The word 'jamaat' in Urdu/Arabic simply means a gathering or congregation, similar to the Hindi 'sabha'. And it's not as if Hindi speakers ought to be unfamiliar with 'jamaat'. We frequently use the cognate 'jama', as in gathered/collected together. Yet, because we have chosen to neglect so much of our linguistic and cultural heritage, because we have somehow made Urdu a 'foreign' language, we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned by the media and public sphere around us into associating 'jamaat' only with certain organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, which in turn are associated in our minds with religious fundamentalism/extremism. And it is in this context that the Tablighi Jamaat, which has existed for nearly 100 years but which most non-Muslims (including me) had heard little about until last week, could be so rapidly fit by the media into a certain narrative, and painted, virtually overnight, as some kind of terrorist organisation.
Note that hardly anybody has called them that explicitly. But the way these narratives work is by the power of subliminal associations, which can be linguistic(as in the word 'jamaat') or visual(as in that shocking India Today graphic, which was basically shouting out 'terrorists' in the guise of presenting statistics). The distinguished cognitive scientist George Lakoff has written extensively about the power of metaphor and framing, and the ways in which our minds so often understand or interpret one thing in terms of another. These framing effects have been exploited to the full by large parts of our media(and government) for quite some time now, to try and reinforce a certain narrative around Muslims and their practices and organisations, all the while maintaining plausible deniability because the associations are mostly subliminal and not explicit. And of course this is buttressed by the proliferation of massive amounts of fake news, mostly via social media, which we tend to accept all too easily because it neatly fits into the larger frames and patterns that the media are creating for us.
The remarkable thing about human cognition is that, despite being susceptible to so many biases, we are also often capable(with the very same cognitive system!) of recognising those biases, as Lakoff and others have so incisively demonstrated. So the least we can do is to be aware of what is going on, and to seek to resist it by critically examining our own instinctive modes of understanding the information we are being presented with. In today's India, it is more urgent than ever for us to utilise this very special element of human reason, self-correction. Otherwise, if we allow ourselves to collectively succumb to our default instincts in the face of the constant reinforcement of such dangerous and dehumanising narratives, then, as history bears witness, we may well be sleepwalking into unimaginable horrors.
Note that hardly anybody has called them that explicitly. But the way these narratives work is by the power of subliminal associations, which can be linguistic(as in the word 'jamaat') or visual(as in that shocking India Today graphic, which was basically shouting out 'terrorists' in the guise of presenting statistics). The distinguished cognitive scientist George Lakoff has written extensively about the power of metaphor and framing, and the ways in which our minds so often understand or interpret one thing in terms of another. These framing effects have been exploited to the full by large parts of our media(and government) for quite some time now, to try and reinforce a certain narrative around Muslims and their practices and organisations, all the while maintaining plausible deniability because the associations are mostly subliminal and not explicit. And of course this is buttressed by the proliferation of massive amounts of fake news, mostly via social media, which we tend to accept all too easily because it neatly fits into the larger frames and patterns that the media are creating for us.
The remarkable thing about human cognition is that, despite being susceptible to so many biases, we are also often capable(with the very same cognitive system!) of recognising those biases, as Lakoff and others have so incisively demonstrated. So the least we can do is to be aware of what is going on, and to seek to resist it by critically examining our own instinctive modes of understanding the information we are being presented with. In today's India, it is more urgent than ever for us to utilise this very special element of human reason, self-correction. Otherwise, if we allow ourselves to collectively succumb to our default instincts in the face of the constant reinforcement of such dangerous and dehumanising narratives, then, as history bears witness, we may well be sleepwalking into unimaginable horrors.
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