Why do Indian Muslims lack an intellectual class? For them, it’s politics first

Muslims in Gurugram offering Friday prayers (representational image) | Photo: Manisha Mondal | ThePrint

Is there an intellectual class among Indian Muslims? If yes, then why do Hindu Left-liberals have to represent them in public debates? Would they have to do this charity if the Muslims were capable of representing themselves? The sad reality is that there is not a single Muslim intellectual around who could represent the case of their community with the ability, skill, and sophistication required for the modern public discourse. The reason is not a lack of education. With over 75 per cent literacy rate, Muslims in India have a large enough pool of highly educated people who could intervene in matters of national interests with the same vigour and cogency as others.

But the problem, in the words of journalist Hamid Dalwai, is “that the ‘Muslim Intellectual’ is not an intellectual in the real sense of the term. He is merely a Muslim”. And since he is little more than his religious persona, it is quite natural that the community gets represented by better-qualified people in the field — the maulvis — the professionals of religion. Embarrassing as their regressive diatribes are, any wonder why the maulvis, and not the modern Muslims, are often seen in TV panel discussions?

Dalwai measures the progress of a society by the ability of its intellectual class to subject the settled conventions and the common sense of society to rational scrutiny, the capacity of the people to engage with such criticism in the spirit of dialogue and dialectics, and by accommodating dissent and dissidents. “However, such a class of intellectuals doesn’t come into existence all too easily. It’s the product of several complex historical, social, political and other processes. The Muslim community in India has not undergone such a process of transformation.” And so, the moment a Muslim turns a critical gaze toward the Muslim society, particularly at its history and politics, that is, on their long rule in India and politics of separatism, they get cancelled and excommunicated. Dalwai suffered the same fate.

Two most reviled figures

From the 1960s to ’80s, the most reviled figures in the Urdu press were two fellow Muslims, viz., MC Chagla, who had been Chief Justice of Bombay High Court, and Education Minister of India; and Hamid Dalwai. The latter’s book, Muslim Politics in India, which was earlier published in 1968 and 1972, has recently been re-published by Penguin.

Nowhere in the book Dalwai deals with Islam as a religion, except insofar as a vehicle for separatist politics and cloak for obscurantist and anti-humanist ends. He was interested only in the non-religious or ideological side of Islam and never said a word even remotely critical of the religion or questioned its principles and practices. Then why did the Muslim opinion-making class come to treat him as an enemy of Islam? They did so because they recognised the subversive potential of Dalwai’s ideas. By questioning their unprincipled politics of separatism, he was undermining the legacy of 800 years of their rule, their continued entitlements and claim to power, which was rephrased in the idiom of secularism. This class might put up with heresy in religion, but questioning their political privilege was unpardonable apostasy. The Muslim hostility toward Dalwai makes one realise that for them, Islam, per se, is important but not so; what’s really important is their politics and the right to rule. Islam becomes important only to the extent it facilitates their politics, which it does fully. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s religious ideas remain so unacceptable to Muslims that his own institution, Aligarh Muslim University, refuses to publish his commentary on the Quran. But, Sir Syed is a revered figure, because he stood against the political growth of Hindus and built the college that equipped Muslims to play the game of modern politics against them. Had he not taught his qaum how to regard the incipient national movement as a threat to their position, his religious thoughts would have made him a more vilified figure than the founder of the Ahmadiya sect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani.

Likewise, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was so irreligious that he had no qualms about breaking the biggest taboo of Muslims — eating pork. But he became their Quaid-e Azam because he provided successful leadership to their separatist politics. Conversely, if he were the greatest of saints, but had opposed that politics, he wouldn’t be able to escape the worst slander from the Muslim community.

This scribe, having long contested the Mawdudian thesis of political Islam, which interprets the religion in such a manner as to make it a political ideology, and, so, a charter for the Muslims to rule the world, has lately been veering toward the same understanding, though from the opposite direction. The theology and religiosity of Islam are indubitably geared toward supremacism.

According to Dalwai, this supremacism arising from the hubris of belonging to the religion of perfect and immutable laws is the ideological root of the impossibility of reform among Muslims and their inability to create a class of critical thinkers.

Where are Muslim thinkers?

When one thinks of critical thinkers among Indian Muslims, one is hard-pressed to think of another name besides Sir Syed. His popular image as a social reformer notwithstanding, Sir Syed didn’t critique the Muslim society for its ills. As for politics, rather than being a reformer, he theorised the innate separatism of the Muslim ruling class. In theology, however, he showed a radical spirit of reformism. But that, too, was aimed less at enlightenment and more at intellectually equipping the Muslims to maintain their position of power.

Though it would be a long shot to call Allama Iqbal a critical thinker, since he is recognised as a poet-philosopher by his fans, it is pertinent to note that he normalised disdain for the ulema by contemptuously calling them “mulla”. He blamed them, and their version of Islam, for being the reason for the downfall of Muslim rule. True to his tradition, today’s “modern-progressive-moderate Muslims” are also critical of the ulema and their antiquated theology for much the same reason. Contrary to the appearance, they are not liberal-secular-nationalists, but communal-identitarian-separatists who attempt a modern interpretation of Islam to enable Muslims to dominate the world again. A motive much the same as Sir Syed’s or Iqbal’s.

Besides Dalwai, it’s hard to name a true intellectual or critical thinker among Muslims. His main concern was the secularisation of Muslims and their integration into the national mainstream. He blamed the supremacist theology for keeping Muslims as a parallel and autonomous society — a state within a state and a society within a society. He pinned his hopes on modernisation without realising that Muslim modernism, as represented by the Aligarh Movement, had been a flawed project from the outset. It was political, not intellectual, aimed at re-empowerment rather than enlightenment. Instead of secularisation, it led to communalisation. The modernisation of Muslims, without the nationalisation of their consciousness, was a recipe for strife, since they have an antipathy to nationalism wherever they are in a minority. In India, it needed to be overcome by synthesising their religious sub-nationalism with the grander civilisational and territorial nationalism of India. This couldn’t be possible because Muslims hadn’t developed an intellectual class equal to the task.

Where Indian Muslims have failed

The biggest failure of Muslims is epitomised in their inability to produce a Gandhi of their own who would synthesise tradition with modernity, religious ethics with political morality, sectarian identity with national personality, and nationalism with cosmopolitanism. Dalwai didn’t see the emergence of a Muslim Gandhi “till the ground is prepared by a generation of men who subject the religion and culture of the Muslims to ruthless scrutiny in the light of modern values”.

The absence of intellectuals, and the critical culture they create, is best reflected in what Dalwai calls the “persecution mania of Muslims”. They blame Hindus for all their woes and wash their hands off any responsibility for their own condition. This is because they suffer from intellectual paralysis and are incapable of critically examining the reasons behind their unsatisfactory state of being. In closed WhatsApp groups, their conversations brim with victimhood syndrome. It’s an addiction and a psychological disorder. Dalwai asks a pointed question: How were the Hindus responsible for the Muslim resistance to modern education?

He also comes up with two blinding insights into Hindu-Muslim relations, saying that Muslim communalism is ideological whereas Hindu communalism is a reaction to Muslim aggression. The former emanates from the Islamic belief that Hinduism is a false religion and Hindus are on the wrong path and Muslims must bring them to the right path by subduing and converting them. The Hindus, on the contrary, are least bothered about what someone’s beliefs are. They are only concerned about how the Muslims behave with them.

Extending the argument, Dalwai makes a discerning point, “I believe that if the Hindus were sufficiently dynamic, the Hindu-Muslim problem would be solved. For if the Hindus were dynamic, they would subject the Muslims to several shocks which history has spared them. Muslims would be left with one stark alternative to perish if they didn’t wish to change. And a society prefers change to extinction.”

Is Narendra Modi an answer to that wish? Is he the long-awaited reformer that Muslims always needed but couldn’t produce? Under Modi’s influence, Muslims have become what they claim to be — peaceful! Never earlier have they enjoyed such peace and been so peaceful. No terror strikes. No riots. A mature response to the Ayodhya verdict, Uniform Civil Code, Citizenship (Amendment) Act, and the abrogation of Article 370. Never have Muslims ever been so inclined to introspection and reform, and never earlier have they been so demonstratively nationalistic.

Truly, Modi hai toh mumkin hai.

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 Humra Laeeq)