A new Indian Islam must rise—and it must start by questioning the Muslimness of terrorists

After the Pahalgam attack, there has been a loud condemnation from the Muslim society. But it's too early to say that the ideological hegemony of militant Islam has begun to erode.

Representational image | Illustration: Soham Sen | ThePrint

“Terrorism has no religion” is perhaps the most pious platitude of political correctness. This cliché spares one the trouble of serious enquiry into the problem, and lets the monster multiply unchecked, unexamined, and unquestioned. It ignores the fact that terrorism is different from any other violence. Terrorism is armed with an elaborate ideological apparatus — socio-economic reasoning, political agenda, and, above all, religious mission. It’s an ideology — a form of religion or a religion unto itself — a religion of violence which kills without qualms, and considers it a sacred ritual, an offering to its god. 

Therefore, condemnation of the mere act of violence is inadequate and half-hearted unless it exposes the religious ideology, which is the genesis of this evil. Any equivocation which, in the name of nuance, camouflages the religious character of terrorism is tantamount to connivance and collusion.

Ideological violence is bad enough since it kills for a “higher ideal”. But where religion becomes an ideology, it is even worse, since the killings are done for rewards in the afterlife. A socioeconomic and political ideology can be critiqued and shown to be a fallacy, but not a religious one, as religion is beyond critique. This is the reason why Islamic terrorism can be condemned for its violence, but not for its ideology, since critiquing the ideology would inevitably implicate the religion from which it emanates.

No fatwa after Pahalgam?

What happened in Pahalgam is the latest episode in the long series of Islamic terrorism. It is Islamic not only because it targeted non-Muslims, but, more importantly, because it has an elaborate ideological apparatus on its back consisting of verses of the Quran, numerous Hadiths, and a compendium of Fiqhi rulings, according to which it is enjoined upon Muslims to conduct jihad against non-Muslims for maintaining the supremacy of Islam.

One could cite a huge corpus beside what is commonly known — the Sword Verses of the Quran (the verses of Surah At-Tawbah, particularly, 9:5, 9:29), the Hadiths about Ghazwa-e Hind, and the authoritative ruling of ulema on the necessity of jihad in books like Al-Hidayah, which is the foundational text of Hanafi school (the largest school of Islamic jurisprudence in the Indian subcontinent), and a part of syllabus in every madrasa.

If an ideology has been built on such authoritative sources, it’s impossible to dismantle it with a critique from within by citing other verses and hadiths that run counter to the ones on which it’s founded. There is a hermeneutical problem involved. 

In the exposition of religion, the more literal and the more orthodox always prevail over the allegorical, contextual, and moderate interpretation. Thus, we see that in the formulation of Shariah, the juristic literature of Islam routinely abrogates the verses of kindness and compassion in favour of those of blood and iron. Therefore, no exegete or jurist has ever abrogated a Sword verse like, “…kill the polytheists wherever you find them, and catch them and besiege them, and sit in ambush for them everywhere” (9:5). Instead, they have used it to supersede verses such as “to you your religion and to me mine” (109:6), and “there is no compulsion in matters of religion” (2:256).

The way Islamic theology has evolved over the centuries under the statist and militarist thought regimes, it is impossible to cast the terrorists outside the pale of Islam. A religious culture in which fatwa of excommunication—known as takfeer, or declaring one a kafir—is issued at the drop of a hat for minor foibles and trifling dissent, such an outrageous act as the carnage of innocents doesn’t arouse the conscience to throw the perpetrators outside the fold. There has been no fatwa from any reputable seminary, whether it be the Deoband in India or Al-Azhar in Egypt, declaring the ideology of terrorism as apostasy, and its followers as apostates — placing them firmly outside the community, and barring them from any relation with Muslims.

Asma Afsaruddin, in her book Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know, cites the communique of a conference of ulema held in Amman, Jordan, in 2005. It categorically stated: “It is not possible to declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in Allah the Mighty and Sublime and His Messenger (may Peace and Blessings be upon him) and the pillars of faith, and respects the pillars of Islam and does not deny any necessary article of religion.” According to commentator Judea Pearl, this implies that “bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the murderers of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg will remain bona fide members of the Muslim faith, as long as they do not explicitly renounce it.”

The Muslim community — the ulema, the intelligentsia, and the masses — has shown extraordinary vigour in vilifying and ostracising those who entered even a minor note of dissent into the predominant Muslim narrative. We know how Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was excoriated, and even excommunicated, for his religious ideas. If it was not for his separatist ideas in politics, and had he not founded a college to prepare a political cadre for the purpose, he would remain the arch villain of Muslims. Same has been the fate of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad for his opposition to the Muslim League. He was superficially rehabilitated in the Muslim esteem only after the League politics went into strategic hibernation in the wake of Partition. Similar has been the fate of another education minister, MC Chagla, activist Hamid Dalwai, scholar Asghar Ali Engineer, and scholar-politician Arif Mohammed Khan. For voicing minor differences with the ulema and the narrative of Muslim politics, they have been vilified, demonised, and ostracised by the Muslims. In most cases, a dissident is not even allowed burial in kabristan (Muslim cemetery).

But there has never been any vilification of terrorist organisations like Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e Muhammad, or their leaders like Hafiz Saeed or Masood Azhar. In fact, there has not even been a suggestion to treat them as pariahs in the Muslim community. No matter what havoc they wreak, how many innocents they kill, there is no question about their Muslimness. This raises questions about Muslimness itself — what constitutes it, what are its moral and ethical contours, and what is its role in the civilised world?

The misrepresentation of jihad

If the terrorists continue to use the Quran and Hadith for their sinister ideology, but they could neither be fought from within by a counter narrative nor be expelled from the Muslim community, this inability to act either way implicates Islam as enabler and the Muslim as accomplice. As poet Kahlil Gibran said, “. . . a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree”.

The complicity of Islamic theology and the Muslim common sense is most evident in how a smokescreen has been created around the concept of jihad — the Islamic war against non-Muslims. Just when the jihadi forces unleashed their terror on the world, the Muslim narrative makers began a dubious intellectual campaign to exonerate the militarist ideology of jihad of any role in what the jihadis — its practitioners — were doing. Recourse was taken to etymology to suggest that it meant moral struggle or spiritual striving. This semantic deception has gone on unquestioned. Never in history jihad has meant anything other than warfare. There is no book of Hadith, Tafseer, Maghazi, or Fiqh in which the primary meaning of this word is anything other than warfare. 

True, in the Quran, the word qatal is also used for armed fight involving killing, but its semantic dimension was so limited that it couldn’t encompass the broad meaning of compulsive and incessant military campaign against people of other religions. The word qatal never became an Islamic terminology. It shot into prominence recently when the apologists needed to play down the actual, historical and Fiqhi meaning of jihad. In order to conceal its real nature, a Hadith was brought into circulation according to which though warfare too was jihad, but it was a lesser one; the greater jihad was the spiritual striving.

The concept of jihad per se needs to be critiqued and discarded as anomalous to the enlightened and civilised values of the modern world which can’t bring violence against a person simply because he doesn’t belong to Islam. For a sincere moral and spiritual striving, we don’t need this historically fraught and ideologically dubious word which has never meant anything other than violence against the people of other religions and even those of other Islamic sects.

The Muslim response 

Thankfully, in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack, there hasn’t been much of the usual brazen tergiversation about the essence of jihad or the intrinsic meaning of Islam. It’s too early to say that the ideological hegemony of militant Islam has begun to erode; but, for sure, its sympathisers couldn’t muster the courage to peddle their hackneyed cliches such as, “Islam is a religion of peace; the word Islam itself means peace; the Quran says that killing an innocent is tantamount to murdering the entire humanity; what happened is not sanctioned by Islam; and the perpetrators were not true Muslims”, etcetera.

This time, there has also been a loud condemnation of the terror attacks from a large section of the Muslim society. Earlier, when such incidents happened, a deafening silence pervaded their public discourse, and any suggestion that they should be vocal in the condemnation, was met with a righteous retort, “Why do we have to shout from the rooftops that we condemn terrorists?” Well, if you shout yourself hoarse in support of Palestinians, take out rallies against the criminalisation of triple talaq, create quite an insurrection against the CAA, and ask for sar tan se juda (behead someone) at the slightest apprehension of blasphemy, why can’t you shout aloud, take out rallies, and ask for the heads of terrorists if you actually feel, as you say, strongly about terrorism? How come you don’t regard the ideology of Islamic terrorism as blasphemy against Islam? Why not organisations like All India Muslim Personal Law Board take out protest demonstrations if they think that terrorism is a sacrilege of Islam?

An Indianised Islam 

Indian Muslims have nurtured a victimhood syndrome. It’s an addiction, a psychological condition, and an ideology. It breeds anti-India sentiments, keeps alive the two-nation theory, and provides justification for the ill will they harbour against their own country. It also plays in the hands of our enemies. In the pedestrian preacher-like speech that Pakistan Army chief Gen. (Hafiz) Syed Asim Munir made as the prelude to the Pahalgam massacre, he celebrated the two-nation theory, and said that Muslims were different from Hindus “in every possible aspect of life”. Did he mean that the Indian Muslims were also different from the Hindus in all aspects, and constituted another nation? 

For the Indian Muslims, this is a moment of reflection. It’s for them to introspect whether their identity politics is the two-nation theory under another name, and whether their increasing emphasis on being different even in looks and appearance lends credence to the General’s vituperations. Indian Muslims, for the sake of truth, and for their own good, must discard the victimhood narrative lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s an inflection point for Indian Muslims where they should assert that they are not different from Hindus in any respect, rather they are different from Pakistan in “every possible aspect of life”. An attack on India should be regarded as an attack on Indian Muslims and their religion. If there are Indian Muslims, there has to be Indian Islam as well. Islam can’t survive in India in the same mould as it did during the Islamic rule — supremacist, hegemonic, and dominant. If it doesn’t blend in the Indian soil, and remains the superficial crust of earth, it could be blown away by a gush of wind. Indian Islam has to be India-friendly, Hindu-friendly, diversity-friendly, non-supremacist, non-aggressive, and non-proselytising. If it has to be an Indian religion, it has to be an Indianised religion.

The necessary change 

The change has to begin from the mosque. According to Pakistani Islamic scholar Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, the pulpit in the mosque belongs to the state, and the Friday sermon, the khutba during the weekly juma prayer, is its prerogative. Therefore, like in the past, the Imams should read from the draft given by the government.

Some voluntary symbolic gestures may also be in order. For example, since the anti-CAA agitation, Muslims have developed a particular affection for the Constitution of India, and they have been reciting the Preamble with immense gusto. So, why not keep a copy of the Constitution in every mosque, and hang the Preamble from its walls? What about flying the national flag from the minarets of mosques on Independence and Republic Days, and on the days when India, and so the Indian Muslims, come under attack as in Pahalgam?

The most important changes are required in the syllabus of madrasas, which is centuries old and in dire need of reform. Compelled by necessity, the madrasa-educated learn the use of technology even though their education has been indifferent to the science behind it. They don’t so much need computers and gadgets, or even physics, chemistry and mathematics, as they need the awakening of critical faculty and internalisation of rationalism through an exposure to the humanities. Most of all, they need connection with their motherland, without which they and their education will remain alien to India. They need courses in Indian history and culture.

For the rising India’s story to be complete, the new Indian Muslim and the new Indian Islam should also rise.

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)