Practice What You Preach

M any political leaders of our country routinely sing paeans to the country’s Constitution, but when it comes to the question of what they practice, they play a completely different tune. They routinely cite the Constitution to pontificate on social equality, but you will not find them behaving in an equitable manner in their own lives. They will glorify the secular character of the Constitution, but in practice they hurriedly abandon their secular pretensions and bare their communal prejudices. It is as if for them the Constitution is something to boast about or to take great pride in but not a guide to action in their own lives. The same sort of thing applies to Muslims today. They loudly proclaim the glories and beauties of Islam in their speeches and writings, but in their personal lives they are guided by their personal interests and communal prejudices, not by true Islamic teachings. Muslims will talk at great length about belief in the oneness of God. They will stress that in Islam, worship is due only to the one God and to no one else. But, in actual practice, the community is immersed in the ‘worship’ of entities other than God. Some members of the community worship their ‘elders’, others worship some ‘thinker’ or the other. Some consider some or the other living person to be ‘holy’. Others give this status to deceased people. Their gatherings resound with praises of the glories of some human figures or the other, not the glories of God. Their talk about pure monotheism is simply a means to express their claim of ideological superiority over other communities and derive a sense of pride from this. As far as their actual practice is concerned, the Muslims’ condition is, by and large, no different from that of other communities. In the same way, Muslim writers and speakers fervently declare that, according to Islam, God is one, that humans are one, and that all Muslims