By Ghazala Wahab
An excerpt from ‘Born a Muslim: Some Truths About
Islam in India’, by Ghazala Wahab.
Nizamuddin Auliya’s most famous disciple, the
poet Amir Khusro had read in a Hadith that South Asia was the
place where Adam descended to earth after being expelled from paradise. Azad
Bilgrami, a seventeenth-century Islamic scholar, described India as the
place where the eternal light of Muhammad first manifested in Adam, while
Arabia is where it found its final expression in the physical form of the
Prophet.
The Mughal emperor Akbar sponsored
caravans of pilgrims to Arabia for many years, but few commoners undertook
hajj. In any case, no Mughal emperor ever went for hajj. They patronised
the Sufi shrines, and the Sufis in turn accorded spiritual and moral legitimacy
to the emperors. On the strength of this legitimacy, Akbar assumed the position
of the leader of the faithful. Akbar even went as far as challenging the
Ottomans, who were the caretakers of the holy lands of Mecca and Medina, and
considered the leaders of the Islamic world at that time.
“In early September 1579, a group of theologians,
including the Shaikh ul-Islam, were pressured into signing a text
claiming for Akbar a special status of Padshah-i-Islam, beyond that even
of a Sultan-i-Adil…one of the epithets used for him was now Mujtahid,
as also Imam-i-Adil…Indeed, the challenge was directed in good measure
at the Ottomans, who had claimed superior status as the Khalifas of the
east, with their conquest of Egypt.”
In addition to challenging the Ottomans, Akbar
assumed these grand titles to keep the conservative ulema from
interfering in governance, especially in matters pertaining to the treatment of
non-Muslims.
Yet, despite this desire for the leadership of
the Muslim world, Muslim rulers in India worked towards greater synthesis
between Islam and Hinduism.
Of course, this was driven by pragmatism rather
than altruism, but the effect was that the two communities were able to not
only coexist in harmony but also developed several similar customs and
traditions.
The pinnacle of this collaboration was suhl-e-kul,
a new creed for universal peace and coexistence that Akbar propounded that
celebrated what he believed was common to all religions. Suhl-e-kul,
also referred to as Din-i-Ilahi, did not live on beyond Akbar’s reign,
but the idea of mutual respect and peaceful coexistence survived.
Even Aurangzeb, his zealousness notwithstanding,
did not disrupt the balance between the two communities and neither did his
successors. However, the most interesting aspect of this
six-and-half-century-long Muslim rule in India, which started with the founding
of the Slave Dynasty in 1206 CE. was that none declared India an Islamic state
and none ruled by Quranic law or Shariah.
Even as late as the nineteenth century, Muslim
rulers remained sensitive to the religious sensibilities of the Hindus. William
Dalrymple writes of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, that
“when a party of two hundred Muslims turned up at the Palace demanding to be
allowed to slaughter cows – holy to Hindus – at Id, Zafar told
them in a ‘decided and angry tone that the religion of the Mussalmen did
not depend upon the sacrifice of cows’.”
But in 1857, when the first war of Independence
against the British ended in ignominious defeat and the collapse of Muslim
power in India, coexistence came under attack.
Though the war was symbolically led by the last Mughal
emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, under whose “command” Hindus and Muslims fought
the British, the truth was that it was largely a Muslim–British affair, which
brutally ruptured the delicate balance between Hindus and Muslims that had
thrived for nearly seven centuries through mutual tolerance and economic
interdependence. Three possible factors worked in tandem to cause this breach.
One, though the sepoys rose against the
British quite spontaneously, irrespective of religion, once they were ensconced
in Delhi, the radical Muslims, the products of the Madrassa-e-Rahimiya,
saw an opportunity to reclaim Muslim power. As a result, fatwa were issued
declaring jihad against the British and likening the revolt to an Islamic war.
The debilitated Mughal court did not sense
the polarising impact of this call. After all, the early Mughals had
labelled their military campaigns jihad to motivate the soldiery. Incidentally,
even in today’s Indian Army, all pure regiments (as opposed to mixed regiments
like artillery or armoured) of the infantry have religious war cries. However,
in 1857, overt and frequent references to jihad led to unease amongst
non-Muslim sepoys.
Two, since the war was being waged in the name of
the Mughal emperor and with the hope of restoring Muslim power, Muslims
of all classes and status threw their weight behind the revolt, thereby
exposing themselves and their leanings. This was not the case amongst
non-Muslims, where the rich and upper castes either stayed away or covertly
supported the British, as they saw this as a war between the Muslim and the
British.
Three, the British were quick to sense this chasm
and worked to widen the rift. This was partly because of their own prejudice
borne of centuries of Crusades against the Muslims further fanned by the
Evangelical Christians in India; and partly from their own experiences with
Muslims in various continents, from North Africa to Asia in the nineteenth
century.
“From around the middle of the nineteenth
century,” Christopher de Bellaigue writes in The Islamic Enlightenment,
“when European colonial interests ran up against Muslim resistance from North
Africa to India, it is possible to say that a rolling agenda of conflicts
between an expanding Western imperium and the Muslims in its path became
inevitable. India’s subjugation by the British had produced a situation of
almost chronic religious revolt, of which the rebellion of 1857, or Indian
Mutiny, was a virulent spasm.”
In addition to the wholesale retributive killings
of the Muslims, the British fanned the narrative of Hindu victimhood of several
centuries.
This narrative continued to get more traction
over the years as several right-wing Hindu ideologues emerged from the embers
of 1857. The Hindus believed that the Muslims had finally got their comeuppance
after several centuries of ruling over them; the Muslims felt let down by their
leaders, cheated by their Hindu neighbours, and disillusioned by their faith.
They had believed the ulema who told them that, as in the historic
Battle of Badr, Allah would intervene to ensure their victory. And so as
a defeated people tend to do, they became despondent and inward-looking.
The ulema were quick to turn this to their
advantage. They claimed that while the Muslims’ cause was just, their faith was
weak. Hence, the faith needed to be strengthened. The growth and eventual rise
of Sunni Muslim sects like Deobandi and Barelvi were the
consequence of this new dependence of the ordinary Muslims on the ulema.
“By the turn of the century,” Bellaigue
writes, “the word ‘pan-Islamism’ had become a portmanteau term to explain the
political solidarity that seemed to extend across the Muslim lands in
opposition to imperialism. From Cambridge the late-Victorian scholar and Islamophile
EG Browne deprecated the term as unfairly connoting fanaticism. In his view, it
was certainly no more fanatical than Pan-Germanism, or Pan-Slavism, or
British Imperialism, and indeed, much less so, being, in the first place
defensive, and, in the second, based on the more rational ground of a common
faith, not on the less rational ground of a common race’.”
The responders in India to this supposed global
awakening were the religious scholars and ulema, who had assumed the
role of “rehnumah” or one who shows the way for the community. As a
result, ordinary Muslims started shrinking away from the national mainstream,
increasingly identifying with the idea of the global ummah.
Besides this development, one of the effects of
the 1857 revolt was the erosion of the economic and educational foundations of
the Muslims. This idea of lost glory and victimhood had a cascading effect on
their collective psyche leading to inertia and loss of hope – afflictions that
linger on in some way or the other even today.
...........
Original headline: Indian Islam: This book
examines how the world’s second-largest religion is practised in the country
Source: Scroll.In
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