Indian Muslims Follow Sufism Which Inhibits Them from Joining Salafi-Wahhabism
By
Adil Rasheed
7
September, 2020
The mystery
behind the very few Indian names appearing in the long list of foreign fighters
in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has puzzled strategic thinkers
for some time now. This pleasant yet inexplicable surprise finds a historical
precedent in the conspicuous absence of Indians from the legions of foreign
‘mujahideen’ fighting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s and
from the Taliban and al Qaeda’s ‘Islamic Emirate’ of the 1990s. One of the
reasons for the non-existent mujahideen from India could be that unlike some West
Asian states then, India never had disposable radicals at home, nor would it
ever pursue a policy of conveniently banishing them to foreign war theatres.
Salafism & Wahhabism Promotes Radicalism Indirectly!!! - Yasir Qadhi
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Thus, the
apparent apathy of the Indian Muslims towards the ISIS’ impassioned
exhortations for global jihad is not a recent and isolated instance. It can
also be viewed as the community’s continuing rejection of the so-called global
jihad, since the time it rose to prominence in the Afghanistan-Pakistan
(Af-Pak) region four decades ago.
Yet,
barring a handful of perceptive articles and a few ‘kumbaya’ panegyrics that
sing the praises of ‘the peace-loving’ Indian Muslim and a ‘cohesive Indian
socio-political milieu’, strategic experts have not presented even a modicum of
seriously researched or insightfully argued propositions (some of which will be
discussed ahead) to explain this conundrum. This issue brief surveys some of
the propositions and ideas published in journals or magazines or being aired in
various seminars and conferences held on the subject of terrorism or
radicalisation in India.
How can a
country with the third-largest Muslim population in the world, which was
partitioned over the issue of Islamism; has had a history of communal violence
since independence; suffered a spate of terror attacks by homegrown and
Pakistan-backed terrorists in recent decades; witnesses a continuing insurgency
in the Muslim-majority Kashmir; and whose polity is still deeply divided over
the Muslim question produce fewer adherents of ISIS and al Qaeda than many
Western states having a much smaller Muslim population? The inability to find
any clear answer or a set of answers to this question has led to the subject
being dismissed as an irrelevant ‘non-issue’ or an academic red herring of
little consequence. Some would argue that the Indian strategic community should
consider even the relatively ‘few’ al Qaeda and ISIS cases as ‘too many’, given
the danger a handful of terrorists can pose to national security.
However,
such questioning in this instance is significant because it calls for the
identification of those mysterious elements that promote immunity within the
Indian society that hinder the spread of the global jihadist contagion.
Counter-terrorism and security experts need to be aware of inhibiting factors
that protect the Indian society from the menace of transnational terrorism
which has spread to different parts of the world.
Many of the
prevailing propositions and explanations are mostly speculative (albeit backed
by some historical and statistical evidence) because the premise of the subject
makes it difficult to be verified through empirical research. Even the most
plausible of them only partially explain some of the reasons behind this
phenomenon.
The Few
Bad Eggs
It is
interesting to note that out of India’s population of over 172.2 million
Muslims (constituting 14.23 per cent of the Indian population), less than a 100
migrants (in several batches) are thought to have left for the ISIS territories
in Syria and Afghanistan, while 155 were arrested until last year for having
ISIS links.
These
numbers constitute less than one per cent of the over 30,000 fighters from at
least 85 countries who joined the so-called ISIS Caliphate by December 2015, a
count that reportedly swelled to around 40,000 in the following years. The
number of recruits from India was much less than that of the European Union
(EU), from where between 3,922 and 4,294 foreign fighters joined the ranks of
the ISIS Caliphate by 2016. A breakdown of foreign fighters from the EU shows
that over 1,700 of them came from France, 760 from Germany, an almost equal
number from the United Kingdom (UK), and around 470 from Belgium. The numbers
from Russia stood at above 2,500, while the tally from the former Soviet
Republics exceeded 7,000 as early as 2015. In fact, Indian migrants to ISIS are
even fewer than that of the Maldives (173), a country having a population of
less than 400,000 people.
The
‘Peaceful Indian Muslim’
Many
well-meaning Indian politicians and Muslim leaders often vociferously state
that Indian Muslims are peaceful citizens, who, unlike their co-religionists in
other parts of the world, have embraced the pluralistic ethos and culture of
India and have moderated the radical zeal and ardour of their faith to live
peacefully and harmoniously with other communities in the country.
According
to former diplomat Talmiz Ahmad: “The rejection of extremist doctrine and
action by Indian Muslims results from India’s unique syncretic traditions that
have fostered an extraordinarily pluralistic culture.” Similarly, Manu Joseph,
in his insightful article published in March 2019, states: “At the first sign
of suspicious outsiders or activities, the local Muslims alert the police.
India has faced very few terror attacks, not in spite of its Muslims but
because of them.”
To David
Heyman, former United States Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security, the
moderation of the Indian Muslim is reflective of the great Indian identity
cherished by all its citizens. He states: “India was born a multicultural,
multi-ethnic, multi-denominational society that embraces that diversity.”
These
laudable claims are difficult to contest for any Indian, who lives and breathes
in the common and composite cultural air of the country every day. However,
this is not a rigorous explanation; moreover, it makes convenient and sweeping
generalisations about the Indian Muslim community. It does not anticipate a
response to any obvious questions that might be raised against the proposition.
For one,
the explanation could have acknowledged and addressed the fact that the Indian
Muslim community is not entirely peaceful and has always had its fair share of
radical elements that have been involved in communal riots and terrorist
attacks. Though not many, homegrown terror groups such as the Indian
Mujahideen, Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Base Movement (not
to mention several Kashmiri secessionist groups) have posed a security threat.
The community is also known for having its share of firebrand leaders, some of
whom have even been jailed for making incendiary hate speeches. Many
Pakistan-based terrorist groups have exploited vulnerable members of the
community to carry out major terrorist attacks such as the Bombay blasts of
1993, Parliament attack of 2001, Mumbai terror attacks of 2008, etc.
Therefore,
the idea that the Indian Muslim community is peaceful and has thus rejected al
Qaeda and ISIS does not appear entirely convincing. The real issue is that
despite the existence of several fundamentalist and radical elements, the
Indian Muslim community has so far avoided joining global jihadist groups in
large numbers, which remains an unanswered question.
Myth of
Sufi Islam vs Militant Salafism
A similar,
but slightly different explanation posits that the Indian Muslims mainly follow
Sufism, a peaceful strain of Islam, which inhibits them from joining its more
fundamentalist and militant antithesis, namely Salafi-Wahhabism. It is argued
that Sunni terrorism in the world is mainly led by Salafi jihadist
organisations like al Qaeda and ISIS, barring a few Hanafi-Deobandi groups like
the Taliban and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In this
regard, noted historian Romila Thapar states that “Sufi teachers played a
central role in the interaction with Bhakti sects and gave Indians a unique
belief-system. This consisted of teachers who, brought up either as Hindus or
Muslims, gave up the formal tenets and rituals of their faith and propounded
devotion to a personal god, while emphasizing social ethics, social equality
and tolerance. This was faith of most Indians, Hindus and Muslims, for 500
years.”
There is no
doubt that Sufism has helped cultivate a syncretic ethos in the Indian society,
but the claim that Indian Hindus or Muslims have given up their formal
religious tenets, dogma or rituals for the sake of a collective faith is
untrue. It is also not correct to assert that Muslims in India exclusively follow
the Sufi school of Islam, nor is there any merit in the idea of viewing the
Deobandi, Ahl-e-Hadeeth or even Salafi beliefs as problematic vis-à-vis a
supposedly benign Sufism. It is important to note that even the founding
ideologues of Salafism such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ahmad Shah Sirhindi were
practitioners of Sufism, although they criticised the scholasticism of some
Sufi orders.
Besides,
many adherents of Sufism have been known to indulge in acts of violent
extremism over the ages. For instance, the Sufi group named Army of the Men of
the Naqshabandi Order (JRTN) led by former Saddam Hussain loyalist Izzat Al
Dourri colluded with ISIS in fighting the current Iraqi dispensation.
Similarly, it is mainly the Sufi Barelvi adherents who persecute and even kill
Pakistani Christians on the charge of making blasphemous remarks. Undoubtedly,
Sufism teaches peace and universalism but the existence of Christian and
Buddhist militant groups goes a long way to prove that extremist violence can
be perpetrated even by followers of largely non-violent religions or
ideologies.
As for
Salafism, the movement is too broad and means different things to different
people. Many Salafis of northern Africa follow the teachings of the founder
(Jamaluddin Afghani) to embrace Western rationalism and enlightenment. The
overwhelmingly large majority of Salafi-Wahhabis in West Asia are known as
‘Quietists’ because of their belief in eschewing politics and violence which
they view as ‘spiritually corrupting influence’. The predominantly Salafi-Wahhabi
states of the Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and
Qatar, are home to millions of Indian and foreign expatriates of various
religious denominations, which shows the moderate face of Salafi-Wahhabism.
When it
comes to non-Muslim places of worship, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
states are not better or worse than Shiite Iran or Sunni Hanafi Turkey. Still,
Ibadism-dominated Oman (a school of Islam having strong theological affinities
with Wahhabism) has several Hindu temples, most notably the over
hundred-year-old Shiva temple in Muscat. In the UAE, the grand BAPS Shri
Swaminarayan Mandir is being built in Abu Dhabi, which will be the second Hindu
temple in that country after the Shiva-Krishna Mandir in Dubai. Thus, the fact
that al Qaeda and ISIS have come from a virulent offshoot of Salafism does not
make Salafi-Wahhabi a problematic community in and of itself. Thus, the false
binary of ‘peaceable Sufi versus militant Salafi’ does not make for an informed
discussion, nor does it help answer the apparent Indian Muslim revulsion to
global jihadism.
Poverty
and Fear Factor
Some
counter-terrorism scholars, namely Kabir Taneja of the Observer Research
Foundation (ORF) and Mohammed Sinan Siyech of the Rajaratnam School of International
Studies (RSIS), have presented a more thought-provoking explanation over why
Indian Muslims have refrained from joining global jihadist groups such as al
Qaeda and ISIS.
They make
the case that Indian migration to the former ISIS-held territories in Syria and
Iraq did not happen in large numbers due to logistical problems. They claim
that Western migrants to the ISIS Caliphate could fly to Turkey with a passport
and easily obtain an air ticket. However, the less well-to-do Indian ISIS
enthusiast found the trip too expensive and the journey to the ISIS dystopia
too treacherous. Thus, Siyech states: “The passport ownership rate in India
stood at 5% in 2017, with Muslims (of whom more than 67% live in poverty)
plausibly comprising an even smaller group. For those few who undertook the
long process of obtaining a passport, the visa requirements to enter Turkey for
Indians were quite strenuous…Adding to this, the idea of travelling to a
foreign conflict-ridden land where Arabic (a non-India Muslim language) is
spoken without any combat training made it even easier for Muslims to stay
back.”
On the face
of it, this explanation appears plausible in that it presents a more realistic
reason for the fewer number of Indian fighters in the ISIS ranks and avoids the
speculative theorising of other propositions. However, it has its own
shortcomings. A large number of Indians work in Gulf countries and have become
quite adept at migrating to countries of West Asia. In fact, over 25,000
Indians currently live and work in Iraq, mainly in Erbil, the capital of the
northern region of Kurdistan, which was close to the territories held by ISIS
earlier.
In
addition, fighters from other South Asian countries would have also faced
somewhat similar economic and logistical hardships, yet migrants from Maldives
(which sent 173 migrants to ISIS), Bangladesh (40), Philippines (100), etc.,
turned up in much larger numbers at the gates of the ISIS proto-state.
Turf War
with Pakistan-Backed Groups
There is
also the argument that the Indian subcontinent has a plethora of old,
well-entrenched radical groups (such as Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-i-Taiba,
Hizbul Mujahideen, etc.) which new terror conglomerates like ISIS are finding
difficult to dislodge.
However,
this argument fails to explain the success of ISIS and al Qaeda in other parts
of the Muslim world, such as in Africa and Southeast Asia, which have also seen
homegrown terrorism for a long time. Even when al Qaeda and the Taliban were
ruling the roost in Afghanistan in the 1990s, they could hardly intervene in
India. It is also noteworthy that while ISIS has found a strong base in
Afghanistan, in spite of its arch-rival Taliban’s pre-existing presence, it
struggles to find any organisational footing in India.
Here, the
superlative performance of Indian security agencies cannot be praised enough
for maintaining constant vigil, for always being ahead of the curve in foiling
attacks of global jihadist groups against the country. However, highly
effective surveillance and prevention measures alone cannot explain the limited
resonance and traction for their call among Indian Muslims.
Traditional
Indian social and family values have also been viewed as an inhibiting factor,
yet similar societies in the subcontinent—like in Maldives and Bangladesh—did
not show equal resilience to the ISIS message.
Idea of
Islamic State Not New to Indian Muslim
This issue
brief presents a few explanations of its own to advance the ongoing debate,
without making any claims of having found the proverbial “silver bullet” as a
solution. The first proposition is that the West Asian Islamism does not appear
as revolutionary a phenomenon to the Indian Muslim mind as it might to other
Islamic communities around the world. For example, the idea of creating an
Islamic state is something Indian Muslims have already dealt with and suffered
the consequences of, with many families splitting up due to the creation of the
now failing Islamic state of Pakistan. Therefore, any proposal for a new
experiment in Islamism, whether by the brutally repressive Taliban or the
terrorist proto-state of ISIS, fails to enthuse the Indian Muslim’s
imagination.
The call
for restituting the Caliphate also does not appeal to most Indian Muslims. This
is because Indian Muslim rulers never paid allegiance to any West Asian caliph,
nor did they send their forces to foreign lands to fight for the glory of
Islam. The replacement of Persian and Arabic languages in Indian courts with
English and Indian vernacular languages as well as the flowering of Urdu
literature has further reduced India’s social and cultural links with West
Asia.
Therefore,
Indian Muslims developed their own distinctive theological schools like
Deobandi and Barelvi and their own fundamentalist movements like the Tabligh
Jamaat and Jamaat-e-Islami. Unlike other parts of the Muslim world, spanning
North Africa to Southeast Asia, that have remained under the theological and
cultural influence of Arabia, India has been able to develop its own versions
of Islam and holds its own against West Asian influences.
Even
radical and extremist Islamic movements such as Abul Ala Maududi’s
Jamaat-e-Islami were not subsumed by Islamist groups like the Muslim
Brotherhood. In fact, Hasan Al Banna and Sayyid Qutb — the early ideologues of
the Muslim Brotherhood — acknowledged the formative impact of Maududi’s
political Islam on their intellect and in support of Jamaat-e-Islami, and yet
the organisation has no branch in the Indian subcontinent to date.
In sum,
Indian Muslims, both of the extremist and moderate kind, are comfortable in
their own skins and barring a few exceptions in Kashmir and Kerala do not feel
the need for any foreign interference in their religious, political and social
affairs.
Muslim
Clerics Declare India ‘Dar Al Aman’
For a long
time, India did not figure prominently in the grand schemes of al Qaeda and
ISIS because radical Salafi-jihadist ideologues consider India Muslims weak of
will and bereft of religious ardour. For several centuries, radical leaders of
West Asia have looked down upon Indian Muslims for having failed to fully
Islamise the Indian subcontinent. In fact, the Mongol marauder Timur invaded
India on the excuse of punishing Indian Muslim sultans for showing excessive
tolerance toward their Hindu subjects, a sentiment shared by many religious
extremists in West Asia to this day. Thus, even among the list of non-Arab
Muslims (pejoratively called Ajami or ‘mute’) Indians feature below Turks and
Iranians. Areeb Majeed, a young Indian Muslim who returned after joining ISIS in
Syria, speaks of how ISIS made him and his other Indian compatriots do menial
jobs like cleaning the toilet and providing water to soldiers and never trained
them to go to war.
It is
noteworthy that the Salafi-Wahhabi movement is said to have risen in opposition
to the independent reasoning and analogous interpretations (Ijtihad and Qiyas)
of the Hanafi and Shafai schools of Sunni jurisprudence, to which an
overwhelmingly large majority of Indian Muslims subscribe. Many fundamentalist
Salafi-Wahhabi ideologues even consider the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam (which
include both the Indian Deobandi and Barelvi schools) to be heretical because
of their ‘strict adherence’ (Taqleed) of Imam Abu Haneefa’s
jurisprudence. This Salafi-Hanafi divide was the main reason for al Qaeda
hard-liners like Abu Qatada and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi to oppose the
Hanafi-Deobandi Taliban’s emirate as ‘Islamic’ in the 1990s, and this doctrinal
divide remains the principal reason for Salafi ISIS to oppose Taliban to this
day.
In addition
to doctrinal issues, Salafi jihadists dislike Indian Muslims for having
embraced citizenship of a secular nation and to have refused Shariah-based
governance since medieval times. For this reason, ISIS equates Indian Muslims
with their favourite hate term ‘Murjiah’, an extinct Muslim sect that refused
to detest people on the basis of their faith.
This brings
us to this issue brief’s second explanation that the Indian clerical movements
led by Darul Uloom Deoband, the Sufi as well as Barelvi schools hold strong
sway over the behaviour of Indian Muslims. In March 2009, Darul Uloom Deoband
issued a fatwa declaring India as ‘Dar Al Aman’ (land of peace), where
militant jihad is prohibited. Similarly, a joint fatwa was issued by 70,000
Indian Muslim scholars against ISIS, Taliban, al Qaeda and other terrorist
groups in 2015, which has helped in refraining a large number of Indian Muslims
from joining the ranks of global jihadist terror groups.
Indian
Inclusiveness an Antidote To ISIS
It should
also be noted here that violent extremism and terrorism fester in an
environment of repression and exclusion. West Asian polities, where dissent is
often quashed, find expression only in violent outbursts and so the region
suffers most from jihadist violence than any other part of the world.
The third
explanation is that violent extremism does not thrive on the Indian soil for
long. Here, the bearded Indian Muslim man and burqa-clad women freely walk the
bazaars of Indian towns and villages, just as the naked Digambar Jain or the
turbaned Sikh feel equally at home and remain proud of their religious and
national identities.
Thus,
Muslims find their identity and place in India, which even the liberal West
does not openly accord to its increasingly diverse population in that it
expects all communities to assimilate and imbibe Western values and ways of
life. India’s democratic polity and eclectic demographic allows even homegrown
fundamentalist groups to live and express themselves, which inhibits the rise of
exclusivist and violently extreme groups like ISIS and al Qaeda to fester. The
cost-benefit analyses of such terror mercenaries do not add up here and even a
few misadventures fail to give the big returns that these groups find
elsewhere.
Thus, the
non-dualist (Advaita) celebration of opposites rolls on and even the absolutist
elements are swept up in the cosmic sweep of the great Indian juggernaut.
Original
Headline: Why fewer Indians have joined ISIS
Source: The Print
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/indian-muslims-follow-sufism-inhibits/d/122827
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