Sarod eminence Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s son converts to Hinduism from Islam and the father is understandably upset.

Aasish Khan, the son of sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, has embraced Hinduism, sparking off a raging debate and heartache to the 84-year-old father who has told TOI his son was besmirching his illustrious family’s name.

Aasish, who has already changed his surname to Debsharma through affidavit on August 19, claims his family was never really Muslim. “We were originally Brahmins and used the surname Debsharma. My great-grandfather Sadananda Debsharma took the title of Khan, which is not a surname and is used by Hindus and Christians… due to compulsions. We never converted to Islam.”

Strictly speaking, Islam rewards apostasy with death. Remember Aurangzeb who put his own brother to death? It’s logical to expect some Mullah issuing a fatwa, or a minister offering a reward to the first person who gets Aasish’s scalp.

But fame and riches talk. Therefore celebrity conversions are issues which get passing attention, soon to be forgotten. Does anybody remember a certain Kamala Das aka Suraiya? This issue too, falls in the league of the tens of inter-religious marriages that are routine in places like Bollywood. One can point out the Salman Rushdie episode as an exception but that only proves this rule. The power of Mullahs and similar religious heads is really over the masses, not over the moneyed.

And so, here’s our very own closet-Mullah, Javed Akhtar, trying to rationalize.

In a post-9/11 increasingly paranoid world, where terror has become synonymous with Muslims, a number of celebrities feel South Asians are looked at with suspicion.

Lyricist Javed Akhtar said the paranoia “is unreasonable, unfair and illogical. Anybody with brown skin and a Muslim name feels insecure these days. People are suffering from racial and communal biases and sadly enough, we can’t do much about it.“

Agreed, it is unreasonable but give us at least one piece of evidence which contradicts this perception. And sorry, I don’t buy the argument of terrorists-as-misguided-followers-of-Islam. If insecurity is the concern, bleating about it won’t help, introspection will. Neither is this bleating new. The instant retort to this bleating is a call to reform Islam, and that’s when the Javed Akhtar types fall silent. For them, Islam is something etched indelibly, true till eternity. So here’s the dilemma then: you complain if Muslims are viewed with suspicion, remain silent when some Muslims faithfully follow Islam’s tenets–Jihad, here–and, at the same time, don’t want to rid it of such extremist tenets.

Speaking of communal and other biases, Javed Akhtar should first clean his own mess. He finds it pretty easy and convenient to attack Hindu symbols and people as he pleases:

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar also is. At the recent India Today conclave famed lyricist, Javed Akhtar, sneered at Indian spirituality, particularly of Sri Sri’s kind, for being little more than teaching rich people how to breathe.

Everyone laughed heartily and nobody dared ask Akhtar his views on Islamic seminaries whose teaching of Islamic spirituality led to the creation of the Taliban.

Nobody asked him if he did not think teaching the rich how to breathe was slightly less dangerous than teaching children how to kill innocent people by becoming suicide bombers. Sri Sri should have asked these questions but probably refrained because they are too politically incorrect.

But, that’s the way he operates because it is the way of least resistance. Don’t introspect but blame others for your misfortune. And there are ready targets–a prominent one is Bush.

“people are overreacting in the West. In all these seven years of presidentship, all that George Bush has managed to do is to make this an insecure world”.

There it is! A Classic Arundhati Roy: terrorists are what they are because Bush (substitute with BJP/RSS/VHP/your pet hate) forced them to be so.

Akhtar wants us to believe that Aasish Khan didn’t convert to Hinduism because he didn’t believe in Islam but because he was insecure. But in Aasish Khan’s own words,

Aasish’s ‘reinvention’ is that his ancestors were Hindus. He claims his family even prayed to goddesses Kali and Saraswati. He said he was never asked to follow Islamic rituals or offer namaz and his grandfather had given Hindu names to him and his siblings — Dhyanesh, Pranesh and Amaresh.

“Staunch Muslims have opposed my decision,” he said. “They did not realise we were never converted to Islam. I would like to make it clear that the only religion our family believes in is music,” said the 60-something Aasish.

Of course, Aasish is lying; or so, says his father. That is not important. What’s important is that Aasish’s freedom to do what he wills is being challenged. However, when Hindus convert to Islam/Christianity by force or fraud, it is lauded as an “expression of individual will to come out of the shackles of a primitive religion.” You need me to spell out the reason? Islam is a progressive religion.

Cross-posted on Desicritics