Faith, Fury and a Poet: Why Javed Akhtar’s Critics Miss the Point

In a sociological sense, if not a biologist, Javed Akhtar is the Richard Dawkins of India. Being a poet and an acclaimed Bollywood lyricist affords him a sharp mind to detect and roast termites eating through the fabric of cultures and religions of India. Akhtar’s crime is that in viral reels, he has, like Christopher Hitchens, declared that God is not Great, setting fire to the feet of the Islamic clerics of Kolkata to think that their all-powerful God cannot defend himself.

Akhtar was invited to preside over a mushaira (Urdu poetry recitation session) organized by the West Bengal Urdu Academy (WBUA) in Kolkata on September 1, 2025. The event was sponsored by the Minority Affairs and Madrasah Education Department of the government of West Bengal. Being a poet and a pillar of Urdu literature, Akhtar is supremely qualified to grace such an event. But in order to defend God, the clerics wrote to the academy to cancel the event. Their worry: the greatest God will be left defenseless.

Writers, poets, playwrights, artists, or intellectuals, or prophets, look at the society in which they live, critically examine its social mores and ideas, and because of this reason they become outsiders in their social midst. Prophet Muhammad too questioned the beliefs and social ethos of the Meccan society in which he lived, was criticized, ridiculed and hounded by the Quraysh tribesmen, and became an outsider in it. Very soon, he was banished from Mecca, much like Taslima Nasreen was banished from Kolkata, the City of Joy that once radiated a global outlook. The challenge before the clerics of Kolkata is to defend the God from a poet, who appears to be more powerful.

In a reel shared on Instagram, Akhtar challenges the widely-held belief about god: “So if no leaf shakes without his will and he is seeing everything, and the religious people also go to temples, mosques and churches, and pray too that their son get a job, their daughter get married, then it means that he also interferes in day-to-day life. Then the injustice that exists in the world, there are hunger, diseases, hopelessness, rapes, killings in the world, these are happening in front of him, and he can stop them if he wants, but he allows them to happen.”

In the next sentence, Akhtar questions the Islamic belief that Allah will ask us, on the Day of Judgment, about our deeds: “He will ask me, he will have the audacity to ask what I did in the material world. I will ask him, What did you do? The small kids who died in Tsunami, the elderly men and women who died, you could have saved them. When a small six-month-old kid is afflicted by diphtheria, his respiratory tube is blocked by a membrane, he turns blue, dies by suffocation. You were seeing this; these hundreds of thousands of kids who die by diphtheria, could you not have cleared the blockage in their throats?”

Everyone has their own idea of god. At an event in Delhi, the great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkins was asked if he believed there is god. He said something to this effect: Even if he is there, the universe is so vast that he would not know in which part of it he is. British philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked this question, and he said if he met god, he would ask: My Lord, why did you not give enough evidence of it? “Many people ask me, why are you an atheist,” Akhtar says in a YouTube clip and responds, “My very simple answer is: Because I think.” The problem is that the clerics of Kolkata think that they know more than even the most educated people in the world.

Akhtar, who survived the streets of Mumbai sometimes on empty stomach, sees facts in their basics, is not a critic of Islam. Driven by universal values about basic human rights and a deep desire to nurse the independent dignity of reason, the Bollywood lyricist is a critic of culture and often exposes meaningless layers of our received thinking. In his worldview, every individual must be willing to shed, like a snake does, their cultural skin in order to live a newer life and be the man Ayn Rand would love, becoming the architect of a new civilization.

Ayn Rand’s man invents how to make wheat hospitable and grow it for us, not the farmer who merely imitates the method of cultivation. Akhtar’s man is the one who reinvents himself and propels the civilization further forward. His views are not limited to questioning religions. He interrogates the very nature of ideas and their uses for our times, and he does so at a very popular level on social media, or at events. As the water starts to heat up, the frogs of Kolkata sense that the onset of the burn. At this point, they have the option to shed their skin and build a new civilization for Muslims, and for all.

In a viral Instagram reel, Akhtar questions the commonly held view that your children carry forward your family’s name through the institution of marriage. Akhtar tells an audience: “That is not going to happen, I promise. Marriage is such an important thing for people (who say): our family’s name will last… Your legacy is not carried forward by your children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren. Your name is recognized by your work. Do you know the name of the father of Thomas Edison who invented bulb, who invented gramophone…?” As a society, we should celebrate such a man who is determined to give a new meaning to our lives.

The clerics who signed the letter include Qari Fazlur Rehman, Hafiz Abdur Razzaq Naqshbandi, Maulana Zahoor Alam Usmani, Maulana Musharraf Ali Qasmi, Maulana Ziauddin Qasmi, Mufti Abdus Saeed, Maulana Makaram Ahsan Qasim, Qari Abdur Rehman Ishaati, Maulana Rehan Qasmi, Mufti Khalil Kausar Qasmi, Qari Said Nazar, Maulana Mansoor Hussain Mazahri, and Malana Aamir Zafar. The letter is formally signed by Zillur Rehman Arif, general secretary of the Jamiat Ulema Kolkta, a branch of Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind. For more than a thousand years, at least since the Golden Age of Islam, their cousins have failed to uplift Muslims.

In a clip shared by ANI, Zillur Rehman Arif said: “Javed Akhtar has spoken a lot of nonsense against Islam, against Muslims, and against Allah. This person is not a human but a devil in human guise.” In their collective letter to WBUA, the clerics, who cannot easily pass a grade eight exam, wrote: “There are many litterateurs, poets, journalists and servants of Urdu who are more deserving of this position [to be the chief guest]. Then, it is an intolerable act to invite such a person who is not only himself apathetic about religion, but rather he is guilty of dishonoring the religion and committing blasphemy against the creator of the universe.

“Therefore, it is an earnest appeal from the Jamiat Ulema that this person be stopped from participating in this program, and in his place a credible and deserving personality be invited, whichever religion they might belong to. But such a person who is the blasphemer of god is not tolerable for us and if attention was not paid to our requests, then we will be forced to adopt alternative means prevalent in democracy.” Like the Quraysh tribesmen threatened Prophet Muhammad, the clerics explicitly threatened to take law into their own hands, stating in the letter: “Before this, the Jamiat Ulama had forced Taslim Nasreen to leave Bengal for committing blasphemy against the honor of the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him.”

Javed Akhtar is indeed known for irreverent views but having worked in film industry for several decades as a lyricist, dialogue writer, filmmaker, poet, he is eminently qualified to grace the poetry session, which was part of a wider program to discuss “The Role of Urdu in Hindi Films.” Given the fact Urdu academies, or departments of Urdu, Persian and Arabic in our universities, have become cubicles of ignorance and orthodoxy, the WBUA was right to invite Akhtar to preside over the mushaira. The fact that it cancelled the event under the clergy’s pressure is worrying. There is no culture of free speech among Muslims, but poetry is one medium through which Muslims still do speak. The clerics’ role must remain within the walls of mosques, their incursion into literary events is a threat to civilization, they must not be allowed to be creators of diphtheria.

Bollywoodfreedom of expressionIndian cinemaIslamic clericsIslamistsJaved Akhtarmosques