Guest post by KAIF MAHMOOD

As a Muslim, a student of Comparative Religion and a practitioner of yoga for over a decade, I believe that both those Muslims who object to the practice of yoga on religious grounds and those others who force the practice on the unwilling, trivialise their own traditions in the service of power and identity politics. Neither is Islam an inane system of punishments and rewards, nor is yoga an ancient version of a modern gym. Both groups are a parody of what their traditions were meant to be, and pose to us the question of how to be culturally rooted without assuming an isolationist, chest thumping fanaticism of the religious kind on the one hand, and of a culturally deracinated, materialistic kind on the other – two sides of the same coin. I attempt here a reading of both the religious traditions involved in a manner that is both philosophical and personal.

The recent objections by certain Muslims over compulsory yoga in schools brings to mind a scene from Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi.

A group of RSS workers, waving black flags, stop Gandhi’s car and request him to not meet with Jinnah. Gandhi replies with a sorrowful agitation: “What do you want me not to do? Not to meet with Mr. Jinnah? I am a Muslim, and a Hindu, and a Christian, and a Jew, and so are all of you. When you wave those flags and shout, you send fear into the hearts of your brothers. That is not the India I want. Stop it, for god’s sake, stop it.” The car moves on, leaving the protestors, including Nathuram Godse, in anger and incomprehension.

The difference between one who breaks down walls of separation and one who creates them could not have been clearer. Continue reading Muslims, Yoga and the Empty Heart of Fanaticism: Kaif Mahmood →