The making of the modern maulvi — X

The writer edits a quarterly Urdu literary journal Aaj from Karachi, runs a bookshop and City Press, a small publishing house

In the previous instalment of this series, we saw how Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi and other maulvis from the Deoband madrassa took diametrically opposed positions on matters of great political and social significance during the 1920s. Seen from afar, the difference of opinion seems political and worldly in nature. Take the matter of the Malabar’s Moplah rebellion for instance. Thanvi clearly and squarely holds the rebels and their leaders — including maulvis — responsible for the tragic and brutal end that those who participated in the rebellion met. He does not blame the British Indian government even one bit for savagely suppressing an uprising which began as a part of a mass political mobilisation claiming to resist colonial rule. You play with fire, he appears to say, you burn your fingers! Sarkar-e-Inglishia — the English government — seems to him to be something of a law of nature, with few moral implications.

The shurafa castes of Indian Muslims as a group — including the Muslim communities’ intellectual, social, political and religious leaders who exclusively came from these castes — had openly and eagerly accepted the role of supporters of the English colonial government after 1857, in exchange for material benefits. These mindset-makers suffered — and still suffer — from an oversimplified and self-serving worldview which ran as follows. (1) ‘We’ ruled India for a thousand years and now it is the Englishman’s turn. It’s Allah’s will. (2) Why ‘we’ lost power is because somewhere, somehow, we stopped being ‘good Muslims’. The proof of our goodness as Muslims was in the fact that ‘we’ ruled not only India but the world (or half of it, or a third, or whatever). (3) Therefore, if we become ‘good Muslims’, we’ll rule the world again, or a large part of, or at least India, or a part of it anyway.

However, divorced from the realities of a changed — and constantly changing — world, it may be the most marvellous fact is that the leaders of the South Asian Muslim communities were able to sell this mindset to those Muslims who were converted from the local low-caste communities during the centuries of Muslim invasion and rule. In the modern era, the specific policies and measures of the colonial government, public education, printing, new and faster means of communication — in short, the advent of modernity — allowed some of these converted Muslims — individuals, families, biradris — to break from the rigid, debilitating tradition of sticking all their lives to their ancestral, caste-determined occupations. They entered new professions and, in order to equip themselves with all levels of skills for these, accessed literacy and education — which, it must be remembered, was completely denied to them in the past and was fiercely resisted throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries by the upper-caste ‘monopoly-holders’ of knowledge. They acquired the power to approach, consume and interpret the written word. And, at that crucial moment in their individual and collective histories, the unbelievable happened: they, the modern South Asian Muslims of the converted origin, bought wholesale and, in the process, sold themselves to the ridiculously unrealistic worldview described above.

They started entertaining the strange idea that they were in fact among the people who had ruled India for centuries — and an indeterminate but large enough portion of the world on top of that. They began not only to use the mind-boggling, delusion-driven expression ‘when we, the Muslims, ‘came’ to the subcontinent’ (‘came’ being a euphemism for ‘invaded, occupied and ruled’) but actually to believe in it! Can you imagine, for example, Africans, converted to Christianity during the European colonial invasion and rule of their continent, claiming to have ‘come’ to Africa at a certain point in history and ‘ruled’ it?

Once the modern, literate, employed lower-caste Muslims acquired this megalomaniac delusional idea, they began to construct their family genealogies and biradri histories to justify their outlandish, acquired view of their past. From there, the next step was simple and easy: they accepted the premise that they ‘lost their rule’ because they were not ‘good Muslims’ and as such admitted to the life long guilt of someone who needed to ‘mend his un-Islamic ways’, i.e., abandon his true, historically-determined geographical, socio-economic, cultural and religious identity and replace it with something dictated to be suitable by ‘an authority’. Once they admitted to this unjustified guilt, they surrendered themselves — and a large number of their personal, family and collective decisions — to this, that or the other ‘authority’ which determined what they needed to do to become good Muslims, i.e. to follow the shariat, as that particular ‘authority’ defined it. The modern maulvi claimed to be such an authority because this position, if accepted by a sufficient number of gullible, obedient people, gave him the power to define shariat for them.

Therefore, to the exclusion of all reasonable considerations usually required to analyse any complex human situation and decide upon a practical course of action, the moot question in every single point under discussion became this: What does Islam say on this matter? And, as we have seen in the case of whether to support or resist the colonial government, and through which means, Islam seems to have said different things to different ‘authorities’ even of the Deobandi variety.

The fact that each of these opinions coming out of the same school of sectarian Islamic thought based itself on a specific interpretation of this or that part of religious scriptures and that each maulvi considered his interpretation to be the ‘only’ true one, points to a fundamental dilemma of Deoband and its contemporary religious ‘reform’ movements. Each modern maulvi purveying his particular opinions as ‘the shariat’ had acquired his religious knowledge by reading the relevant printed material and interpreting it as determined by his political outlook, but he was not prepared to give the same right of interpreting the religious text to even the other, equally modern, maulvi — let alone those who are considered unfit by birth to attempt it, for example women and people of lower castes.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 22^nd, 2011.