Javed Anand: Reluctant Democrats - Jamaat e Islami Hind (JIH)
Communalism Combat, July 2012
To the ardent followers of Maududi, the organisation is deviating from "true Islam". As for those (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) who consider Maududism to be a recipe for a totalitarian state (some even call it "fascist"), its movement towards secularism and democracy is seen more as an opportunistic, temporary, tactical move. For them therefore, the JIH is not very different from the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Replace Marxism with Islam, communists with Muslims and the Bolshevik party with the Jamaat and there you have the complete blueprint for a totalitarian Islamic state. For Maududi, the bloody partition of India was a great leap forward, since it had given birth to a dar ul-Islam, an abode of Islam (Pakistan). Admittedly, there was a little anomaly here, a little twist in the tale. The creator of the "dar ul-Islam", it so happened, was a beardless man whose commitment to Islam was suspect and whose avowal of secularism and democracy threatened to turn Pakistan into a Paap-istan (land of sin). But Maududi was confident that his Jamaat would ensure course correction and soon usher hukumat-e-ilahiya in Pakistan.
Meet Irfan Ahmad. Having started his educational jour-ney from a madrassa in North India, he is today assistant professor of politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University, Australia, and leads the country’s Centre for Islam and the Modern World. What got him there, quite possibly, is his book Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami, published in 2010 by Permanent Black. The book forms part of ‘The Indian Century’, a series of select books on India’s recent past. It has also been published by the Princeton University Press in the USA. "This is the most important book written on Muslims in India in the last three decades," says Dale F. Eickelman, a renowned US-based professor of anthropology and a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies.
Book review (2009): The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam & Global Politics
To the ardent followers of Maududi, the organisation is deviating from "true Islam". As for those (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) who consider Maududism to be a recipe for a totalitarian state (some even call it "fascist"), its movement towards secularism and democracy is seen more as an opportunistic, temporary, tactical move. For them therefore, the JIH is not very different from the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Replace Marxism with Islam, communists with Muslims and the Bolshevik party with the Jamaat and there you have the complete blueprint for a totalitarian Islamic state. For Maududi, the bloody partition of India was a great leap forward, since it had given birth to a dar ul-Islam, an abode of Islam (Pakistan). Admittedly, there was a little anomaly here, a little twist in the tale. The creator of the "dar ul-Islam", it so happened, was a beardless man whose commitment to Islam was suspect and whose avowal of secularism and democracy threatened to turn Pakistan into a Paap-istan (land of sin). But Maududi was confident that his Jamaat would ensure course correction and soon usher hukumat-e-ilahiya in Pakistan.
Meet Irfan Ahmad. Having started his educational jour-ney from a madrassa in North India, he is today assistant professor of politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University, Australia, and leads the country’s Centre for Islam and the Modern World. What got him there, quite possibly, is his book Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami, published in 2010 by Permanent Black. The book forms part of ‘The Indian Century’, a series of select books on India’s recent past. It has also been published by the Princeton University Press in the USA. "This is the most important book written on Muslims in India in the last three decades," says Dale F. Eickelman, a renowned US-based professor of anthropology and a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies.
No mean achievement for a first venture, an outcome of Ahmad’s PhD thesis on the subject from the University of Amsterdam. "You’ve come a long way, baby," one might say to him in appreciation. That, in short summary, is also what Ahmad has to say to/about the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) in his book. Without quarrelling with Ahmad’s conclusion based on meticulous research, the fact remains that his conclusion, though not incorrect, is incomplete. A complete sentence about the JIH should read: You’ve come a long way, baby, but you’ve still got a long way to go. Though the JIH has in practice moved far away from its ideological moorings, it has yet to cut the umbilical cord that still ties it to the lethal ideology of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, the Jamaat’s founder.
That there is a movement within the Jamaat movement in India is true and that’s a welcome thing. But there is a limit to the extent you can play with ideas, how far you can go with verbal jugglery. How long can you "interpret" and "reinterpret" Maududi to legitimise a course of action which would have been absolute heresy for the good maulana? All that you achieve in the process is to stand Maududism on its head. What is needed is a clean break, a decent burial of the Maududian world view, but as of now the JIH is nowhere close to getting there. Ahmad’s otherwise engaging book fails to satisfactorily address the disjoint between Maududism – the bedrock of Jamaat politics – and its otherwise welcome departure – in the secular, democratic direction. Given this dislocation, to many Indian Muslims, the JIH looks in many respects like the mirror image, the Muslim version of the Hindu right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The Lenin of Islamism: To Maududi, the Lenin of Islamism, goes the dubious credit of "discovering" (Sayyid Qutb of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was later to toe the same line and stretch it even further) that unlike other religions, Islam is not just faith and rituals, Kalima, namaaz, roza, Haj, zakaat. Above all, Islam is a "revolutionary ideology" whose goal is the capture of state power. To be a Muslim is to be a revolutionary whose entire being is dedicated to dismantling and overthrowing all man-made ideas, institutions, laws, isms – capitalism, communism, fascism – and grabbing political power to establish hukumat-e-ilahiya (Allah’s kingdom) and Shariah laws. Since there is no place for nation and nationalism in Islam, it is the bounden duty of a Muslim to strive through all means possible to establish Allah’s kingdom and Shariah rule throughout the globe: from Japan and China to Iceland and America. If Islam is the revolutionary ideology and Muslims the revolutionaries, for Maududi, the Jamaat and Jamaatis are its vanguard.
In short, here is Lenin’s famous "What is to Done?" thesis Islamised. Replace Marxism with Islam, communists with Muslims and the Bolshevik party with the Jamaat and there you have the complete blueprint for a totalitarian Islamic state.
For Maududi, the bloody partition of India was a great leap forward, since it had given birth to a dar ul-Islam, an abode of Islam (Pakistan). Admittedly, there was a little anomaly here, a little twist in the tale. The creator of the "dar ul-Islam", it so happened, was a beardless man whose commitment to Islam was suspect and whose avowal of secularism and democracy threatened to turn Pakistan into a Paap-istan (land of sin). But Maududi was confident that his Jamaat would ensure course correction and soon usher hukumat-e-ilahiya in Pakistan. The subsequent trajectory of the Jamaat and the fate of its agenda for Pakistan (and Bangladesh) lies outside the scope of this article, since the focus here is on the Indian version of the Jamaat.
Jamaat in dar ul-kufr: If a part of the partitioned country was dar ul-Islam, the other part – greater in size and larger in numbers – was "dar ul-kufr (an abode of infidels)" as Maududi saw it. The agenda of the Jamaat in the predominantly Muslim dar ul-Islam appeared simple enough. But what was the Jamaat’s rump – with all of 240 arkan (members) in 1948 – left behind in Hindu-majority India to do? Not much of a problem there, the maulana believed. If the transition of Pakistan into an Islamic state was a certainty, Maududi was also confident that there was "at least a 60 per cent chance for Islam’s success" in India too.1 If you believed there was "at least a 60 per cent chance of success" in whatever you seek to achieve, wouldn’t you "go for it"? So the JIH "went for it"; took up the challenge of transforming infidel India into a dar ul-Islam.
If you find this idea bizarre, hilarious, ridiculous or whatever, many Indian Muslims thought so too, even then. In his book, Ahmad narrates the account of a retired professor from Aligarh Muslim University who, as a student of the same university in the 1960s, had attended a lecture addressed by Syed Hamid Husain, then a prominent Jamaat leader. Formerly a communist, the highly westernised Husain had later embraced Maududism. During his lecture Husain attacked the ideas of secularism, nationalism and democracy, offering Islam as the only real alternative before India. Ahmad’s interviewee challenged Husain, arguing that it was "foolish" and "reactionary" to fantasise about an Islamic system in Hindu-predominant India. But an unfazed Husain asserted: "Yes, it is possible." Asked if Hindus needed to convert to Islam for the miracle to happen, his answer was no. Husain was simply reiterating the Jamaat line that just as a secular, democratic system remained un-Islamic irrespective of whether an Abdullah or a Ram Prasad presided over the affairs of state, so long as an "Islamic system" was established, it did not matter who was at the helm!
Maududi’s and the JIH’s conviction that India could be Islamised rested on three assumptions:
Assumption one: A very large section of Hindus who are victims of caste oppression can easily be won over to the fold of Islam. Why would lower-caste Hindus who did not convert to Islam through centuries of "Muslim rule" in India do so under the new secular, democratic dispensation? Because there was no Maududi and his Jamaat on the scene earlier, might well have been the response.
Assumption two: As the Jamaat’s monthly Urdu organ, Zindagi, argued in 1955: "If we consider the population of the whole world… we can say that every sixth man is a Muslim whereas out of 300 men, there is only one member of the Communist party. Despite their small number however, communism has captured one-fourth of the planet and is one of the two leading powers."2 (Yet another example of the Jamaat’s love-hate relationship with communists?) Numbers apparently did not matter; what did was the determination and sacrifices of the vanguard.
Assumption three: Since Hinduism did not have a "permanent world view", Hindus had no choice but to look to others for a system of governance. That is why they ended up adopting the "evil principles" of secularism, nationalism and democracy from the West. The task before the JIH was therefore straightforward: to tell the Hindu leaders of the Congress: "It is your duty (farz) to recognise, assess and examine… the Islamic principles and display the same objectivity you have adopted towards European democracy and Russian communism. We are sure that if you examine that then you would realise that in reality only the Islamic system is the guarantee of your and the world’s welfare."3
Jamaat’s recipe for India: Hindu state: Based on such comforting assumptions, the strategy proposed by Maududi and adopted by the JIH was simple: Goad the Hindu leaders of the Congress party to ditch the ideals of secularism and democracy, establish a "Hindu state". In short, the Jamaatis preferred that Indian Muslims live under a Hindu state rather than a secular state.
While deposing before the Justice Munir Commission (appointed to probe the vicious and violent anti-Ahmadiyya agitation in Pakistan in 1953), Maududi had stated: "I should have no objection even if the Muslims of India are treated… as Shudras and Mlecchas [the lowest castes and barbarians] and Manu’s laws are applied to them, depriving them of all share in the government and the rights of a citizen."4 Embarrassed by such a statement from their leader, Maududi’s followers continue to claim that the good maulana was misquoted by Justice Munir. But then, here is the 1950 statement of Maulana Abullais Islahi Nadwi, the first amir (president) of the JIH: "I request… the Hindu leaders to adopt only those principles and based on them, establish whatever way of life exists among them. We would prefer that (Hindu state) to the secular systems of Europe. In the (Hindu) system, if there is a provision of death for Muslims like us, we are agreed even to that."5
"For a Muslim, it is not even legitimate to breathe in a secular society unless he strove to convert it into a dar ul-Islam," said Maududi. However, his and JIH’s preference for a Hindu state seems to have been purely ‘tactical’. It was believed that a ‘Hindu state’ (to be installed with full encouragement from Muslims) cannot last long because Hinduism lacked a "permanent world view" and was cursed with the caste hierarchy. A "Hindu state" was sure to collapse and the JIH (Islam’s Bolsheviks) would quickly step in to seize the moment. As simple as that.
The commandments: Equipped with such an impressive theological arsenal, the 240-member army of the JIH enthusiastically launched its Islamist project in post-independence India. In the beginning the JIH chose to float an island of its own in the sea of kufr so that Jamaatis may lead an uncontaminated Islamic life. The organisation’s purist agenda included the following:
- Jamaat workers were prohibited from participating in any way in the electoral process. No standing for elections, no voting, since Maududi believed it meant participation in the taghuti nizam (idolatrous system).
- Staying away from elections was not enough. Every other component of the state apparatus, part of the system that propped up the un-Islamic system, was to be shunned.
- Government service, particularly in the Indian army and judiciary, and the banking system were an absolute no-no. (Muslims inspired by Maududism resigned from their government jobs before joining the Jamaat.)
- Joining the legal profession and practising as a lawyer was prohibited; taking cases to the courts was not permitted either except in extreme situations.
- Leave alone government educational institutions, even studying in a Muslim-managed educational institution like the Aligarh Muslim University was out, since Maududi had called such institutions "slaughterhouses" for Muslims. Madrassas run by various Muslim outfits too were "slaughterhouses" although of a different kind. So were Muslims to stay illiterate? Not at all; the JIH would open darsgahs (schools) and saani darsgahs (institutions of higher education) which would impart true Islamic education and nurture future Jamaatis. Girls’ education was fine but co-education was out.
- The JIH would have nothing to do with other Muslim organisations because they lacked the "fundamental perspective of Islam" (read did not subscribe to Maududi’s Islam).
- Any dealing with banks, savings or pension accounts, educational or business loans, all were haram because interest equals usury which Islam prohibits.
- Sinful practices such as listening to music, watching films, etc were all haram.
- Birth control measures were un-Islamic and for women, the burkha was a must.
How on earth was the Jamaat going to transform anything with such self-imposed isolation? Daawah (invitation, propagation) is the answer. For starters, the JIH issued a daawah to top Indian leaders, including the then president of India, Rajendra Prasad, and prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Sadly for Maududi’s followers, the response, if any, was not encouraging. In order to convert the aam aadmi (common man) to its cause, it published books and periodicals in several Indian languages. But here again, the progress was far from soul-stirring. According to the JIH’s own figures, as against 240 members in 1948, it had grown to only 981 members in 1960 when the total Muslim population in India then was around 42 million. It was not a very encouraging picture.
The vanguard behind the masses: As was only to be expected, the JIH found itself running into hurdles every step of the way. India’s secular, democratic polity and more so the Indian Muslims’ near total indifference to its agenda soon forced the organisation to rethink or be reduced to irrelevance. As it turned out, the demands of survival won over the dictates of ideology. Maududi had envisaged the Jamaat as the vanguard of the ummah (the global Muslim community). But if it has any presence on the Indian landscape today it is only because it chose, willy-nilly, to be led by the Muslim masses. Slowly but surely, the body that had set out to transform India was itself trans-formed. That this transformation was not uniform but zigzag and patchy is another matter. The Jamaat’s step-by-step ideological retreat is best illustrated through its shifting stance towards the political, electoral process.
- Soon after independence, the JIH switched from its original hukumat-e-ilahiya mission to that of iqaamat-e-deen (establishing religion). It’s just a change of terminology, both mean the same thing, the cadre was told. In that case, why change? The realisation, presumably, that harping on "Allah’s kingdom" would not only not go down too well with the Hindu majority, even Muslims might scoff at the absurdity of the proposition.
- In the first two general elections of independent India – 1952, 1957 – Muslims were warned that taking part in the taghuti nizam was totally un-Islamic, haram. Indian Muslims however totally ignored the Jamaat and participated actively both as voters and as candidates. Finding itself totally isolated, the JIH was forced to revisit Maududi.
- In a dramatic U-turn on the eve of the 1962 elections, the JIH mass-distributed a pamphlet in Urdu under a title in Persian: ‘Pas che bayad kard (What is to be done?)’. Lenin again! The pamphlet, penned by the JIH’s amir Nadwi, pleaded with Muslims to participate in elections, for not to do so would be "tantamount to suicide".6 Muslims had in any case been actively participating since 1952!
- The ground for the shift had been prepared in 1961 when circumstances forced a new realisation on the Jamaat’s shura (highest decision-making body): "if the path of elections could be used for the goal of iqaamat-e-deen", participating in the "ungodly system" was acceptable, it decided. Interestingly however, in the resolutions passed by the shura, the phrase iqaamat-e-deen was given a quiet burial. Participation in the elections was now okay because it was "in the interest of Islam and Muslims". But conditions applied: a Muslim wanting to contest elections must shun non-Islamic parties; it was okay for a Jamaati to vote only "under some conditions"; votes must only go to a candidate who is "not from a non-Islamic party". For all practical purposes however, the JIH stayed away from the 1962 polls.
- Until the early 1960s, the JIH would have nothing to do with other Muslim organisations because, as mentioned earlier, they lacked the "fundamental perspective of Islam". But eager to be part of a new political formation in North India in 1964 – the All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat – Nadwi assured its leader Syed Mahmood through the Jamaat’s mouthpiece, Radiance, that the JIH had full faith in the Indian Constitution and in a secular state. However, it remained opposed to sharing a platform with Hindus. All said and done, in the 1967 polls too, JIH members did not contest elections and the ban on its workers from voting remained in place.
- In the aftermath of the emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi – during which period the JIH was banned and many of its top leaders jailed – the organisation took no official stand on the 1977 elections which dislodged Mrs Gandhi from power.
JIH in defence of secularism: Fast-forward to 1985. Though matters reached a flashpoint and the organisation seemed on the verge of a vertical split, the leadership at long last pushed through its resolve allowing Jamaat workers to vote. After nearly four decades of organisational twists and torments over the issue, Jamaat members were at last free to vote: for Muslim or even non-Muslim candidates. The only condition now was that the candidates be of good moral character, sympathetic to Muslim concerns and not affiliated to any party whose ideology is "clearly against Islam and Muslims".
The JIH which began as a staunch opponent of India’s secular, democratic polity (idolatrous system) had now turned into its active participant some 40 years later. Marking this shift, the phrase iqaamat-e-deen disappeared from the mastheads of the Jamaat’s publications. What’s more, with the rise of virulent Hindutva in Indian politics from the mid-1980s onwards, the JIH turned from mere participant into an ardent defender of democracy and secularism. In the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, it even floated a platform, Forum for Democracy and Communal Harmony, wooing practising Hindus, communists and avowed atheists to jointly combat "communalism and fascism". Invited to the Jamaat’s ijtima (gathering) of 2002 were several Hindu high priests (shankaracharyas). One of them even blew a conch on the occasion and chanted: "Om, Om!" Had he been alive, what would Maududi think or say?
Along with the radical shift of the JIH on the electoral front, some other foundational Maududian myths also came into question. Maududi’s neat delineation of the world into dar ul-Islam and dar ul-kufr was one of them. Some Jamaat leaders now found democracy to be "an unexpected divine boon". Others claimed that India is neither dar ul-Islam nor dar ul-kufr but a dar ul-daawah. But for the devoted followers of Maududi, all this is heresy of the highest order.
In his book, Ahmad well captures the disgust of a Jamaat member from Delhi who was among many who quit the organisation when the ban on voting was lifted: "How on earth could Islam allow voting for taghut (idolatrous parliamentary system)? When I joined the Jamaat, we were told to eliminate taghut, secularism, democracy… everything against the Koran… We joined for iqaamat-e-deen. Now the Jamaat is fighting for iqaamat-e-secular democracy. Do you know about the Forum for Democracy and Communal Harmony?... What is it doing? It is fighting for the glory of secularism and democracy. You have also read Maududi. Tell me, what has secularism got to do with Islam? Where is the original ideology?".. read more:
See also:
Mahmoud Mohammed Taha (Author of Second Message of Islam); also known as Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was a Sudanese religious thinker, leader, and trained engineer. He was executed for apostasy at the age of 76 by the regime of Gaafar Nimeiry. (See his Court statement)
THE MODERATE MARTYR - A radically peaceful vision of Islam
THE MODERATE MARTYR - A radically peaceful vision of Islam
Book review (2009): The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam & Global Politics
Najam Sethi - Pakistan: Pluralism and tolerance
Unfortunately, attempts to rationalize and modernize our education system have continuously foundered on the rock of misplaced, conservative or politically motivated religious elements in society..Two such cases have caught headlines recently. The first is an attempt by Imran Khan's PTI government in KPK to undo the rational cleansing of the textbooks by the previous ANP government by reinserting nations of jihad and "Islamic" vice and virtue into the curricula. The second is an attempt by a section of the media to devalue the teaching of "comparative" religion in schools in which the values of relative compassion, mutual respect and human dignity common to all religions are emphasized.
See more: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130920&page=1
Unfortunately, attempts to rationalize and modernize our education system have continuously foundered on the rock of misplaced, conservative or politically motivated religious elements in society..Two such cases have caught headlines recently. The first is an attempt by Imran Khan's PTI government in KPK to undo the rational cleansing of the textbooks by the previous ANP government by reinserting nations of jihad and "Islamic" vice and virtue into the curricula. The second is an attempt by a section of the media to devalue the teaching of "comparative" religion in schools in which the values of relative compassion, mutual respect and human dignity common to all religions are emphasized.
See more: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130920&page=1
We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree. // We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons. // We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights. // We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind. We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called "Islamaphobia" in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights...
