The Mumbai-born Muslim cleric and televangelist Zakir Naik's old video clip was condemned on social media for its dangerous rhetoric of terming the documented cruelties, crimes and violence of the Taliban regime as a hoax. Using an anecdote of a doctor Malaysian couple who told him about the hearsay stories of how the world was being duped by the untrue stories of Taliban-looking men who couldn't tie the "turban" properly as violent terrorists.
The runaway fugitive from India is different from the garden variety of Muslim clerics speaking in English and wearing tailored suits. His computer-like memory of inter-religious texts demonstrates how rote-memory and cognitive bias can dream up "facts" and render them "scientific", with serious errors and mesmerise millions, especially when there is no culture of critical thinking among Muslims since the 12th century Abbasid era.
Zakir Naik's rise and popularity is also a display of how Wahhabi/Salafi versions of Islam have appropriated terms like rationality, reasoning, liberal, secular, when it is and always has been the mental gymnastics of obfuscation and obscurantism. Naik is a radical preacher who defended the actions of Osama bin Laden, for which he was banned in the UK in 2010.
Naik's TV channel, Peace TV at one time had 100 million viewers across India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It was popular among English-speaking Indian Muslims making the Saudi brand of Islam the biggest factor in the Arabisation of the more relaxed, liberal and flexible Persian-influenced Islam in the subcontinent. Naik is wanted in India for money-laundering and hate speech, for which his Islamic Research Foundation got banned in 2016. Many detained al-Qaeda followers speak about the huge influence he has on them, as told to investigating officials.
India's Enforcement Directorate (ED) which investigates financial crimes, filed charges against him for acquiring 28 million dollars worth of criminal assets and using them for dubious purpose while buying lands in India from where subversive activities are carried out. Activists in Lebanon also launched a campaign in 2017 to ban him from entering the country after he fled India, seeking asylum in various countries.
Naik has been a permanent resident in Malaysia since 2017, despite which he has been banned in seven states from giving speeches for breaching the peace in the interest of national security since 2020. His remarks about the Hindu and Chinese communities living in the Muslim-majority nation pitted ethnic and religious minorities against the predominantly Muslim Malay.
Grilled by the Malaysian police for 10 hours, he apologised but insisted his remarks were misconstrued and not meant to be racist. No less than PM Mahathir had to step up and school him to promote religion only and not interfere in the racial politics of the country, by insisting the 'Chinese should be sent back to China and the Indians back to India'.
Naik has also been controversial for recommending the death penalty for homosexuals and those who abandon faith Islam as their faith. Bangladesh too suspended his TV channel that featured his preaching after their media reported that terrorists who attacked a Dhaka Cafe killing 22 people last year were admirers of him. His wife Farhat Naik also addresses women in separate speeches.
Naik was invited to the FIFA World Cup 2022, in Qatar to deliver religious lectures throughout the competition. Naik, in one of his speeches, supported suicide bombing while citing Salman Abduh, an Islamic preacher from the banned outfit Muslim Brotherhood, dubbing him as one of the great scholars of Islam. As per reports, Naik has also defended the bombing of a Pakistani temple, arguing that Islam forbids the building of temples. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in India, his Islamic Research Foundation was declared an unlawful association in March 2022 and outlawed for five years, for praising known terrorists and advocating that every Muslim should be a terrorist.
One of the charges was also forceful conversion of Indians from other religions to Islam. The letter from the MHA stated that Naik had been advocating for forced conversions of young people to Islam, defending suicide bombings and publishing offensive statements against Hindus, Hindu Gods, and other religions that are insulting. Naik, of course, dismisses these allegations, to the extent of saying that Hindus in India love him so much that it is creating a problem for the vote bank. These statements, as per reports, were said at the Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre this year.
The old video clip which was freshly circulated elicited dismay and protests from Afghan activists who said his factually incorrect disinformation regarding the Taliban was shameful and dangerous for the country and Muslims everywhere. His justification of the Taliban regime, portraying their cruelties as humanist, exposing the misogynist Sharia laws, is similar to the war-torn trope in Jammu and Kashmir in the 1990s, when Pakistan-sponsored Jihadi terrorists massacred religious minorities many times and the 'blame' narrative was shifted to Indian Hindu State troopers "dressed" as militants.
The world is standing with Afghan women today, Afghan men are tearing up their degrees on national TV, walking out of classrooms, wearing the veil in solidarity with their fellow compatriots who have been banned from educational institutes and public spaces. A radical fugitive preacher cannot gaslight the experiences of those millions of Afghan people resisting one of the cruelest regimes on earth.
[Disclaimer: This is an authored article by Arshia Malik. Views expressed are author's own.]
