Tabassum Ruhi Khan,Beyond Hybridity and Fundamentalism: Emerging Muslim Identity in Globalized India

The community of Muslims is the second majority community in India. It is ironical that the community has been relegated to minority status, discriminated as well as victimised at multiple levels and we are left with a landscape replete with signage of otherness. A maze of stereotypes circulates and rarely do we come across scholarly engagements capable enough to penetrate inside the wrapper of otherness. Beyond Hybridity and Fundamentalism by Tabassum Ruhi Khan is one such welcome effort. The book successfully challenges the dominant image of Muslim youth as fundamentalist in attitude and traditionalist in appearance.

Focused on the middle and lower middle class sections, the author frames her enquiry around four crucial yet overlapping axis: modernity, media, consumerism and aspirations among Muslim youths living in Zakir Nagar, Delhi. The setting (or broadly the māhaul) is a predominantly Muslim enclave in the close proximity of Jamia Millia Islamia University on the one side and an upmarket residential locality of South Delhi on the other side. The neighbourhood has been a preferred place of dwelling for a large number of Muslims migrating from various parts of north India and enrolled in Jamia or working in different corners of Delhi. ‘A space redolent with signs, sights, and sounds of the Indian Islamic culture’ (p. 6), this is a landscape that provides a sense of security and community feeling for Muslim youths in a city terribly hostile towards migrant Muslim tenants. In a similar circumstance of contemporary urban dynamics, such a living has been termed as ‘choice less decision’ (Gayer, endnote 94, p. 371).1

This is an ethnographic exercise that squarely asks the equation between minority identity and material aspirations in the contemporary world. At the larger level, she has been in constant dialogue with the modernity and its theorisation from postcolonial locations. Drawing resources from postcolonial scholarship, Ruhi Khan attempts to develop ‘an argument for thinking through and against the grain of western modernity’. She leisurely engages with postcolonial oeuvre but also brushes the corpus aside for its seer absence of any engagement with the everyday materiality (a sweeping statement not quite palatable though). Unlike this scholarship, she claims to have a ground beneath her feet in terms of the rootedness of her arguments in the everyday material experiences of the community. Moving beyond postcolonial prefixes, such as hybridity, alternate and contested modernity, Ruhi Khan explores how Muslim youths in their everydayness negotiate their own Muslim identities and respond to contemporary strands of materialism, consumerism, Hindu majoritarian nationalism and globalised Islam. In lieu of already circulating postcolonial currencies, she comes up with ‘convoluted modernity’ to capture ‘a layered mutuality between seemingly antithetical ideas’, ‘to give credence to modernity’s ubiquitous presence’ and to reassert that the core tenets of modernity, that is, freedom, self-questioning and reflexivity are ‘internalised in varying degrees in different geographies’.

The author successfully persuades us that for her respondents (coming from nameless small towns of north India), the issues of adab, akhlaq and tahjeeb are neither irrelevant nor opposite to their positioning in the contemporary world of consumer culture and media-ted expectations. These are not hegemonic in proportion either. Instead, she argues that the Muslim youths, in their everyday life, struggle and wear their religiosity while aspiring for the material prosperity and progress as defined by the dominant parameters of the contemporary consumerism. Such a plural approach does not mean that Muslim youths are insulated from anxieties. This is merely to suggest that their anxieties are primarily material and non-religious in nature: aspiration for a good job, prosperity and stable income. Yet, some of them practice adab and akhlaq in their own manner negotiating what seem to be exclusive worlds of Islamic tahjeeb and contemporary demands of globalised material expectations. The question one further needs to ask is how the two shape each other? Even at the risk of being deterministic, one would be tempted to ask what does this negotiation mean to the world of Islam? However, the author has justifiably remained focused on what does this coming together (of Islamic practices, norms and globalised aspirations) mean in the lives of youths from Zakir Nagar and has gestured that it may be fallacious at the first place to think about the two world views as mutually exclusive. One may extend the argument that the contemporary world of adab, akhlaq and tahjeeb cannot be accessed by isolating them from the contemporary media flows and networked terrains of materiality.

This is a terrain of practices. In addition, such practices make meanings fluid, puncture stereotypes and allow theory building from the ground up. Thus, we have a series of observations and responses pertaining to a range of events, encounters and viewpoints with which Ruhi Khan has woven her argument. This includes issues like attitude towards burkha, veil, hijab and abaya; controversial Batla house event (when in 2008 a contentious police encounter was conducted during broad day light); circulation and reception of Dr Zakir Naik’s (a popular presenter of Peace TV) imageries and views among Muslim youths of this locality; interaction with students and faculty members of Jamia Millia Islamia University; and a unique encounter of a scene of a woman offering her magrib namaz in front of a restaurant at busy Connaught Place (one of the most popular and centrally located shopping centre of Delhi).

We enter into this world through an encounter (unusual for the author, routine in the life of the locality) in a cold winter night setting the stage for an ethnographer located in American academia and studying her ‘own community’ on the one side and her informants and respondents marked by their ‘lack of access to elite education or fluency in the English language’ on the other side. The latter remains migrant figures (‘baahri’ or outsider as nonchalantly informed to her) coming from nondescript small towns and villages of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but the researcher’s self acquire sharper focus when we come to know about her precise location, California. It is unfortunate that the hierarchy between the researcher and her subject remains tightly sealed along the lines of geography and subject positions. At temporal level, the past life of the researcher in Jamia (when religion was never allowed to be an identifying equation and where a bohemian and an almost irreligious subjectivity was celebrated) is pitted against contemporary practices having appearance, behaviours and daily routine as overtly sutured through Islamic norms, symbols and rituals. Such contrasts serve crucial purpose to achieve certain comparative perspective and through an insertion of the self, author allows us to appreciate subtleties in the production of this account. However, on few occasions, the contrast gets blurred and we come across richer and much nuanced tapestry of everyday practices.

The book is divided into three chapters, a long introduction and a conclusion. As mentioned earlier, the field unfolds itself before a reader through author’s chance encounter of a congregation of male Muslim youth out in the street at an hour close to midnight and attired in trendy Western styles. To comprehend this unusual scene, she weaves a rich narrative mobilising media-generated images, dynamics which go in the making of ‘apana mahol’ or the milieu where Muslim youth feel at ease and the overarching insecurity lurking in post 9/11 world to suggest that ‘only in those few late night hours the young Muslim men could reclaim a space for themselves and perform their different imaginations of being, but without disrupting the essential mores and ways of being of the Muslim community’ (p. 81). In the next two chapters, she not only merely brings in the young Muslim girls and rupture the masculine street but also very insightfully puncture our liberal bourgeois understanding of public place. Thus, instances of a young woman offering namaz on a busy pavement, young girls rushing out of classrooms for their wuzu (the compulsory abulation before offering namaz) and a young civil engineer appearing for a job interview with a multinational firm and successfully carrying out her persona at élan while remain comfortably tucked in full veil disrupt the liberal hegemonic idea of how one ought to carry one’s own self in the public. However, the flip side of the story, the insecurities and anxieties of Muslim youths owing to their minority status have not found adequate analytical space. At times, such an under treatment of the dominant fears of our times makes an otherwise incredible account by Tabassum Ruhi Khan vulnerable to be treated as one which is oblivious to the politics of otherness which shape our global self-hood. Due to such an approach, we hardly come to know how these Muslim youths explicitly respond and challenge aggressive majoritarian politics.

To me, the third chapter is the most insightful one. Focused on women respondents and issues of agency, we come across these young (perhaps single) women as confident, articulate and exhibiting certain ‘aggressiveness’ countering ‘entrenched perceptions equating veiling with denial of individuality and negation of women’s right’. Aptly a professor remarks, ‘Today if they (Muslim women/girl) wear hijab they know why they are wearing it’. This is a powerful proposition. Yet, beside taking this knowing for granted or questioning its veracity, we also need to engage with researcher’s wisdom to self-doubt and ask how do we know that they know it. The issue is not about honouring or criticising choices made by respondents but to invest into processes and practices where making choice itself never appear to be in black and white but acquire fluidity, ambivalence and greyness. It is at this point, anthropology of everyday life cannot afford to remain an exercise in asking questions and gathering responses. As an ethnographic project, one expected at least few thick accounts, life journeys, anxieties and desires and convoluted routes giving us a glimpse of how people made choices when they had to. Currently, most of these accounts come before us in the form of responses to specific questions, heavily edited (perhaps to meet the word limits of a monograph) and already theorised nuggets.

Another obvious blind spot comes in the form of a lack of engagement with the past and history leaving us wandering in a depthless contemporary. Yet, it is only fair to remark that despite this lack, the contemporary remains captivating and the engagement with the postcolonial variants of the modernity dexterously handled.

Notwithstanding some of the sweeping claims (which is difficult to swallow in light of some rigorous and thought provoking works of recent years on experiences of Muslim communities in India; work of Nida Kirmani2

on Zakir Nagar is one such case conspicuously absent in Ruhi Khan’s account),3,4 the book is an important signpost in the way we should approach contemporary world of aspirations and religious identity, particularly Muslim identity in Indian context.