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.