Celebrating A Syncretic Culture
Sabah Hussain
BUT YOU DON’T LOOK LIKE A MUSLIM by Rakhshanda Jalil HarperCollins Publishers India, 2019, 223 pp., 599
August 2019, volume 43, No 8

‘How is one supposed to look like one’s religion?’ With these opening lines, the author, Rakhshanda Jalil sets the premise of her book which questions the common imagination of Muslims as a community. Through various essays, Jalil stresses that all the Muslims are not cut from the same cloth. The book is divided into four broad themes of identity, culture, literature and religion containing ten essays in each chapter. The essays are written over a period of time containing her life experiences. The book cannot be categorized as a memoir, a book of anecdotes or a political commentary as it is a mix of all this and more.

In the chapter titled ‘The Politics of Identity’, Jalil gives references to all those incidences from her life where she had been ‘othered’ because of her religious identity. These may not be very stark instances of discrimination in the sense of approaching the court of law but are still important for one’s life of dignity. In the introduction itself, the author marks the perceived distinction between ‘they’ and ‘us’. All the bearded people with surma (kohl) in the eyes or skullcap on head are ‘the terrifying other’ whereas ‘us’ are those who are vegetarian and hence considered ‘nonviolent’.

The book traces instances from popular culture and media. Cinema has a power to shape people’s perceptions and ideas therefore it should abstain from stereotyping. Indian Cinema in pre and post-globalization era has manufactured a certain stereotypical image of Muslims. The only transformation in this image over the years is from paan chewing to tech savvy yet devout cold-blooded jihadists. This steady and subtle infiltration of ideas in public discourse has done more than alienate Muslims.  On the same note, in one of the later essays, ‘Of Kings, Queens and Invaders’ in Part 2, Jalil highlights the mass hysteria created by recent movies, most notably by Padmaavat. Other than misogyny and the narrative of the chaste and the promiscuous, Padmaavat creates a notion of ‘native Hinduism’ and ‘foreign Islam’: the sinister, bestial, slanted kohl-lined eyed, raw meat-eating pervert versus sanskari native ruler. Following this, the author takes a strong position on the episode of the Charlie Hebdo killings. The author condemns the killing but at the same refuses to call herself ‘Je Suis Charlie’ because of the ‘irresponsible, inopportune and imbecilic’ stereotyping by the magazine ‘with strong political subtext’ (p. 29).

Continue reading this review