Demystifying Islam in India

Henry Kissinger may be a great writer, but anyone who finishes his book is certainly a great reader. The wag who made that statement should take a look at India's Muslims. Its bulk is intimidating.

It is, in fact, a triple sundae: three separate books in one jacket. This itself sets it apart from books that are a collection of essays on different aspects of the Muslim experience in India. Each one of the three books is a definitive work:

In Islamic Revival in British India, Barbara Daly Metcalf, historian based at the University of Michigan, investigates the great Islamic seminary in Deoband from 1860 to 1900.

The second book in the volume, by Rafiuddin Ahmad, is an eye opener on the Bengal Muslims. Even though he covers the period 1860-1906, he places his theme in a much more comprehensive historical framework.

Mushirul Hasan's torrent of output on post-partition India is ceaseless: sometimes one fears if scholars, too, run the risk of over exposure.

His contribution to the volume is vintage Hasan. The author sees himself, with ample justification, as a man committed to liberal and secular values. This is not all: he takes up cudgels against illiberal tendencies among the Muslims. With equal forthrightness, he exposes the wrongs Muslims have suffered, for whatever reasons, since independence.

In his life as a scholar, an Indian and a Muslim, in that order, Hasan has confronted forces of obscurantism, on occasion physically. Since I have seen these incidents closely, I doubt if even some of his admirers are aware of the fact that at least on two occasions, he was mobbed by Muslims and could have been killed. His guilt? He would not resile from his liberal stance. I have deviated into this biographical aspect simply to bring out in bold relief the fact that Hasan has not been an ivory tower intellectual.

He frequently quotes a couplet from Ghalib and has not been able to resist the temptation of introducing poetry (organic part of his cultural makeup) between passages of clinical scholarship.

Likhte rahe junoon ki
Hikayat-e-khum chakan
Harchand isme haath hamare
Qalam huwe
(I did not desist from writing, mad as the wind, my narrative, dipping my pen in blood. Even though repeatedly they cut off my hands.)

Everything else in the 300-odd pages is not quite so lyrical because Hasan does pose charts and figures, an impediment to easy reading, but absolutely an essential component of the volume, making it an essential reference book. Readability tempered with tiresome fact "" the stuff of well written history.

Barbara Metcalf's Deoband, 1860-1900, is clearly in response to anxieties generated in recent times about political Islam.

Compared to the sharp focus on Arab Islam, Egyptian thinkers, and the role of Al Azhar, for example, Western scholarship on the sources of political Islam on the Indian subcontinent is limited.

Metcalf's is the sort of work that takes up ideas germinating in a key seminary like Deoband. Her view of the Deobandi Ulema is a relief in the context of ignorant debate about the school.

She explains the response of the Ulema "to the colonial dominance and the collapse of the Muslim political power". This important aspect explains how and why the Jamiat ul Ulema i Hind eventually threw its lot with the Congress and vigorously opposed the two-nation theory.

There is a persistent misperception at the popular, political level, despite scholarly efforts to introduce correctives, that Islam in India is a huge monolith, and this coherent entity is unified by, among other things, Urdu.

Visit Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Bengal and you find that in manners, customs and languages, the regional communities, Hindus and Muslims, are homogeneous and that culturally Muslims of one region have very little in common with the Muslims of another.

Indeed, there are so many sub-divisions within Islam in a given region as to seem almost comical at this distance in time.

Wandering faqirs in Bengal were considered deviant sects by the orthodox. Their syncretism was seen by the fundamentalists as a threat to the faith. The orthodoxy's advice to the common people about these "deviants" is vicious:

"Let me describe some features in the Kali age; The world became full of false fakirs.

Some smoke cannabis; some go around singing.

If you come across such a faqir

Beat him with shoes and break his head!" Reminds one of the Spanish Inquisition!

This is just a vignette from Rafiuddin Ahmed's masterly work The Bengal Muslims: 1871-1906, which covers, like Metcalf's book, the period of Muslim reaction after the excesses of 1857. I would be comfortable with three separate volumes but three-in-one has its uses as a reference book. The bulk, however, does bring to mind the comment someone made about Kissinger's tendency to write books of more than 1,000 pages.

INDIA'S MUSLIMS

Barbara Daly Metcalf, Rafiuddin Ahmed, Mushirul Hasan (3 books combined)
Oxford University Press
Rs 795, 1,004 pages