Britain’s Muslim empire and its Indian future

FAISAL DEVJI

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THERE was a time not so long ago when British statesmen proudly characterized their empire as the ‘world’s greatest Mohammedan power.’ By using such a locution these men sought to compete with the Ottomans, whose emperor claimed to be the Caliph or heir to the Prophet Muhammad’s worldly authority. Yet the Turkish sultan only started claiming authority over Muslims outside his domains in the eighteenth century, once European powers had advanced similar claims over his Christian subjects, which only goes to show that pan-Islamism has its origins in the West as much as anywhere else.

Unable to claim a comparable religious status for themselves, the British derived their Islamic credentials from the sheer number of Muslims they ruled. But by basing their religious legitimacy on the facts of demography, Britain’s ideologues ended up conceiving of their empire as a liberal, if not quite a democratic order, in which the consent of the greatest number had to be secured. And indeed they were keen to demonstrate that by offering its subjects religious freedom and promising to protect their interests, the empire did in fact represent Muslims as well as Hindus and other groups whose most sizable populations were all to be found in India.

However numerous the religious communities within this empire, it was only the Muslims who lent their name to its otherwise Christian dominion, perhaps because their global distribution more than matched Britain’s own. After all it was not because they comprised the majority of this empire’s subjects that Muslims could claim it for themselves, and certainly not because they ruled it, but only by virtue of their planetary dispersal, of which India formed the dominant part. Disingenuous and self-serving though it may seem, we should recognize that such rhetorical forms of religious authority played an important role in British policy, and were often tailored to suit the convenience of Muslims themselves.

In ways both devious and direct this narrative that drew religious legitimacy from numbers rather than doctrines might even constitute the source of all those movements that from the beginning of the twentieth century have dedicated themselves to Islamic nationalisms, democracies and republics. For it was in colonial India that Islam first became a political category in the modern sense, naming as it did the interests and opinions of a population rather than some ritual observance or religious authority.

 

Britain first emerged as a ‘Mohammedan power’ following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, by far the most serious armed rebellion she had to face during the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of this bloody event, which the British often viewed as an attempt to restore Mughal and therefore Muslim rule, India was formally put under the crown’s jurisdiction, with Queen Victoria falling heir to the emperor she had displaced. And if the title Empress of India allowed Victoria to sit at table with her Christian rivals in Berlin, Vienna and Moscow, its Indian form as Kaiser-i-Hind made it clear that she was competing with the Caliph himself, who was styled the Kaiser-i-Rum or Roman Emperor because his capital of Constantinople was after all the New Rome.

Even at its commencement, in other words, the British Empire set itself within a pan-Islamic context unknown to its Mughal predecessor. But this is only one example of the way in which western powers from Napoleon’s France to Reagan’s America have sought to lay claim to Islam by cultivating its religious authorities or promoting jihad against their enemies, demonstrating that Islam’s ‘holy war’ against the West has an intricate history in which Christians are as implicated as Muslims themselves.

 

Departing from her constitutional status in Britain as the head of an established church, Queen Victoria established a secular state in India by issuing a famous proclamation in which she guaranteed religious freedom to her subjects there without privileging any one faith over another. This immensely popular edict was taken by many Indians as their Magna Charta or charter of freedoms, which meant that the Empress was now seen as the constitutional defender of religions like Hinduism and Islam.

It was not until 1877, however, that Britain’s position as an Islamic power received its most fulsome elaboration in an influential book called The Indian Mussulmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? Written by the Bengal civilian W.W. Hunter, this treatise examined anti-colonial forms of jihad to conclude that while the Raj could never be part of the ‘Abode of Islam’ in any theological sense, neither could it fall into the ‘Abode of War’ as an illegitimate order. Instead the empire could protect Islam and represent Muslims in an altogether different way, since by ruling more of the faithful than any other power, it had the mandate to act globally in their name.

What this meant in effect was that Britain sought to guard against religious forms of sedition in her domains by aggressively advancing Muslim interests where it was convenient to do so both inside India and out. For their own part these subjects dreamt up federations of Muslim states led by India as a full partner in the empire, and so on occasion even lent support to British plans of reserving Iraq or other bits of the Arab world for Indian colonization. And in fact India’s Muslims under colonial rule played a far greater role in places like the Middle East than they ever had in the pre-colonial past.

Forming as they did the largest portion of the Indian army, which the British deployed all over Asia and Africa, as well as in Europe itself during the two World Wars, Muslims had an unprecedented military presence in these vast regions of the world. And this role their colonial masters tried hard to justify on Islamic grounds, always fearing a religious revolt among their troops, such as had occurred during the Mutiny. Realizing Britain’s predicament, her enemies too, from Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm and even Hitler, appealed to what they thought was Muslim feeling by inculcating jihad among Indians, though without any glimpse of success.

 

But military activity was the least part of Britain’s Muslim empire. More important by far was the fact that in their search for an ‘authentic’ Islamic or Hindu law that they might administer in secular fashion, the English ended up discarding or downplaying the customs and profane regulations that had characterized previous dynasties, to set in place purely ‘religious’ legal systems in their colonies. Islamic law as we know it today, then, is in great measure a combination of Muslim jurisprudence and English case law that was produced in India starting in the eighteenth century and exported to many other parts of the Muslim world. It is this hybrid legal system, known in colonial times as Anglo-Mohammedan law, which forms the basis of the Sharia as a legal system pertaining to the citizens of modern states as disparate as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Even when Britain did not impose such new practices outside the subcontinent, some ended up nevertheless being adopted by Muslims there. After all India’s place at the heart of the empire made cities like Bombay into magnets for Muslim traders, intellectuals and politicians across Asia and Africa, becoming a centre for the production and distribution of print materials, recording and film to all corners of the Islamic world.

 

On the eve of the First World War, then, two great Muslim powers confronted each other – the Turks with their Middle Eastern and European possessions against the British with their Asian and African ones. Each represented a different form of Islamic authority and served as the centre of political gravity for a large part of the Muslim world. Before going to war Britain’s prime minister had promised India’s Muslims that the Ottoman Empire would not be dismembered once hostilities ceased and that the Caliph’s position would remain inviolate. As it turned out, Indian soldiers were deployed against the Ottomans only to see their Middle Eastern possessions partitioned between the British and French, with Turkey narrowly escaping a similar fate due to her military revival under Mustafa Kemal Pasha.

David Lloyd George acknowledged the importance of his pledge to the empire’s Muslim subjects in these telling words:

‘It is too often forgotten that we are the greatest Mahomedan power in the world and one-fourth of the population of the British Empire is Mahomedan. There have been no more loyal adherents to the throne and no more effective and loyal supporters of the Empire in its hour of trial. We gave a solemn pledge and they accepted it. They are disturbed by the prospect of our not abiding by it.’

Though Arab nationalists professed themselves happy to exchange Turkish suzerainty for a European one, India rose in revolt with a fervour not seen since the days of the Mutiny. Quickly placed under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, this movement brought together Hindus and Muslims, Sunni and Shia, in a non-violent agitation that shook British rule in India by the scale at which people refused to cooperate with the government, resigning posts, preventing the work of administration and flooding jails. Gandhi himself withdrew from the movement, though he never disclaimed it, when violence started breaking out, and without able leadership or indeed Arab and Turkish support it eventually fizzled out, especially once the Turks themselves abolished the caliphate in 1924.

 

For our purposes what is interesting about this movement is that the Indians who engaged in it saw themselves as the citizens of a Muslim power. What enraged them more than anything else during this episode was Britain’s ‘betrayal’ of her Islamic obligations. For it was because many Indians believed that they were or should be partners in empire that they were outraged by the treatment meted out to the Turks, which gave rise to the subcontinent’s first mass mobilization, and the world’s only great pan-Islamist agitation. For his part the Mahatma’s aim was simply to hold the British to their word and call upon them to represent their subjects:

‘What is this British Empire? It is as much Mahomedan and Hindu as it is Christian. Its religious neutrality is not a virtue, or if it is, it is a virtue of necessity. Such a mighty Empire could not be held together on any other terms. British ministers are therefore bound to protect Mahomedan interests as any other. […] To join the Khilafat movement then means to join a movement to keep inviolate the pledge of a British minister. […] If the seven crore Mussulmans are partners in the Empire, I submit that their wish must be held to be all sufficient for refraining from punishing Turkey. It is beside the point to quote what Turkey did during the war.’

 

Gandhi’s task was to compel his rulers to act in a democratic fashion by moral and non-violent means, for he thought Britain could forever redeem herself by doing so, and thus establishing a world wide commonwealth in the truest sense of the term. It was during the Khilafat Movement that he finally lost his faith in the empire and turned to nationalism in its more conventional forms. Nevertheless, pan-Islamism continued to interest the Mahatma, not least because in the period before non-alignment and socialism came to take its place, Islam formed the only substantive link between India and her neighbours, and one that was of far more political and popular consequence than subsequent forms of internationalism ever were.

In other words India could only become a world power as an Islamic one, by gaining the trust of her Muslim neighbours rather than depending upon the support of distant powers with global interests of their own, something which would reduce India to the position of a client state rather than a force in her own right. Or as Gandhi put it:

‘It is only a people whose mentality has been perverted that can soothe itself with the domination by one race from a distant country, as a preventative against the aggression of another, a permanent and natural neighbour. Instead of developing strength to protect ourselves against those near whom we are permanently placed, a feeling of incurable impotence has been generated. Two strong and brave nations can live side by side, strengthening each other through enforcing constant vigilance, and maintain in full vigour each its own national strength, unity, patriotism and resources. If a nation wishes to be respected by its neighbours it has to develop and enter into honourable treaties. These are the only natural conditions of national liberty; but not a surrender to distant military powers to save oneself from one’s neighbours. […]

‘The Indian struggle for the freedom of Islam has brought about a more lasting entente and a more binding treaty between the people of India and the people of the Mussalman states around it than all the ententes and treaties among the Governments of Europe. No wars of aggression are possible where the common people on the two sides have become grateful friends. The faith of the Mussulman is a better sanction than the seal of the European Diplomats and plenipotentiaries. Not only has this great friendship between India and the Mussulman States around it removed for all time the fear of Mussulman aggression from outside, but it has erected round India a solid wall of defence against all aggression from beyond, against all greed from Europe, Russia or elsewhere.

‘No secret diplomacy could establish a better entente or a stronger federation than what this open and non-governmental treaty between Islam and India has established. The Indian support of the Khilafat has, as if by a magic wand, converted what was once the Pan- Islamic terror for Europe into a solid wall of friendship and defence for India.’

This of course had been the basis of Britain’s own Muslim policy before the First World War, so the Mahatma was only urging Indians to make it their own in a more genuine and honest way than the English had ever done. It was also a policy that continued to inform Muslim leaders in the subcontinent for many years to come. So the Nizam of Hyderabad, for instance, who was both the world’s richest man and the eccentric ruler of India’s largest princely state, entertained the ambition of transferring the caliphate to his own dynasty by supporting the exiled Ottoman emperor and marrying into his family. In this he was encouraged by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, an Englishman who had converted to Islam, produced a famous translation of the Quran still in use today and agitated for pan-Islamic causes which he thought were entirely in Britain’s true interests. Outlandish as it appears today, the idea of situating Sunni Islam’s central authority in a still colonized country where Muslims were a minority was not considered especially peculiar then.

 

What Muslim thinkers and politicians realized after the First World War was that by eliminating Turkey as a great power, Britain and France were sowing the seeds of conflict and instability across the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire’s successor states would be too small and weak to stand on their own in the international arena, becoming therefore clients and proxies of distant powers, plunging the entire region into a morass of petty squabbles and descending finally into rapacious and repressive regimes.

In such a situation, moreover, where no centre of gravity existed in the region, all manner of radical movements would flourish, with Islam being detached from its role as the religion of a clerical establishment, one upheld but also controlled by imperial might, to become instead a Protestant version of its formerly Catholic self, that is to say a faith beset by divisions each one of which was free to act politically in its own right. As had happened in Europe, in other words, religion in the Muslim world would end up politicised only after having been freed from the state, a paradox that proponents of established churches like Thomas Hobbes had recognized as early as the seventeenth century. These Indian predictions have all been amply justified over the last seventy years.

 

With the end of the Ottoman Empire, the only great power that existed in the Muslim world was the British, which however had forfeited much of the trust that the Prophet’s followers once placed in it. Today it is easy to dismiss these men as toadies and lickspittles, though we should remember that for the majority of Indian Muslims, and even among the anti-colonial clerics of seminaries like Deoband, the Raj did enjoy some legitimacy on religious grounds. Even when they were overtaken by Wilsonian ideas of nationalism after the Great War, many clerics and other Indians of a traditional cast of mind continued to envision their country’s future in imperial terms. For these men India needed to remain the world’s greatest Islamic power, which was why they opposed the creation of Pakistan as a state for Muslims.

This apparent irony is not to be explained by any clerical opposition to the supposedly secular or irreligious ways of Pakistan’s future leaders; after all many in the ranks of the Indian National Congress were atheists if they were not Hindus, and so hardly examples of Muslim piety. And yet it was the Congress that these traditionalists supported, not least because they realized that India divided would no longer constitute a great Islamic power, and that like the states emerging from the Ottoman collapse, Pakistan would be too small and weak to sustain South Asia’s Muslims, let alone provide them with a centre of political gravity.

 

What these men foresaw has also come to pass, so today there exists no great power in the Muslim world and no centre of gravity for its politics, all of which goes a long way towards accounting for the state of things in this extended region, something explanations based on the politics of oil or neo-colonialism cannot quite manage to do. By a centre of gravity, of course, I do not mean some kind of theological order, but instead a power that might centralize political and religious thought across an entire region, whatever its constitutional character. This in fact is what has already happened to Christianity, which despite its huge following in the poor and powerless countries of the global South, is nevertheless stabilized politically in the rich and powerful states of the North.

But then this is not a particularly new argument, with Muslim thinkers making it since the end of the First World War, the event from which Osama bin Laden too dates Islam’s decline. In this vision of things pan-Islamism does not refer to some kind of theological entity or even a world state, but only a Muslim great power of the Ottoman or British kind. And pan-Islamism, as we have already seen, is as much a Christian fantasy as it is a Muslim reality, being in either case a thoroughly modern phenomenon.

Today the British model of an Islamic power is the only one possible, not because its pluralist character was more egalitarian than the Ottoman, its secularism more pronounced or its demographic politics more imaginative, but rather because India in our time has once again become the world’s greatest Muslim power. For although they are by and large an impoverished and disadvantaged minority in the country, the enormous population of over a hundred and fifty million Muslims there renders any simple socio-economic profile suspect, especially in light of the fact that the Indian community represents a significant portion of the world’s total and still constitutes a centre of gravity for Islam in the region.

After all it is no accident that every single religious movement in Pakistan and Afghanistan, militant or moderate, from the Taliban and Lashkar-e Taiba to the Barelwis and Sufis, all have their intellectual and doctrinal origins in India. What is more Islam in these borderland states is capable only of radicalizing its Indian roots, not setting down any of its own. Despite all the talk of Middle Eastern funding for fundamentalism and militancy in the region, no Muslim movement there derives its history or inspiration from places like Saudi Arabia but only from India, and more especially from the days of the British Raj.

 

This extraordinary situation should at least give us pause for thought. Were it to be fully appreciated, scholars and policy-makers would realize that India is the key to Islam’s flourishing in the region, as well as to the latter’s own stability. Rather than placing Pakistan and Afghanistan in a Middle Eastern context, in other words, such experts would see that India provides the centre of gravity for Islam in both. This is one reason why India serves as the focus for Pakistani militant groups in particular, which are dedicated not to avenging the suffering of Indian Muslims so much as the loss of Islam’s historical centre there.

Neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan is large enough or powerful enough to centralize Islam and make of it a global model, just as no Middle Eastern country is able to do. Indeed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, while mobilizing a great many people for this or that reason, has never produced a single mass movement of any kind, let alone a national one, since the day it was founded over half a century ago. Its religious politics is therefore like every other politics there, made up of conspiracies, compromises and coups d’etat conducted by all sorts of factions, each making up for its lack of numbers by direct action and armed force.

 

Only a federation that brings together India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka, perhaps along the lines of the European Union, has any hope of creating a stable and prosperous South Asia while centralizing both Hinduism and Islam within it. Indeed the former religion has been as radicalized as the latter with the partition of British India. It was because he realized that Hinduism ran the risk of becoming politicized merely as a state religion that the Mahatma had advocated a more expansive global role for it and India in general, one that justified his own participation in the Khilafat Movement:

‘The age of misunderstanding and mutual warfare among religions is gone. If India has a mission of its own to the world, it is to establish the unity and the truth of all religions. This unity is established by mutual help and understanding between the various religions. It has come as a rare privilege to the Hindus in the fulfilment of this mission of India to stand up in defence of Islam against the onslaught of the earth-greed of the military powers of the West. […] If Hindus and Mussalmans attain the height of courage and sacrifice that is needed for this battle on behalf of Islam against the greed of the West, a victory will be won not alone for Islam, but for Christianity itself. Militarism has robbed the crucified God of his name and his very cross and the World has been mistaking it to be Christianity. After the battle of Islam is won, Islam and Hinduism together can emancipate Christianity itself from the lust for power and wealth which have strangled it now, and the true Christianity of the Gospels will be established. This battle of non-cooperation with its suffering and peaceful withdrawal of service will once and for all establish its superiority over the power of brute force and unlimited slaughter. What a glorious privilege it is to play our part in this history of the world, when Hinduism and Islam will unite on behalf of Christianity, and in that strife of mutual love and support each religion will attain its own truest shape and beauty.’

 

In the absence of a South Asian union in the foreseeable future, and with the loss of Hinduism’s world-historical ambition for the time being, the Republic of India, as the region’s only great power, has a particular role to play as far as the politics of Islam is concerned. And this role its Muslim citizens can take on by exercising a kind of gravitational pull for their co-religionists elsewhere, in the same way as they had in the colonial past, and in doing so to provide a model for Islamic politics globally. As it is this huge population that is yet a minority already serves as the chief example of Muslim politics in a democratic mode, though it is more fashionable today to talk about the community either as a breeding ground for terrorism or as a victim of discrimination and violence at the hands of Hindu militants. While they are ostensibly opposed, these characterizations are of course nothing but mirror images of one another.

 

In one way India has been true to her colonial past by trying to become a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference, (attempts always frustrated by pakistan) sponsoring her citizens to go on pilgrimage to Mecca and routinely playing the Muslim card in her dealings with Middle Eastern states. But on the other hand her governments have viewed even Islamic organizations with a long history of patriotism, such as the important seminary of Deoband, with suspicion and have tried to cut down their international profile.

The seminary, for example, which used to attract students from places as far away as South Africa and South East Asia, has now to content itself with a largely Indian intake, the rest having gone off to study in countries like Saudi Arabia. And this is to say nothing of the routine discrimination that many Muslims face in India. Nothing could be more counterproductive for India’s own regional ambitions and global stature than this situation, which in addition serves to destabilize the whole of South Asia. But half a century after the partition of British India, the ceaseless conflict of whose successor states poisoned the religious atmosphere of India, things are finally changing.

Pakistan, which has never rendered any assistance to India’s Muslims but instead always imperilled them, no longer forms an object of desire or even envy for the latter. This is in part due to the fact that politics in neither country is dominated any longer by single parties and controlled economies but has splintered across their surface. As a result Indian Muslims are no longer trapped within a state-dominated society and reduced to trading their votes for negligible favours from different levels of government. Not only has the private sector opened up to businessmen and labour as a new arena for Muslim organization and expression, but the fragmentation of the great national parties means that Muslims, like caste, regional and other groups, can assume a political role of their own for the first time since independence.

Naturally this brave new world is not some utopia but filled with corruption and violence, while at the same time signalling the advent of a better future. And indeed Muslim politics has gone the way of private sector enterprises, which include large numbers of schools, colleges and other facilities for this disadvantaged community, and is now routinely in the business of social service, charity and relief.

 

Unlike the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir, which as a heavily militarized border region is taken up by the kind of separatist movements that link it to earlier Sikh struggles in Punjab or contemporaneous ethnic ones in the North East, the community’s politics in the rest of India has such a different character that there is little interaction between these Muslims and those in the Valley. Focused on Assam, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Kerala, all states where Muslims make up twenty per cent or more of the population, this politics is not only democratic in nature but draws into its ambit even clerics and fundamentalists who had in the past stood apart from the electoral arena to influence it from without.

In an extraordinary move, the country’s largest association of divines, the Jamiat Ulama-e Hind, is now running candidates for parliament, while the most important fundamentalist group, the Jamaat-e Islami, has renounced its opposition to electoral politics and is also fielding candidates. Both organizations have also declared themselves to be secular in the expansive sense that term enjoys in India. What does it mean when religious authorities submit themselves to the popular vote? The long-term implications for such authority, and the way Muslims relate to it, are both complex and ambiguous, but if nothing else the new politics of Muslim India suggest possibilities not yet available in much of the rest of the world.

Given the size, influence and history of India’s Muslim community, its politics can by no means be defined as belonging merely to a minority. For India has in the past been a centre of Islamic learning, culture and power internationally, without ever possessing a Muslim majority or even being subject to Muslim rule, and this indeed has been one of its distinguishing features. If today India presents herself to the world in the incarnation of a nation state, she yet retains the spirit of an empire in her infinite diversity, and is still able to become a centre of gravity for Islam across a vast hinterland.

This is no utopian vision but part of the region’s historical reality, whose acquaintance should warn us against the drawing of simple distinctions between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Similarly imperialism and pan-Islamism, Sharia and British law, the West and jihad have been so entangled in the recent past as to possess no pure forms. Cognizance of this history allows us to recognize who we are and to accept our intimacies with others, also therefore permitting us to act with the maturity to stand against easy definitions of all kinds, and to envision the future in more imaginative ways.

 

* Faisal Devji is the author of Landscapes of the Jihad (2005) and The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (2008).

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