Part
I: Chapter 6
KASHMIR - NOT
A TABULA RASA
A
victim to his political commitments, P.N. Bazaz has failed to assess and
evaluate the depth and dimension of Kashmir's culture and civilisation
and its share of contributions as a tributary to the mainstream culture
and civilisation of India and with this lacunas in his historical and intellectual
constructions he seems to uphold the idea that Mir Ali through his stray
visits was filling in a cultural and civilisational vacuum in Kashmir.
In sharp contradiction to what he held and expounded, Muslim experience
was that Kashmir was not a tabula rasa and 'tabula' refused to be wiped
out'. Despite political hegemony, on cultural plane Islam was a failure
in Kashmir as its frontal forces exhibiting extreme forms of bigotry failed
to provide an alternate culture-model in sharp contrast to the tremendous
indigenous developments. As values are the outcome and product of a long
churning that societies undergo during life shaping processes, Mir Ali
resorted to cosmetic and artificial changes, but assiduously worked for
the involvement of a state-based apparatus burdened with the religious
responsibility of spreading the support-base of Islam by forcible conversions.
The rest was done by Sayyids parading as sufis posted by him at various
centres of Hinduism, who drilled the new-converts into some mechanical
codes, tethered them loose from their heritage, taught them the only lessons
of believers and non-believers, the blessed and the damned and to cap it
all, fed them on the 'narrowness of the spirit', a hall-mark of Islam and
other Semitic religions, thus modelling them into split personalities caught
up in the chasm of the rejected past and stillborn future.
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