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.
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.
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.
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)
In spite of trying a million times
Your thoughts are still inclined towards muslims and it reflected in a subtle way that this article is written by a unknown Muslim writer who is trying to show the real image through his writings.
Well done muslim 👍
This article shows Ibn Khaldun Bharati’s thorough grasp of the issue. I never fail to be dazzled by the breadth and depth of his knowledge of any subject that he chooses to discuss. And the way he organises and articulates his thoughts is positively first rate. After reading this article I also read all the four comments below, and three of them, albeit sounding serious, would come off as laughable to anyone who has some real understanding of the subject.
1. Right or Wrong Indian Muslims have a strong sense of Ummah solidarity, seeing the Arab world as their another support base. Even making jokes about Hindus surviving on support from Arab countries. I have seen my Muslim friends behaving as if they own Dubai and Doha.
2. Many Indian Muslims believe that the western world has a deep love for them. Have you seen Prince Charles packing dates for our Rozas?
3. Muslims believe ( or they just say so) Indian Hindus oppose Modi, the BJP, and the RSS. In Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir, Punjab, Bengal, and Kerala, BJP will never win. In other states, they’ve lost support. In UP, they are on their way out.
When I mention that after the Lok Sabha, they have won Haryana, Maharashtra, and Delhi, Muslims remain silent.
Escapism is the most serious hazard to survival. Indian Muslims are acting mature but do not have any strategy to counter rising communal polarisation.
Why should the safety, security, well being, welfare of Indian Muslims have anything to do with the 57 member states of the OIC. They are full fledged Indian citizens. Each organ of the Indian state should work as diligently for them it does for members of the majority community. It is disrespectful to suggest that there is something lacking in their Indianness, that they look wistfully to foreign countries, most notably Pakistan, for support. They should not be required to make overt displays of loyalty to India, which are taken for granted for others.
Raihan Baig Saheb, thanks a lot for reading my article, and taking the trouble to leave your detailed comments here.
I’ll deal your comments in the same order as yours — serially and one by one.
1 – You say, “Maulana Jauhar’s statement was a reflection of the emotional and spiritual consciousness of Muslims as part of a global religious community, while being fully loyal to their Indian homeland.”
My contention is that the Two Circles concept was a figurative representation of the split personality of the Muslim community. The real circle — the “emotional and spiritual”, the one to which the their heart and mind belonged — was the Muslim world. The Indian circle was incidental to this conceptualisation. Their Indianness was an accident of birth. It was a physical incident, with little “emotional and spiritual” attachment.
You say, “dual identity does not mean dual loyalty”. It does. If it didn’t, the Indian Muslims would be more worried about India’s interests than the Muslim countries’. It’s a simple poser, has the pro-Muslim foreign policy advanced or compromised India’s interests? Please, answer this in your heart.
Mohammad Ali had a meteoric rise with the Khilafat movement, and, much like a meteor, petered out along with the movement. Was this movement meant to secure Swaraj, or was the Muslim acquiescence to Swaraj was at the condition that the Hindus should help them protect the Khilafat by the forcing the British into it? You know the answer well.
I need not remind you that Mohammad Ali participated in the First Round Table Conference as a part of the Muslim League’s delegation.
As for his “martyrdom”, well, he died of illness at a relatively young age of 51.
2 – I said that the Khilafat movement was aimed at saving the Ottoman caliphate. Swaraj wasn’t its purpose. It wasn’t an India centric movement. Yes, indeed it was a mass movement of Muslims which Mahatma Gandhi tried to harness to the national movement, but he failed in it. Khilafat brought the genie of Muslim separatism out of the bottle. You know how it led to the partition.
3 – Critiquing my views on Maulana Abul Kalam Azad of the period of Al Hilal, and Al Balagh, you say, “Azad’s aim was to awaken anti-colonial and pan-Indian consciousness among Muslims. He was a committed opponent of British rule and remained a fierce advocate of Indian unity and pluralism until the end.” Change the term pan-Indian with pan-Islamic, and I won’t have much to argue with you. If you had seen the two journals, or had read about its content and style, you would know that it was pan-Islamic, not pan-Indian. Maulana Azad’s campaign to become Imam-ul Hind, and his fatwa declaring India Darul Harb, which led to the migration of thousands of Muslims to Afghanistan and Central Asia, caused the damage which isn’t talked about much because of his later nationalist role.
As for Iqbal, you have more or less agreed with my view. However, let’s have the clarity that his shift to pan-Islamism was ideological, and therefore, political. I won’t call it philosophical.
4 – After Khilafat, Palestine has been the most emotive issue for the Indian Muslims. Foreign policy of the national movement, and of independent India was a prisoner of the Muslim sentiments for a long time.
Gandhi and Nehru wanted to keep the Muslims on their side. If their political pragmatism coincided with their idealism on the Palestine policy, it was indeed a rare coincidence. I would only draw your attention to the fact that India didn’t establish full diplomatic relations with Israel even after many leading Arab countries had done so.
5 – India is the country of over 20 crore Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the world where the two countries with higher populations are just marginally above it. One out of ten Muslims in the world is a Muslim.
How come it bothers no Indian Muslim that their country is not represented on OIC? Aren’t they the same people whose political consciousness begins and ends with counting the number of Muslims in the parliament and the assemblies? They are happy about Zohran Mamdani’s win, but aren’t bothered about their absence from the OIC. Why?
6 – Whether the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate had universal support of the Muslims or not, all the leading and legitimate Muslims powers of the day in Arabia, and Turkey itself, were in its favour. The question, however, is — what was Indian Muslims stake in it? Had they ever been a part of it? To say the least, they were being quixotic. They had the urge to fight the British, but they couldn’t fight for India, so they fought for Turkey.
Conclusion : Indian Muslims must learn to draw right conclusions from the known facts. They can’t have one opinion for the private circulation and another for the public consumption. They must rid themselves of the too clever by half argumentation that doesn’t befit even Tahsil court’s vakil. Enough of glib vakalat and cheeky arguments. Let’s have some honest conversation now.
Best wishes,
IKB
The article is full of lies, contains twisted quotes by Ali Jauhar, and misrepresents Mawlana Azad. This “Bharati” again proved him to be a WhatsApp university graduate!
The article presents a deeply flawed narrative based on selective history and sweeping generalizations about Indian Muslims. Below is a factual and principled rebuttal to its major claims:
1. 🔁 “Two Circles” — A Misused Quote
The article quotes Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar from the Round Table Conference (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.”
This quotation is historically accurate. Maulana Jauhar did articulate a dual belonging — to the Indian nation and to the global Muslim Ummah.
❗ However, the conclusion drawn in the article — that this implies divided loyalty or anti-nationalism — is entirely unfounded.
Maulana Jauhar’s statement was a reflection of the emotional and spiritual consciousness of Muslims as part of a global religious community, while being fully loyal to their Indian homeland. His life, activism, and martyrdom in the cause of India’s independence are testament to that.
Dual identity does not mean dual loyalty. Just as a person can be a proud Indian and a global environmentalist or humanitarian, a Muslim can simultaneously identify with India and care about the global Muslim Ummah — without disloyalty to either.
2. Misrepresenting Pan-Islamism
The article equates Indian Muslim solidarity with the Ottoman Caliphate as disloyalty to India. This is misleading. The Khilafat Movement (1919–24) was not anti-national; in fact, it was one of the earliest mass movements against British colonialism, and had the support of Mahatma Gandhi as a strategy to unite Hindus and Muslims.
3. Misleading Framing of Maulana Azad and Iqbal
The article implies that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s writings and journals like Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh gave ideological shape to pan-Islamism, and suggests that this somehow weakened Indian nationalism. This is a gross mischaracterization.
While Al-Hilal did express concern for the global Muslim condition, Azad’s aim was to awaken anti-colonial and pan-Indian consciousness among Muslims. He was a committed opponent of British rule and remained a fierce advocate of Indian unity and pluralism until the end.
His participation in the Indian National Congress, his opposition to the Two-Nation Theory, and his authorship of India Wins Freedom clearly show his unwavering loyalty to a unified and secular India.
Portraying him as a progenitor of religious separatism is historically incorrect and intellectually dishonest.
Similarly, Allama Iqbal’s later poems may have expressed pan-Islamic visions, but his earlier works like Tarana-e-Hindi (“Saare Jahan Se Achha…”) are deeply patriotic. His shift was philosophical, not a rejection of Indian belonging.
4. India’s Palestine Policy Was Not Appeasement
The claim that India’s support for Palestine was to appease Muslims is historically incorrect. India’s position was rooted in its anti-colonial and moral diplomacy. Leaders like Nehru and Gandhi opposed Western imperialism in all its forms. The Non-Aligned Movement shaped India’s consistent stance — not community appeasement.
5. Unfair Blame on Indian Muslims for OIC Politics
To blame Indian Muslims for India not being included in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is absurd. That is a matter of international geopolitics, especially Pakistan’s influence, and has nothing to do with the loyalty of Indian Muslims.
6. Abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate Was Not Universally Supported
The article claims that Arabs and Turks supported the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate. This is factually incorrect.
In Turkey, the Sheikh Said rebellion (1925) was a direct response to Mustafa Kemal’s abolition of the Caliphate.
In the Arab world, major scholars including those of Al-Azhar University (Cairo) condemned the abolition.
The Jerusalem Conference (1931) and Mecca Conference (1926) were organized to revive the Caliphate, proving that strong opposition existed.
Popular opinion in Palestine, India, Egypt, and Syria viewed the Caliphate as an institution of religious unity and rejected its removal.
Only a small group of secular nationalist elites and pro-European forces supported the dismantling of the Caliphate — not the wider Arab or Turkish Muslim masses.
📌 Conclusion: Complex Identities, Undeniable Loyalty
Indian Muslims, like others, carry complex identities — spiritual, cultural, and national. Their bond with the Ummah is religious, not political; their loyalty to India is complete and evident in history, struggle, and sacrifice.
Attempts to delegitimize that loyalty by cherry-picking history and twisting statements — like that of Maulana Jauhar — do a disservice to both truth and national unity.