Islam in India : Challenge or Promise-1
Wajahat Habibullah
I am greatly flattered to have been invited today to deliver the Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture at this prestigious Institute. Asghar Ali Saheb was a man held in the highest esteem for his honesty, as an intellectual of the highest order and as a crusader against social evils that had seeped into society. Under his leadership many persisting wrongs were addressed to the benefit of our social fabric and of our country. To be asked to deliver a lecture in memory of an Indian of such standing can only be described as a deep favour.
On the subject of my address let me start by quoting from amongst the most distinguished and learned amongst India’s Muslims in the recent past, Maulana Azad, who as Congress President stated, in the 1940 Ramgarh Session of the party, the role of India’s Muslims in the making of India :
“I am a Muslim and profoundly conscious of the fact that I have inherited Islam’s glorious traditions of the last thirteen hundred years...I am equally proud of the fact that I am an Indian, an essential part of the indivisible unity of Indian nationhood, a vital factor in its total makeup, without which this noble edifice will remain incomplete...This thousand years of our joint life has moulded us into a common nationality. This cannot be done artificially. Nature does her fashioning through her hidden processes in the course of centuries. The cast has now been moulded and destiny has set her seal upon it.”
This is a sentiment not unique to the Maulana although rarely so lucidly expressed.. But in today’s environment, with the rise of ISIS in West Asia, the extremism sweeping across several Muslim countries, and apprehensions blatantly voiced by elements even within our own country, that Islam and democracy are irreconcilable, the subject “ Challenge or Promise” needs to be placed in context. Is our own society also riven by divisive impulse and can our country survive such internal infraction? Or will our inherent agelessness, nurtured over the centuries, absorb the impact and help lead the world into an age not simply of tolerance, nor even of co-existence but indeed of harmony springing from convergence?
As argued by Alastair Crooke, British diplomat and founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, an organisation that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West, in his article ‘You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
Concept of Allah:
The very first Chapter of the Quran explains the Islamic concept of God-the worship of Allah being the determining factor of whether or not a person is Muslim; belief in La Ilaha Illalah-There is no God but God. And what exactly is God? The opening lines of the opening Chapter of the Qur’an ‘Surat al Fatihah’, described by Maulana Azad as the gist of the Quran declares:
“Praise be to God, Master of all creation, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Ruler of the Day of Judgement”
God is therefore universal and just, and the embodiment of compassion.
But how did Islam spread to its present proportions particularly in South Asia, where the largest section of the world’s Muslims abide? There are several explanations, each of which is examined exhaustively, particularly with regard to Bengal in Richard M Eaton’s “The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760”
v The Religion of the Sword-The role of military force. But how ‘force’ was exercised and ‘conversion’ affected has never been defined. Persian works talk of the submission to Islam of the defeated State, but this is a reference to their military submission to the Indo-Muslim state, not to the faith.
v Religion of Patronage-Conversion to receive favours from the State. But why was the concentration of Muslims in the Muslim Indian empires most wide in its furthest reaches, where the hold of the empire was at its most tenuous?. Why did the first realisation that Bengal had a Muslim majority concentrated in East Bengal, wherein Dacca had remained capital only for one century of Mughal rule and Chittagong became part of the empire, seized by the Emperor Aurangzeb from the Arakanese only in 1660, come only with the census of 1892?
v The Hindu caste system and the social liberation theory is the most widely accepted explanation. No conclusive evidence has been produced in support of this and presupposes that what are described as the lower castes had already some aspirations of equality and hence resentment against the Brahmanic order. Also, as the Christian experience has shown, unless the ‘convert’ then left his neighbourhood, he continued to occupy the same status in his society. And this theory fails to explain the fact that Islam’s most dramatic expansion in Bengal was not within a stratified social hierarchy reeking with injustice, but in the densely afforested areas of the east where the influence of the Brahmanic order was minimal and the population largely animist.
What then is the explanation? Islam has no missionary institution as does Christianity. It also has no concept of ‘conversion’. To be a Muslim, you need simply to accept Islam as comprised in what is called the Kalama: “:There is no god but God and Muhammad is his Prophet” Hence the question raised by Eaton: what is ‘forced conversion’? The question then naturally follows, what becomes of existing religious beliefs for one who has accepted Islam? The answer to that is simple: Islam does not renounce other faiths, but if one is a Muslim one is enjoined to follow the interpretation given by the Quran. Again with reference to Eaton’s book on Islam in Bengal it is easy to trace the means of the spread of Islam in relatively recent times. This passed through four phases:
Inclusion, during which Islam and Islamic figures are included among traditional deities; a pronounced example of this is found in Kashmir’s Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani (1377-1438), popularly known as Alamdar-e-Kashmir whose wooden shrine was tragically incinerated in Charar-i-Sharif in 1996 and has since been rebuilt in grand proportion, known to Hindu followers as Nund Rishi. Sheikh Nooruddin was spiritual heir to the Saivite Yogini Lal Ded (known as Lal Ishwari among Hindus and Lal Arifa among Muslims).
Identification in which the Muslim cosmology is identified with the Hindu. An example is the bilingual Arabic and Sanskrit inscription in a thirteenth century mosque in Veraval, Gujarat. In the Arabic version the deity of the mosque is described as Allah, whereas the Sanskrit text describes Him as Visvanath (Lord of the Universe) Sunyarupa (in the form of emptiness) and Visvarupa (a form that is universal)
Displacement. This would mean the supplanting of Hindu entities from religious cosmology with Islamic ones. This was a consequence of Islamic reform movements led by the clerics
Conforming to the Monotheistic ideal In this final phase Muslims would be encouraged to identify themselves as a distinct community. Whereas the first two faces owed much to India’s Sufis the next two saw the active This is not to deny each of the explanations described earlier. Indeed, historical examples can be found in support of each. But none of these explains the movement of entire sections of the community into becoming Muslims. I have explained to start with the concept of Allah in Islam as the embodiment of compassion. Although Buddhism, as explained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, believes in no God, the fountainhead of the faith comprised in the Four Noble Truths, is dukkha or compassion for suffering, a concept springing from the Sanskrit concept of karuna. And the Qur’an, in the opening verses of its second Chapter, describes to the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) what the Quran means: “2. This Book there is no doubt in it, is a guide to those who keep their duty 3. Who believe in the Unseen and keep up prayer and spend out of what We have given them 4. And who believe in that which has been revealed to thee and that which was revealed before thee, and of the Hereafter they are sure” Placed in this context, it is easy to see how the phases described above led to the spread of the faith. Indeed the remains of earlier tradition are recognisable in Muslim ritual to this day in Muslim majority areas of Kashmir and Lakshadweep. So the Islamic belief that every community has been graced by a Prophet, that there is no compulsion in religion and that Allah has innumerable names falls into place . Like the Buddhist concept of cause and effect being the basis of human impulse, Islam itself is the consequence of evolution through the ages. It is then easy to see how India, in ‘This thousand years of our joint life has moulded us into a common nationality’, absorbing Islam as ‘a vital factor in its total makeup, without which this noble edifice will remain incomplete’. Also clear in Islam is that Allah is a concept, not a form; hence stern restrictions in what is perceived as reducing him to a human image. (Wajahat Habibullah's Lecture delivered on the occasion of 3rd Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture.) Quoted by Syeda Hameed “A harvest of horror and shame” The Hindu Saturday August 23, 2014 p 8 Editorial
