Dear Editor,
A letter in your paper of August 4 contains a comment disputing my reference to Vishnu Bisram as “a respected pollster” some time ago (‘Lack of familiarity with day-to-day events’).
The letter is by Freddie Kissoon and deals also with my citing Fazeel Ferouz of the CIOG as a “post-racial” public personality, by which I meant someone I observe to be free of the racial preferences and prejudices we note in our society.
With my characterisation of both these gentlemen Mr Kissoon takes objection. Since this is the second recent letter in which he challenges my description of Mr Bisram in the terms I just quoted, I think a response may be merited and something needs to be made clear. Mr Kissoon and I have always had frank but rarely boisterous exchanges of views, and his observations I consider valuable and noteworthy. Naturallly we do not always agree and his positions on politics and personalities are never unvarying or even consistent over time. Naturally, as distinct personalities we respond in different ways to the same problems and people.
First, the interchange with Mr Bisram in which the phrase from me figured, turned around the claim that the Hinduism practised here was especially affected by the ban and restriction on food items that we experienced in the seventies. It was thus a discussion with a religious aspect. The Quran tells me that when we are discussing, with non-Muslims, religious matters, we are to adopt a “mild and conciliatory” tone, to avoid the passions that the subject may arouse. I was therefore held to a polite exchange with Mr Bisram as I would with Swami Aksharananda (of whom more later), a Pandit or any Christian with whom I exchange views.
The term “respected pollster” has to be understood, then, in the light of our rules of engagement. In a parliament, a certain formal courtesy requires us to refer to those on the other side as “the honorable.” In a court of law counsel for the adversary side is routinely referred to as “my learned friend,” etc; Mr Kissoon is free to slug it out as he chooses with his opponents and address them as it pleases him. We cannot be obliged to reproduce his method and to mimic his personalities.
Included in the reprimand was a dismissal of Mr Bisram as a pollster. Frankly, I recall the NACTA activist as being more right than wrong in his predictions over the years, as being the sole institution we have created that bothers with polling or psephology in any consistent way. He ought to be respected for what he has done. His views as a political writer are often bizarre. His work as a pollster, separate from that, is what I wrote about. Any disagreement with my opinion has to be based on a demonstration of a percentage of wrong polls published by Mr Bisram and on some substance, beyond the supposition, joked about, that Mr Bisram polls for the Illuminati or for a mere figment of his imagination.
The Fazeel Ferouz objection by Mr Kissoon is based on the flimsy and the nebulous. Mr Ferouz is a “confidante” of Mr Bharrat Jagdeo’s we are informed. This information, presented as fact, is supposed to disqualify Mr Ferouz from consideration. The views of Mr Kissoon on Mr Jagdeo are now the subject of a libel case. Suffice it to say that we have chosen not to ascribe racist views and motives to all who are associated with Mr Jagdeo. Again, insisting on certain personal liberties, we refuse the imposition of Mr Kissoon’s standards and judgements. Mr Ferouz is known in the Muslim community as someone who has personally, with the support of Moen ul Hack and others, had the courage to protect and promote a Ghanian scholar of jurisprudence in Guyana in the seventies and eighties who had fallen foul of the wider Muslim community, not because of race essentially, but because of his resistance to some traditional forms of Islamic practice here (moulood etc). I have known him to have friends and employees from the African community and never observed any discrimination in his treatment of them. His views on the mixing of the two communities and the integration of black converts I also know. Mr Kissoon is unaware of the history of the CIOG and the work that Fazeel Ferouz has done. That he has worked with the PPP government to successfully strengthen ties with the Islamic world is something that all we Muslims are proud of. That previously, he also represented the community before the PNC government is also known.
His involvement with the IAC is not, to my mind, to his discredit. I also think the IAC is a good idea and that it needs to be developed and perhaps transformed.
The Kissoon letter also proclaims that the fact of living at a geographical distance from Guyana renders it impossible for me to be au courant with all that passes there. It is inevitable that distance lessens the information we receive. Even with modern technology. I write analysis in the forms of letters which are sometimes commented on by countrymen, including Guyanese in the diaspora. Freddie is saying that we should all stop, on the grounds of not living in Number 69 village where the event took place or not attending the Congress where the shot was fired, etc.
There is proximity and proximity. The world spends more time commenting on events distant in space or time, on ideas from another universe, than it does on the immediate and the contemporary. It is surprising that a lifelong academic fails to acknowledge that most commentary is about somewhere else and some other time.
Intimate knowledge helps, but often what is being defined and described subsists at the purely ideational and abstract. There are lots of Guyanese living in the place and writing about it who have a lesser understanding of the historical and actual reality than do many migrants. I do agree, as a former journalist, that living there is useful in some cases, but fail to understand what it signifies in real terms, or why you have to be a citizen of Guyana only to run for some office.
The thing about David Hinds and the existence of the Cuffy 250 Committee whose birth I had missed, is unfortunate. But not life threatening. I had been responding to a letter or article in which the age and activities of the committee would not have been stated. A good press release should have anticipated diasporic ignorance and mentioned “the Cuffy 250 has been holding seminars since 2000 at which F Kissoon hit out again at the former president.” The insistence, by Mr Kissoon, that I correct my aim signifies something else. I think that he, or friends and associates, could be uncomfortable with something I have written or failed to write, and hence are finding a form of expressing dissatisfaction.
On a final note, I see that Abdul Rahim Forde has responded briefly but adequately to Swami Aksharananda that Muslims in contemporary times would have, in many cases, missed Quranic intentions on subjects such as women.
We as Muslims are aware of the prophetic saying that dissension and difference of opinion and interpretation would afflict us as it has the Jews and Christians. There will be departures from orthodoxy and right understanding we know. The current Islamic renewal is about remedying the wrongs. Hinduism as a folk religion with its castes, etc, is also, if we are to believe the Swami himself, a deformed version of the real dharma.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
