Muslim secular ideas of India

Amar Sohal's book is a fascinating attempt to remind us of the political values of modern Muslim secular ideas

The Muslim Secular: Parity and Politics of India’s Partition

Author: Amar Sohal

Publisher: OUP

Pages: X+328

Price: Rs 995

This book makes a serious contribution to the great Indian debate on secularism, at least in two ways. First, it underlines the distinctiveness of Indian secularism, one of the most original intellectual political formulations in the postcolonial period. Political theorist Rajeev Bhargava’s argument that the state is expected to maintain a “principled distance” to practise contextual secularism, in a way, is situated in the realm of intellectual history to trace a particular kind of Muslim  political thinking in late colonial India.  Although the discussion revolves around three key Muslim figures  —Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Ghaffār Khan, and Sheikh Abdullah — the book also highlights the contributions of a set of scholars, poets and authors who define the contours of Muslim secular thinking.

Second and importantly, the book is deeply invested in what political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj calls the languages of secularity in India. The author systematically investigates those crucial intellectual-political trajectories that deal with India-specific secular concerns. In this sense, an attempt is made to redefine secularism as a public virtue.

As he notes: “…Indian secularism has also been interested in fostering a popular culture of acceptance and fair mindedness. So far removed were our three Muslim protagonists from the European idea of separation that they even made comparative theology a part of their public conversation about Indian life. Just as they jealously guarded the frontiers of Islam to preserve its autonomy, they opened it up to a dialogue with Hinduism. The secular for these figures, therefore, was a shared Indian public space consisting of both religious and non-religious elements.”

Let me elaborate this point by highlighting two thematic concerns of this book. First, the author offers us a framework to conceptualise the Muslim secular as a particular form of political attitude. The adherence to Islamic universalism, commitment for Hindu-Muslim unity and the struggle for independence are described as inseparable constitutive elements of a secular political project. This persuasive framework is used intelligently to exclude M A Jinnah and Husain Ahmad Madani. Jinnah’s secular/modern attitude is problematised because he eventually subscribes to the given Euro-centric solution for the “Muslim Question”. According to  Amar Sohal, “... once secularism is provided with its thicker definition, of state neutrality and cultures of coexistence, it becomes increasingly unsuitable for Jinnah”.

The exclusion of Madani underlines another aspect of Muslim secular thinking. Dr Sohal is clear that the sunni ulama class of north India, especially those from the Deoband school, adhered to a specific form of Islam. Their arguments were certainly anti-colonial in nature and they were also committed to Hindu-Muslim unity to produce a new imagination of nationhood, which Madani called  muttahidah qaumiyat or composite nationalism. However, the scope of their overtly religious argument was rather limited.

The crucial distinction between Maulana Azad and Madani is significant. It explains the gradual appropriation of the ulama class by the Congress in the post-Nehru period, which led to the infamous fatwa politics of the 1980s. It also shows the intellectual limitations of pure religious arguments, which restricts the possibility of critical secular thinking.

This brings us to the second major thematic concern  —the secular Muslim imaginations of India’s past. This is one of the most original aspects of this study. The author makes two interesting moves. First, he recognises the intellectual significance of the writings and speeches of Muslim leaders and politicians. This helps him trace the public life of a few key ideas that were produced primarily as political arguments in the 1940s. Themes such as India’s national culture, shared heritage, and fusion of civilisations, which dominated the public discourse in the early post-Independence decades, become intellectual resources.

Secondly, a crucial distinction is made between the past and history to appreciate the presentism of Muslim secular thinking. The author makes a powerful argument that the Muslim political elite produces a set of original arguments about India’s past, beyond Nehru’s Discovery of India thesis. India’s past is seen as a reflection of historical accommodation. India, in this framework, emerges as a land of migrants, where a unique Indian civilisation has advanced. This line of argument, the book reminds us, is used in a variety of ways to evolve a set of context-specific responses. The Muslim secular thinking experiments with Islamic theological discourses and even tries to secularise the overtly religious idioms and metaphors. The book shows how Azad, Khan and Abdullah employ these resources to produce different and even conflicting sets of arguments.

The book offers us an analytically provocative and methodologically sophisticated narrative. The author relies heavily on “thick descriptions” to produce an evidence-based story of the Muslim secular. This is a strength, but the thick descriptions are not expanded sufficiently to make full use of the explanatory potentials inherent in the details. Consequently, the scope of the Muslim secular remains confined to the realm of intellectual history of late colonial India.

The second point is about the placing of the Muslim secular thinking in the wider sphere of Muslim politics. The book does not pay attention to the three unwritten norms of Muslim politics—adherence to legal-constitutional status as a minority, emphasis on Muslim contribution in the process of nation-building, and the need for Muslim unity to function as a pressure group. These norms are shared by all Muslim political actors even now. In fact, the Muslim secular played a significant role in shaping these norms in the late 1940s.

These minor inconsistencies should not be exaggerated. The Muslim Secular is a fascinating attempt to remind us of the political values of modern Muslim secular ideas.           

The reviewer is associate professor at CSDS, New Delhi