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PINJRAWAN PANCHAYAT, India — In a distant city within the Indian state of Bihar, a peculiar grave stands. This grave holds the half-burnt books that lie behind the blackened library partitions of Azizia Madrasa, a 113-year-old Islamic instructional establishment. The library’s 4,500 books had been torched throughout a riot in March. Their ashes now lie in an eight-foot-deep pit. Lots of of half-burnt pages are a testomony to the various aspects of Islamic tradition and historical past, which now, each actually and figuratively, are consigned to a grave.
On March 31, a mob of about 1,000 individuals armed with swords, bricks, and petrol bombs vandalized and set fireplace to Azizia Madrasa. What began as a celebration of a Hindu spiritual pageant finally turned violent as automobiles, properties, and retailers within the small city had been torched and a number of other individuals had been injured. The extremist mob was reportedly chanting “Jai Shri Ram” or “Glory to Lord Ram” and “Kill them, burn them” as they broke the lock of the madrasa (Islamic college) and threw petrol bombs into its three-acre campus housing 22 school rooms, a library, and different communal areas. Closed for Ramadan, not one of the madrasa’s 500 college students or academics had been current on campus. Nevertheless, the library of books, a wealthy archive of Islamic and cultural heritage, and a website for students, was fully destroyed.
The library is now a shell of its former self — soot-covered partitions, cracked steel followers, and crumbling balustrades. The books — which included handwritten manuscripts from Egypt and Turkey, uncommon Arabic texts on science, philosophy and logic, Islamic literature, medication, divinity, and 250 uncommon handwritten Hadiths in Urdu and Persian calligraphy — at the moment are gone. The worldwide supply of those books would attest to transcontinental literary data and change as soon as frequent within the subcontinent dominated by Central Asian Islamic rulers. The depth and variety of topics are proof of the extensive scope of scholarship practiced by readers and thinkers, who challenged the narrow-minded perceptions of Islamic data as purely theological. The wealthy calligraphic texts had been a nod to the visible aesthetic of Islamic tradition.
“We simply couldn’t throw them away,” mentioned Mohammad Shahabuddin, the aged library caretaker, in an interview with the authors. “We buried 4 thousand 5 hundred burnt books in an eight-foot-by-eight-foot-deep pit behind the library constructing.”
The violence in Pinjrawan Panchayat is simply one other tragedy within the spate of Islamophobic incidents — mob lynchings, hate crimes, and discriminatory authorities insurance policies — which have turn into more and more commonplace in India. However the assault and burning of the century-old Azizia library is proof of a cultural warfare being waged in opposition to Muslims, carried out by means of the distortion and erasure of India’s Islamic heritage.
In 1996, historian and founding member of the Subaltern Research undertaking Gyanendra Pandey described the “new Hindu historical past” that was being created to strengthen Hindu nationalists’ concept that Muslims had been international invaders within the pure land of India. By perpetuating this narrative, right-wing teams are in a position to paint websites of Islamic heritage as websites of desecration.
They’re definitely finishing up their undertaking efficiently, and the nation’s very historical past is being reshaped consequently. Consultants say that 230 distinctive Islamic websites had been destroyed through the 2002 riots in Gujarat alone, rivaling the destruction of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas and the Crimson Guard’s destruction of Tibetan monasteries. After profitable the case in 2020 to construct a Hindu temple on the location of the Sixteenth-century Babri Masjid, which was demolished in 1992 by a Hindu nationalist mob, right-wing Hindu nationalist teams are calling for different heritage websites, similar to Delhi’s Qutub Minar and the Taj Mahal, to be designated as Hindu websites and renamed “Vishnu Pillar” and “Tejo Mahalaya.” Cities, cities, and roads reflecting India’s Islamic previous are being renamed as nicely. Websites of historic and spiritual significance, just like the Sixteenth-century mosque Shahi Masjid within the state of Uttar Pradesh, are routinely demolished to make manner for city infrastructure tasks. In April of this 12 months, a nationwide schooling board eliminated the chapters on the Mughal Empire, a rule spanning 300 years of India’s historical past, from Twelfth-grade textbooks.
“What has been occurring since Narendra Modi got here to energy in 2014 is a acutely aware effort to erase the Muslim imprint on Indian historical past,” mentioned Dr. Zafarul-Islam Khan, a well known scholar and former chairman of the Delhi Minorities Fee, in an interview with Hyperallergic. “After this wanton deletion of Muslims from India’s historical past and cultural areas is achieved, their bodily deletion and relegation to second-class residents and even non-citizens can be simply doable. This can be a century-old Hindutva undertaking. If this course of continues, Indian Muslims would turn into aliens in their very own nation. Who will care about individuals who haven’t any historical past and made no contribution to the nation?”
In April 2018, the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), a authorities physique on historical past, closed down its library that contained invaluable sources on Islamic historical past and tradition in India and included the private library of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the primary schooling minister of India. Azad was an iconic Muslim member of the federal government that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru fashioned instantly after India’s independence in 1947. “Nobody now is aware of the place that treasured treasure has gone. The identical ICCR additionally closed down its Arabic journal, Thaqafatul Hind, which was a bridge between India and the Arab World,” added Dr. Khan.
With a purpose to make their declare of a Hindu Rashtra (nation) a actuality, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Social gathering (BJP) and its supporters should not solely guarantee Hindu supremacy within the current, but additionally rewrite India’s syncretic previous. However with these violent acts in opposition to India’s heritage, the demolished mosques, burned libraries, and forgotten metropolis names, what will we lose of ourselves?
To historian Rana Safvi, who has spent many years documenting Islamic heritage in India, this isn’t solely a tragedy for Muslims, but additionally a tragedy for the entire nation. The assault on the madrasa in Bihar reveals that Hindu nationalists diminished madrasas and symbols of Islamic heritage to their spiritual id, ignoring their historic function in nation-building.
“For them, a madrasa is a non secular establishment, and since majoritarianism is on the rise, it’s a pure goal,” Safvi mentioned in an interview. “It was precisely as a result of it was seen as a logo of Muslims and so it might damage their emotions. However madrasas haven’t solely been patronized by Muslims.” She famous that the famend Hindu reformer, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, discovered Arabic and Persian in a madrasa in Bihar’s Phulwari Sharif, lower than 50 miles from Madrasa Azizia.
Authors like Ziya Us Salam and Mohammad Aslam Parvaiz have written extensively concerning the function of madrasas in mainstreaming schooling in India of their just lately launched ebook Madrasas within the Age of Islamophobia (2020). They argue that madrasas in pre-independence and in post-independence India “weren’t the monopoly of Muslims, or mere facilities to study to learn the Quran.” Slightly, they taught an unlimited vary of topics together with arithmetic, poetry, physics, and geography. Reflecting on the assault at Azizia, Safvi mentioned, “The books that had been misplaced right here weren’t solely spiritual texts but additionally invaluable treatises on literature and tradition. These books in Urdu and Persian are our collective heritage and burning them down means destroying reminiscences of a pluralistic previous too.”
“I believe it’s actually vital to emphasise that Islamic heritage in South Asia is at risk,” Dr. Vivek Gupta, an artwork historian on the College of Cambridge, instructed Hyperallergic. “Not simply a part of it, however even issues which can be so-called ‘protected’ are in an terrible state of hazard. An entire vary of cultural historical past is in danger.” The adjustments, to Dr. Gupta, are taking place slowly and maybe have turn into anodyne now, not even making the entrance pages of newspapers nor inciting protest anymore. “When monuments are destroyed, we lose entry to our histories,” he mentioned. “The Babri Masjid is now not, and that was an vital website that students can now not research as structure, simply as documentation. When the federal government, and even the general public, targets Muslim heritage, after they erase it, we will now not begin to inform its story.”
The charred pillars and partitions of the Azizia library function a reminder of the violence by the Hindu nationalist mob. In keeping with stories, the restoration will price an estimated $365,088. However the library’s assortment, an archive spanning centuries which will have held on its cabinets the solutions to many questions for students, is now misplaced eternally.
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