Two Muslims Meet At A Debate

This evening, I had the pleasure of listening to the debate organised by the YouTube channel, Lallantop, between Javed Akhtar and MuftiShamail Nadvi. I was not surprised to learn that the public declared Nadvi to have been the winner, as I thought this would be the case as I listened even though, for me, it was Akhtar who won each and every point in the debate.

Before getting into the res, I will say that I was immensely gratified by the very idea and form of the entire debate, especially with Nadvi's making a brilliant and unexpectedly secular opening. He did not refer to the Quran or any sacred matter at all. Instead, he made his case in logical terms, that were strictly confined to the terrain of philosophy and epistemology.

I found this to be gratifying, however, not as an answer to the topic of the debate – 'Does God Exist?' - but as a well-wisher of the Muslim community. To see a bearded young Muslim theologian speak in the language of the Greek philosophers, and in a tone of dispassionate objectivity, is a great thing for the world to see at this juncture when we are riddled everywhere with prejudice against Muslims.

Nadvi has performed a great service to the Muslim community in India, and to humanity in general, by cultivating the skills that were so glitteringly evident in his performance from the start to finish of the debate.

But Nadvi’s success in this manner of proving the existence of God, to me, proves the claim of Hinduism, that we live in the Black Age – the “Kalyug” - where goodness, that once walked on four legs, now hobbles on one. For it is only in the Kalyug, that even great, noble and redeeming ideas can be proven not by appealing to greatness and nobility, but to the very things that are the handmaidens of human folly and evil – shallowness, glib logic, and, most condemnable of all, evading moral responsibility.

Ironically, it was Javed Akhtar, who argued as a man of God throughout. Let me explain why I think so. Firstly, it was Akhtar, and not Nadvi, who couched his argument in moral terms. Morality was an issue that Nadvi evaded all along, only speaking of the idea of morality to make the logical but morally empty point that there cannot be morality without some idea of God. A God that can be explained in such amoral terms is, in my opinion, no God at all.

More importantly, it was Akhtar who showed himself to be truly the son of God, by appealing to nothing more or less than humanity in making his case. For me, this was the most touching and thought-provoking aspect of the whole debate. Akhtar began by putting it in the simplistic terms that atheists often do – ‘if there is a God, then why is there suffering’? I did not expect the discussion to go anywhere interesting from here. Nadvi responded by giving some equally anodyne response, that I have forgotten, that believers give to this question. 

But this is where something, perhaps God, spoke through Akhtar: ‘why does God let innocent children in Gaza be killed as they are being killed? Why does God listen to a father’s prayers for his son to find a job, to marry, to do all the things that life promises, while letting the children of Gaza be cut off before they can even begin to know life’; this, in sum, was his point.

It was now Nadvi’s turn to clutch at the straws that religions so conveniently lay out for us: "God’s purpose is not for us mere mortals to comprehend", quoth he. "Those children will be redeemed in heaven." "Life’s sufferings are God’s way of testing us" and "God made evil so that we may learn what good is."

Nadvi was rewarded with several rounds of applause from his Kalyug audience. And I was put in mind of my college days as a debator, where rhetoric and crafty logic always won the day. 

I was also reminded of the time a professor said of an essay that I had struggled over, that it is harder to write a good essay on a subject that one cares deeply about. And this is perhaps why Akhtar lost the debate.

But he only lost the debate as an exercise in semantics. On the substance, Akhtar was the winner all the way.

Because God is nothing if he is merely the abstraction of a First Cause or “Necessary Being”, to use Nadvi’s expression. Mathematics, physics, metaphysics and philosophy are peppered with such abstractions. If Nadvi has to reduce the idea of God to the level of negative integers, irreducible fractions, irrational numbers and the like to make his case, then he has proven nothing real or relevant about the idea of God as God. In fact, he has used sophistry to circumvent the question of God entirely.

Answering the question of why God permits suffering by pointing to His infinite and therefore unknowable wisdom is the theologian’s equivalent of what mathematicians have done by saying that one divided by zero is infinite or “not defined”. But while logicians use infinities to get away with imponderables, Akhtar is too sincere on the subject of God to make use of any such clever tricks.     

A First Cause, even if we accept that there is such a thing, presents no meaning for the Universe that it is said to have unfolded, and gives us no imperative to be moral beings. A Necessary Being, even if we were to find such a one, has nothing at all to do with good and evil. Nor will proving the existence of such a being tell us a single thing about the meaning or purpose of life, suffering, the Universe or anything.

The substantive question of God's existence cannot be answered by referring to Necessary Beings or “contingency”, as Nadvi put it. Akhtar was absolutely right to ask about suffering and meaning when questioning the existence of God, because for those who believe in God, it is not the First Cause or contingency which is the point, rather, it is the belief and faith, or for some, the instinct, that God elevates suffering, and provides meaning to the seeming arbitrariness and cruelty of life. 

Nadvi adroitly side-stepped all these issues, the only real issues, with semantics and polemics. If there is a God, then he spoke through Akhtar and not Nadvi at the debate.

The debate stopped here, and I congratulate the participants and the organisers for this well-conceived and thoughtful production. It was a telling and healing interjection in these fraught times.

But I hope that the conversation continues over everything that the debate left dangling. What is the meaning of suffering, and do we have to suffer to find meaning? These are questions for all of humanity, but they present themselves with especial urgency and poignancy to Muslims today all over the world. What is the meaning and purpose, not in heaven, but on this Earth, of the dead babies in Gaza?

As an Indian and a Hindu, I have some reflections that I will leave you with. I am at the moment going through a bit of a crisis in belief myself, looking at what is being done today in the name of Hinduism. I am seriously questioning the morality of continuing to participate in Hinduism, given what Hindus are doing. One of the things that is straining my relationship with Hinduism is the very destruction and disavowal by Hindus of the principles of Hinduism and other Indian belief-systems of the pre-Islamic period, that I found compelling and convincing in the theory, but absent in all the Hindu practice of today. 

But even though Hindus are busy discarding all this, maybe the rest of the world will find something worth mulling over in it. A recurring motif in Jain, Buddhist and Hindu lore is the emergence of a plea for peace and peaceful reconciliation after a long age of violence and conflict. Historically, we know that both the Buddha and Mahavira rose in an age of conflict to become prophets of peace.

“Live without hatred, even among those filled with hate toward you”, said the Buddha. “Defeat anger without anger, defeat bad conduct with good, defeat selfishness with generosity, and lies with the truth”: this is a teaching to be found in both Hindu and Buddhist literature. The Mahabharata bluntly and unambiguously denounces violence and fighting. It is a declaration of war against war, and gives no quarter to a fighting mentality or revenge of any kind. Not even to Draupadi - for all the injustices heaped upon Draupadi, her own sons are killed after the Pandavas won the war. I could say more, but these examples are sufficient to set one thinking.

Could it be that on the question of endemic conflict, Muslim society is at the juncture that the people of the time of Ajatashatru and Bimbisara found themselves 2000 years ago? While Hindus, on the other hand, are at the opposite end of the same arc?  

The other question is how to respond to injustice, to victimisation, and to suffering. As an individual, you cannot win. Not only is temporal justice hard to find, in the end you die; where is the justice in that? None at all. Neither is there any meaning in our mortality. This is why we all live as though we will never die.

However, I think that as a people, as a society, as a nation and as a civilisation, we can find meaning and redemption, and in this sense win, against suffering and injustice, here on this Earth. But we have to take this task into our own hands. There is no Necessary Being who will do it for us. This is what Javed Akhtar is doing, and we should all understand this, and start doing the same ourselves. I believe that this is what God is telling us to do, from New Delhi to Gaza:

“Kabey se, but-kadey se, to kabhi bazm-e-jaam se

Awaaz de raha hun tujhey, har mukam se.”

Suranya Aiyar

24 December 2025