Buddhist-Muslim Relations in Ladakh -- Part 4

By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,

The Shi‘a mosque in Leh is located at the foot of the grand palace of the Ladakhi kings. It has recently been renovated in Iranian-style, but its painted beams, with their intricate floral designs still betray the Tibetan-style architecture of the original structure. The mosque serves as a major community centre for the Shi‘as of the town, who are almost all Baltis, with a small minority of Kashmiri Shi‘a traders.

I met Husain at the mosque one evening as the prayers got over. Husain is a Balti and runs a small shop in town. Like many other Baltis, he complains of the discrimination that he claims that his community suffers both from the Buddhists as well as the Sunnis. ‘We are the poorest and least educated community in Ladakh’, he tells me. ‘This world and its glamour are not for Muslims’, he explains. ‘Let non-Muslims enjoy the luxuries of this world. We will enjoy bliss in the hereafter, while others will suffer in hell’.

Part of Husain’s family is Buddhist—his mother was Buddhist before she married his father—but yet Husain has a low opinion of the Buddhists. ‘They have no sense of shame or modesty’, he says. ‘They drink and dance and make money by selling their religion to foreign tourists’. That is why, he says, they are economically better off than the Baltis. For the Baltis, he says, ‘religion is more important than anything else in this world’. Many Buddhists may be very nice and gentle human beings, Husain admits. But still the fact that they worship idols, he believes, means that they are ‘impure’.

The Baltis, Husain tells me, refuse to eat food cooked by the Buddhists or any other non-Muslims. ‘So strict are some of us in this regard that the mere physical touch of a non-Muslim is considered to be polluting, which can only be purified through a bath or by cleaning the part of the body touched with mud’, he says. This Balti practice is said to be evenly more strictly observed in Kargil, where Baltis are in an absolute majority.

This is the first time that I hear about a Muslim form of untouchability, and I ask Husain to explain. ‘Ourmaulvis’, he replies, ‘tell us that it is written in the Qur’an that the kafirs are polluted (najis) and that is why we do not eat their food’. Not surprisingly, Husain confesses not to know Arabic and not to have read the Qur’an himself. ‘This is what the maulvis tell us, and we must listen to what they say because they have read the Qur’an’, he says in his defence when I tell him that I have read the Qur’an myself but have not come across any reference to the claim that non-Muslims must be treated as untouchables. ‘Yes’, Husain replies, ‘That is what the Sunnis also say. They have no problem about eating Buddhist food, but the Sunni interpretation, our maulvis tell us, is wrong’.

Another reason why the Baltis refuse to eat food cooked by Buddhists, Husain explains, is that the Buddhists drink alcohol, which is forbidden in Islam. ‘So strict is the Islamic prohibition on drinking’, he tells me, that Imam ‘Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, whom the Shi‘as, in particular, deeply revere, ‘once stated that if a drop of alcohol fell into a pond and the pond later dried up and grass sprouted there, and if a goat ate the grass the animal should not be eaten’. ‘So how’, says Husain as he winds up his little sermon, ‘can we eat Buddhist food?’.

At the same time as Husain thinks that the Buddhists, being non-Muslims, are ‘impure’, he also says that Islam does not forbid friendship with the Buddhists or other non-Muslims. He refers to a verse of the Qur’an that forbids Muslims from criticising the deities worshipped by others because others might, in turn, criticise Allah. The Qur’an also says, he informs me, that God does not forbid Muslims from dealing justly with those non-Muslims who are not aggressors and who leave Muslims alone in peace. Husain tells me that it was, in part, due to the efforts of a Balti politician, Akbar Ladakhi, that the Buddhists as well as Baltis (although not the Argons) finally had their demand for Scheduled Tribe status accepted, as a result of which he was held in high esteem by the Buddhists as well. Akbar Ladakhi’s grandfather, he claims, was so widely respected by the Buddhists that he was appointed as a manager of the Hemis monastery, the largest monastery in Ladakh. ‘Despite not eating their food they were so close to the Buddhists, so there is really no problem at all’, Husain argues.

Husain tells me that he has a number of Buddhist friends and also regularly visits them and his several Buddhist relatives. Although Buddhists willingly eat food cooked by Baltis, he says, when Baltis visit Buddhist houses they accept only ‘dry’ food, such as biscuits or uncooked things. But biscuits and similar things, I point out, might well have been prepared by non-Muslims in factories, and so how is it, I ask, that these can be consumed? Husain thinks for a while and then answers, ‘These factory-produced things could also have been prepared by Muslims, so in case of food items where the producer is anonymous, we are allowed to eat them’. Similarly, rules of pollution and purity can be relaxed while on a journey, ‘out of compulsion’ (halat-i majburi mai).

We talk about the boycott and Husain tells me that although many Baltis, ‘swayed by the Argons’, initially opposed the Buddhist demand for Hill Council status for Leh, they now are ‘forced’ to support the cause of autonomy because they are a vulnerable minority. He, however, acknowledges that the Hill Council has brought about considerable development in the area, which has benefited many Baltis as well. Autonomy for Leh, he says, is probably a good thing, although, like many other Baltis, he fears that if Leh is separated from Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir the Baltis might suffer. He does not see the possibility of another boycott, as many Buddhists have now opened hotels and operate vehicles and a repeat of 1989 would hurt them badly.

Husain, echoing the views of almost all the Shi‘as I have met in Ladakh, says that the Baltis in general are vehemently opposed to the idea of joining Pakistan. He tells me about how some Kashmiri Sunni traders and government employees working in Leh tell the Baltis that they must support the militant movement against India, but how the Baltis refuse to agree. ‘We look down on the Buddhists but still they treat us very well’, he says. ‘But in Pakistan the Sunnis don’t consider the Shi‘as as physically impure but still the Shi‘as are badly persecuted there’. ‘It’s best for the Shi‘as of Ladakh’, he insists, ‘that Kashmir remain with India’. ‘After all’, he adds somewhat philosophically, ‘we eat the salt of India, so how can we praise Pakistan?’

A short distance from Leh, on the other side of the Indus river, is the sprawling village of Chushot, said to be the largest village in the Leh district. The majority of Chushot’s inhabitants are Balti Shi‘as. Chushot boasts of a centuries-old Shi‘a imambara, a congregational hall dedicated to the twelve Shi‘a Imams. The structure has recently been renovated in a decidedly Iranian mode, although a few traces of its earlier traditional Ladakhi appearance are still visible. Inside, the pillared hall is decorated with thick Persian-style carpets, black flags with Arabic slogans embroidered on them, and pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini and other such Iranian religious leaders.

A turbaned Shi‘a cleric stands before a podium delivering an impassioned address, while a large crowd of villagers sits below in rapt attention. It is the birthday of Imam Husain, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and a majlis, a gathering in honour of the Imam is underway. The cleric repeats his point over and over again, about the bravery of the Imam and the tyranny of his killers and so on, till the crowd is driven to loud sobs. The majlis continues for well over two hours and is then followed by a community feast.

The crowd makes its way out of the imambara, and on the steps I meet Hasan, a Balti college student. We walk down to the Indus nearby, and settle down on a sand-dune in the sun. I ask him to tell me about the history of the imambara. It was built a long time ago, he says, but no one knows when exactly. However, he says he has heard of a miracle associated with the shrine, familiar to almost every denizen of Chushot, which he proceeds to relate. Once, he tells me, some dacoits attempted to loot the famous Hemis gonpa, the largest monastery in all Ladakh. They were foiled in this when a range of high mountains suddenly appeared in front of them, blocking entrance into the monastery. The dacoits were then forced to change their plans. They headed towards Chushot, in order to raid the imambara, but when they approached the shrine the Indus river suddenly rose to surround it on all four sides. Just then, Staksan Rinpoche, the head lama of Hemis, passed by and he saw two lions standing outside the imambara, drinking the water of the river so as to prevent it from entering the shrine. From then on, every year the lamas of Hemis sent tea, incense and oil as presents for the imambara. This practice, Hasan claims, carried on till 1989, when the LBA enforced the boycott of the Muslims. In the past, Hasan tells me, the local Buddhists would participate, generally as spectators, in the mourning rituals for Imam Husain at the imambara, but after 1989 this has sharply declined. However, local Buddhist government officials are still invited and some of them do attend.

Hasan is reluctant to speak about the boycott, and tells me that relations between Buddhists and Muslims are now almost ‘normal’. Most of Hasan’s friends are Buddhists. In fact, his mother’s side is partly Buddhist, and his Buddhist relatives often visit his home. Likewise, on festive occasions his family visit their Buddhist relatives, and on these occasions the latter make special arrangements for food to be prepared for them by a Muslim cook. Hasan tells me that he eats food cooked by non-Muslims when he travels out of Ladakh, but he pleads with me not to reveal this to anyone.

Hasan takes me with him to his home, and shows me his impressive collection of books. He hands me a set of issues of the Ladags Melong, Ladakh’s only English-language magazine, and explains that the magazine is a ‘secular voice’. Its editor, Sonam Wangchuk, is a Buddhist, and its two sub-editors, Muhammad Hasnain and Rebecca Norman, are probably, as their names suggest, a Muslim and a Christian respectively.

I skim through the issues of the magazine that Hasan hands me. Most of them deal with local development problems. There are some that deal with the question of Buddhist-Muslim relations, and I make a quick note of these in my diary. One issue highlights the Dalai Lama’s visit to mosques in Nubra and his public lectures, attended by Muslims and Buddhists, where he stressed the importance of communal harmony. Another issue carries an extensive interview with the late Kushok Bakula, a revered Buddhist monk and political leader, who is quoted as appealing to the Ladakhis ‘to be vigilant all the time of forces that seek to divide the Ladakhis in the name of religion and region. Buddhists and Muslims must remain united and maintain their traditional harmony’. A third issue contains a report of a peace rally jointly taken out by Buddhist and Muslim organisations in Leh to pressurise the Indian and Pakistani governments to defuse the tension along the border and to resolve the Kashmir issue through dialogue. Interestingly, several issues of the ‘Religion’ page magazine carry selections from the Ladakhi translation of selected verses of the Qur’an that has been jointly undertaken by a local maulvi and a lama.

R introduces himself as a ‘Balti, but with a difference’. I think he is bragging, but as we talk I realise that he is right. He is certainly the dissenter that he claims to be. He tells me that he is a committed Shi‘a but that he has ‘no faith’ in most of the local Shi‘a ‘ulama, whom he accuses of having a vested interest in preserving the backwardness of the Baltis. ‘They talk only about heaven and hell and nothing about the problems of the real world’, he complains. ‘Till recently they even used to insist that studying English and Hindi or taking to government jobs would lead us to abandon our religion’, he says, adding that now this opposition is not so vocal ‘because they know that no one will listen to them if they say this’.

The Baltis in Kargil are even more backward than their cousins in Leh, R claims, one factor being that the Shi‘a ‘ulama there have a stranglehold over the community. However, he tells me, things are gradually changing. Several Shia ‘ulama of the younger generation now urge Baltis to go in for modern education, while at the same time also stressing the importance of traditional Islamic learning. Ordinary Baltis, R says, continue to ‘blindly follow’ the ‘ulama, who claim authority on the basis of their supposed superior understanding of Islam. Often, he says, particularly in Kargil, the ‘ulama are used by different political parties to deliver votes to them, for which service some ‘ulama often receive money. This is one major reason why, he says, Balti-dominated Kargil is ‘almost thirty years behind Leh’.

In recent years, R says, a growing number of Balti students have been travelling to other states in India or to Iran to study at madrasas there. The sort of education they receive there is said to be sternly literalist and, in most cases, does not include any relevant modern subjects. This, he claims, ‘makes some of them even more rigid and inflexible in some ways’. ‘They think that they are authorities in matters of religion just they have studied in Uttar Pradesh or Iran’, he complains. Often, they use their new-found authority to collect money from local people in the name of religion. Some of them also try to use their contacts with the Iranians to get money for themselves from abroad, wrongly claiming that they would use it for the welfare of the local Shi‘as. In fact, R tells me, almost no Shi‘a ‘ulama are doing any public service at all. Most of them, he tells me flatly, are ‘just using religion as a lucrative source of livelihood’. ‘The ‘ulamaseem least interested in any sort of community uplift work’, he says, noting that there is not even a single Shi‘a madrasa in the whole Leh district. ‘They keep fighting among themselves, supporting one political party or another, one leader in Iran against another one, thereby dividing the community as well’.

We talk about mutual perceptions of each other of Muslims and Buddhists. R thinks that Buddhists are, on the whole, ‘gentle, helpful and peace-loving people’, and that is why, he thinks, they are economically considerably better off than the Muslims in Leh. Most of his friends are Buddhists. In contrast, he says, ‘Muslims keep fighting, with others or among themselves’, because of which the remain ‘backward and ignorant’. Buddhists, he says, as a rule do not condemn others for their religion, but Muslims routinely do so.

I ask R about the Balti refusal to eat food cooked by non-Buddhists. He sniggers and tells me that he regularly eats at his Buddhist relatives’ homes, but has to keep this a secret. In fact, he says, despite the seeming consensus of the local Shi‘a ‘ulama that this is haram or forbidden, many educated Balti youth do surreptitiously eat food cooked by non-Muslims. ‘I’ve been to Lucknow and Hyderadad, where there are many Shi‘as, but they willingly eat Hindu food’, he says. He knows, he claims, of some Shi‘a ‘ulamaoutside Ladakh who have declared it permissible to eat food cooked by non-Muslims, but says that their views are almost unheard of in Ladakh.

R thinks that the interpretation that the Baltis give of a Qur’anic verse to justify their stance is ‘ridiculous’ and simply a means to promote ‘barriers’ between them and the Buddhists. He claims it is ‘an invention’ of some ‘ulama who ‘want to strengthen their own hold on the community’. ‘If their interpretation were right’, he argues, ‘why would the Qur’an allow for Muslims to eat food cooked by Jews and Christians?’. ‘How’, he adds, ‘would the Prophet have allowed a group of Christians to pray in the mosque in Medina if he thought them to be physically polluting? How would he have consented to an invitation by a Jew to join him for a meal? How would Islam have spread throughout if Muslims considered others as polluted and stayed away from them? ’.

R tells me that he sometimes raises these questions with the local Shi‘a ‘ulama, but they counter his argument by claiming that while the Qur’an allows for Muslims to eat the food of adherents of ‘heavenly religions’ like Christianity, it does not give the same permission in the case of ‘idol worshippers’, among whom they include the Buddhists. ‘You just cannot argue with these obstinate and hard-hearted people’, R says in despair. He refers to an uncle of his who insists that ‘A pig and a kafir can never be clean, no matter how much you wash them’. He tells me of a certain Balti leader in Kargil who, on the eve of a local election, told his followers that they were not to vote for a Buddhist candidate on the grounds that, as he put it, ‘Kafirs are to be demeaned, not to be elected as leaders’. The leader then went on to allegedly tell his flock, ‘Kafirs are so unclean that if a drop of water touched by them touches you, you must take a bath, so how can you ever think of voting for a Buddhist?’ ‘How ridiculous this is!’, R exclaims as he relates this story and as I try to conceal my horror.

The Qur’anic verse that most Baltis refer to when they defend their practice of abstaining from Buddhist-cooked food, R informs me, is contained in a chapter of the Qu’ran titled at-Tauba (‘The Repentance’) (9:28). The verse reads as follows:

O ye who believe! Truly the Pagans are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach the Sacred Mosque. And if ye fear poverty, soon will Allah enrich you, if He wills, out of His bounty, for Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.

Most Baltis, of course, do not understand Arabic, and so rely on their ‘ulama to explain the scripture to them. For their part, R says, the ‘ulama take the verse completely out of context. A close reading of the preceding verses appears to suggest, R says, that the ‘pagans’ referred to here are those who forcibly sought to suppress Islam and the mission of the Prophet, taking up arms against him and his followers. It is thus probably not addressed to all non-Muslims as such, including those, like the Buddhists, who are not violently opposed to the Muslims. In any case, he points out, the verse refers to a ban on entry into the ‘Sacred Mosque’, probably the Ka’ba in Mecca, and does not speak about food at all.

R carries on with his harangue against many ‘ulama, whom, he says, ‘say bad things’ about other religions. R says he believes in Islam, but adds that ‘there are good things in every religion’. He has a number of lama friends, from whom he has learnt a considerable deal about Buddhism. He has read several Buddhist texts, and tells me that there are several things in common between Buddhism and Islam, which, however, many Muslims are either unaware of or do not appreciate. As a rule, Muslims, he says, think that Buddhists are idolators, but, in actual fact, the Buddha condemned the worship of idols. R thinks that the widespread custom of constructing and worshipping idols in the monasteries is a later development. Likewise, he says, many Muslims believe that Buddhists do not believe in God. This, he claims, is not, in fact, true. Admittedly, he says, the Buddha did not talk about God, but he did not deny His existence either. He approvingly cites the story of the Buddha’s disciple who asked him why he did not talk of God. The Buddha replied to him with a parable. If a deer is shot by an arrow, one’s first task is to remove the arrow rather than searching for the person who shot it. Likewise, our principal task in this world is to remove suffering, not to squabble about theological niceties.

Although he reserves most of his ire for the ‘ulama, R is also critical of many lamas. Some of them, he says, just live off the faith of the credulous. They spend their entire lives in prayer and rituals and are not involved in doing anything concrete to change people’s lives. Like any Shi‘a ‘ulama, most of them are not interested in learning about other faiths, believing firmly that theirs’ alone is the way to salvation. In recent years, R tells me, the lamas have become ‘more politicised’. Many lamas are associated with the Ladakh Buddhist Association, which is said to have ‘Hindutva leanings’. R expresses the fear of the possibility of the Hindu rightwing in making inroads into Ladakh by trying to woo the Buddhists and set them against the Muslims.

As a minority, R says, the Muslims must go ‘out of their way’ to seek to build better relations with Buddhists. The ‘ulama have a major role to play in this, he argues, but he laments that they are not doing much in this regard. He talks of how communal prejudices are deeply rooted among both Muslims and Buddhists, and of how what he refers to as ‘narrow-minded’ ‘ulama and lamas actually only further reinforce these prejudices. He does mention, however, that some local Shi‘a ‘ulama supported the Iranian government when it offered to pay the Taliban a sizeable sum of money if it refrained from destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas. This stance of the Iranians was widely appreciated by many Ladakhi Buddhists, he tells me.

R insists that the future of his fellow Shi‘as lies with India. That, he says, is a point that even the Shi‘a ‘ulama stress. The ‘ulama say, he tells me, that they will never declare a fatwa of jihad against India unless the mujtahids, leading Islamic scholars, in Iran tell them to do so, but the mujtahids have apparently told them, so he says, that the Shi‘as should be loyal to India. R tells me that Pakistan-controlled Baltistan remains poor and undeveloped, and that ‘no Indian Balti in his right mind would like to migrate there’. Baltistan, he alleges, and is ‘now being flooded by Talibanist-type radical Sunnis’ as part of what he calls a ‘plot to reduce the Shi‘as there into a minority’. He expresses his concern with certain Sunni groups in Kashmir, who might not preach anti-Shi‘a hatred openly but are convinced that the Shi‘as are heretics. ‘If they had their way they would declare Shi‘as as non-Muslims, just as they have done to the Qadianis in Pakistan’, he warns.

He talks me about the oppression of the Shi‘as in Pakistan, something that most Shi‘as in Ladakh readily do. He refers to the gunning down of Shi‘a worshippers in mosques and imambaras there. ‘Thank heavens’, he exclaims, ‘such things don’t happen in Ladakh, where the Buddhists are generally very peace-loving’. ‘The only reason why there’s been no Shi‘a-Sunni conflict here’, he claims, ‘is because the Buddhists are a majority and both the Sunnis and the Shi‘as feel marginalised and so are forced to keep up a face of unity’. He talks of what he sees as the deep differences between the Shi‘as and Sunnis, which both, being minorities in Leh, do not like referring to. Some Sunnis actually think that the Shi‘as are kafirs, although they do not generally openly say this. To stress his point he refers to the Nubra valley in north Ladakh, where Shi‘a and Sunni groups are competing with each other to convert a large group of Nurbakshi Muslims, who are neither Shi‘a nor Sunni.

‘Frankly’, R says to me, ‘only God knows who is right, the Shi‘as or the Sunnis. As far as I am concerned it makes little difference what your religion is if it does not make you a better human being’.
*

Shaikh Mirza is, clearly, the most sensible and level-headed Shia ‘alim I’ve met in all Ladakh. He comes from a family that has produced numerous scholars—his own father was the imam of the main Shi‘a mosque in Leh. After spending more than a decade studying with various Shi‘a scholars in Najaf, Iraq, Shaikh Mirza returned to Leh, taking up employment as an Arabic teacher in a government school. He is retired now, but keeps himself busy with various projects, not least as the imam of the principal Shi‘a mosque.

As we walk through the narrow lanes of the Shi‘a locality Shaikh Mirza tells me about himself. He has three children, including a daughter who is doing her Master’s degree in Jammu University. He sees no problem in girls studying along with boys, he explains. ‘Narrrow-minded mullahs will put up all sorts of objections to prevent people progressing’, he says with a shrug. He tells me, to my surprise, that the Imamia Model School, the only Shi‘a-run school in Leh, has a majority of girls on its rolls, and that they study in the same classrooms as the boys. Some conservative Baltis rave and rant against this, but Shaikh Mirza is insistent that girls’ education is perhaps more important than boys’. To educate a girl is to educate the entire family, he says.

Shaikh Mirza is himself an ‘alim, but he is impatient with many local Shi’a ‘ulama, whom, he says, have little knowledge of the contemporary world. Their knowledge, so he claims, is restricted simply to the religious texts, and they do not know how to apply these in today’s context. Islam, he stresses, is not simply the bundle of rituals that some ‘ulama seem to have reduced it to. ‘Islam teaches us to move along with the times, not to reject modernity altogether’, he explains. He talks about Kargil and the notorious infighting among the Shi‘a ‘ulama there, often on party lines, with rival groups supporting rival political parties. ‘A Balti saying has it that there can’t be two Gods because otherwise there will be global war, two wives cannot live peacefully in the same house; two beggars cannot live in the same lane; and twomullahs cannot live in the same locality without squabbling with each other’, he says in jest. ‘Broadmindedness’, Shaikh Mirza tells me, ‘is a gift from God, whom He gives to whom He wills. It cannot be simply learnt in a madrasa’.

The conversation veers to the topic of Buddhist-Muslim relations in Leh, and we talk about the boycott and its aftermath. Shaikh Mirza insists on the need for improving relations with the Buddhists, and says that Islam positively encourages its followers to live in peace with others. Jihad, in the sense of physical warfare, is allowed only when one’s religion or life is under threat, he points out. In Ladakh, he says, the Muslims enjoy freedom of religion, and so talk of jihad against India is absurd. He dismisses that the notion that Muslims must perpetually be at war with others to expand the boundaries of the ‘abode of Islam’ (dar ul-islam) as ‘un-Islamic’, a later accretion after the time after the Prophet when the Ummayad and later Abbasid Caliphs sought to justify their expansionist designs. If some Muslims still cling to that belief, he says, it is because ‘today everyone claims the right to issue fatwas’. He insists that this right is meant only for the qualified ‘ulama alone, or else, as the happenings in large parts of the world today prove, it can be ‘misused by people to promote their own narrow interests and promote conflict’.

Shaikh Mirza strikes me as remarkably open-minded and I am emboldened to ask him what I think is a provocative question. In strictly legal terms, according to the shari‘ah, I say, many Muslim ‘ulama would not consider the Buddhists as ahl-i kitab, or ‘people of the book’ (such as Jews and Christians), who enjoy the status of ‘protected subjects’ (dhimmis) in an Islamic state. Some Muslim scholars provide only two choices for non-ahl-i kitab: death or conversion to Islam. Shaikh Mirza vehemently disagrees with the latter point. Even if the Buddhists do not believe in God, Muslims must learn to live with them in peace, he insists. ‘God has given life to even animals, so how can we kill someone just because he isn’t a Muslim?’, he asks. To consider all Buddhists, or all non-Muslims for that matter, as ‘enemies of Islam’ is, he says, ‘completely wrong’ because ‘there are good people in every community’. If all non-Muslims were, as some Muslims think, by definition, ‘enemies’, he asks me, why did the Prophet Muhammad invite Christians to pray in his mosque in Medina? To further stress his point he tells me the well-known story of a Jewish woman who would daily insult the Prophet and throw rubbish on him as he passed by. The Prophet tolerated this silently. One day, it so happened that she was absent, and the Prophet, thinking that she might be sick, went to inquire about her health. ‘We need to draw a lesson from this and this is how we must behave with others’, Shaikh Mirza says.

I ask Shaikh Mirza what he feels about the general Balti refusal to eat food cooked by Buddhists. He is somewhat hesitant to commit himself to any position, but he informs me that there is no consensus on the issue among the Shi‘a ‘ulama. I then tell him about a Shi‘a Shaikh I had met the day before who insisted that while conditions in India for the Shi‘as are much better than in Pakistan, the Shi‘as have been, so he put it, ‘enslaved’ by the Buddhists. As ‘proof’ of this claim he mentioned the fact that, out of respect for Buddhist sensibilities, fishing in the Indus river is prohibited, meat cannot be sold on some Buddhist holy days, and cigarette smoking is illegal in buses. With regard to the last point he claimed that it was ‘clearly anti-Muslim’, because the ban had not been extended to drinking alcohol in buses as well. Shaikh Mirza, who knows the other Shaikh well, laughs, somewhat in scorn, when I relate the story. ‘Next time the Shaikh will claim that Muslims are being discriminated against in Leh because plastic bags have been banned here!’, he exclaims, not concealing his disgust.

‘Since we live in a multi-religious society, we all must learn to compromise otherwise we simply cannot co-exist’, Shaikh Mirza urges. He goes on to tell me about his own involvement in local efforts to promote Buddhist-Muslim dialogue. He is often invited by Buddhist groups to speak on the occasion of the Buddha’s birthday, where, he says, he sometimes speaks on Buddhism and Islam, pointing out some of their similarities. He also participates, as a member of the local chapter of the International Association for Religious Freedom, in meetings with Buddhist lamas and scholars that generally have to do with communal harmony. But more than this, he says, is what he calls the unique Ladakhi form of inter-community dialogue: through intermarriage. He offers his own example to stress the point. His wife’s mother is Buddhist, and his wife and her Buddhist half-sister are inseparable friends, visiting each other almost every second day.

Every religion, Shaikh Mirza says, ‘has some good points’. There is nothing in Islam to prevent a Muslim from appreciating the good things in other religions. Since Muslims are supposed to believe that all the various prophets of God taught the same primal religion (din), they must willingly accept the good points in other faiths as well. Shaikh Mirza cites a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: A word of wisdom is the lost property of the believer, and wherever he finds it he can pick it up. That being the case, he says, one can genuinely appreciate the truths contained in other religions, while still being a proper Muslim. He tells me that he, for one, considers the Dalai Lama to be a remarkable man and that he deeply respects him. He recounts the reception that he, along with other local Muslim leaders, once gave to the Dalai Lama on his visit to Leh. The Dalai Lama apparently told the Buddhists present at the meeting that they must consider the Muslim minority to be in their care and protection and must ensure that no harm befalls them. ‘Only a sincerely spiritual person could have spoken like this’, Shaikh Mirza thoughtfully says. ‘If only there were more people like him in the world it would be a much happier place’.

Shaikh Mirza takes me down to the Imamia Model School, the only Shi‘a school of its sort in Leh. It is time for the tea-break, and young boys, smartly dressed in grey trousers and green blazers, and girls neatly turned out in shalwar-kameez, rush out into the courtyard shouting in gless. Some of them come out to greet Shaikh Mirza, who happens to be one of the founders of the school. He speaks with them for a while, asking them about their studies, and then leads me up a flight of stairs to meet the principal, who, it turns out to my surprise, is a Kashmiri Pandit woman. All but one of the four principals the school has had so far, Shaikh Mirza tells me, have been non-Muslims: two Hindus and a Buddhist. ‘Some people say that having a non-Muslim principal might lead the children astray from Islam, but this is not true’, he says. ‘We are interested in good education for our children, and will take it from whoever is capable. What is the use of having an ignorant principal even if he is a fellow Muslim?’.

Shaikh Mirza steps out to meet a teacher, while I sit in the office of Shameeta Pandit, the principal of the school. She sports a large bindi on her forehead and a golden pendant shaped in the Hindu sacred figure of ‘Om’ dangles from her neck. Her family, she says, is from Baramulla in Kashmir, and, like most other Kashmiri Pandits, they were forced to flee and now most of her relatives live in Jammu. She feels ‘quite comfortable’, as she puts it, working in a Muslim institution, and claims that the Ladakhi Muslims are ‘very different’ and ‘more open’ than their co-religionists in the Kashmir Valley. Most of the students in the school, are, of course, Shi‘as, but there are, she tells me, a small number of Sunni, Buddhist and even Hindu students on its rolls. Likewise, most of the 16 teachers in the school are Buddhists and Hindus. She tells me that the Balti practice of refusing food cooked by non-Muslims is ‘intriguing’ since in Kashmir the Muslims readily eat in Pandits’ homes, but she says that the practice is hardly unique. After all, she reminds me, many Pandits continue to practice varying forms of untouchability towards Muslims. ‘I guess it takes all sorts to make the world’, she says thoughtfully.

After the noon prayers get over, Shaikh Mirza returns and takes me on a round of the school. Slogans painted across the neatly whitewashed walls announce piously formulated instructions: ‘We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together’; ‘Read the Qur’an and you will find Allah wants you to be kind’; ‘Happiness is a wondrous commodity—the more you give the more you have’; ‘Education is discipline for the adventure of life’. Framed pictures of Gandhi, Muhammad Iqbal and Maulana Azad grace the walls. It is, in short, just like any other school in town. But Shaikh Mirza has reason to be proud, because, as he explains, the school has excelled in a range of fields. He points to a dozen or more shields and cups that grace a large shelf in the visitors room, placed between photographs of the Dalai Lama and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Several of these were won by the students of the school in competitions organised by the local administration, for sports, essay-writing competitions and the march-past on Republic Day. The school’s results in the board examinations have also been equally impressive, I am told.

As he takes me around Shaikh Mirza provides me a brief history of the school. The Baltis were, and still are, the least educated community in Leh, he informs me. ‘Our religious leaders are, in part, to blame for this’, he says. The traditional ‘ulama did not recognise the value of modern education. Some of them genuinely feared it would lead to irreligion, while others thought simply that it would undermine their own authority. Not surprisingly, then, when Shaikh Mirza and his colleagues set up the school there was considerable opposition from the conservatives. Undeterred, the team carried on with their mission, helped, he says, by the local administration and a Christian woman from Britain, who provided the school with a generous grant. Today, he tells me, the local ‘ulama have come to appreciate the work of the school and the importance of modern education, but he laments the fact that most of them are simply not interested in doing anything to promote it themselves. For many ‘ulama, he says impatiently, religion is limited to the four walls of the mosque.

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