The complex reality of Islam

Islam and Muslims are under attack from Western intellectuals. Within India and Pakistan, Muslim communities are under siege both by their co-religionists and believers of other faiths.

In India, Muslim communities are threatened by a section of Hindu fanatics; in Pakistan, different sects of the Islamic belief system are fighting battles among themselves on the issue of who is a true Muslim.

This apart, Islam is increasingly been projected as a monolithic religion, quite contrary to the reality that Islam is internally differentiated and fragmented into many hostile and competing sects.

The best approach towards understanding the complex and contradictory history of a rich and varied religious civilisation is to understand the reality of "Islam-as-lived" in different countries and continents. This is the only corrective for highlighting the reality of living Islamic/Muslim communities.

Otherwise, a stereotyped image of Taliban-type Islamic fundamentalists will be sold by Western scholars like Samuel Huntington and others who have made it a business to demonise Islam by artificially constructing a distorted picture based on the Quran.

On the basis of her researches on Islam and Muslim communities in India and Pakistan, Metcalf describes the purpose of her book as a "...corrective to the old-fashioned notion..., namely that true Islam, exists only in the Middle East because only the earliest Arabic texts matter. Islam in South Asia is at once distinctive and Islamic. This is true of Islam in Saudi Arabia as in Bangladesh or Sumatra".

Meltcalf also grapples with the issue of colonialism, nationalism and Islam as a religion because the received knowledge about Islam is that it is communal and not nationalist.

The author suggests that, "The argument is intended in part to question 'religion' or 'communalism' as the opposite of modernity and nationalism and to see politicized religious identity, rather, as emerging in the same context, and under the same conditions, as nationalism".

As the author correctly maintains, that the historical context of religious behaviour should not be ignored while understanding Muslims of India and Pakistan.

In her study of 13 chapters, Metcalf exposes the reader to a feast of ideas, many of which have great contemporary relevance. A significant finding is about women in Islam.

Metcalf writes: "They challenge the stereotypes that Islam is...politically militant, that Muslim women are particularly oppressed, or that Islam is a static tradition, sunk in medievalism. There may indeed be militancy, oppression, or stasis, but that is not the whole story, and Muslims themselves have challenged positions they themselves characterize with such terms."

The author has made a detailed study of Deoband which, along with Aligarh Muslim University, has played a substantial role in the making the Muslim elite of the undivided Indian subcontinent.

Darul Uloom, "the world's second largest centre of Islamic study", at Deoband, and Aligarh Muslim University have played a major role in moulding Muslims from two different routes. One is an Islamic seminary and the other is a modern university but it did not mean that the Aligarh "modernists"and Deoband "traditionalists" influenced Muslims to follow opposite ways of life.

The author says, "Deoband provided one of the many examples of how the very concept of 'traditional' becomes part of the self-definition of modernity."

The essays take readers from the colonial to nationalist and post-colonial phases of India and Pakistan by showing great continuities and basic "ruptures" in 1947 because of Partition.

"While the Deobandi Madrasas ...succeeded in training a large number of Ulama in its reformist ideology and in establishing a network of ancillary schools further disseminating that teaching", Pakistani society is getting condemned to the state-led traditionalisation of Muslims in that country.

The forces of Hindutva are competing with the Pakistani state to achieve the goal of medievalising Hindus. Since Pakistan has a short history of origin, the author says, "Pakistanis have been absorbed in self-justification and it led Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to talk of history of five thousand years of Pakistan."

Pakistan muhajir who fled from north India took all the problems with them and made Urdu the first tongue of a mere 4 per cent of the population which gave birth to the idea of a separate East Bengal because the Bengali population did not accept the imposition of Urdu over them. The Hindutva proponents are doing precisely the same thing.

One is tempted to argue that the short history of Pakistan has seen an increasing convergence of religious myth and nationalism but the author points out that "there has not been a 'rebirth' of Islam in Pakistan".

The reality is that "a passionate attachment to a Muslim identity has been constant in Pakistan's self-image and in the rhetoric of its politicians".

General Zia-ul-Haq and the Islamist fundamentalists revived by him created a Pakistan where "...an Islamic language became dominant in public life".

"There is no coherent, fully developed rival language to challenge it, whether couched in terms of Islam, or liberalism, or anything else," the author says.

This is the inside story of Pakistan created by military dictators who needed Islam to legitimise their rule. It is very interesting to know that the Deobandi school which was founded in the late nineteenth century was split and a minority group among the Deobandi ulama dissented from support for the secular state and the privatisation of religion espoused by the Indian nationalist government and this minority is the father of the Taliban fanatics in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The most valuable message of this scholarly work is that it sets the record straight about Islam-as-lived unlike Huntington's much-touted work. Metcalf's book should be read by every Indian because it not only tells us about the complex reality of Islam and Muslim communities, it also gives a warning that if the state (like the Pakistani state) uses religion for its legitimacy, it would always bring conservative and backward looking ulamas and Shankaracharyas as the authentic interpreters of religion.

ISLAMIC CONTESTATIONS: ESSAYS ON MUSLIMS IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Barbara D Metcalf
Oxford University Press
Pages: 365, Price:Rs 595