Tarek Fatah (1949-2023): A Tribute

Tarek Fatah, a Pakistani-born Indian, as he liked to call himself, passed away on 24 April, 2023, after a prolonged battle with cancer.

The 73-year-old remained jovial until the end, as seen through his daughter Natasha Fatah's tweets and pictures documenting his hospital stay.

Described by many as larger-than-life, witty, cynical, courageous, and lion-hearted, he took on the mullahs and was controversial to those who disagreed with him.

To rationalist Muslims, he did something that very few from the Indian subcontinent have done: acknowledge the Islamic invasion of India and the dissociation of Indian Muslims from their Indic and Hindu roots.

For a Kashmiri woman like me, he burst onto the social media scene in 2013 like a meteor shower, being unbelievably candid about things every Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and others in India knew in their hearts, but didn't dare speak about for fear of being accused of communalism and the disingenuously coined term ‘Islamophobia’.

We had only heard of Hamid Dalwai, the 'angry young secular' from Maharashtra in the 1970s, and were more familiar with Ghalib, Rumi, Kahlil Gibran – the deviant of Muslim heritage and the remote Ibn Sina, Ibn Khaldun, and of course, the towering Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the last man who stood his ground for rationality and reasoning in Islam in the 12th century.

But here was a living Pakistani from Muslim heritage with Left leanings who called a spade a spade with unyielding wit and sarcasm. It was unbelievable to hear Tarek say that the creation of Pakistan was a mistake and that Indian Muslims, especially Kashmiris, should not repeat the mistake with their delusional secessionism and separatism tendencies.

His book, Chasing the Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, written in 2008, expanded on his argument, taking the mullah-cracy in Islam head-on. It was no surprise that he was also against anti-Semitism and had authored, The Jew is Not My Enemy.

When I had the chance to meet him through a common friend, he was deep in research for his notes on The Hindu is Not My Enemy, and was incidentally campaigning to have the Aurangzeb Road renamed to either APJ Abdul Kalam Road or Dara Shikoh Road - 'my kind of Muslims' that he often liked to say, the kind who had assimilated into the Indic heritage without any confusion about their faith, its purpose, or their identity and home. The kind he wanted Indian Muslims to emulate.

Tarek would listen to everyone, including believing Muslims, agnostic Muslims, and atheists or ex-Muslims. His famous debate with India's lyricist and cine personality Javed Akhtar, winner of the Richard Dawkins Award for critical thinking in 2020, still garners views. 

He was a firm advocate of the Balochis in their struggle to separate from Pakistan and for Sindhis to have their homeland, bringing Raja Dahir's legend to the fore, conspicuously missing from our Left-Lib white-washed NCERT history books.

This brought up our discussion on Sindh and Baloch secessionist movements. Playing the devil's advocate, I asked why it wasn't an option for Kashmiris across the Line of Control. Knowing the answers, yet wanting to hear it in his witty speech, quoting stalwart politicians from yesteryears, able to paraphrase passages from countless books he had perused, and drawing on his vast experience with activism from his Leftist days in Pakistan, it was a delight to get confirmation for what nationalist Kashmiris had known while opposing the Pak-sponsored insurgency throughout the 1990s into the new millennium.

Tarek was deeply saddened by the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits in the 90s, the forced exodus, and the Jagmohan canard spread by the intifada factory from a Kashmiri Muslim's perspective.

It was no surprise to him that very few Kashmiri Muslims dared to speak out against gun-wielding jihadists, knowing that the Indian state had no concrete policy of counterterrorism and rehabilitation for Kashmiri Pandits, and that the civil society of Kashmir was in cahoots with the ISI.

He was impressed by my bold writing style on the Pakistani news site, The Nation and that my hijab article had gone viral in 2015, thanks to a Pakistani editor who allowed me to express my pro-Indian Kashmiri viewpoint.

Tarek urged Indian Muslims to organise themselves and discard the yoke of the AIMPLB and other ineffectual Muslim politicians whose rhetoric reminded him of Jinnah and his entourage.

He had written extensively on how Islam's core message of equality and merit based on piety and morality, as revealed to the Prophet, had been hijacked by the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties who compiled misogynistic Sharia laws. This completely twisted the Prophet's teachings and life.

Tarek Fatah's legacy is not just his words, but his courage as well. He taught the fundamental lesson that truth, facts, boldness can sustain against falsehood, vilification campaigns, coordinated attacks on character, mind, and even physical threats. 

Of course, he wasn't without flaws, often reducing Muslims to stereotypes, despite Islam being a diverse and complex faith across the globe. In his last interaction with me on Twitter space, he admitted to battle fatigue and frustration at how much still needed to be done to extricate the Muslim world from the morass into which it had sunk, starting with the subcontinental Muslims across Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.

Tarek triumphed over ignorance, mediocrity, obfuscation, obscurantism, and the mullah version of Islam through his reach on social media. He prompted people to consult their sources on Islam, confirm, affirm, research, and re-research what their "gatekeepers" of morality had told them. 

I'm glad he got to witness Iranian women rising in revolt against the mandatory hijab and demanding a return to their Persian heritage, which boasted of democracy, the world's first laws on human rights and freedom.

He was a staunch ally of Afghan women and men, openly discussing the devastation of the region through Pakistani puppets commandeered by the West in the Great Game. Tarek's debates on TV and his revolutionary statements gave voice to millions of people who had long been colonised, even after independence. That Brown intellectual- and journalist-sepoys, in the employ of the West in the new millennium, still try to shame us for our Indic identity, 75 years later and this was unacceptable to him. 

We Indians will never forget how he shook us up to embrace our civilisational roots and the fact that we had given the world so much in the ancient past. He reminded us that our time had come to take the stage as a world leader in innovation, infrastructure, healthcare, and governing billions of people democratically.

Tarek may have physically been gone, but the attempts of petty Muslim clerics to advocate denying him an Islamic burial will fail, in death he will still be triumphant (Fatah).