The use of the name ‘Mir Jafar’ in a manner similar to that of an insult or slander still rankles, say his descendants, as the name of the former Nawab of Bengal comes up once again ahead of Lok Sabha election.

The house of a direct descendant of Mir Jafar in Murshidabad. (Express Photo: Neha Banka)

“Why is this still not getting resolved? Haye Allah!,” says 62-year-old Syeda Tarat Begum, an 11th generation descendant of Mir Jafar, out of exasperation. Her uncle, Wakir Ali Meerza, walks around their small courtyard, watching in despair as monkeys chew away all the flowers the family painstakingly grows in their small plot of land. 88-year-old Meerza, a direct descendant of Mir Jafar, is a little exhausted and doesn’t talk much; only that the family have lost much of their wealth over the generations and how difficult a legal battle it is to get even some of it back.

With less than a month to go for the Lok Sabha elections, the campaigns by political parties have witnessed the unexpected resurrection of Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of Bengal Army under Siraj ud-Daulah.

Last month, a row erupted after Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council, blamed the people of Bengal for “poverty of aspiration”.

“The first time when he (Jyoti Basu) got elected, he had already carried out the Marichjhapi massacre… The question is, why did they keep getting him back despite his lack of performance? Some part of it was, of course, electoral malpractice. Booth capturing was converted into an art form. But I would argue that even more important than that was a poverty of aspiration,” he said in a podcast interview

The Trinamool Congress (TMC) condemned Sanyal’s remarks, calling him “modern-day Mir Jafar”. “The hate spewing Bangla-Birodhis of @BJP4India have crossed all lines of decency! PM @narendramodi’s Chief Economic Advisor and a new addition to the list of modern-day Mir Jafars, Sanjeev Sanyal openly criticised the glorious culture of Bengal by accusing us of having a “Poverty of Aspirations”, making a complete fool of himself! Following the footsteps of his Bangla-Birodhi overlords of the BJP, he mocked our cultural icon Mrinal Sen and the prolific culture of Kolkata, the city of joy,” read a post by the TMC on ‘X’.

The use of the name ‘Mir Jafar’ in a manner similar to that of an insult or slander, still rankles, say his descendants, who live in Murshidabad and Kolkata.

Several weeks before the controversy erupted, on a warm February evening, indianexpress.com sat with some of Jafar’s descendants in Murshidabad to talk about the legacy that the family continues to live with. They say they are tired of the many times their ancestor’s name continues to come up in conversations and interviews, but particularly in a negative context, and they firmly believe that the Nawab of Bengal has been unfairly maligned over the course of history.

ISRAEL AT WAR – DAY 632

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Anila Ali, A Mir Jafar Pakistani-American, defends Israel visit amid criticism back home

Delegation prompts fierce outcry in Islamabad, with one participant getting fired from his job; Herzog says trip shows possibility of growing ties between Israel and Muslim world

By Munir Ahmed and Tia Goldenberg30 May 2022, 9:26 pm

Pakistani-American Anila Ali gives a book to President Isaac Herzog during a rare trip by a Pakistani national to Israel in May. (Twitter)

ISLAMABAD (AP) — A Pakistani-American woman who came under fire in the Islamic nation for leading a delegation to Israel defended the trip Monday, saying she traveled to Jerusalem with a small group of Muslims and non-Muslims to promote interfaith harmony.

Anila Ali, a Pakistani-born US citizen living in Washington, DC, responded to growing criticism from Pakistanis, some of whom questioned who was actually behind the visit. She said the goal of the visit was to seek truth and to reconcile Muslims and Jews.

“(The president) of Israel received us warmly, and the people of Israel opened up their hearts and homes to us and they knew that we were Muslims and they knew that we were Pakistanis,” she said, adding that Israelis knew that members of her delegation included Sikhs and Christians, and they were still

Pakistan is among the countries that have no diplomatic relations with Israel because of the lingering issue of Palestinian statehood, and Pakistan says no delegation from Pakistan visited Israel.

Ali said she led a 15-member delegation made of Pakistani expatriates to Israel earlier this month. She told The Associated Press that neither Pakistan’s government nor the US was behind the trip.

The state-run Pakistan Television took to Twitter on Monday to say it fired news anchor Ahmed Qureshi, who visited Israel in a “personal capacity.” Qureshi was part of the delegation that visited Israel with Ali, it said.

The visit was confirmed by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who said he received the Pakistani expatriates. He spoke about the visit at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, saying it “showed me the great change” taking place in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords.

The Abraham Accords refers to a series of diplomatic pacts brokered by the Trump administration in 2020 that normalized relations between Israel and four Arab countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Israel already had peace deals with Jordan and Egypt, with which it fought several wars.

Earlier this summer, Pakistani-American interfaith activist and former teacher Anila Ali led a historic delegation to Israel that brought together political leaders and influential Muslims and Jews to foster trust and develop relationships between the Abrahamic faiths. The trip was sponsored by Ali’s American Muslim and Multifaith Women Empowerment Council and the Israeli organization Sharaka, of which Ali is a board member.

Notably, the delegation included several Pakistani- and Bangladeshi-Americans, Sikhs, a Pakistani Jew, and two Pakistani journalists. Pakistan does not have diplomatic ties with Israel, and the Pakistani Television Corporation later fired one of the journalists, Ahmed Quraishi, even though he flew from the U.S. and accompanied the delegation in a personal capacity.

Ali recently spoke with ReligionUnplugged.com about the trip, the Women Empowerment Council and uniting Muslim women, her philosophy of diplomacy, bridge building and education to fight hate and bring peace; and addressing antisemitism among the Muslim community in the U.S. and Pakistan.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Isabella Meibauer: To start off, why did you found the American Muslim and Multifaith Women Empowerment Council?

Anila Ali: Let’s go back to 9/11. 9/11 put a lot of responsibility on Muslims like me — just regular mothers, teachers, engineers who had children in America. My kids were coming back from school saying who had called them a terrorist and asking where they and I were born. It was up to us to unite, to get out there and knock on our neighbors’ doors and say hey, I’m a Muslim, not a terrorist.

I started working with the Council of Pakistan American Affairs and the Muslim Public Affairs Council at that time. After a couple of years, I realized that these were male-dominated organizations. They did not represent my point of view. I’m a person who lives in America, who wants to embrace it and not live in a cocoon (limited to other Muslims). I want to know who everybody is, and I want people to know who we are. There was nobody who represented us like that.

These organizations would often tell me not to work with the Jews or the Christian right-wing. But I wanted to talk to the Christian right, I wanted to talk to conservatives, I wanted to talk to the liberals. Liberals know me and love me, but I want to talk to the people who don’t know me. They don’t like me, or they have a fear of the other because they don’t know me.

And the treatment that I was getting there, that I was not equal, was not OK with me. One time, a New York Times journalist was sitting with me (and a number of male Muslim leaders). She clearly wanted to talk to me also, but the men would tell me to go to the kitchen. One time, over an email chain with many recipients, one Muslim leader said to me, “Honey, you don’t wear a hijab, so you shouldn’t be at the interfaith meeting.” I asked him, “Where does it say in the Quran that I’m not a Muslim if I don’t wear a hijab? What you just said is not Islamic at all. You don’t know me, and I’m not your honey, so don’t be patronizing to me.” Only one man out of about 100 on the chain stood up for me. You can see the hidden bigotry in my community.

I took this very personally. I wanted to reclaim my religion from a man who does not represent me. He comes from another country. He does not represent the diversity of Islam. He does not include me. He does not speak for me. And this is what the American Muslim and Multifaith Women Empowerment Council grew from.

Having a Muslim women’s organization was very important. Once in the middle of the night, a woman found my number and called me because someone had thrown feces in her house. She was really scared, she didn’t know any English, and she was not educated. She called one of the Muslim organizations, but they didn’t even listen to her.

By that time, I had built relations with the law enforcement. I called the chief of counter terrorism at that time. The whole group of law enforcement people got together to take action on these types of hate crimes. That sort of gave me an impetus on organizing a very powerful Muslim women’s platform where these women knew that I kind of looked like them and I would help them.

The government at that time knew what an important role women play when it comes to countering extremism. A woman came up to me and said, “Please don’t tell anyone, but my daughter has all of these ideas. She’s going to a liberal university. And she is saying that she doesn’t like Jews and Israel and they’re the reason Muslims are going down. What do I do?”

At that time, a lot of Muslim organizations did not want to tackle the real issues. But women do. Because it’s our children. As a teacher, I want to make sure that our kids are swayed away from people and organizations that are harmful to our country, to our thinking and to our religion.

My board is now a group of women who help other women. We will be the voice that speaks out for these women who are coming from a very vulnerable place.

We needed to be stronger than the bigotry and unequal treatment, and the Women Empowerment Council was that platform.

Meibauer: How did this trip happen? How did you connect with Sharaka?

Ali: What we had been doing for the past 13 years in America as Muslim women was building bridges. At one point, we had received so many hate messages against our Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him). For the first time in my life, I felt bad. I was actually hurting inside, though I’ve always been positive, and I’ve fought hate with love. I reached out to my brothers at the American Defense League and the temple where we have our interfaith Iftar with the Jewish community. I said, “Rabbi, I need your help. This is the time when I want to express how I’m feeling. I want the women to talk about it. If I expose all of this hate, every Muslim is going to hurt. These are really serious allegations (against the Prophet) and against me.”

So, we held a town hall meeting. We poured our hearts out. And we realized that the best way to fight hate is to stand with communities that have suffered from it for 5,000 years.

We did town halls also at academic centers, such as at the University of California, Irvine, where I worked for 10 years doing conflict mediation between Muslim and Jewish students. There had been a complete collapse of relations between the Muslims and the Jewish students at UCI, Cal State and Fullerton and in the whole of California.

I would tell the students that people of Abrahamic faiths are our people. If you are a Muslim, you have to co-exist with everybody. All of this antisemitism is only going to hurt you and our community. Why? Because they are our natural allies, and it is against Islamic principles to say and do all of these things. Plus, it’s unconstitutional. It’s not what American values are about. You were included in America, so you need to include everyone else. This was my premise behind my work at campuses with DHS and with the FBI.

As the other women got know the Jewish communities, they agreed that they are our natural allies.

Several years ago, I went to Israel. I toured all of the Palestinian cities, Jenin being the most sensitive. I spoke to Palestinians. I spoke to Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, in Israel. I met with a presidential candidate in Gaza. He complained of the corruption of his own political party and politicians and of the Palestinian Authority. I was asked to go ask President Trump to give them more money. I saw a very different side of the conflict. What actually really stirred me to action was that I saw a lot of posters in Jenin advertising money to parents if they send their children for jihad. That hurt me. That completely changed my point of view.

I came back and I said, for Muslims, saving a life is saving humanity. That is the commandment of God. I want to save lives. I don’t care what life — if it’s Palestinian or Israeli or Pakistani or Hindu, I want to save lives.

And the only way toward a path of peace is diplomacy. It’s going to be you and me talking. It’s going to be us talking to the other. We’re going to build peace. We are going to be the next generation of Muslim women peacebuilders.

I’m not saying the path to peace is easy. There are obstacles, such as the killing of the journalist (Shireen Abu Akleh). We are going to have to be steadfast in our desire to have peace. God knows, every time there is a life lost, it tells me that I need to work harder, that I need to make sure that we, as women peacebuilders, are doing our job. Yes, Israel will have to compromise. Palestine will have to compromise. But if they want children to stop dying, they will have to come to the table.

It’s time to save our future generations that are being poisoned with hate for Jewish people and for Judaism and for the state of Israel.

Even two days ago, one of my interns told me that after she shared a post of my trip to Israel, her friends called her and said that Israelis are the worst people. These are middle and high school kids that are being indoctrinated to hate not only one nation but to hate an entire faith community.

One of the Pakistani members of our trip told me that he was always told that Jews have horns on their heads, that Israelis are bad people. He told me how grateful he was to be able to go on this trip and check his biases.

To think that for the duration of their lives, the Pakistanis on the trip were told that Jews are bad people and taught that a small country was about to take the rest of the world over.

A former Pakistani minister, Shireen Mazari, got a hold of my picture with a woman politician (Maryam Nawaz Sharif) who I had met in Pakistan, whose party happened to be the one that deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party. I had seen a picture of Sharif with the top clergy in Pakistan sitting behind her. I looked at that picture, and I said I wish that my clergy in America would sit like that and support me. What an amazing thing it would be for Muslim clergy to stand with Muslim sisters who are building peace!

I want American clergy to include me in every conversation. I have a different point of view. I’m different. I don’t wear a hijab. More than 50% of Muslim women don’t wear a hijab. Nike wants to represent Muslims, so they portray the hijabi girl. But my daughter played basketball, and she doesn’t wear a hijab. Why isn’t she represented? That is hurting us. The stereotyping of putting Muslims in a monolithic box, saying that we’re Democrats. But we’re Republicans too. We’re independent thinkers. Don’t do a disservice to us. We’re of all sorts. We’re intelligent people.

I shared my picture with Maryam Nawaz Sharif because I was admiring a rising Muslim woman in a nuclear Muslim nation — Pakistan. Mazari, who is so highly educated herself, unfortunately used that against me to create this kind of vitriol. Hamas tweets against me, and people are doing fatwas that I am an agent of Israel and America. I’m telling all of them one thing: “I’m an agent of peace, and you go deal with it. If you can’t deal with it, you have no right to be in public service. We expect you to be honest, to be forward thinkers, and to have integrity. I feel that that does so much disservice to the cause for Pakistanis.”

But there is always a silver lining, which is that I have so many messages from people, young people in Pakistan, asking me to help them to get water technology or jobs from Israel.

Meibauer: How did you coordinate the safe passages of Pakistani Jew Fischel BenKhald and Ahmed Qureshi? Was it difficult for them to enter Israel?

Ali: The Pakistanis were welcome all the way. I want to see more Pakistanis and more Muslims traveling to Israel. I feel like I’m a travel agent now because many young people from Pakistan are asking me to take them to Israel. There is a big interest in academia to go to Israel, especially from agricultural universities.

Sudan is going to be able to grow vegetables for its people because it collaborated with Israel. Pakistan is going to be food insecure by 2050. By rejecting diplomacy with Israel, Pakistan is forgetting that Turkey has diplomatic ties with Israel, and Pakistanis love Turkey. Egypt has diplomatic ties — they have to improve, but they do have ties. This is not an abnormal thing. It’s a new normal. It’s best for Pakistan to think about its own people.

In Tharparkar (Pakistan) where I have schools, there is no hygiene, no electricity. They live in the most dire conditions. What can I take from Israel and give to these people living in dire poverty? I want to give them water and food (via Israeli irrigation technology). That’s my personal motivation.

The toughest thing with getting into Masjid Al-Aqsa and the Muslim Quarters was when they asked one of our team to recite the Quran. At Al-Aqsa, I spoke to a man there. I said that the fact that you aren’t believing that I’m a Muslim and asking me to recite from the Quran — that is compulsion. Islam says no compulsion. He said that he didn’t know if I was a Muslim. I said, “Allah knows; you don’t need to know. I’m here in a place of worship, which the caliph of Islam, Umar, had said must be a place of all faiths. You aren’t allowing my Sikh friends, or Jews to come.” But he was not happy. He told one of the other team members to tell me to shut up or I’m not allowed to come in.

But the feeling of going into the Church of the Sepulcher and the Wailing Wall (also called the Western Wall) is so welcoming. No one stops you. We even met the Hindu irrigation minister from India at the Wailing Wall. I talked to him, and I said, “Brother, you are here in a Jewish holy place; I’m a Muslim in a Jewish holy place. I hope that you will go back and tell your politicians that we want to come to India, and we want to build peace. We want to finish this hate we have between us. We are all one human race. Just like I am here, I want to do the same for you. I want to come to India and change the way people think about us.”

Meibauer: Your trip coincided with the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. According to your Twitter post on May 21, you wrote that “the funeral happened, we didn’t feel or see fear.” Do you believe that the news coverage of her funeral was inflammatory?

Ali: That day, we were in Jerusalem. We got messages from friends in the U.S. about her death. Because we did not see it, we did not feel (any tension). The day of the funeral as well, concerned people in the U.S. kept asking us if we were okay. It was very safe there, and we walked the streets. We did not see anything to report. I’m not the only one. My board members are on record as saying that we didn’t see or hear anything.

I think that it’s important to not take one incident but to look at the bigger picture. I immediately sent a tweet out for my sympathies that this shouldn’t have happened.

The death of the journalist is very close to me because my father was a journalist. He started the first news agency in Pakistan, and he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor for 20 years. For me, it’s very important that journalists have the freedom to speak, but I think that journalism has a sense of responsibility. They can make peace, or they can break peace. They can help spread vitriol, or they can help spread peace. I think this journalist, by being there, was trying to see both sides, just like so many journalists have perished telling the truth.

At the same time, there are news agencies and outlets that sensationalize, that work on spreading hate, misinformation and propaganda. I felt that there was propaganda in that news. She was caught in the crossfire, and I think that that is exactly the reason why we have to stop this violence. It should not be happening in a mosque. A mosque is a sacred place.

Jerusalem has to be remembered as a place where people come together. It cannot be a place where people are divided and killing. That has to stop.

Isabella Meibauer is a freelance writer with a focus on South and Southeast Asia. She holds a degree in religion from The King’s College in New York City.

“This was an amazing experience because we haven’t had a group of Pakistani leaders in Israel ever in such scope, and that all stemmed from the Abraham Accords, meaning Jew and Muslim can dwell together in the region,” he said.

Ali told the AP that there was no truth to remarks by Pakistani opposition leader Imran Khan in a speech at a rally Sunday, in which he said a Pakistani delegation had gone to Israel. Khan also alleged, without providing evidence, that the current rulers in Pakistan “are going to recognize Israel.”

“We have no intentions of speaking for the Pakistani government, whether to normalize relations with Israel or not,” Ali said. “The matter is between the Israeli government and Pakistan.”

For Israel, while the delegation was small and did not involve Pakistani officials, it marked somewhat of a milestone in its relations with Pakistan, coming after other Muslim states have changed course and agreed to normalize ties with Israel. That’s despite Israel’s continuing occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

For decades, the Palestinians counted on a wall of support from Arab and Muslim states for its cause, as a way to exert leverage on Israel so that it might make concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for recognition by those Muslim allies.

But after the Abraham Accords, that wall of support crumbled, perhaps paving the way in the future for other countries to take the same step.

Israel and Pakistan have made overtures to each other in the past, most notably when the country’s foreign ministers met in Istanbul in 2005 following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Though the two countries have participated in joint military exercises sponsored by their shared ally, the United States, including one earlier this year. But there hasn’t been any major public push to bring the countries closer, even as Israel has tightened ties in recent years with India.

Herzog’s office did not release an official statement about the meeting, but rather retweeted one of the participants. The visit appeared to go under the radar in Israel, with few media covering it and those that did doing so belatedly.