We should never judge anyone by how their adversaries represent them, especially when it comes to fellow travelers. In my case, a month of working and speaking on the streets of Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh and Jamia during the 2019 protests against the union government’s new citizenship law, and a decade of sustained research and writing, was all ignored because of a clip mischievously propagated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their supporters. Also because, having been a victim of “Congress nationalism,” I try to seriously engage with the ideas of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. 

It was Jawaharlal Nehru, not Jinnah, who sabotaged the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan after it had been agreed upon by all parties (see Maulana Azad’s India Wins Freedom. Also, Aakar Patel’s The Constitution that wasn’t—or, a Muslim man’s vision of Independent India, National Herald, 26 Jan 2025). Jinnah is more important than ever for any conversation around the decentralization of power, minority and community rights, and my invocation of him must be read in that light. In the words of Parthasarathi Gupta, my plea is “for a federal polity and a confederal association among the countries of South Asia” (see Gupta’s Identity Formation and Nation States, Indian History Congress, Patiala, 1998. He further writes, “In our own country, if we were to shed some of the centralist features of GOI Act 1935 and make India a genuine federation of states, we will set an example to our immediate neighbors and be in a position to make the states of SAARC [the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation] a genuine confederation of peoples…”). 

You might disagree with me, but judgements based on the image that the troll army wants of me are problematic. So is calling me crazy or a BJP agent, only because my adversaries cannot digest my positions. The way a section of “progressive” media and opinionmakers (both Muslim and non-Muslim) have sought to silence me and erase our tireless and decisive contributions to Shaheen Bagh from day zero to day 18—I mean books have been written about Shaheen Bagh without even mentioning me, Asif Mujtaba, Afreen Fatima, or others—just goes to show that this section is either disingenuous or intellectually bankrupt. But thankfully, in this day and age, facts cannot be suppressed forever. I have no complaints; I am just pointing it out. Faith in God and the love of my people is enough for me. 

On faith 

“I am a pessimist because of my intelligence and an optimist because of my will.” Gramsci is supposed to have said that. The same applies to my case although I would prefer a modified version: I am a pessimist because of my intelligence and an optimist because of my faith. For some the two might be the same, but for me and people like me raised in the Islamic faith, “will” is meaningless without “faith” in God and His plans for me. There is the one grand “Will” of God, and the smaller “wills” cannot make sense or be optimistic without having faith in that “Will”—something that one can never fathom and only have faith in. 

In other words, one could say history is “unknowable,” present is “unknowable,” and the trajectory of future is also “unknowable.” All we have are inaccurate approximations and sometimes plain wrong guesses and conceptions. To make sense of one’s contribution or one’s place in the grand scheme of things is impossible without faith. There are those who are too eager to see change in their own lives, who think that a revolution is just around the corner. The problem with such an approach is that the patience required for fundamental change is missing. Patience—self-effacing patience—can only come through faith. It is faith in God which drove me towards historical studies and it is faith in God which sustains me in prison and it is faith in God which allows me to contextualize my life and my life’s work in a span not of decades but centuries. 

I have spent five years in jail now. I would reiterate that these have been the most productive years of my life, not only because I got to read a lot—hundreds of books—but also because I have met a lot of political prisoners, have lived with people from Assam for six months, and have been living with people from Delhi and Haryana for over four years. All this has been a learning experience. 

I am a student of Islamic modernism and its scholars such as Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh of Egypt. Our own Akbar Allahabadi, Allama Iqbal and Maulana Azad, and Ali Shariati, the Iranian revolutionary, have shaped my understanding of politics as well as Islam. It is these people who inspired me to take up a study of Islam and history as an engineering graduate. 

I was raised in a traditional middle-class household in Bihar’s Patna and Jehanabad. My father was a local politician and contested as an independent from Kurtha in 2000. In 2005, he got the Janata Dal United (JDU) symbol from the Jehanabad seat for the state assembly. He lost both seats—coming third in Kurtha and second in Jehanabad—but established himself as someone who had behind him around ten percent votes in multiple state assembly seats and where Muslim population was only 10-12 percent. It gave him some hold in the JDU, which has held power in Bihar since 2005. It is my father’s distributed vote bank that first made me aware of the flaws of the First Past the Post system (FPTP) as opposed to proportional representation. 

As I have written earlier, under FPTP, a territory is divided into spatial constituencies, each sending a representative elected through a vote. The candidate receiving the largest number of votes is considered elected, even if they receive, say, less than 20 percent of the votes. It is this system that enables parties with around a third of total votes to achieve a two-thirds majority in an assembly. India’s Constituent Assembly debates also witnessed disagreements over the issue as the Congress party abolished separate electorates. While some Muslims did speak up, demanding proportional representation, it needs to be noted that separate electorates have a significant demerit, too: Hindus can’t vote for Muslims and vice versa. People like Hasrat Mohani, the poet freedom fighter and one of the most vocal opponents of FPTP, maintained that joint electorates would eliminate Muslim representation. The alternative was proportional representation where the number of seats would be decided by the percentage of votes received by a party and while Muslims could vote for Hindus and vice versa, minorities couldn’t be silenced. 

My years at IIT 

In 2006, at the age of 18, I qualified the Joint Entrance Examination and got admitted to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay to study computer science. Apart from that, I was into religious literature in Arabic and Persian. I was also reading Islamic history even though I had yet to encounter Islamic modernism. In my second year at the IIT, in a literature class, when the professor started talking about evolution, I objected saying evolution was just a theory and not a fact of science. The professors in the IIT were like those in JNU, so he didn’t shut me up. He asked me to do a presentation on the subject. The next week, standing in front of 200 students of Literature 101, I offered my presentation filled with comments from Christian pseudoscientists I had found in some Islamic books refuting evolution. 

Listening to my presentation of half an hour, the professor appreciated the work but asked me to read a few texts. However, more than those texts, what helped me understand evolution was Iqbal, the poet philosopher of the 20th century. Revered among the Muslims of South Asia, people at large remember Iqbal only as the poet who wrote Saare jahan se achha. Iqbal the philosopher has been summarily ignored. 

It was Iqbal who led me to Henri Bergson and his Creative Evolution. He also led me to Karl Marx and his Capital. Iqbal had his critiques of both, yet with profound respect. My point is it wasn’t Marx who opened my eyes about capitalism, or Darwin who made me respect evolution, but Iqbal who made me understand these things. The reason is simple: the materialist treatment of these ideas by most of the protagonists of the 20th century drove me—a young and curious but faithful Muslim kid looking for answers—away. (I am not anti-communist. I mean their contributions towards the most meaningful political and economic analysis of the recent human history, towards class struggles, against superstition or ugly ideologies of capitalism would naturally be incorporated into any future development of the human thought. What is often problematic about communists, though, is their claim that dialectic materialism is a science, even though materialistic ontology was abandoned by physics over a century ago. For a longer discussion, see my Worldview in a cell: a Muslim political prisoner’s insight.) 

Even though science abandoned deterministic materialism in the early 20th century, political ideologies still follow the old vocabulary of the Newtonian era. This is where a figure like Iqbal breaks new ground while avoiding the impression that we know everything or that we’re on way to knowing everything. This is where faith as the foundational building block of community and individual development comes into play. Iqbal was one of the few philosophers who attempted to synthesize this post-Newtonian scientific knowledge with questions of faith. I am referring here of course to the ontological and epistemological questions raised by the 20th century revolutions in physics—relativity and quantum physics—and the ways in which it shattered metaphysical assumptions of materialist schools of thought as well as most religious schools of thought. 

To name a few important texts, for a critique of materialism and determinism one must read Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science by Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics. For an argument in support of the mystical thought, read What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell and Mind and Matter, both by Erwin Schrodinger, another founding figure of quantum physics. Further, I’d urge you to see The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Jammer (specifically its chapter “The Philosophical Background of Nonclassical Interpretations”) to understand the influence of the 19th-century Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard—the Danish precursor of existentialism and neo-orthodox theology—on Niels Bohr, another of the pioneering quantum physics scientists. 

Further, read the letters of Kurt Godel—arguably the greatest mathematician of the 20th century—between 1946 and 1966 for an enunciation of his Christian, monotheistic faith. A summary can be found in A Logical Journey: From Godel to Philosophy, a 1996 essay by Hao Wang. For Godel’s engagement with general relativity, read Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe. And for an early Islamic reaction especially to relativity and evolution, one must go through Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), Javid Nama (or The Book of Eternity, 1932) and Saqi Nama (or The Book of the Winebringer, 1935). 

I am cramming these pages with references because I want you to enquire and engage with my ideas for themselves. My words are not mere ramblings but philosophical and historical questions rooted in my reading of science, theology and history. There is so much to say and explain about these theories that I cannot do presently. I shall, however, try to write in more detail in future. 

By the time I graduated from IIT Bombay, I had made up my mind to study philosophy. My summer internship in Copenhagen in 2009 also provided some exposure to western universities and the Scandinavian model of welfare states. I had a long conversation about this with Amitabha Sanyal, my favorite professor and project guide. He encouraged me to take up philosophy and gifted me The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. 

Turn to history 

I applied for PhD in dozens of American universities but all of them said I needed to have a master’s in philosophy. I decided to go to Egypt to study Islamic theology and Arabic at Al-Azhar University but the Arab Spring stalled that plan in 2011. So I took up a placement offer in Bangalore and started my corporate job while continuing to study philosophy and Islamic theology. In 2012, I appeared for the MPhil/PhD in Philosophy entrance for Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). I qualified for the viva, where the faculty appreciated my attempt. But they asked me to come back next year since I didn’t have a proposal. By then, however, something transformed and I turned to history instead. 

My mind had always been conflicted, coming from a scientific background. Twentieth-century physics, as discussed above, is a philosophical tinderbox for the religious as well as the irreligious but for a community that’s been a victim of Partition as well as majoritarian politics and violence, and as a son of a politician who dedicated his life against such forces, South Asian history and its fault lines were part of my daily life in a very conscious way. I had started learning German in 2011. By 2013, I was deep into 20th-century Germany and the history of fascism. It tilted the balance in favor of history. I realized the philosophical and socio-political questions of the nature of human existence and social justice, of casteism in India and the rise of nationalism, of majoritarianism, Partition and minority rights—the most urgent questions I was seeking answers to—were historical. 

Soon I left the corporate world to join JNU for a master’s in modern history. A parttime job paid me Rs 25,000 a month, a mere fraction of what I earned previously. But tragedy struck right after—my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in January 2014 and my second and third semesters were spent at Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute. When I asked my father if I should leave JNU and find a corporate job again, he prohibited me saying, “Your money will not save me.” It was my uncle (my mother’s brother) who took care of all the expenses as my father, despite being a powerful figure, earned just enough to keep the household running. His possessions included a total of two vehicles, two rifles and a shop. He didn’t own a house. If not for my uncle, I would have had to abandon my studies and find a job. I will never be able to repay him (an engineer in the state government, he has since retired). 

My mother had been a patient and sacrificing partner of my father and she wanted me to go back to my previous career. She weighed in, asking my father to tell me to go back. But my father told her, “Let him be. He will write the history of our struggles.” In May 2014, my father was watching television in the hospital when Narendra Modi was sworn in as prime minister. “Sharjeel, you should leave India,” he said. “Go to the United States, study there. If you stay here, you’ll join politics. It will be a struggle, and they’ll send you to jail.” I thought it was his paternal instinct, because he wouldn’t be around to protect me. I was such a naive young man. He knew the world better than I. He even knew me better than I. He knew I was stubborn and opinionated enough to crash headlong into this emerging fascist ecosystem. Not that he would have prohibited me, but he saw it coming. 

While I hardly attended classes that year, I wrote tutorials, made software (the small salary was still a lot), and read to my father in the hospital. I remember reading a book on the Iranian revolution and listening to his comments on the events as he recalled his youth. He passed away in November. 

I spent the next semester, my fourth, idly grieving. It was my worst semester in JNU. (I am particularly apologetic to Janaki Nair, one of my professors. I took a course and a seminar but did nothing except reading the whole of Tipu Sultan’s Persian diary.) 

A father’s lessons 

Coming back to my father, I learned two things from him. One, that Partition led to a systemic exclusion of Muslims in the Indian polity and that Jinnah was right in his demands against centralization and for a true federal structure and minority rights. And, two, that it’s not a democracy if we have only one side to vote for. That is why he said that both the JDU and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) should be strong and competing forces. Otherwise, if one side was left open for the BJP with no strong leaders and parties to keep it in check, then however good the RJD alliances may be, Muslims will not be their voters but their “slaves.” 

The first lesson about Partition and Jinnah led me to the theoretical quest I’m currently following. The second and more practical lesson about electoral politics has become more evident and urgent in the last decade as Muslims have lost political agency in almost all of India, except probably Tamil Nadu and Kerala and to a lesser extent Andhra and Bihar. Even in Bengal, the emergence of the BJP means we cannot be picky. 

It is based on these two lessons from my father that I have been reading and doing research and finding people invested in similar subjects. Both my MPhil and PhD are about violence inflicted on Indian Muslims. Why this line of enquiry is of utmost urgency is visible today around us—the loss of political agency of Muslims is not accidental. It is systemic and historical, just that its most pernicious manifestation has emerged in the post-1990s era because of the alignment of many global and local variables of polity and economy. 

Paying lip service to equality and secularism is not enough. Reducing everything to class is also problematic. The only way forward is through realizing that systemic change is necessary to restore agency to Muslims and other minorities of India. And for this reason, Jinnah is more relevant today than he was in 1947, when he was anticipating the contradicting tendencies of Brahmanical forces and the alienation of Muslims in the narrative of “secular” Gandhian nationalism, which according to both Jinnah and Iqbal was not fundamentally different from Brahmanical revivalism with its imagined nationalist history and a tendency towards centralization and majoritarianism aided by a large section of capitalists. (For more, read Aakar Patel on the centralizing tendencies of the Congress and the possibility of a better future had true federalism been adopted, the kind that Muslim leaders such as Jinnah had hoped for.) The only lacuna in Jinnah’s political expression seems to be his silence on the issue of caste among Muslims, ostensibly because in the context of impending decolonization and Hindu consolidation in the Congress, the most urgent task was to counter centralization and majoritarianism, which required some kind of consolidation of Muslims. 

Representation and the Muslim League 

What was anticipation then has become stark reality today. For Jinnah, the Congress party’s secularism was essentially a tool to silence and exclude Muslims and other minorities. Recall his assertion about secular majoritarianism and its attempt to erase other identities: “Democracy does not give one community the right to rule over another through the ballot box.” About Jinnah, historian Joya Chatterjee writes in Shadows at Noon (page 67): “From 1906 … until … he died … Jinnah remained a liberal constitutionalist with a rare talent for negotiation. … What changed … in the 1930s and 40s was not Jinnah but the Congress whose leadership became ever more insistent that it represented the entire nation. … Its leadership saw less reason to conciliate those who rejected that claim. This more hegemonic stance drove out those, Jinnah among them, who believed that constitutional safeguards were necessary for minorities in Indian circumstances and that there were identities other than “Indian” that demanded space, recognition and respect. It proved impossible in the end for the arch negotiator to bring about a compromise with the party (Congress) which would not bend.” 

You could also read Iqbal’s presidential address at the All-India Muslim Conference, 1932: “Congress leaders claim that they are the sole representatives of the peoples of India. The last round-table conference made it abundantly clear that they were not. This they (the Congress) naturally resent. … They have therefore started the present campaign … to defeat a pact which they fear may find a place in the coming constitution, and to force the government to settle the matter of minorities with the Congress alone. The Congress resolution … made it perfectly clear that since the government had refused to regard Mahatma Gandhi as the sole representative of the country, the Congress decided on Civil Disobedience. How can then a minority join a campaign which is directed as much against itself as against the government?”

The 1946 elections proved that a majority of the Muslim voters across the provinces of British India felt the same way. Among the Muslim vote, the Muslim League (ML) won 75 percent of polled votes and 87 percent of assembly seats across the provinces. Contrary to the myths later propagated, this was not merely an elite election. More than 35 percent of all men were registered to vote but only around 6-7 percent of women, which brought the total registered figure to just above 20 percent (see Kuwajima Sho’s Muslims, nationalism, and the Partition). The ML performed especially well among the peasants of Bengal and the middle classes of Madras and Bombay Presidencies. (According to the data collected in my research, out of the 42-million adult Muslim population of British India, 6 million votes were polled, out of which 4.5 million went to the ML. The ML also won 40 seats unopposed. The average polling was around 65 percent (based on data from Punjab, where, out of 1.6 million registered Muslim voters, one million voted). This means the total registered Muslim voters were above nine million, out of which more than 7.5 million would be men and around 1.5 million women. Therefore, more than 35 percent of Muslim male population was registered to vote and more than 25 percent of all Muslim men voted. Also, see Anwesha Roy’s 2018 Making Peace, Making Riots.) 

Modernism in Islam 

As I said earlier, the other aspect of my studies all these years in IIT, JNU, and now Tihar has been to understand the strands of modernism in Islam—a reaction to both the loss of sovereignty as well as the power of modern science. I have written about fundamentalism before coming to jail, but in prison I have sought and received far greater clarity vis-a-vis what can be called a “pathological” reaction to modernity (for the usage of the term “pathological” here, look at “Epilogue” in SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire, 2023). It is only through political agency for the Muslim masses, and not just modern education, that the fundamentalist and anti-democratic reaction to modernity can be arrested. Both are equally necessary. 

Monarchical and dictatorial forces in the Islamic lands, especially the ones aligned with western imperialism, will keep promoting anti-democratic, sectarian and counter-revolutionary interpretations of Islam and the only way to counter these is through a democratic, inclusive and revolutionary Islam, especially, but not only, from modern thinkers like Iqbal and Ali Shariati, the most democratic voices of South Asian and Iranian Muslims, respectively. Allahabadi (d. 1921) lived through what can be called the high noon of colonialism. He had nothing to show to match the material achievements of the colonizers, political or scientific. He was critical of Aligarh for aping colonial masters, but he was also critical of the ulema for keeping their minds closed to modernity and modern thought. 

Despite the repeated exhortations of the Quran towards empiricism, observation and interpretation of the cosmic order—to the extent that observing nature seems almost like a religious exercise in the Quranic worldview—the ulema failed to grasp the significance of modern scientific development (see the Quran, chapter 88, verse 17-26; chapter 36, verse 33-42; and dozens of other similar passages; see also Iqbal’s Knowledge and Religious Experience, 1930). But Allahabadi himself tried, in vain, to reconcile these two extremes. In this, he represents the best of South Asian Muslim thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Well versed in western science and philosophy as well as in Islamic studies, he is a unique and towering figure who had faith but still fell short of a breakthrough. 

The breakthrough came in the next generation. A closer synthesis of modernity with Islam on the one hand and the groundbreaking development in physics on the other produced figures like Iqbal who could argue more freely against materialism, as Newtonian physics collapsed, and who could also critique the ulema who held dubious historical records as sacred and were involved in sectarian squabbles because of it while ignoring the Quranic revelation and monotheistic foundation of the Islamic community. Iqbal was of the opinion that a democratic leadership of Muslims would be able to build institutions that would lead to the next chapter in the life of the Islamic ummat. Unfortunately, Partition put a brake—a temporary one, we pray—to his dreams. 

However, my views must not be misconstrued as condemnation of any religious community. My beliefs call for rationality and empathy. They also include support for monotheistic and anti-caste movements in other religious traditions. For instance, read Iqbal on Gautam Buddha: 

Qaum ne paigham-e Gautam ki zara parwah na ki
Qadr pehchani na apne gauhar-e-yaqdana ki 

The nation paid no heed to the Buddha’s message
Little did it understand the worth of the priceless pearl 

Or his words on Guru Nanak: 

Phir uthi tauheed ki sadaa Punjab se
Hind ko ik mard-e kamil ne jagaya khwab se 

Once more has a monotheistic banner been raised in Punjab
India has been raised from slumber by a saintly man 

I clarify again that I am neither essentializing any religious community nor passing judgements on individuals. I am merely discussing the conceptual categories. I agree with Iqbal’s articulation of that delicate idea: 

Kafir-e bedar dil pish-e sanam
Beh zi dindari ki khuft andar haram 

The pagan idol worshipper with a living heart
Is better than the religious man who sleeps in the haram 

If you are content that you know the truth, if you have put your heart to sleep, you have abandoned Tawhid. The Quran reiterates on multiple occasions that Tawhid is not a novel idea introduced by Prophet Muhammad but it’s as old as humanity. For me, this is the breakthrough that brings together life and academics. The best among us is the one who is the most righteous (one with taqwa), not of a particular tribe or religion or nation. That is the worldview of Tawhid. Failure to appreciate this dimension leads to the dangerous notion that others are less important than us. These are the things that occupy my mind even in jail; I cannot not write about them. 

A cup of tea 

The most difficult years of my life have been the two years after my father’s death—2015 and 2016. I was earning less than Rs 30,000 a month, had my mother and younger brother to think about, and although my uncle offered unconditional support, I remember there were days when I didn’t have even five rupees in my pocket for a cup of tea. The mess and friends in JNU helped me survive. I am particularly indebted to Shafqat, my dear friend, who let me live with him as I was twice on the waiting list for the hostel. I remember I was living with him when my father was diagnosed with cancer and later when I got into MPhil but had no place to stay. 

But things changed for the better in the next year. I received the Maulana Azad National Fellowship, 2016-2021, in my second year MPhil and in 2017 I moved to a better freelance job, at Rekhta. Designing algorithms for the largest Urdu database, transliteration and automatic syntactic analysis of Urdu poetry, it was a dream job where all my passions—coding, Urdu, poetry, history—came together. It was also slightly better paying, and I am grateful to Sanjiv Saraf, the director, for giving me the opportunity. I needed to go once a week and would mostly work remotely. In short, by 2017, I had a stable income and could send a decent amount of money to my family while continuing my research. The fellowship and Rekhta kept me afloat. 

I spent most of 2018 and 2019 traveling in northern India—Chandigarh, Patna, Kolkata and Delhi—for archival material. JNU and the friends I made there have been an integral part of my intellectual development, and even though I have been critical of the framework of leftist organizations, I have friends, comrades and loved ones like family in each of them. 

Mobilization, incarceration and democracy 

During the Shaheen Bagh protest in the first two weeks, besides Asif Mujtaba, the speakers and crowd managers largely comprised JNU friends and comrades. The Muslim Students of JNU—a collective formed after an all-party meeting in JNU to discuss how to respond to the Citizenship Amendment Bill witnessed only Muslim students turning up—was there from day zero but as we needed more speakers, the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) was the first organization to oblige. Then there was a leftist group led by Martand da who also offered unconditional support. I had met Martand da in 2013 in JNU and had not seen him in many years; but he found me. I remember by the fifth day my throat was so sore I could not speak, yet I had to take some hot water and speak. It is not appreciated how important JNU was in setting up the Shaheen Bagh protest. There were many IITians as well, most importantly Asif Mujtaba, and I was sort of a link between the IITs, JNU and Jamia (I had done Arabic courses from Jamia as well). So, in a way, my stay in each of these campuses had a role to play in what can be called the most important episode of my life so far—the Shaheen Bagh roadblock. 

Now, why are we in jail? And what has been achieved? The fascist regime will attempt to crush people like us. After all, when all the constitutional democratic and procedural doors have been shut for Muslims and other minorities of India, the only way left is for the masses to make their presence felt. Masses, the millions, are the real democratic force. It does not matter that they have been silenced by the FPTP electoral process and over-centralization. If these systems do not serve the purpose of the masses, they have to make their presence felt through other means and that has been the crux of the hundreds of my speeches during Shaheen Bagh and later. People’s mass mobilization is not opposed to democracy but rather it’s the test of its integrity. A nation belongs to the people and if the systems in place and the people in power do not ensure a dignified existence of its diverse communities, it is the democratic duty of the people to rise. 

Disruption is the keyword; the masses can establish democracy and leverage through disruption. It is clear to me that I, along with others, pointed towards a productive line of resistance. It gives me immense pleasure to say that people responded to this call. I was surprised to find out my speeches as well as my writings translated into many languages by Muslim activists, Bengali, Tamil, and Malayalam to name a few. Imagine my surprise when I received a letter in jail from a Sri Lankan Tamil Muslim woman who wrote she received a Tamil rendering of my speeches as a gift from her colleague. She said that as a minority in Sri Lanka many of the issues raised in my speeches regarding majoritarianism had a special resonance for her. I have received many such letters from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, who, having heard my speeches (especially the Aligarh one) or having read my articles, write to me to comment or appreciate my line of thought. It shows that our message has resonated with minorities—whether Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, or others, victims of majoritarianism in their own countries—across South Asia and beyond. 

It is more than enough to keep me going. It also gives me a sense of satisfaction that I have left some meaningful words behind me, words which attempt to shed light on the most pressing and fundamental issues facing the Muslims of India. Such an exposure would not have been possible 20 years ago as the internet has led to a democratization—however miniscule—of knowledge production and sharing. My words will remain, even if the fascists want to erase them. As Ahmad Faraz said: 

Main kat girun ki salamat rahun yaqin hai mujhe
Ki ye hisaar-e-sitam koi to girayega
Tamam umr ki iza-nasibiyon ki qasam
Mere qalam ka safar rayegan na jayega 

No matter I’m slain or I survive, I believe
This cruel siege will be broken one day
And the tortured destinies of a lifetime bear witness
The journey of my words will not go astray 

There is a lot more to write about. For now, this should suffice. 

Sharjeel.