Indian Muslims must face the truth—Muslim countries don't care about them

The Print

7 hours ago

However, so long as India was under Muslim rule, it didn't really matter whether the caliph was recognised or not. But with the termination of the titular Mughal sovereignty in 1857, the Muslim ruling class found itself stranded. In order to find an ideological mooring for their adrift theo-politics, they anchored themselves in the theocratic institution of the Ottoman caliphate. The Muslim ruling class had so maintained its foreign character that this transfer of allegiance to a new overlord outside India seemed normal and caused no consternation. Rather, this instinctive reaction was understood as a default action.
Since the establishment of the Mughal rule in 1526, Muslim rulers of India stopped swearing allegiance to any foreign entity, as was the practice during the Sultanate period (the reason why that period came to be known by this name), when the Sultan tacitly recognised the suzerainty of the Abbasid caliphate, which, after the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongol army led by Halagu Khan in 1258, moved to Cairo where it resided until 1527. Later, the caliphate was transferred to the Ottoman rulers of Turkey. In the political lexicon of Islam, Sultan means an autonomous governor of the caliph. The Mughals didn't recognise the new Ottoman caliphate in Turkey, and called themselves Padshah (king) instead of Sultan.
West Asia has ever been on the boil, and its tumultuous events perturb Indian Muslims no end. Their attitude toward international affairs, particularly events in Muslim countries, is determined more by their religious identity and extraterritorial loyalty than by their national identity and the country's interests.
The first stirrings of the newly incubated pro-Turkish sympathies became visible during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Unsurprisingly, the newly established Muhammadan Anglo Oriental College in Aligarh, the precursor to Aligarh Muslim University, chose the Turkish dress, with the distinctive Fez — the red hat with black tassel — as its uniform. This trend of associating with the Ottoman caliphate matured during the Khilafat Movement, which, in the Muslim mind, forever subordinated Indian nationalism to pan–Islamism, and also to a great extent made the Indian foreign policy sensitive to the extraterritorial loyalty of the Muslims.
Indian nationalism vs pan-Islamism
India's Muslim ruling class had cultivated a sense of identity that made it easier for them to associate with their foreign co-religionists than the native compatriots. Therefore, it was inevitable that Muslims diverged into pan-Islamism when the national movement emerged in India. It's true that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan had been wary of the pan-Islamist ideas, and opposed its propagation by the peripatetic preacher, Jamaluddin Afghani (1838-1897). But his opposition was because of pan-Islamism's anti-British edge — and Sir Syed was a British loyalist — rather than any thought for Indian nationalism, which he had contested.
What's known as global Islam or Ummah today was, in the late 19th and early 20th century, termed pan-Islamism. Contrary to what the terminology conveys — an ideology encompassing and shared by the entire Islamic world — it actually denoted the political attitude of Indian Muslims who, though domiciled in India, sought the meaning of their existence in belonging to the global Muslim community. India was incidental to their worldview. They were born here, but belonged elsewhere. What affected them the most, at the deep emotional and psychological level, were the affairs of the Muslim world. Their politics was decided not so much by what was happening in India, but by what happened in Turkey and the Arab world. It's telling that one of the strongest mobilisations of Indian Muslim opposition to British rule emerged not over Swaraj, but the fate of the Ottoman caliphate in Turkey. More on that later.
Pan-Islamism began as a sentiment and a political attitude, and acquired the strappings of a well–expounded ideology through the writings of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who went on to become one of the foremost nationalist leaders. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the setbacks suffered by the Ottoman Empire caused a great deal of despondency among Indian Muslims. Azad started an Urdu weekly, Al Hilal (the Crescent), in 1912 to rouse Muslims against the British, who were accused of being complicit in the defeat of Turkey. The government forced it shut in 1914, and Azad started another weekly, Al Balagh, in 1915, which, too, was shut before long.
These two journals crystallised Indian Muslims' pan-Islamism as an ideology and a political movement, which touched the apogee with the Khilafat Movement, which, in turn, so institutionalised separatism as a religious creed as to make the Partition inevitable.
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Fallacy of Ummah
The Khilafat Movement, the strongest pan-Islamist venture of Indian Muslims, was a strange phenomenon whose weird legacy has never ceased to haunt Indian politics. It was strange because even though Indian Muslims wanted to save the Ottoman caliphate of Turkey, the Turks themselves were not in favour of its continuance, and abolished it in 1924.
Indian Muslims wanted the Arabian peninsula, which contains Islam's holiest sites, to remain under Turkish control. But the Arabs wanted independence from them, which they eventually achieved after a successful revolt during the First World War.
Indian Muslims were in a world of their own. They did not know what the Turks or the Arabs wanted. And when they belatedly came face to face with the facts, they were more shocked at the 'un-Islamic' behaviour of them both than embarrassed at their own quixotic pursuit. They begged the Turks not to abolish the caliphate, and the Arabs not to secede from the Ottoman Empire, but they couldn't admit that they had been chasing the chimera of Islamic unity.
One wonders why they wouldn't see their own folly, the flawed understanding, and the faulty assessment, which led themselves up the garden path, despite being so manifestly wrong. Was it because, in their mind, they made no mistake in pursuing an ideal? Or, deep in heart they knew that the Khilafat Movement wasn't so much in support for the Turks as for asserting the Muslim power in India? MK Gandhi failed to understand this nuance of collective psychology when he adopted the Khilafat issue in order to win over Muslims.
Delusion of dual identity
Elucidating how Indian Muslims had two separate identities — one as Indian and another as Muslim — which were neither coterminous nor overlapping, and only had a minor intersection at the margin, Mohammad Ali (1878-1931), the iconic leader of Khilafat Movement, said this while attending the first Round Table Conference in London in 1930: 'I belong to two circles of equal size, but which are not concentric. One is India, and the other is the Muslim world… We as Indian Muslims belong to these two circles, each of more than 300 millions, and we can leave neither.'
It's surprising that in Mohammad Ali's conceptualisation, the Muslim circle existed outside the Indian circle. Why couldn't the Muslim exist within the Indian, and be concentric with it? Don't other communities, even non-Hindu ones, exist within the Indian circle? Don't they find full scope of their spiritual and material growth here, without seeking to belong to another circle of their foreign co-religionists?
Does any other religious community anywhere in the world identify itself with their foreign co-religionists more than their native compatriots? In
Mohammad Ali's conception, it was the Muslim circle that expanded into India and made this country a part of the Islamic dominion. Therefore, Indian Muslims represented the global Ummah in India rather than being primarily Indian.
But, as I said earlier, pan-Islamism was less about the idealistic association of Indian Muslims with the Muslims of the world, and more about dissociation from fellow Indians. It was just a fancy word for communal separatism. In both concept and operation, pan-Islamism amounted to anti-nationalism. The most emblematic shift from Indian nationalism to pan-Islamism could be seen in how poet Allama Iqbal overwrote the immortal lines of the poem, Tarana-e Hindi (Anthem of India), Saare jahan se achha Hindustan hamara, Hum Bulbulein hain iski, yeh Gulsitan hamara, with Cheen-o Arab hamara Hindustan hamara; Muslim hain hum watan hai, sara jahan hamara in a later poem, Tarana-e Milli (Anthem of Muslim community).
Foreign policy as politics of appeasement
If Indian Muslims related to the global Ummah not merely as Muslims but very much as Indians, the national interest should have remained paramount in their discourse. However, their Ummah fixation made India subserve interests of others without a care for its own. What began as a movement to save the caliphate set the template for India's foreign policy for the next hundred years.
The pro-Ummah stance became our default mode wherever a Muslim country was involved. What was ostensibly a principled position in solidarity with the developing countries was actually a concession to the sentiments of Indian Muslims.
Its most glaring example is Gandhi's stand on the Arab-Jewish problem in Palestine. He refused to see the Jewish point of view despite persistent pleadings of his Jewish 'soulmate', Hermann Kallenbach (1871-1945), who had earlier donated 1,100 acres of land to him in South Africa where he established the Tolstoy Farm.
In the 26 November 1938 issue of Harijan, Gandhi published an article on this subject that not only set India's stand on Palestine in stone, but also decided forever the contours of our foreign policy with regard to Muslim countries. Though he explained his position in moral terms, it was a strategic choice by which he wanted to win Muslims over to the cause of the national movement. His hopes remained unfulfilled.
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Unrequited love
While India always took a pro-Arab and pro-Muslim stand in almost all international conflicts, these countries seldom ever sided with us in our ongoing problems with Pakistan; and, on the issue of Kashmir, they speak the same language as Pakistan. In fact, they speak of Palestine and Kashmir in the same breath, thus identifying India as their enemy much like Israel.
Since India has been conducting pro-Muslim diplomacy in order to appease its own Muslim minority, it was for Indian Muslims to feel indignant at the anti-India behaviour of Muslim countries. But, no. They see nothing amiss in this arrangement where India sides with them without any expectation of reciprocation. They take it as their entitlement as an appeased minority that India should remain in the service of Islam.
Arab disdain for Indian Muslims
What's interesting is that Muslim countries don't even care for Indian Muslims. They don't even regard them as Muslim proper; and don't have the mind to indulge in the semantic quibble of Hindi and Hindu; and, more often than not, don't differentiate between the two.
As if that wasn't enough indifference, they haven't even offered India a seat on the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a 57-country strong body. India is home to over 20 crore Muslims, the third-largest Muslim population, and 11 per cent of the total Muslims in the world. Without India, the OIC's claim to be 'the collective voice of the Muslim world' that works to 'safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony' will remain hollow.
Two circles or one?
One in every ten Muslim is an Indian, and yet they don't have a seat on the OIC. Strangely enough, this disregard and denial of representation on the Islamic world's most representative body doesn't even rankle with Indian Muslims, as it should, particularly because they regard themselves primarily as part of the global Ummah. The situation acquires added piquancy when we recall Indian Muslims' loud accusation of discrimination against the Indian political system for not facilitating their representation in Parliament and Assemblies in proportion to their population. So, how could they be so unconcerned about the denial of representation in one of the two circles to which they claim to belong? Surely, there is something amiss, and they need to revisit their pet concepts about circles of belonging.
There is only one way for Indian Muslims to be respected in the Muslim world: be Indian above all, and situate your Muslimness within Indianness. You belong to one circle, not two; and you have no other destiny besides Indian.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor's note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)