Asaf Ali and Zama did Kufra to Slight Hindus- so who Exactly got Insulted?
The issue of Malayali actor ‘worshipping’ Tony Stark’s gauntlet instead of Bhagwan Vamana’s Sri Thrikkaakara Appan needs to be looked at on two very different levels, for interpretations are entirely different on the two levels and don’t even cancel out each other.
Malayali actor Asaf Ali and his wife Zama are trending on the news currently for his ‘bravery’ in replacing Sri Thrikkaakara Appan of Onam with Iron Man’s gauntlet from Avengers: Endgame movie. Sri Thrikkaakara Appan is a spiritual representation of Vishnu’s first human avatar Vamana, son of celestial rishi-s Kashyap and Aditi. In fraudulent Dravidian narrative spun by EVR Ramaswamy and his acolytes, however, Vamana is maligned as an “Aryan invader” who tricked the ‘indigenous, lower-caste ruler Bali into giving up his kingdom to ‘Aryan king’ Indra. This narrative is notwithstanding that Bali was himself not only a devotee of Vishnu, as were his father Virochana and grandfather Prahlad, but he was also a brahmin by the paternal birth rules- Prahlad’s father Hiranyakashipu was the son of the very same Kashyapa rishi (and Aditi’s sister Diti) who fathered Vamana.
But Dravidian hatred of anything remotely Hindu runs so deep that even most Dravidian-narrative-subscribing Hindus don’t think their narratives through, Asif Ali is still a Muslim.
The message that he presumably wanted to convey to Hindus was two-fold. On one level, it is pure and straightforward mockery and contempt of Hindu iconography, the good ol’ iconoclasm. But, on the other hand, it is one word in which the entire history of Asif Ali’s birth religion, Islam, could be summed up, including in post-1947’ secular India’, where this is a crime on books the law was seldom enforced on Muslims.
On a second, more profound level, the evident intent was to show the Hindus how their mythology is as ‘flimsy’ and ‘shaky’ as a pop-culture comic book, and their gods like Vamana and Indra might very well have been characters of children’s storybooks from the bygone millennia. On this level, however, Asif Ali betrays nothing but his ignorance and illiteracy of culture, history, mythology, metaphysics, and even social psychology.
The tool he employs to convey the second message is still a Hindu tool, ‘icon worship, a Shirk, a Kufra in the eyes of Islam. The punishment is also very severe in Islam, ranging from death in this life to eternal hellfire in the next, regardless of how many other good deeds one may have done in this life. And the funniest thing is that if one interprets Asif Ali’s act through the lens of Hindutva and Dharma, he didn’t even manage to really insult the devata-s or devotees, only managed to earn the ire of his Allah and the more hardliner clergy of Islam.
On a socio-political level, what he did was undoubtedly a dastardly act. It was made more pernicious by the fact that a Muslim dared to try and belittle a Hindu god, for which he should be in jail under 295A of IPC and 153A of CrPC (notwithstanding the writer’s personal detest of these sections of the law, and opinion that they should be scrapped from the books, under the principle of absolute free speech).
Its socio-political impact was also aggravated by that thousands of deracinated Hindu fools are cheering it, in complete oblivion to the spirit of Chrislamic iconoclasm, its bloodied history of 2 thousand years, and the gory future it contains for us all, including those cheering today. To see this is a bit like watching a replay of Americans cheering for Mujahideens in the 70s and 80s.
On the more spiritual and/or psychological level, however, matters turn inside out. Asif Ali does not realize whether the gauntlet would still be a respectable object fit for worship in the eyes of the Kafirs as given the significance it holds within Marvel mythology.
If Marvel were a real-world (even an alternate universe), where Tony Stark did save trillions of lives, sacrificing his own, using this gauntlet, worshipping it would have still been Haraam for those whom Asaf Ali tried to sympathize with, with his act. For Hindus, on the other hand, if anything remotely like this had existed in this world, this gauntlet would have become ‘Ayudham’, which would be worshipped with as much fanfare as Sharang, Sudarshan, Kaumudaki, etc. PR Sreejesh turned to his goalpost and saluted to it as if it were his deva after winning a mere medal, and we cheered on! Just think what a great significance this ‘Ayudham’ would have had for us; it was real in any plane, dimension, or alternate universe.
Hindus’ history of creating divine objects from mundane artefacts, including creating deities via the process of consecration (prana pratishtha), is as old Hindutva/Dharma itself. In Mahabharata, Ashwatthama makes a blade of grass the conduit of Brahmastra, the most venerated and feared spiritual weapon; Ayudha puja is a tradition as old as Vijayadashami itself, and defence minister Rajnath Singh worshipped Rafale fighter jets on Vijayadashami of 2019 before they were inducted in the Indian air force. So, given that within the mythology of the Marvel universe, Tony Stark’s weapon symbolizes the self-sacrifice of a ‘privileged’, “upper caste”, rich, ‘capitalist’, ‘exploiter’ bourgeois hero to save the life of trillions in the universe, Hindus would gladly bow down to the divine meaning Tony Stark’s sacrifice bestowed on the gauntlet.
This writer’s (informal) Guru once remarked that the discovery of alien life would be a cataclysmic blow to Islam and Christianity. This is because they claim exclusive franchise on human salvation via the one-time-one-point-one-person intervention of God in human history. But, on the other hand, Hindus would be delighted to map Vishnu avatara-s on the aliens’ gods as well. He also views Sai Baba temple at Shirdi as a cultural and spiritual victory of this land’s Hindutva on Islam by creating an Agama-compliant, Shirk-committing temple to harness the spiritual Shakti of a Sufi saint.
In his blind hate, Asaf Ali did do a Shirk, a Hindu act- and that’s what he needs to be mocked on the lines of, so that not only a socio-political pushback to desert cult happens, but it happens in the way of normalizing and furthering more iconography, more Shirk, more Kufra! The writer has previously expressed his views on how the Hindu rage needs to happen on more ‘masculine lines instead of the more ‘feminized’ trigger-happy outrage model we are running on today. Along the same lines, here’s food for thought: Hindu outrage should also happen when Hindutva is violated when a ‘sin’ on Hindu standards happens, not when hateful idiots like Asif Ali end up violating their own religion in a bid to insult Hindutva.
On an off-chance that Asif Ali was really “trying to celebrate Hindu-Muslim syncretic culture”, here are a couple of suggestions on the same lines as his original act in Muslim territory:
- Perhaps Asif Ali could next consider sharing snaps of creating pictures of Allah, and his last prophet, the Mohammed of Arabia. That would be a great example of two-way syncretism, of Islam also modifying itself to accommodate local religions.
- Given that our neighbour Afghanistan has newly turned into an Islamic Emirate, perhaps Asif Ali would consider it a ‘Ganga Jamuni privilege’ to be India’s cultural ambassador to Afghanistan and propose three temples of Allah in Kabul, Karachi, and Kashmir, connected by the “KKK corridor”.
And if the above ideas make Asif Ali fear for his life, he would do well to reflect that his initial act of ‘worshipping’ the gauntlet, ‘celebrating’ the Kafir festival of Onam, is no less sinful in the eyes of Islam.
Playing on a line from Main Hoon Na by Asif Ali’s co-religionist Shahrukh Khan, “Nafrat bahut soch samajh ke Karni chahiye, Asif Ali. Hum jisse nafrat karte hain, aksar hum wahi ban jaate hain!”
