Ibn Khaldun was a preeminent scholar, historian and philosopher, widely recognised as the father of modern sociology. He looked at everything, including religion, through the cold lens of logic.
Among his theories is the idea that empires decline by their third generation. Empires, he argued, follow a natural life cycle of roughly three generations.
The theory has aged well. Some now apply it, with a wink, to the third term of Prime Minister Modi.
Rule of three, anyone? But Khaldun's real monument is the Muqaddimah, a rare medieval work that keeps religious emotion out of the study of society.A man in India has tried to live up to the pen name bearing the great's.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati. He recently wrote a piece calling out the Islamist overtones in Sharjeel Imam's attack on the Indian Constitution, secularism and other founding principles.
The reaction was swift and telling: widespread outrage that an anonymous writer was allowed to criticise an ideologue currently "in prison for his political views".The clamour to unmask Ibn Khaldun Bharati is pure bad faith. Pseudonyms exist precisely so that people can challenge orthodoxy without being hunted.
He is not a journalist. He is reportedly a serving officer, which complicates any reveal.
Exposure would colour how people judge his work as an officer. Why demand the Aadhaar of a writer who criticises Sharjeel's Islamist doctrine while refusing to engage the doctrine itself?
The argument is on the table. Answer it or admit you cannot.
Write a rebuttal instead of seeking his A/S/L.First, nobody should be jailed for speech, however toxic. Not for tweets, not for talks, not for a tirade against the "system".
Sharjeel's incarceration has dragged on far too long, and his misery is being milked as proof of political persecution. Muslim intellectuals and sundry liberals who came out guns blazing against the op-ed need to examine the actual source of their anger.
What offends them more: the piece that called out Sharjeel's communal agenda, or the fact that its author remains anonymous? On other days, these same warriors stand ready to hear a dog whistle from three states away and protect any whistleblower.
Sharjeel's prolonged prison time is still clearly untenable. Both things can be true.
That is inconvenient for people addicted to outrage of a single flavour.Spare us the ritual demand for "nuance". Here is the actual nuance.
Sharjeel is a practising Muslim who is also well-read in history, sociology and politics, and can hold his own against the intellectual elite. That combination is out of syllabus for both the Muslim intellectual and the non-believing liberal.
In his reading, a true practising Muslim faces a cognitive dissonance living in a non-Islamic country. The faith, as he reads it, directs Muslims to migrate out of lands ruled by idolaters. "Was not God's earth wide, so that you might have emigrated?" Or find ways to rule the land.
He is not seeking the former. Sharjeel exhorts people to effect the latter.
He says in as many words how Muslims are a superior people and the man-made Constitution of India enforces equality. "To those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." Not to say that India gives any privilege to anyone. Muslims live an equally miserable life.
His problem is not misery. His concern is the "equally" in that sentence.In Islam, no sin is greater than shirk.
Look at what Sharjeel considers the ultimate sin: nationalism, materialism, secularism, liberalism and humanism. It is an argument too far for 2026.
It is still an argument, even if purely theological, and an Indian citizen has the constitutional right to make it. You do not wish to hear it?
Too bad.And worse for Type L. This is where liberals get queasy.
Their discomfort is less with the doctrine itself than with Sharjeel's willingness to state it plainly. Many Islamic schools of thought reject his reading on purely theological grounds.
Islam is not a monolith, however the orthodoxy presents it. Different people interpret the same verses differently, based on their respective disposition.
Even accepting the text's infallibility and finality, room remains to justify or reject almost any idea. Liberals prefer to ignore the interpretations that do not land nicely.Sharjeel Imam is a nightmare for liberals because he says in public what many of them are afraid to say even in private.
He does not look like a textbook text-adherent mulla, yet he sounds like one. The reaction is shock, or the performance of shock.
He is a scholar of a particular kind, and his colour is too stark for the liberati, who keep a Sufi sher ready for every argument. When pressed, they retreat into the claim that understanding him requires critical theory, and this, and that, blah blah.Calling the Constitution fascist, secularism a trap, and democracy a device to deny Muslims their "divine right" is not critical theory.
It is the Two-Nation Theory updated for a new century.India is the birthplace of the Two-Nation Theory. Theories don't die; they can only be managed or swept under the Ganga-Jamuni carpet.
Shutting up Sharjeel will only turn India's Got Talent into India's Got Latent. Both are entertaining.
One for the family audience. The other, Members Only.The university that spawned the Two-Nation Theory is a Central university in India.
The founder is revered and the Prime Minister, the Hindutva icon, never misses paying his tributes on Sir Syed's birth anniversary. That's how India has been.
That's how India is. Sharjeel disturbs the India that manages this dichotomy remarkably efficiently, unlike everything else.Sharjeel seeks to radicalise Muslim youth against the Indian state.
In reaction, it hardens Hindu youths already carrying dangerous levels of animosity fuelled by the declining political discourse, and online content from home and abroad. Communalism is one of the few businesses where rivals happily run each other's marketing.
The communal kinds love Sharjeel's deadly droppings. Liberals fear Sharjeel's fundamentalism less than they fear the wrong Right using him to say: "We warned you".Sharjeel has been in custody since 2020 in the Delhi Riots larger-conspiracy case.
The process has been unacceptably slow. Prolonged detention without a concluded trial is wrong.
The charges, however, concern alleged criminal conspiracy around the riots, not merely his views. That does not make him a pure political prisoner.
The real issue is the sickeningly slow judicial process. Not whether to criticise or defend Sharjeel's disdain for democracy in India.India still manages inter-faith coexistence, under severe stress almost everywhere else in the world.
We manage it noisily, clumsily and often delusionally, but we manage a balance. Protecting space for internal Muslim dissent is part of keeping that balance.
Hunting for Ibn Khaldun Bharati's real name throws it off.India has uber-practising Muslims like Sharjeel just as it has uber-practising Hindus. They sit at the edges of the fabric the moderately-practising are so profusely proud of.
Also, Sharjeel is not alone. He finds support even among champagne-swirling liberals who squirm at his ideas yet will not demand he retract them.
This is the class that wears slit evening gowns while insisting the burqa in school is a right for little girls, provided the parents consent. They see agency where others see a symbol of patriarchy.
In other contexts, they want to smash the patriarchy. For too long they have held the naming rights to ideas and handed them out according to convenience.No wonder they want the real name of Ibn Khaldun Bharati, the man behind the op-eds.
The illiberal crowd can then call him names, and the liberals can condemn the "over-reaction". Hence, the demand: Ibn Khaldun ko benaqaab karo.The bottom line remains unchanged.
Sharjeel Imam's trial needs to move forward. It is good for him and good for everyone else, except the ID-dikhao types who will be back tomorrow demanding protection for someone else's identity if it suits them.- Ends(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)