand what they were saying.

Hard as I tried to think like a postmodernist, my mind refused to be anchored in the trendy school of people who thought that modernity is passe, that it was just an ideology colonising your mind, that the so-called achievements of modernity were myths constructed to keep you mentally colonised, that the Western Enlightenment had caused irreparable damages to cultures colonised by the West. Listening to the advocates of postmodernism was like participating in an October Revolution taking place in the Text with a capital T. Lot of textual subversions, deconstruction, hermeneutics. Meta narratives were being carpet-bombed by the New Radicals of Postmodernism without shedding any real blood. Texts after bloody texts lay deconstructed, decolonised and dethroned.

Despite the excitement this textual (also virtual) battlefield offered, I refused to be converted to the radical postmodernist faith that insisted as its cardinal dogma that there was no right and wrong, no objective truth and that everything was relative. Years after those intoxicating university days, I was able to see why I refused to be proselytised by those who claimed that there was no objective reality that you can objectively know. Here is why.

I hail from a backward family in a very backward community in the coastal area. I was lucky to have a father, who had not reached anywhere near matriculation but still wanted to send his children to 'English medium convent schools'. As my father's endeavours to get me admitted in an English-medium school failed, I found myself studying in a local Malayalam-medium school where teachers always complained that we, their students, gave off unpleasant scent of fish. It was true because we ate lot of cheap fish and did not wash our hands with soap. I was poor in science subjects and the only science word that I was familiar with in those days was 'Density' because that was the nickname of our science teacher who taught us chemistry.

My dislike for science also comes from a personal reason. In those school days, science appeared in my life as painful vaccines against all kinds of diseases. Despite the fact that our parents were mostly either barely literate or utterly illiterate, they ensured that we would be subjected to those painful vaccinations, mostly in schools. The parents were in collusion with those cruel health workers to make sure that we did not skip the 'torture'. The only consolation was that there would be screening of old Malayalam movies after every vaccination drive in the school. Why should I love science that caused me pain?

That pain was real. It was by no means subjective. But that pain ensured that I survived without those debilitating diseases that either killed or crippled many in the generation before mine. We did not know then that health care workers were on the frontlines of a battle to ward off tetanus, diphtheria, poliomyelitis, smallpox and also that common disease in my neighourhood called filariasis. Hospitals were the last places I wanted to visit as they were places of dreaded doctors, nurses and attendants. When I was a child, periodical visits to the local government hospital were part of my life, either to get treatment or to accompany others in the family who needed treatment.

Yes, the pain caused by those vaccinations and treatments was as real as the fact that they worked. Even in my childhood days, I knew people who used to go to local religious healers to get their ailments cured. That did not work then. If it did work then we would now be having lot of superspeciality centres run by the healers who could cure the dreaded diseases.

What I am hammering home is that I, just like all other postmodernists of my generation and the generation before mine, am a beneficiary of science and awareness that secular education has brought me. My children, just as the children of the postmodernists of my generation and the generation before mine, are also beneficiaries of scientific health care and education that I got and they are getting today. I feel that it is a betrayal to say, after being privileged to be the beneficiary of science and still enjoying the fruits of science such as my car, mobile phone, iPad and many other things that we take for granted (electricity, for example), to say that science is just a social construct, that it is epistemologically equivalent to the practice of healers who healed nothing.

If a generation is educated in disciplines that teach them that there is no right and wrong, no objective reality or facts to be known, that science also serves ideology of the colonisers and such other meaningless rhetorically effective ideas, that bodes ill for that generation as well as the generation that follows. That is why I am not a postmodernist. Period.

Everything is a story

Eng Lit Departments in our colleges and universities appear to have been long infected by a virus which has various strains known by names such as post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism and cultural relativism. Though these deadly strains of the deadly virus have infected other departments in colleges and universities, Eng Lit faculty and students are found to be easily vulnerable to them. The closer the proximity of Eng Lit Dept to Anthropology Department, the greater the risk of the faculties of those closeted in the former getting damaged irreparably.

A few days ago I got a chance to see a professor apparently hit by the bug. Worse, he was allowed to spread it to the Eng Lit faculty and students in a local university. This Professor is a senior guy from another university. He was on the campus to deliver a lecture on "Why tell stories?" in commemoration of a late Professor of English. A story is not true, he said and added with an emphasis that we all love stories. The Professor addressing a small audience of teachers and students was behaving properly and showed no sign of the infection. "All the time there are stories around us....Identity is a story, self is a story. Your identity card is a piece of fiction," he was telling the audience. It all sounded very interesting.

The Professor started pushing his Theory of Fiction to envelop communities. "Community also uses language," he said adding that communities should communicate more [their stories]. I could not see the point the Professor was trying to hammer home. But it started getting clearer when he suddenly unearthed colonialism. 'Colonialism is still there,' he stated emphatically. Colonialism would not end once the exploitation of materials and resources ceased to happen, he continued. Economic exploitation, he pointed out, was just a part of colonialism. Colonialism, he argued, had deprived us of our right to tell our stories. "Every person has a right to tell stories,' he said. Bingo! That's statement. That's exactly what Salman Rushdie said in his memoir 'Joseph Anton'. And remember the attempts to deny him his right to tell his stories. Was the Professor indirectly hitting at THAT colonialism that deprived the author of The Satanic Verses of his right to tell his stories? Wasn't the Khomeini fatwa an attempt to colonise our minds, police our thoughts and leave us brain-dead by means of coercion and intimidation? I thought the Professor would mention Rushdie's book before he said what he said during his speech: "Stories are the best prophylactic defence against hatred." But the name of the reputed author who was the victim in our time of the most vicious and nakedly violent attempt to gag a story-teller did not come out of the Professor's lips. He mentioned Tony Morrison, Hanif Khureishi, who had been in the forefront of the protest against the fatwa, and  Walter Benjamin, who wrote the essay 'The Storyteller'.

My disappointment was eclipsed by the way the Professor was unravelling his Theory of Fiction. "FIR registered by the police following an incident of crime is a story, nation is a story, my CV is a story, a lie is a story. The stories are mirrors where you can see a little bit of yourself. The stories are things that make you imagine things."

So far so good.  I thought he made his point and did it well. Then came the rabbit out of his hat (just imaginary, not real). "Unless we have stories we cannot understand what multi-culturalism is." To make it clearer he said: "Until we hear other people's stories, there is no multi-cultural society." He was suggesting that multi-culturalism stood for multiple voices. I thought: You add 'multi' before everything and it looks nice, progressive and sexy. (A close friend of mine, who is a sharp-eyed journalist, told me he had once asked some local leaders of an Islamist organisation at a press conference, when they were lecturing the assembled journalists about the virtues of multiple voices in a multi-cultural society, if they could accept the idea of multiple gods since they were of the view that 'multi' is something to be cherished in matters cultural and social. My friend did not tell me how the Islamists responded to that question.)

The stories were soothing, the stories order and structure the world, the Professor said and I nodded. That reminded me of what the famous sceptic Michael Shermer said: "Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not." But the Professor's linkage of multi-culturalism and stories already unnerved me. He was, I thought, thinking about Rushdie who represented the individual's right to tell his or her story; he was also thinking about Khomeini who represented a culture's right to tell its story which is one of the stories in a Multi-cultural Paradise where the Khomeini story of silencing a storyteller would co-exist with the Rushdie story of free expression, except that the pro-free expression Rushdie team should go hiding for years while pro-fatwa team would roam free to pin its story on to the corpses of hapless tellers of different stories, to tell them that the world needed just One Story and One Book.

I heaved a sigh of relief after the Professor concluded his speech to be followed by a Q & A session. I couldn't help myself suppress a question to know whether his Everything-is-a-story theory really covered everything. I shaped a question in my mind. I wanted to ask him if everything is a story and if it was colonialism's job to deprive individuals and communities and cultures of their right to tell their stories, was it possible to assume that colonialism itself was a story ('A story is not true'). But when I stood up to ask the question, the question I shaped in my mind got unshaped and I found myself asking this question: "Sir, you have said that everything is a story, that is, fiction. In that case, are there no facts to be known in this world? It is the endeavour of science to break the spell cast by stories of different sorts. Is science itself a story? Are theory of gravity and theory of relativity, for example, pieces of fiction?"

I did not understand exactly what the Professor said in reply to my question. My understanding was that he evaded my direct question and resorted to babbling for the next two or three minutes. My notepad showed just two sentences that I managed to comprehend and write it down: "Stories only have a provisional value" and "Belief in something, it works." I don't know how to decipher these two sentences to arrive at what exactly the Professor meant. He could be saying that stories were different from facts and that stories (religion, superstition, lies) would work as long as you have faith in it. The Professor was certainly against breaking the spell cast by the stories. (If you really want to break the spell, read Daniel Dennett's book 'Breaking the Spell'). If stories were soothing, they should be safeguarded against attempts by science to know facts that sometimes cut through fiction.

I stood up again after a round of questions from others in the audience. "A multi-cultural society is a society where there are different cultures with different stories. Are all these stories equal? Should we assume that all the cultures are equal? Should we not differentiate between a culture that subjugates its women and another culture that upholds gender equality?"

This time I really failed to make head or tail out of what the learned Professor said to answer my question. My notepad contained the word 'Anthropology' written legibly by myself. I thought that most Anthropologists were ardent advocates of cultural relativism.


The virus of post-modernism, post-colonialism or cultural relativism could have originated from the Departments of Anthropology. But it definitely wrought havoc on the English Departments in our part of the post-colonial world where anthropologists and English Professors inspired by culture studies tended to believe that everything was perfect and pristine before the Western colonialism stepped its foot in the lands where our ancestors had lived a life of happiness and fulfilment. Perhaps, as the Professor suggested, we are condemned to live in the world of eternal fiction.

Rage of Islam

On April 4, 1851 Maria I. Duymaer van Twist-Beck wrote to her sister Cecilia Beck from Suez describing her stay in Alexandria, Cairo and Suez. She was in Egypt with her husband A.J. Duymaer van Twist, the governor-general of what was then the Netherlands East Indies, on their way to the Dutch colonies in South-East Asia. The letter reflects the European couple’s little surprise at the social circumstances they met with in Egypt as social conditions in that country were much like what they were familiar with in their own country.

That letter can be taken as an anecdotal illustration to show that the differences between the Muslim world and the West were not very large in the eyes of the Dutch couple and their contemporaries in Europe of mid-19 th century. As Johannes Jansen writes in the Preface to his book The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (1997), though the Dutch lady expressed her surprise at the biblical scenes the couple saw during their travel in Egypt, the social circumstances there such as the distance between the servants and the elite and the rulers and the ruled, for instance, did not strike her as unusual.

One does not know for sure whether any member of the elite in contemporary Europe will say anything that suggests that the Islamic world and the West or other liberal democratic societies are not recognisably different. It is far from true to deny that the two worlds are fast drifting apart. Recent violent protests in the Arab countries including Egypt and Libya and other parts of the Muslim world triggered by a despicable film depicting the Prophet of Islam in a poor light exemplified the divergent and mutually incomprehensible idioms that define meanings of freedoms of individuals, human rights, rule of law and blasphemy, among others.

History is replete with incidents of people killing and dying for their beliefs. Dominant religions of the world carry their own legacies of inhuman cruelties committed in the name of their respective faiths. History being what it is and we being where we are, what should concern us is the bleak prospect of a life that bears no resemblance to any idea of life in a decent, fair and democratic society if the fuming mobs that burn the embassies have their say in the affairs of this world. The Enlightenment and all the modern, scientific and democratic values it has engendered appeared to have firmly established the view of a better world in which individual freedoms are safeguarded, human rights are sacrosanct, rule of law is maintained and faith de-linked from the affairs of the state. The violent protests against the film Innocence of Muslims that led to the killing of four Americans including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, in Benghazi are not just a manifestation of the apparent incompatibility of the value systems of Islam and liberal democracies. They also demonstrate the profundity of the drifting of the two disparate ways of thinking that leaves no room for a meaningful dialogue.

In terms of the message those protestors convey, the death of Chris Stevens and three other U.S. citizens in Libya for a film they were by no means responsible for making is no different from the killing of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, for the film he made. They were meant to reinforce the perceived irreconcilability of the Islamic world rooted in a value system that is antithetical to the idea of an open society, an idea based on liberal democratic values embedded in the Enlightenment rationalism and scientific worldview. The fault line of that divide was visible in the Rushdie Affair of 1989 that, according to Kenan Malik, author of From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (2009), marked 'the moment at which a new Islam dramatically announced itself as a major political issue in Western society.'

The images of the U.S. consulate building in Benghazi stormed by the protesting mobs and of the violent protests outside the U S embassies in Cairo and Islamabad add to the repertoire of images of the rage of Islam seething not just within the Islamic world but also in the West and other parts of the world as well as in the cyberspace. These images define the contours of what many believe to be the mortal clash between Islam and the liberal democratic values. More than the actual divide, they invoke and perpetuate a sense of the widening civilisational gap that at this point of time appears to be unbridgeable.

As we are apparently at a crossroads of what could be a long drawn out struggle for meanings of freedoms and rights we have learned to take for granted, such images have a chilling effect. True, highly motivated people kill for causes dear to them. They knifed to death a filmmaker cycling to work in Amsterdam and murdered a doctor for running an abortion clinic in Kansas City. Some individuals or groups will always be there to commit brutal acts in the name of one or the other cause dear to them. But it will be a recipe for disaster if we respond to motivated cruelties with political correctness by refusing to call those cruelties by their true names. Zealots of all hues who perpetrate terrible crimes are driven by a sense of moral absolutism and the zealots who burn embassies or offer reward for the death of the maker of the anti-Islam film are no exception.

When a group of people believe that their certainties about right and wrong are absolute and beyond any scepticism, the rest of the world is in trouble. To be politically correct in the face of the absolutism of any brand of fundamentalism is equivalent to acceptance of a psychological dictatorship. It leaves people to live in what Jonathan Zittrain calls, in a different context in his book The Future of the Internet (2008), a 'hyper scrutinised reality' whose impact will be 'press conference behaviour' as people are inclined to moderate themselves instead of expressing their true views.

In theory, a neat separation between faith and politics is not possible in Islam, though it is an exaggeration to say that all Muslims across the world have always practised their religion as a combination of piety and politics. In fact, majority of Muslims practice their faith as an expression of their personal piety. However, political component is integral to the doctrines and history of Islam. Perhaps no Muslim thinker has been aware of Islam’s political ambition as deeply as the 10 th century Muslim political philosopher Al-Farabi whose treatise Attainment of Happiness seeks to temper that ambition for a universal religion and a universal state. Al-Farabi envisages realisation of Islam’s ambition to spread Islam to the inhabited world. At the same time, he raises questions about the suitability of one homogeneous religion to the diverse human communities throughout the world. (Read Joshua Parens’ An Islamic Philosophy of Virtuous Religions: Introducing Alfarabi [2006] for a detailed account of the Muslim philosopher’s exposition of the virtuous society.)

Perhaps, that combination of faith and politics in Islam makes Muslim societies inherently unstable. Any perceived attack on Islam is countered by responses couched in a language of domination and subjugation. The protestors who scaled the U.S. Embassy walls, tore down the U.S. flag and replaced it with a black Islamic flag derived their motivation from that language. Any alleged insult to Islam always appeals to a deeply embedded sense of victimhood. The boiling anger of the Islamic world against the West has acquired a political dialect in the aftermath of the Arab Spring bolstered by the West. The irony of the killing of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, which was protected by the West from the attacks of the brutal Qadhafi regime, is compelling. Equally gripping is the dichotomy of the symbolism of freedom found expressed in the rebellious fury against dictatorships in the Arab countries including Egypt and Libya, on one hand, and the passionately violent protests outside the embassies of some Western countries against any kind of freedom of expression whose subject happens to be Islam, on the other.

There is always scope for academic enterprises to understand Islam or its fundamentalist strains and explain what they are aspiring to and their linkages to Islamic history and doctrines. There may still be facts to be known about the contemporary phenomenon of the anger of Islam. But we cannot wish away the facts that we already know and their impact on the meaning of life and liberty as we understand them today.

Back in 1851, the Dutch lady was impressed by the red Turkish cap worn by the Egyptian diplomat, Nuber Pasha, an Armenian Christian who was later to become Prime Minister of Egypt thrice between 1878 and 1895. She was just delighted to see the Armenian of the 'Greek religion' following 'the Turkish ways in dress and custom' in a social milieu which otherwise showed no major difference from that of Europe of the nineteenth century. That celebration of cultural diversity is passé now when new expressions of faith underlining religious absolutism inspire cultural practices, including dress and custom.

Alternative to puritanical Islam?

Both Saeed Naqvi's article, "A Sufi message from a Pakistani President" (The Hindu, April 9, 2012) and Ayesha Siddiqa's response, "The Road from Ajmer leadsnowhere" (The Hindu, April 17, 2012) capture the essence of the question asked both within and outside Islam: what went wrong with the Muslim world? Both the writers apparently favour an alternative narrative in the religion that will challenge its puritanical Deobandi or Wahabi versions equipped with ideological armaments capable of undermining even the search for such an alternative to ensure peaceful co-existence across the globe. While Mr. Naqvi finds the message of Sufism 'the only path to tread' to end discord spawned by puritanical Islam, Ms. Siddiqa is sceptical of Sufism's 'potency' to offer an intellectual challenge to radicals or militants in the religion.

The visit of Pakistan President Asif Sardari to Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti's mausoleum at Ajmer on April 8, 2012 certainly had some symbolism in the backdrop of the bounty announced by the United States on Hafiz Saeed, the Islamist leader in Pakistan. But he is not the first Pakistani head of state or government to visit the shrine. Probably he will not be the last. The shrine perhaps owes its fame to the Mughal patronage after Emperor Akbar walked barefoot all the way from Agra to Ajmer to fulfill his vow that he would walk on foot to the shrine if a son was born to him. In the folklore of popular faith in the subcontinent, the 12 th century Sufi saint is known for his miracles. Every one of those who visit there does so with a prayer and a desire. Islamism that entertains the establishment of a global Islamic community, however, hardly gives much import to the idea of fulfillment of personal desires of the faithful.

Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti was not the first Sufi saint to visit India. No shrine is known to have been built anywhere in the world for the Persian mystic, Mansur al Hallaj, who was the first Sufi to visit India and toured extensively in the subcontinent. Hallaj who traversed the frontiers of mystical experience and equated himself with truth by declaring "I am the Truth" was cut into pieces in Bagdhad in 922. Blasphemy is serious in Islam, a fact that in recent times was exemplified by the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer for his staunch opposition to blasphemy laws in Pakistan.

Holy men such as the khwaja might be successful in spreading Islam among the people in the subcontinent in the past. That heritage is still deep-rooted in the region. History has proved that the rigid orthodoxy can live side by side with mysticism at least in this part of the world. If Sufism today is more a heritage, radical political Islam inspired by the Wahabi or Salafi ideology is a contemporary reality posing a formidable challenge to what we understand as modern values.   

Between the optimism of Mr. Naqvi and the scepticism of Ms. Siddiqa lies the road that neither of them is prepared to acknowledge: the road of reason. That road is as old as the parallel road trodden by the Muslim mystics in the very early periods of Islam's history. No doubt, the question of blasphemy was at the very heart of the mainstream discourse in the Islamic societies during those early centuries when they dealt with the heresies of the mystics and the 'rationalising heresies' of Muslim philosophers, who introduced Greek philosophical ideas to question religious dogmas of their times and thus opened the gates to philosophical inquiry, rationalism and scepticism. That gate remained open till it was closed by mid-thirteenth century in the Islamic world.

The fruits of the unlocking of the gates of inquiry are all there to see in the former Christendom as clearly as the consequences of Islam’s inability to adapt to the modern world and its values. The West with its liberal democratic traditions and rationalist, secular and scientific worldview has derived its intellectual energy from Enlightenment, while Islamic societies with their disdain of democracy, secularism and scientific rationalism show the dominance of religious orthodoxy that has never tolerated anything that smacks of the spirit of inquiry.

Many in the West argue that Islam itself is the root cause of the problems in the Muslim world. That is a debatable argument that will not go unchallenged. It is also argued that perhaps the relative absence of deep theological rift within Islam contributed to the religion’s inability to adapt to the modern world. It is a fact that theological differences between Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drove European thinkers and philosophers to re-define the relationship between religion and politics and that re-definition led to Enlightenment. Hafiz Saeed and his ilk will thrive in an Islamic society bereft of a milieu that encourages rational thinking and freedom of inquiry.  

The alternative narrative that can compete with the puritanical religious dogma is there within the history of Islam. Perhaps, the rationalist tradition in Islam, which gained patronage of some Abbasid Caliphs and presented reason (aql) as the arbiter in affairs concerning life and religion, offers some hope. Advocates of puritanical religion abhor reason and promote acceptance of faith without doubt. The only intellectual tool to challenge the religious puritanism in Islam and the question of blasphemy that entails it can be drawn from that rationalist tradition in the early history of Islam and not the mystical tradition.

The road to religious reform starts from al-Farabi (870-950), whose treatise Attainment of Happiness tempers Islam’s ambition to establish a homogenous Islamic state in the inhabited world and urges Muslims to accept the idea of multiplicity of ‘virtuous religions’. It also starts from ibn Sina (980-1037) and ibn Rushd (1126-1198) and the other illustrious philosophers. “I learnt with certainty that it is above all the mystics who walk on the road of God,” wrote al-Ghazali (1058-1111), often referred to as the greatest Muslim after Muhammad. Al-Ghazali, who urged the Muslims to reckon the philosophers as infidels, knew that taking the road of reason is fraught with dangers. That road is worth traversing today and no sensible person can say that that road leads nowhere.