Curlers under the wimple

Like the swine flu spreading across the globe, bigotry knows no international or religious border
Jawed Naqvi Delhi

HINDI poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Urdu poet Raghupati Sahai, nom de plume Firaaq Gorakhpuri, taught at the famous Allahabad University, on the confluence of the Ganga and Jamuna river, in the 1950s-60s. They had a few things in common apart from their Kaayasth Hindu caste, which included a love for occasional banter.

When Bachchan published his controversial Hindi version of Omar Khayyam, underscoring the many virtues of wine, Firaaq is said to have retorted that celebrating liquor was meaningful for those whose religion forbade it, Ghalib and Majaaz being the leading practitioners apart from Khayyam. "Coming from you, whose culture celebrates the soma ras, it sounds like a drunkard's plaint," Firaaq chided the Hindi poet, who was otherwise a good-humoured teetotaller.

The power of poetry runs as deep as the roots of its societal moorings. Even at the height of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the ayatollahs could not remove Hafez Shirazi from bookshops, much less from the minds of his teeming lovers. Recently, a friend from Lahore was so lost in his reverie of the 14th century Persian poet that he sent me the following Hafez couplet even as the terror attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team was underway.

Man tarke ishq baaz-o-saaghar nami kunam
Sad baar tauba kardam-o-deegar nami kunam

(I cannot forsake my passion for love; and never on wine shall I shut the door. I tediously swore a hundred times to give up both; but enough, not any more.)

Just north of Tehran's Farmaniyeh district, where Ayatollah Khomeini lived amid overarching hills that protected him from a feared missile attack, there is a picturesque road leading to the Dawamand mountains. Here, I saw Iranian women, lovers of Hafez, taking off their mandated shrouds and putting on skis instead. Gigantic love messages were etched on their skis in the glistening snow, images of heart pierced by an arrow and so on, were large enough to be read from a plane flying overhead. The ubiquitous moral police were there, too, not to stop men and women from breaking the alleged religious code, but to prevent snooping journalists from taking pictures and giving the country a bad name!

Inspired human resolve to break religious codes must be as old as the earliest form of social regimentation. The Sound of Music became a Hollywood blockbuster in many socially regressive societies including in orthodox Muslim countries. And yet, the story of a nun located in the 1940s Nazi-occupied Austria was not too dissimilar to the spectacular defiance you would see at the Dawamand ski resort a year after the mullahs took over the country in 1979.