Like every other child who has ever grown up in a Muslim household, I had a maulana employed to teach me the Quran in Arabic without comprehending, of course, what the text really meant. And like every other boy who has ever followed that afternoon lesson blabbering indecipherable sounds -- indecipherable to the maulana also, by the way -- with a game of cricket in the evening, I was very adept at sighting a group of mustache-less bearded men clad in pastel coloured long kurtas and pyjamas tied higher than their ankles, and running off from the playground. After the unopposed surrender of his game, a young boy’s priority, then, is to save the rest of the evening by avoiding getting held into a group of men asking him some deep questions about the "purpose of life" that possibly they themselves do not understand. This would be followed up by an "invitation" to go around the neighbourhood between Asr (the early evening prayer) and Maghrib (the late evening prayer) with the group preaching the word of Allah –- as if that abrupt end to the game of cricket was not torture enough.
Unlike most Muslim boys, however, my bone of contention, to put it lightly, with the Jamaatis did not end at the ruined cricket evenings. I soon grew out of the idea of a divine creator and became what the Tablighi Jamaatis would abhor the most -– murtad -– an ex-muslim, and I have been a vigorous critic of the extremist practices of the Jamaat and their allies since then. Pursuing my undergraduate at the birthplace of Students Islamic Movement of India – Aligarh – my criticism earned me several threats, public shaming, and also a criminal case for "hurting religious sentiments" of a group of otherwise strong, brave, and young men. I am yet to be acquitted.
Some days ago, however, the fallacy of imagining that I can dissociate from the Muslim community by branding myself as an ex-muslim once again came to life. Nizamuddin Markaz -– the headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat -- came to be known as the "hot spot of epidemic in India". The description was quite fitting. Some two thousand Jamaatis -– belonging to various nationalities –- had congregated at the Markaz and then travelled to various parts of the country, carrying the virus with them -- no, not the proselytization here, I mean the real, the novel Corona virus. As per reports on April 2, the meeting had contributed to around 20% of all cases of the disease in India.