Revelation 2016: ‘God’ may not want to see us... : The Tribune India

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Revelation 2016: ‘God’ may not want to see us...

In the midst of an on-again-off-again furor about women not being allowed into shrines, I’ve just realized that God may not actually want to see us!

Revelation 2016: ‘God’ may not want to see us...

The thought of preventing women from entering some temples is very absurd.



Saba Naqvi

In the midst of an on-again-off-again furor about women not being allowed into shrines, I’ve just realized that God may not actually want to see us!

This epiphany came to me after I read the April 19 Delhi edition of the Hindu. On the front page was a report about proceedings in the Supreme Court that was hearing a petition against the ban on women of a certain age from worshipping at the famous Sabrimala temple in Kerala. According to the report, senior advocate Raju Ramachandran was arguing that biology should not be held against women who wish to worship a “celibate’ deity. At one point in the proceedings, one of the judges of the three judge bench reportedly asked: “If the deity says I don’t want to see you, why do you compel him to see you? If the deity does not want to be pleased, why do you compel him to be pleased?”

Voila. I had the answer to my years of irritation, frustration and anger at being pushed behind a wall, into a dark corner, not being allowed into the sanctum, the grave et all in religious shrines. Why just last week I had gone to the Dargah of Qutb ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli, Delhi. I like to pray sometimes, an act that I believe is about human hope and not organized religion. I also like the dargahs of the Chishti order because of the cool music (those great qawwalis) and the very organized manner of giving alms at these shrines (makes me feel I am atoning for my sins). 

Beyond anything off course is the innate humanism of the message of these Sufis whose graves are at the centre of the worship in the shrines. But at the Mehrauli dargah I have to stand behind a trellis, since women are not allowed inside the courtyard that houses the grave. Universalism and humanism it seems sometimes does not apply to half the human race. 

Still, I think interpreters of God and Godliness are still figuring out whether women are kosher or partly impure or wholly impure. For it’s all rather ad hoc in the Chishti silsila. At the shrine of Khwaja Gharib Nawaz at Ajmer, the founder of the order, women can go near the grave. But at the two famous dargahs in Delhi--Nizamuddin and Bakhtiyar Kaki-- built for the followers of the order founded by Garib Nawaz, women are kept at a distance. Again at the Salim Chishti shrine in Fatehpur Sikri, women can go near the grave. It’s all very confusing from the gender perspective.   

Unless Allah made haphazard distinctions, varying from mohalla to mohalla, I imagine it was men who laid down the rules. Indeed, in the two years that I spent researching popular religion and syncretistic culture for my first book, In Good Faith, I realized that there are no gender divisions at the shrines of popular local pirs/fakirs who are part of the sacred landscape for people of all religions. The distinctions begin to be made when men need to share their superior wisdom or when the imams and khadims who have to justify their salaries, begin to give fatwas. That’s exactly what happened some years ago at the Haji Ali shrine in Mumbai (not part of the Chishti order). I’ve been there when women could go right up to the grave. Now apparently I can’t go. 

At times, we are told it’s just tradition and girls should not take it personally. In my childhood, during visits to Lucknow and the family village in Awadh I remember complaining to my grandmother that I would not attend the majlis that were organized during moharram if girls were made to sit behind purdah where they could see nothing and it was hot (the fans and coolers were conveniently placed for the men). My grandmother, being an amazing woman for her generation, laughed and promised to put me up front with the men and did so as long as I was a little girl. I must qualify that in family majlis’ the segregation was not necessary. But if an outside maulana was delivering the sermon it was back to the not so comfortable spot divinely ordained for women. In principal, I still avoid such congregations unless I absolutely have to go, which is usually after a death in the family.

We all know about Eve being made from the rib of Adam and the 72 virgins in Paradise so I’m not going to examine the gender bias of the Abrahamic religions. What is more relevant for us in India is the popular practice of religion, always a dynamic changing tradition. Be it Haji Ali or Sabrimala, I am not asking historians or the pundits or mullahs to explain how certain shrines build lore and tradition to encroach on rights of women that should be expanding in independent India. I’m just addressing this question to well, God. And off course Bharat Mata.

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