The generation that could have fully and satisfactorily answered these questions is either dead and gone or too frail to be disturbed by ghosts from a troubled past. Hoping to find some clues, I find myself turning the pages of my grandfather’s autobiography, Khwaab Baqui Hain (‘Dreams Still Remain’). His words bring me solace and hold out hope for my own future and that of my children:

I am a Musalman and, in the words of Maulana Azad, a “caretaker of the thirteen hundred years of the wealth that is Islam”. My deciphering of Islam is the key to the interpretation of my spirit. I am also an Indian and this Indianness is as much a part of my being. Islam does not deter me from believing in my Indian identity. Again, to quote Maulana Azad, if anything “it shows the way”.

While it is true that I imbibed religion from my family and the environment in which I grew up, my own experiences and understanding made its foundations stronger. In Badayun, religion was the name for blind faith in traditionalism and age-old orthodoxies, miracles and marvels, faith healing by pirs and fakirs. I believe Belief in One God leads the way to equality among all mankind. Allah is not simply Rabbu’l-Muslimeen [‘the Lord of Muslims’]; He is also Rabbu’l Aalameen [‘the Lord of the World’]. The all-encompassing compactness of the personality of the Prophet of Islam has always drawn me.

Islam doesn’t teach renunciation from the affairs of the world; it teaches us how to fulfill our duties in this world while at the same time instructing us to regard this mortal world as the field in which we sow the seeds for the Other World. There is no obduracy in Islam. I have seldom found obdurate people to be good human beings. The Islam that I know gives more importance to Huqooq-ul ibad [‘rights of the people’] rather than Huqooq-ul Lah [‘rights of God’].