Business Standard
Jihad in secular struggles
This book focuses on the call for jihad against the British by the Islamic clergy (mullahs) in the 19th and 20th centuries
COLONIALISM AND THE CALL TO JIHAD IN BRITISH INDIA
Tariq Hasan
Sage
232 pages; Rs 695
Modern historians have rightly focused attention on the study of colonialism, imperialism and the wars of expansion by Europe's rulers in Asia and Africa, the special victims of European greed. History also provides ample evidence that indigenous exploited societies resisted and violently opposed loot and plunder by colonial powers. This book focuses on the call for jihad against the British by the Islamic clergy (mullahs) in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Tariq Hasan explains that he has chosen this area of study because it is a relatively neglected field, largely ignored by mainstream scholars of Indian nationalism. It is a complex story with myriad issues; as the author writes, "In the Islamic world and in countries like India, where the followers of Islam were in sizeable numbers, a remarkable synthesis of anti-Colonialism, pan-Islamism and Indian nationalism were evolving."
Mr Hasan is conscious of the contradictions inherent in involving religious leaders in secular struggles and that jihad is considered equivalent to ruthless violence against all opponents of jihad, colonisers or otherwise. He clarifies at the outset that the literal meaning of the Arabic word jihad, is "striving for a worthy and enabling cause" though it "is commonly thought today to mean 'holy war' against non-Muslims."
This study contains a lot of useful information about mobilisation under mullahs during the Revolt of 1857, the Khilafat Movement and Partition.
In 1857, Ahmadullah Shah, maulvi of Faizabad and Sufi saint-turned-commander described by historian P J O Taylor as "one of the ablest leaders of the insurrection," played a pivotal role as Awadh was the epicentre of the Revolt. It should be clearly stated that the revolt brought Muslims and Hindus on the streets because Christian minorities were indulging in anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu activities. With the collapse of the Revolt and the declaration by Queen Victoria in 1858 that the Empress would not interfere in religious matters, a new chapter was opened in the history of India. Many mullahs who actively participated in the Revolt were perhaps fighting against Christians as a result of perceived deviations in religious practices imposed by British colonisers.
Thus, after 1858, many Islamic leaders actively involved themselves in the movement against British colonialism. This gained impetus during World War I, when the British fought the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Sultan was also the Caliph, the spiritual head of Islam and sacred for Muslims worldwide. Indian mullahs, therefore, equated the struggle against the colonisers as equivalent to the defence of the Caliphate.
This defence came to an abrupt end after World War I when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and Kamal Ataturk changed the story of Islam by dissolving the Caliphate and dragging the Republic of Turkey, the rump country that remained after the dismemberment of the empire, into the modern world. The only value of this story, as related by the author, is that the Hindu Raja Mahendra Pratap and Muslim Mullah Obaidullah Sindhi made every effort to persuade the Kaiser of Germany, Vladimir Lenin and the Amir of Afghanistan to jointly launch an anti-British struggle, but it failed to materialise.
The focus then shifted to India. Muslim mobilisation was organised around the Deoband School and the All India Khilafat Conference held in Delhi in 1919, a pan-Islamic struggle launched by Muslims of British India against the dissolution of the Caliphate. Mahatma Gandhi attempted to provide a joint platform for the leaders of the Khilafat movement with the non-cooperation movement against the British, launched in the 1920s.
It is ironic that Gandhi saw fit to construct a Hindu-Muslim unity platform by linking a secular struggle around a movement to save the Islamic Caliphate. When Gandhi called off the non-cooperation movement in 1922 following violence in Chauri Chaura, the Ali brothers, his staunch Khilafat movement supporters, felt betrayed. They withdrew from the struggle and became Gandhi's staunchest critics.
The Deoband School also split. One of its most respected leaders, the Islamic scholar Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani remained committed to the cause of Indian unity and against the creation of a separate Pakistan, while a faction of the Khilafat opted out of Madani's ideological platform of a composite culture. Madani, the main interlocutor for nationalist Muslims, offered a political formula: (i) Hindu-Muslim parity in the Central Assembly; (ii) autonomy to the states; (iii) no separate electorates. The proposals of the 1946 British Cabinet Mission, to discuss the transfer of power, were almost on the same lines but they were rejected by the Congress fearing a "Balkanisation" of India. Madani's well-intentioned formula did not get any mileage either. Deoband and Madani opposed Jinnah's Muslim League which asked for Partition of the country.
The final chapter bemoans the fact that Saudi Arabia, whose petro-dollars support the Salafi-Wahhabi ideology based on extreme intolerance and violence, is not targeted by the Americans. The Taliban, al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are all creations of western imperialist wars in Arab countries and the last named is supported by the regimes allied with the West.
The experience of Muslim anti-colonial struggles underlines the fact that religion in politics creates perverse situations and symbols like jihad or the Ram Mandir. These are political and not religious instruments in the hands of violent extremist groups. This is the clear message from the book - that however well-intentioned, linkages established between religion and so-called progressive causes creates a situation for the ugly face of religion to triumph. The moral of the story is that secular causes should be fought on the basis of secular ideology and led by secular leaders, not mullahs or shankaracharyas.
