Laal Bujhakkarr (لال بجھکڑ)

I apologize for having delayed my posts for such a long time inviting a lot of snide comments online and offline about how I promised a lot of stuff that I never wrote. I've come to the conclusion that blogging is a game either for the most organized or the most useless. Since I am currently neither, it is hard for me to keep up with my promises too well. Here is one of the posts that I promised and was really dying to write until now that I have written it.

Of all the different characters that I have encountered in real life or otherwise, my favorite one is Laal Bujhakkarr.

Back in the day in villages of Indo-Pak; when the ability to read was hard to come by, let alone a passion for news reading; where electricity was considered a magical phenomenon, let alone television and cinema; village men used to gather somewhere “downvillage,” if you may, at night and share their events of the day (with rather spicy details added as convenient). In this crowd, there was always this one person who happened to possess just the right mix of knowledge of some random facts, the confidence to present them, and some dramatization skills. This person consequently became known in Urdu literature as “Laal Bujhakkarr”. In effect, Laal Bujhakkarr knew very little, but had the ability to persuasively present that little information to people who knew even less.

We, too as an ummah, are infested with Laal Bujhakkarr’s: as executives in our governments, as politicians in our parliaments, as intellectuals and students in our institutions of learning, as imams in our mosques; just about everywhere you go. (I consider myself to be one of them). So many people, claiming to be this and that, trying to fix things (or break them) in an unorganized fashion that bears no foresight and no vision. Just using bits and pieces of what they know (or in some cases, of what they do not know), spicing it up, and presenting it with unparalleled confidence as if they know what they’re talking about and everything else. Some Laal Bujhakkarrs are even delusional. No one accepts them as being anything out of the ordinary, but they still continue to portray themselves as being something and try to externalize their underlying self-image of Laal Bujhakkarri.

I will cite a very specific example without mentioning any name, only in order to prove my point. I attended this qiyam during the break that I didn’t really plan on attending initially. It turned out it was mostly planned out as a night with a young brother visiting from another state. Now, notice that this brother has already been hyped up for me quite a bit; and I was kind of curious, even excited, to hear what he had to say. What I did end up hearing provided me with a terrible insight into the state of our ummah, and the expanse and extent of the institution of Laal Bujhakkarri in our collective culture. Now, I don’t mean it as anything against the brother himself, I am sure he is sincerely trying to do his best and I reserve the best of my suspicions for him. He is not really the one who bothered me, what was hard to accept was the fact that people listening to him were able to swallow all the misinformation they were fed, were able to find it “cool,” and were able to pay more attention to the usage of certain “ghetto” words than to what was being said with them. And of course my classification of it shouldn’t be taken for granted, let me paraphrase from my memory, what was said so that it is clear what I am talking about. He mentioned this Stanford University student walk home/escort program that the University spent around $230 million on. That, in and of itself, is hard to swallow for anyone who knows what that figure represents; but again, let’s not jump to conclusions, anyone can make factual errors. So at first he exclaimed a little bit about the ridiculously large amount of money that was for something as trivial as a student safety program. When he was done with that, he took his exclamation a bit further and claimed, “give me $230 million, and I will buy all (or a significant part) of Africa. I will buy their people, their cars, their houses, their clothes, their kids, and everything else that they own.” Now I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about real estate and slave trade, but quite honestly, that is just too much to even be allowed. Again, what I mean to prove is not really the problem in the brother’s rhetoric, because there are many people with faulty rhetoric and I can continue to point out a whole host of examples; but the more important, and ultimately the underlying problem is that people are quite happy with it. The ummah is ok with being fed unprocessed, crude, and even evidently wrong information as long as it is done by someone who has the “coolness” factor around them; regardless of whether they associate it with Ebonics in one part of the world, and with English in another.

Another huge and ever-emerging institution of Laal Bujhakkarri is the so-called progressive Muslim movement, as if other Muslims are regressive somehow. Every Zaid, Bakar, Ahmad, and an occasional Tim; with no knowledge whatsoever of the primary sources of Islam (from which all the rules are derived), of Arabic language (in which the primary sources are), and the well-established rules of jurisprudence (that form the basis of interpretation from the sources); finds the need and the ability (we salute the internet) to put their voice out there and be picked up by the media and by the ummah. All of a sudden, our deen is defined by schizophrenic individuals who realized one day that there was something different about them and that they “decided to merge” their two identities together and still call it Islam. All of a sudden there are people who have read some translations from here and there and think they’ve done their “research” on the matter and know exactly what all the scholars and the ummah has been missing for over 14 centuries and a quarter. The same people who would not be found debating with a medical doctor about medicinal matters can be seen debating with contemporary and non-contemporary scholars about what Islam is and what it should be. What is not understood is that this “progress” is calculated in relation to the Western ideals of progress. Since the Western ideals of democracy, freedom, individualism, and equality are cool and rather intimidating; Muslims find themselves forced to back off from, apologize about, find loopholes in, and manipulate their own ideals of democracy, freedom, individualism, and equality to make room for “progress.”

A similar budding Laal Bujhakkarr, belonging to the rather delusional stock, showed up as an attendee at one of the panel discussions that the School of Journalism put together on Islam and Muslims. Apparently, she wanted a more “liberal” definition of Islam. It turns out that the khutub in our traditional mosques don't quite “do it” for her. Now, if you have already decided what you want Islam to be, why not just go with what you liked in the first place? Why try to fit Islam on what you like when there is already something you like better? But I am getting ahead of myself into a whole different debate.

We, as an ummah, need to refine our thought processes. We need to start thinking more objectively. We need to rise above the beards, the degrees, the language, the intellectual sounding rhetoric, and other similar things that define superficial coolness for us. We need to be able to identify the Laal Bujhakkarr’s from genuine knowledgeable people. The need is to be more critical of ourselves and of others around us. Of course not to make it a mental illness or a criteria to judge people by, but to use it as a vehicle to get to a point where we are able to separate superficial effect from the spirit of the matter; and hence the solution.