Muslim nationalism in South Asia
From a historical perspective, Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed of the University of Stockholm and Professor Shamsul Islam of the University of Delhi classified the Muslims of the subcontinent into two categories during the era of the Indian independence movement: Indian nationalist Muslims (individuals who opposed the partition of India) and Indian Muslim nationalists (individuals who desired to create a separate country for Indian Muslims).[1][2] The All India Azad Muslim Conference represented Indian nationalist Muslims, while the All-India Muslim League represented the Indian Muslim nationalists.[2] One such popular debate was the Madani–Iqbal debate.
Historical foundations[edit]
During the medieval era, an Islamicate society in the Indian subcontinent that originated from Persianate culture that spread the religion amongst Indians, resulting in the rise of powerful Muslim kingdoms such as the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. The Islamization of India resulted in the birth of a new distinct Indo-Muslim culture or civilization, which, by assimilating many aspects of Indian culture in customs, social manners, architecture, painting and music, not only established its separate identity from other Muslim peoples such as the Persians, etc, but also simultaneously maintained the distinctiveness of this new Indo-Muslim culture from the former Hindu India by being essentially Indo-Persian in character.[3][4] This is seen as a conscious decision of the Muslims of India. Thus an Indo-Muslim cultural identity existed as a distinct group both in relation to Hindu India and the rest of the Ummah and the Muslim World.[5] The assumption of the Muslims of India of belonging to a separate identity, and therefore, having a right to their own country, also rested on their pre-eminent claim to political power, which flowed from the experience of Muslim dominance in India.[6] According to the historian Qureshi, the distinctiveness of Muslim India could only be maintained by the political domination of the Muslims over the Hindus. Any sharing of political power with the Hindus was considered dangerous and the first step towards the political abdication of the Indian Muslims.[3][7] Although a religiously informed cultural identity did not translate automatically into what came to be understood by the 1920s as communalism and separatism, there had been a sense of religiously informed cultural differences in the subcontinent long before the encounter with Western colonialism.[8]
Ideological foundations[edit]
The first organized expressions began with Muslim scholars and reformers like Syed Ahmed Khan, Syed Ameer Ali and the Aga Khan who had an influential major hand in the Indian independence movement.
Expression of Muslim separatism and nationhood emerged from modern Islam's pre-eminent poet and philosopher, Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal and political activists like Choudhary Rahmat Ali.
Variants[edit]
Indian Muslim Nationalism[edit]
The nationalism espoused by Sayyid Ahmad Khan defined Indo-Muslim identity as a distinctive cultural identity in relation to both Hindu India and to the rest of the Ummah or the Muslim World. Muslim rule had resulted in the development of the Indo-Muslim culture marked by Indo-Persian influences, which was exclusive to the Indian Muslims, the foremost symbol of which was the Urdu language. At the core of his views was the romanticization of Muslim rule in India at the historic realm, which identified it as an exclusive possession of the collective national memory of the Indian Muslims.[9]
Sayyid Ahmad Khan viewed his cause as a response to the rise of Hindu cultural ethnocentrism in the 1800s.[10] Recently, historians have challenged the oversimplified binary surrounding Indian Muslim nationalism in south asia, as a conflict between religious nationalism and secular nationalism, by shifting the conceptualization of Indo-Muslim nationalism as a form of culturalism, which was primarily North Indian and Indo-Persian in character.[11][12] It is worth noting that the differences between Indian Muslims and Hindus were asserted as a modern issue of ethnocultural differences, and that the notion of a shared culture within a group of North Indian Muslims were mobilized to construct identities. The historian Ayesha Jalal, for example, suggests that the inclination of Muslims towards the notion of an Indian Muslim community in the early twentieth century was less of a "communal" or religious movement, but more of a cultural move, and a gravitation towards the assertion of cultural differences and a religiously informed cultural identity. Therefore, Jalal suggests that what used to be simplified as Muslim communalism should be seen as a form of Indian Muslim cultural nationalism.[13][14] At the same time, this gave way to cultural chauvinism among North Indian Muslims.[15]
Prominent Indian Muslims politically sought a base for themselves, separate from Hindus and other Indian nationalists, who espoused the Indian National Congress. Muslim scholars, religious leaders and politicians, led primarily by Indian Muslim feudal lords,[16] founded the All India Muslim League in 1906. A movement led by Allama Iqbal and ultimately Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who originally fought for Muslim rights within India, later felt a separate homeland must be obtained for India's Muslims in order to achieve prosperity. They espoused the Two-Nation Theory, that India was in fact home to the Muslim and Hindu nations, who were distinct in every way.
Indian Nationalist Muslims[edit]
In contrast, another section of Muslim society, led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari and Maulana Azad felt that participation in the Indian Independence Movement and the Indian National Congress was a patriotic duty of all Muslims.[17][18][19] The Deobandi strain of Islamic theology also advocated a notion of composite nationalism in which Hindus and Muslims were seen as one nation united in the struggle against British colonial rule in undivided India.[20] In 1919, a large group of Deobandi scholars formed the political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and it maintained a position of opposing the partition of India.[20] Deobandi Islamic scholar Maulana Syed Husain Ahmad Madani helped to spread these ideas through his text Muttahida Qaumiyat Aur Islam.[20] Although the Deobandis, like the Aligarh movement, focused on the separation and conservation of a North Indian Muslim cultural identity based on the Deobandis' inherited Indo-Persian tradition, encouraging Indian Muslims to discard clothing associated with Hindu culture, they emphasized legal guarantees within an Indian constitution which would protect minority cultural rights.[21][22][23][24][25]
Pan-Islamism[edit]
The current of pan-Islamism also gripped much of the Indian Muslim intellingentsia, which was influenced in its earlier years by Jamal-ud-din Afghani. It resulted in the rise of the Khilafat Movement.[26] The Pan-Islamic Sentiments and Islamic religious universalism was opposed by Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his Indian Muslim nationalists, and therefore the latter became the victim of severe criticism by an eminent protagonist of pan-Islamism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din Afghani.[27][28]
Muslim nationalism in Modern India[edit]
According to official government statistics, the Hindu-majority Indian Republic has almost 14% Muslim population spread across all states with significant concentrations in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana, Assam, West Bengal, Gujarat, Kerala and Jammu and Kashmir. It is the third-largest home to Muslims after Indonesia and Pakistan.
Since independence, there has been a great deal of conflict within the various Muslim communities as to how to best function within the complex political and cultural mosaic that defines Indian politics in India today.
All in all, Muslim perseverance in sustaining their continued advancement along with Government efforts to focus on Pakistan as the primary problem for Indian Muslims in achieving true minority rights has created a sometimes extreme support for Indian nationalism, giving the Indian State much-needed credibility in projecting a strong secular image throughout the rest of the world.
The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, a leading Indian Islamic organization has propounded a theological basis for Indian Muslims' Indian nationalistic philosophy. Their thesis is that Muslims and non-Muslims have entered upon a mutual contract in India since independence, to establish a secular state. The Constitution of India represents this contract. This is known in Urdu as a mu'ahadah. Accordingly, as the Muslim community's elected representatives supported and swore allegiance to this mu'ahadah so the specific duty of Muslims is to keep loyalty to the Constitution. This mu'ahadah is similar to a previous similar contract signed between the Muslims and the Jews in Medina.[30]