My Travelogue: Singapore: Part 4

After a nice and deep sleep I woke up at 4.30am to see Abdullah Haji performing the voluntary night prayer, tahajjud (the Arabic word means the struggle to get rid oneself of sleep). As we bumped in to a man in Indian blue-lined Dhoti while getting out of the lift on our way to the nearby Masjid Hajjah Fatima for Subah (early morning) prayer, Haji told me he is a Chulian. I eagerly asked what Chulia is as he repeatedly used the term. He said it is the name used in Southeast Asia for Hanafi Muslims with Indian origin.
Singapore is home to a notable number of Chulia Muslims, who came mostly as traders and money changers. The name is after the famous Chola Kingdom of Tamil Nadu along the Coromandel Coast. There is a historically important monument called Jamae Chulia Mosque, ironically established in the heart of the amusement hub of Chinatown. Built in 1826, this is the first of three Islamic heritage buildings in Chinatown. The other two are Al-Abrar Mosque and another building in the memory of Seikh Shahul Hamid, the famous Sufi scholar buried in the famous South Indian pilgrim city of Nagore. The mosque is a national monument since 1974, thanks to its typically south Indian entry gate and remarkable architectural style which is a mix of sorts.
The morning prayer at Masjid Hajjah Fatimah was the first experience on the life and culture of the ethnically mixed Muslim community of Singapore. There I met people from various backgrounds and multiple origins, Tamil, Malay, Malayali and even Chinese and Arab origin. The Imam was from Java, a clean-shaved man wearing the typical half-sleeved cream Malay shirt and colored line dhoti. His recitation of Quran was attractive, but he was doing the extra movement back and forth while reciting, a widespread habit generally picked up while memorizing the holy book, but frowned upon during the prayer which is considered nullified by deliberate extra moves according all schools of law. Almost all of the Muslims in Southeast belong to Shafi legal thought, and it is evident especially through prayer rites and rituals observed at the mosque. After the namaz, they sit longer and collectively murmur various invocations and litanies before an emotional group prayer in Arabic led by Imam, like as majority of us do in Kerala, a typical Yemeni-Hadrami tradition spread throughout South India and Southeast Asia, the major point of departure in my research project. The imam asked me to come another day when I introduced myself as a researcher on the way to his native place.
Masjid Hajjah Fatimah is a heritage mosque built by a woman on the Beach Road in the Malay enclave of Kampong Glam district. Built in 1845, the mosque was designed by British architect, John Turnbull Thomson, a fact that explains its European elements along with Islamic ones. It was named after an astute businesswoman from Malacca who married a Bugis prince from Celebes (Sulawesi), and who donated the land, on which her house formerly stood, for the mosque. Undaunted by an early widowhood, Fatima single-handedly managed a huge business through numerous vessels and prows that helped her amass a large fortune. Her only daughter Raja Siti was married by Syed Ahmad Alsagoff, son of an influential Arab trader, Syed Abdul Rahman Alsagoff. The compound of the Mosque includes the graves of Hajjah Fatimah, her daughter and son-in-law. Since 1973, Hajjah Fatimah Mosque is one of the national monuments. Today the mosque is under the Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS).
The morning scenes on the way back were interesting as usual. Life was already on showing its multi colors. Various types of people were out on the pathways lined here and there amidst the housing and business complexes, cleaning workers toiling along footpaths, office and school goers, night-duty returners, brisk walkers, dog walkers, couples enjoying the breeze and shadowy climate immersed in their own world, and wrinkled elders - singles , couples and groups - out for pastime.
We walked to a nearby hawker centre passing a Chinese restaurant and a fruit-vegetable market. The smell from the Chinese food court was penchant and unbearable for me. It has always been like that only, when many of my friends go ga-ga over Chinese cuisines, I have yet to cope even with its smell. They were eating all kind of things, including meat and fish, right from the early morning. Abdullah Haji took me to his regular vendor, a devout Bangladeshi, and we had a delightful tasty tea in a big cup along with a bun. The pulled tea 'teh tarik', sold at 80cets, is made with sweetened condensed milk. While having the tea as well as getting new and new information from Haji, I looked around the hawker centre, one of the popular food courts meant generally for ordinary people. The concept of the hawker centre is open-air complexes housing many stalls selling a variety of inexpensive food. Found near public housing estates or transport hubs, hawker centers are another display of the multi-ethnicity of Singapore. Stalls representing all from global and cultural colors and run by people from various backgrounds are available under one roof. Some stalls are exclusive for some items. Jointly owned by the National Environment Agency (NEA), Housing and Development Board (HDB) and JTC Corporation, and managed by NEA, the public hawker centre system is the best way to maintain hygiene in cheap-eat centers, a best idea countries like India can learn a lesson from. In almost all Indian cities cheap public eating is always risky and dangerous, but hugely popular. We are always used to neglect the filthy and dirty situations at our roadside Dhabas, not to mention the problem of unhygienic food preparation by unlicensed street hawkers.

Love for Jihad Or Jihad for Love

Heartily congratulations to the proud JNU Students Community who sternly rejected another heinous attempt by the regressive, hopeless and divisive forces in the campus, with an apparent support from outside, to malign the healthy, pluralistic, cordial and accommodative atmosphere of this prestigious campus through a couple of ill-intended, venomous and vitriolic pamphlets.

Accustomed to fish in the dirty water, self-assured or misguided that a call for flesh and blood of minorities are the best way to practice cultural nationalism and an eventual establishment of a Hindutva state, these desperadoes never deserve even a response to their heinous acts.

We have seen more of these in the past, witnessed its culminating orgasm in the post-Babri 90s, and have got assured that the majority Hindu brothers and minorities stand united to uphold a secular and democratic country, more concerned with its inclusive development.

However, as the entire target of this well-planned character assassination were a particular community, we, some concerned students thought to clear the air and do our part sincerely to avert any potential negative consequences of such dastardly efforts in vitiating the existing unity in diversity of our beloved campus.

In the immediate backdrop of such a sadistic ‘Sanghi Daharma’ exposure we see many things from the Sangh Parivar’s calamitous debacle in this year's election that indicated to a frightening desertion of the party by its general vote base of urban middle class as well as to the unending problems of the Sangh party due to an ageing and week leadership and vicious back-stabbings and in-fights, to a Remarkable erosion in the interest of parents to see their wards in the awkward and pre-modern kakki-knickers.

More importantly, the relentless attempts of Sangh mafia to paint the minority community black and to establish the ‘all-terrorists-are-Muslims’ theory through fake encounters and a number of dubious and mystery-shrouded attacks and explosions, obviously exploiting all the government machineries, were well exposed by the powerful secular forces of the country to the utter disappointment of these people. Now the Sangh is once again going back to its basis – evoke communal frenzy, spread hatred, divide the society through victimization and vilification of a particular community and seek the way to power.

The entire ‘Love-Jihad’ episode has underlined the ability of Sangh Parivar to spread a lie as truth and utilize it for fomenting communal violence. On first March, 2002, Gujarat’s Sandesh newspaper reported that a group of Godhra Muslims have abducted two young Hindu girls, raped them in turns, sliced their breasts and threw them in a nearby canal. The police force made an extensive search, investigated in detail, found that the entire story was cooked up to maximize the destructive effect of the ongoing post-Godra violence.

The newspaper later pretended apologizing through a three-line report, but all the intended damages were over by that time. The Sangh Pariwar spread the story all over Gujarat fanning the revenge and inducing their activists to employ the most heinous methods of killings, widespread rape, immolations of children and women and even taking out of fetus from the womb of a pregnant woman. Now we see the same people spreading some imagined stories sexed-up by their counterparts in Kerala.

Love inside and outside the campus irrespective of religion, and subsequent inter-religious marriages are nothing new, especially in Kerala, where there is more mingling between communities and less or no ghettoisation of particular religious groups. In most cases, there have been initial tensions in the families, obviously due to inability of the parents to cope with the fact, given the social and religious realities. Conversion is in fact a painful experience for the families involved.

However, there are thousands of mixed families in Kerala and elsewhere who have survived these initial obstacles and keep living, in some cases even in the same villages as of their families. Amazingly, there was no big hue and cry in Kerala when a Muslim girl, whose historic first rank in SSLC public exam was highly celebrated by each and every Muslim organization in the state, decided to live a marital life with her Christian boyfriend she met while studying MBBS. Generally, when such issues reach to police stations and courts, the will of the adult girl is asked and she is allowed to go accordingly.

However, in the controversial case involving two MBA students of Pathanamthitta Pokkanam St. Jones College, who fell in love with their Muslim boyfriends, they were compelled to go with their parents, without considering their repeated requests to go with their lovers. One of them had even called a press meet in Kottayam to clarify that she married her Muslim lover on her own will, and no one had converted her forcefully.

The reported change in the tones of the girls came only later, after the family got enough time to brainwash them. The picture and drama behind the ‘Love-Jihad’ episode becomes clearer when one knows that the Hindu girl belonged to the family of a top state BJP leader, while the Christian girl hails form the family of a high ranking police officer. More interestingly, Shahansha, the other boy involved, was the district president of MSF, the student wing of State Muslim League, which is well-known in the state for its strong stances and measures against all extremist forces among Muslims. The handsome boy was also a hero in the campus.

A state BJP leader traded blind allegations and distributed spicy stories of “love-jihad’ in a press conference. Suddenly everybody from the court and police to Christian leaders started speaking in the tongue of Sang Parivar. The Catholic Church in Kerala alerted parents and teachers about an ‘extremist Islamic strategy to convert young women through marriage’, adding that ‘movement is a network of organized young and handsome Muslim youths to lure girls, make them pregnant and dump them’. Shamelessly, it even announced a plan to organize defensive and corrective measures in co-operation with VHP against the actors in of this imagined tales.

Let’s look why anybody fail to believe these cooked stories. All from Sangh Parivar, the Catholic Bishops Council and the police now say that there are zonal offices under a chairman for the ‘Love-Jihad’ or ‘Romeo Jihad’ outfit in all the 14 districts of the state, and it has been working for long with the help of ‘terror funding’ by many international terrorist organizations. The outfit has already converted around 4,000 hindu and Christian girls. However, one wonders that then how come the entire security apparatus, which had extensively scrutinized each and every Muslim family in the state in the wake of recent controversy regarding ‘terror recruitment to Kashmir’, could not get any tip on the existence of this ‘highly active Love-jihad’ force before this incident.

There are many boys and girls who fall in love and marry non-Muslims, and it is well-known that generally these people happen to be less performing, willing to get out of the religious rituals and mores, interested in living a cool, happy and loose life. They usually get the wrath of religious authority for being ‘irreligious and lax’. It is the last thing to imagine about them that they are jihadis doing love to increase the number of Muslims. So far those practicing Muslims with caps and beards were the main terror suspects, now one of the immediate consequences of this propaganda will be targeting of these pleasure-loving, happy-going less or no religious Muslim youths, who generally happen to be the main link among communities.

Lastly and more importantly, the term love-jihad itself is self contradictory and abusive of its true religious meaning. ‘Jihad’ is striving hard in the struggle against one's own self, controlling of ill deeds, ill-words, and even ill thoughts and intentions. A true Muslim’s entire life should be an unending endevour to succeed in this ‘jihad’ so that he can be a shining light for all others.

Romantic Love in the eye of Islam is both prescriptive and proscriptive. Prescriptive and highly rewarded when it is intensely shared between the husband and wife. Proscriptive when is shared between two opposite sexes out of the marital bliss. The real relation between a male and his non-related girl should be that of mutual respect, and any kind of sexual overtones are discouraged in such a relation.

“Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that will make for greater purity for them” “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty” (Quran: Nur: 30-31). ‘So a brazen stare by a man at women (or even at a man) is a breach of refined manners’. One has to strive hard to get this value, and Islam says it is the true jihad. How far and contradictory is this and using the same word to lure girls, abuse. Love does happen among Muslims also, but there is no way for any kind of religious interpretation to endorse it, let alone to use it as a weapon for conversion.

My Travelogue: Singapore – Part 3

It was late night on my first day in Singapore, and Shafeeq had given me a lot of friendly advises in order to avoid all possible disturbances to my aged host. Actually we cut short our interesting chats through memory lines only to help Abdullah Haji reach his room in time and get his sleep. But I was impatient and couldn’t really sleep over this ‘mine of information in front of me’. His initial answer ‘it is a great and long story’ to my question ‘how you reached Singapore from a North Kerala village’ suddenly washed off my sleepy mood. He also sat cross-legged on his string cot apparently happy to narrate me his story, and the history of Singapore, which I had tried to understand little bit through books and websites beforehand.

Abdullah Haji can be counted among the third group of Malayali Diaspora immigrated to Singapore. For Indians, especially Mallus and Tamils, it is easy to understand the origin of word Singapore, meaning the ‘City of Lion’ (Singam or Simham). A Malay legend is that a Sumatran prince spotted a lion while visiting the island of Temasek, and based on this good omen he founded a city there naming it ‘Singapura’.

The first group of migrants from South India is assumed to have reached in this Lion’s City when Sir Stamford Raffles, with the tacit support of Lord Hastings, Governor-General of India, established a trading station at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula in 1819, concluding a treaty with Temenggong Abdu'r Rahman and Sultan Hussein of Johor, who were in control of Singapore and who were compelled to let British consolidate their power in exchange for increased cash payments and pensions.

The trading station of Singapore was aimed at securing a safe and strategic base for the British Empire in the Straits in order to help expand its trade with China from its dominant bases in India. The British also established a trading post in Penang (1786) and captured Malacca from the Dutch (1795) in order to protect their merchant fleet in this region. Stamford transformed the sparsely populated, swampy island into a free-trade port and brought in unprecedented prosperity, attracting immigrants from nearby areas in large scale, especially from Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The layout of Central Singapore is still as Rafflews drew it.

In the second half of 19^th century many of the immigrants reached as 'indentured servants', a term used for ‘laborers under contract to an employer for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for their transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities’. This kind of contracts was a boon and something like a safety valve to the growing number of poverty-stricken tenants of agricultural labourers of Malabar and Cochin because of the fast-deteriorating socio-economic conditions in those regions.

The immigration to the Sugar and coffee plantations of the region was essentially a south Indian phenomenon. Almost 90% of Indian migrant labour in the region was from Tamil Nadu since the main recruitment was based in Chennai, the erstwhile Madras. However, most of migrants from Malabar and the Coromandel Coast were non-labour migrants such as professionals, teachers, salesmen, peddlers, petty entrepreneurs, traders, shopkeepers and street vendors.

The third group of migrants reached after the tragic days Singapore experienced following ‘torturous’ Japanese occupation during the World War 2 in 1942, which brought the days of the Empire to an abrupt end. For three and a half years Singapore was under ‘cruel’ Japanese occupation, until the British Military Administration recaptured Singapore in 1945, leading to the dissolution of the Straits Settlements and making Singapore a Crown Colony in 1946.

During this period, the British had started providing a large number of work permit /employment pass, and many from Kerala arrived on this. Abdullah Haji, a young job-hunter, desperate in the extreme poverty and starvation at home and around, was one among those who secured a permit (it was nice to hear him pronounce the word permit in real Mappila style ‘permeett’) and boarded a not-that-much-safe launch sailing South East.

(photo: Me and Abdullah Haji at Singapore's famous Darga of Sayyid Habeeb Nuh, along with the Mausoleum caretaker. I will narrate the interesting story of Habeeb Nuh later)

He came as a rubber estate laborer in a Singapore that was totally different from today - Small huts scattered everywhere, two-storied buildings at some places, Arab, English, Bugis (an ethnic community from Sulawesi island of Indonesia) Chinese and Malay quarters and Kampongs (villages), small-scale peddlers and vendors doing most of the business all over the island, and a busy port. He changed from a laborer to a little tea vendor after Singapore attained full internal self-government in 1959, and an imposing authoritarian Lee Kwan Yew, who took the helm as prime minister, issued citizenship for all those stayed back during the crippling period, urging them to be part of the city-state’s struggle to survive and prosper on its own.

In 1961, Singapore's merger with Malaya as part of a larger federation was agreed between Malayan Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew in view of closer political and economic co-operation between the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei. After a short-lived merger, Singapore became a sovereign, democratic and independent nation on 9 August 1965. Though angry at the dominating Chinese people and culture and their sometimes arrogant ways, Abdullah Haji is in full praise of Lee Kwan Yew, an economic visionary, for developing Singapore into one of the cleanest, safest, and most economically prosperous cities in Asia.

Despite possessing the Singapore citizenship and its prestigious passport, which ensures hustle-free traveling to almost all rich countries in the world, Abdullah Haji never brought his family from Kerala to settle in Singapore, nor did he marry one in the adopted country as many migrants do. He visits his family or twice every year and keeps the nostalgic bond with his native place alive. He brought his family to Singapore only once last year to show them the pomp and splendor of the city-state. Now, as he has given out the tea-shop to run and leading a kind of retirement life, he gets more time with his family back home, and keeps traveling between Kerala and Singapore, a typical Malayali who has emotionally trapped between the love to his adopted world and the nostalgia to the birth place. Anyway, he wants the final sleep to inside the home soil.

While asked why he didn’t settle his family in Singapore, where they would have better education and employment opportunities, Abdullah Haji hinted at the darker sides of Singapore and acknowledged me why he was right in his decision. I remembered the words of Rajan Srinivasan I met on board Air India.Tuning his old radio for the 12am Tamil news locally broadcast, Abdullah Haji told me that I will realize why he kept the family safe back home. Before going to sleep he taught me a tip on how to deal with the bugs. Taking out a piece of sellotape, he showed me how the cellulose-based, pressure sensitive adhesive tape is effectively used to net the bug. He asked me to keep myself one piece near the pillow and use it whenever needed in the night.

Note: Reading about bug in the last part, close friend Hafiz Ismael called from Doha telling me the bug phenomena is not limited to Singapore, but it is found in Qatar and other GCC states as well, especially in the densely populated pravasi (migrant) quarters. His wife Taju first saw a bug from the Qatari metropolis. Migrates took away the bugs also with them, and left nothing of the species in Kerala.

Rahul Ghandi Night In JNU

It was really a Rahul Gandhi night in JNU on Tuesday, 29^th September. He came and showed he is a pragmatic politician, has changed a lot, and that the youth can think their future will be comparatively better in the hands of leaders like him.

I salute his boldness to come and have an open interaction with the students of JNU, the intellectual repository of India and the so-called left bastion, from where even acclaimed leaders and academics keep themselves away fearing direct ideological grilling by students.

But Rahul, possibly the future leader of India, came in, had a dinner at my old Jhelum hostel, arrived in the programme venue in time, mixed with students, obliged for autographs, and making a very short speech boldly opened the venue for questions. A few students raised black flags, but he was gracious in dealing with them, ordering the security not to obstruct them and even asking them ‘why you don’t start the interaction with a question’.

The Left friends may be trying to downplay the impact of his date with JNU and may be eager to describe his failure to answer them, but Rahul has really waged and won a polite war of practical politics.

Each and every question was coming from a hostile terrain, and the strong leaders of the opposite political outfits were up with difficult questions - SFI leader Roshan, AISA leader Sujetha, PSU’s Vibha Iyer and DSU’ Samar Pande, of course all of them are most difficult ideological challengers to deal with. Even then Rahul was insisting to keep the mic in the hands of the same questioner, allowing them to make follow up questions. During my seven years of experience in JNU, I have seen even Left leaders like Prakash Karat and Sitharam Yechuri evading such follow-up questions, and always their student leaders would wind up sessions with limited questions, blaming the time.

What I cannot understand is why the tones of all questions, especially from opposite student leaders, were high-tempered and not cool, while Rahul himself was showing his cool. The other thing is that these people are good at asking questions and raising problems always, but bad to find answers and to get practical solutions. They pose Himalayan questions and have the habit of not listening even to the answers of their own questions. A month ago one of the same student leader was there in the programme of Shashi Tharoor posing a difficult question on India’s arms deal with Israel, and while the former UN official was responding with arguably the best available answer with the UPA on the issue, he had to request the questioner twice to have at least a ear to the answer. The same thing happened with Rahul also, as he was requesting the questioners to show a will to listen.

The questions touched all difficult issues from tax exemption for corporates, to dynasty politics, Sachar committee report, right to education and his stay in Dalit villages.

To Samar Pande’s sarcastic comments and question over dynasty politics of Congress at the mercy of which Rahul got to the power, he said that it is clear and undeniable that we are already in a system where this habit exists, and he has only three options in his hands. First is to go home and it is a cowardice, the second is to propagate this system and he doesn’t want to do it, and the third is to change the system, and he claimed that he is doing the same.

Though not fully successful to answer questions on UPA’s education policies and tax evasion for corporate, he succeeded in tearing apart the Left rhetoric on distribution. He repeatedly asked the SFI leader and others to appraise him that according to Left ideology where the money comes from in a state to spend.

Everybody, even Rahul Gandhi, agrees that the Left raises some genuine issues in the politics. But what is the benefit if you are a good debater and ideologue, but you completely fail to deliver in practical sphere. While coming to the reality, the Left has always failed to do justice to its ideologies. Take any example from any of communism-based countries. And in India, we have Bengal and Kerala. One of the biggest ideologue of Left in Kerala is now sitting at the helm of power realizing that practical ruling and governance is not easy without dealing with the reality.

In JNU, I know many of the left leaders for last many years. After leading ideological slogans in high pitch for long and speaking against imperialist governments and MNCs throughout their studentship, they silently disappear to practical world to earn a job in MNCs or Western-funded NGOs, or even relocating themselves to the same US or other capitalist countries they were fighting ideological battle against.

Some JNUites who got addicted with the slogans raised by theses leaders becomes desperate and get embarrassed seeing the great gap between their ideologies and the real world, despite having excellent academic credentials. We have many of such people inside JNU and just outside in the so-called ‘JNU Street of Budha Vihar’. One of such fellow showed himself during the Rahul Night. He complained that he is desperate that government fails to give him a job, but he himself acknowledged that he has done his education in French and Francophone studies, with which it is sure that he can earn a well-paid job at global level. However, he is disillusioned with his ideology.

Finally, though Rahul won in igniting a new debate I wonder whether his student wing NSUI can cash in out of that debate. The problem with NSUI and the Congress especially is that they have only leaders even at the grassroots level, and no hard-working and committed activists, who are ready to understand others problems and sufferings. (I exclude brother Simmy from this category, I think his sincere activities are behind some kind of their show-up in JNU) They have a good lesson in left parties in this regard, but I am sure they will never learn and they cannot work, other than just showing they are leaders wearing the crisp wrinkless Kurta. It was obvious recently during Malayalees’ Onam cultural celebration in the campus that was unfortunately politicized for the first time in my experience. And more unfortunate was the fact that the SFI gang kept away from the celebrations en messe, and the NUSI indirectly took over. To utter disappointment of the apolitical people like me, it was the showing of Neta character by its activists and supervising the things without actively participating in the chorus like supplying the food. Rahul will have to work hard to change this mentality, and only then his party can do something in this campus, and of course for the benefit of the entire country.