6. The idea of a Muslim community: British India, 1857-1906

Chapter 6 The idea ofa Muslim community: British India, 1857-1906 Faisa! De:l!ii 6.1 Introduction The Muslim 'community' emerged in India during the nineteenth century as a direct consequence of colonial rule. With the destruction of royal and aristocratic forms of power in British territory, these indigenous sources of profane authority were displaced by religious ones, which for the first time stood free of the formers' tutelage (Devji 2007a). In other words, it was the Muslim community's separation from political authority that made it a religious entity in the modern sense. Yet by freeing Islam of such profane elements, the secular politics ofcolonialism freed it from all inherited forms of authority, making the Muslim community into a site of competition between different groups ofdivines and laymen. The birth of this new collectivity was signalled by its adoption of a name unknown to history, with Muslims in the nineteenth century calling themselves a qawm, an Arabic word meaning something like 'tribe' or 'people' that had rarely been used to describe religious groups in the past (Devji 2007b). Eventually, this word would become an equivalent for the equally novel term 'nation' in South Asia. Notwithstanding their reference to ties ofkith and kin in other contexts, neither community nor qawm were names used to describe local forms of Muslim belonging, being deployed iostead to represent the disparate, dispersed and merely demographic collection of Queen Victoria's Muslim subjects. While its demographic boundaries may have been mapped by the colonial census and its juridical borders by Angio-Muhamrnadan law, the Muslim community was occupied by Indians themselves in differentways. Indeed, it soon became the site ofgreat struggles between Muslim groups in northern India, primarily Sunni clerics and their relatives among the laity. Both these groups belonged to the same class of minor landholders, admioistrators and bureaucrats, all Urdu-speaking, who had been liberated by colonial rule from the kings and nobles they had once served. Fully conscious oftheir independence, these men called themselves 'sharif ('wellbom'), and set out to recast Islam io their own image, thus lendiog the qawm some substance as an ethnic category. It was the laymen who set the terms of debate in this struggle and especially those who gathered under the 'reformist' and pro-British sign ofthe Aligarh Movement whose II2 COLONIAL AND GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM POST~CLNIA project to modernise Muslims was named after a town in the United Provinces that was home to its great institutions, the Muhammadan Angle-Oriental College (later Aligarh Muslim University) and the Muhammadan Educational Conference. Aligarh was also the base of the movement's founder and guiding spirit, the influential moderniser Sayyid AhmadKhan. During the nineteenth century, this new Muslim community was anchored by the rival institutions ofboth reformers and traditionalists, as well as being addressed and represented in the outpouring of pamphlets, journals and books produced by these groups. It was not until 1909, however, that the community became a formal political actor, when the British introduced limited franchise to India, with legislative seats being reserved along religious lines, thus producing a separate Muslim electorate. But this meant that the North Indian Muslims who had dominated debate on the community's future suddenly become a minority among their co-religionists, whose superior numbers they finally had to acknowledge by handing leadership to the Punjabi landlords, Bengali trades unionists and Gujarati merchants, who all came together in the Muslim League. The word 'qawm', of course, eventually came to refer to India's Muslims as a nation represented by the League, though this did not happen until after the 1937 elections. But even with the rise of the Pakistan Movement in the 1940S, this term and its English equivalent, 'community', continued being used of Muslims in a non-national sense. In today's India, for example, the Muslim minority is still called both a 'qawm' and 'community', as indeed are all religious groups despite the fact that 'qawm' is also the word for 'nation'. The non-political history of the Muslim community, then, continues to esist alongside its nationalist past, lending this collectivity great depth and complesity. In this chapter, I will be concerned only with the nineteenth-century history of the Muslim community in North India, specifically with its elaboration within the Aligarh Movement. My concern is not with the juridical 'construction' of this community, but rather with the way in which Aligarhists defined the qawm as a non-political entity. In reformist writing, the English word 'politics' was usually transcribed directly into Urdu as something complementing but not identical to the older term 'siyasat'. or other terms for (governance' such as hukumat' and 'saltanat'. Politics, in other words, was not only conceived as a new field of action, but also as one that displaced siyasat to some extent. This latter had been a branch of ethics, consisting in the ruler's virtuous administration or even nurturing of different ranks and grades among his people. Politics, on the other hand, did not participate in ethics but created a new space for relations ofpower that were more or less neutral, having marginalised the old domain of ethical nurture in favour of a practice in which power was both sought and deployed according to principles that no longer 1 FAISAL DEVJI coincided with those that defined virtue in its traditional forms. Siyasat was not entirely done away with, but survived as the virtuous action of government, which now consisted in the enactment of law as something that created a society rather than simply governing the relations between different estates. Law, in other words, could no longer be applied to pre-constituted polities, but only imposed on a more or less amorphous mass, thus acting as the principle of form for a mass as content. But the retention of a marginal and reformed siyasat rendered this new space of politics somewhat ambiguous. For while it was recognised that both government and suhjecta could engage in a politics that was autonomous of ethics, any action against the good as defined by law was still seen as being unethical. This is why the very word 'politics' was used as an accusation in the nineteenth century and why Muslim reformers were always careful to define their activities as religious or educational instead. In this chapter, I intend to explore such refonnist practices conducted in the shadow of politics hy looking at some of the ways in which Urduspeaking Muslims grappled with the decline of siyasat and sought to rethink social relations outside the ethical boundaries of the past. 6.2 Islam's invisible body As a colonised entity, the Muslim community was able to admit neither siyasat nor politics into its practice. In this situation, only two forms of discourse presented themselves as sites for a politics denied, the association and the press, whose role is aptly characterised by the satirical poet Akbar lllahabadi, perhaps the Aligarh Movement's most popular and perceptive critic. Tamam qawm 'editor' bani hay ya 'leader' Sabab y<h hay kt koi awr dillagi na rahi (Illahabadi 1990: 123) ('The entire community's become an editor or a leader The reason's this that there's no other occupation left') Muhsin ui-Mulk, Sayyid Ahmad Khan's right-hand man and successor at Aligarh, was merely pointing out the obvious to his audience at the Muhammadan Educational Conference ofr89o, when he reminded them of the novelty of their meeting. We have not been summoned here, he said, by royal edict. Neither do we attend out of feudal duty, for commercial gain, in order to witness a spectacle, criticise and lobby the government, or create religious dissention. Rather, we have congregated voluntarily and out of concern to sympathise with the community and work for its uplift (Ali Khan r9r3: 44). In the space of this singie paragraph, the Nawab dismissed all the traditional functions of association. Instead, he COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM promulgated a strange kind of organisation that was so dependent on individual, autonomous will that it became void of all moral relationships ofa collective kind: an association that was nothing in itself, which neither constituted the polity, nor represented it, nor did it establish dogma because its referent was autonomous and outside. Such an organisation existed as a place apart from life itselfor, as Akbar Illahabadi puts it, using the word 'camp' to indicate this colonial form of order. 'Camp' hi men nazar ati hay unh<:n quwwat-e qawm Varna basne ko to dehat bhi hay shahr bhi hay (lllahabadi 1990: 6o) ('They only see the community's strength in the camp Otherwise there are both country and town to live in') The Aligarhist association did not spring fully grown from the head of tradition. Indeed, the poet and critic Altaf H usayn Hali, who was Sayyid Alrmad Khan's associate and biographer, suggests that in its early years the organisation (he is referring primarily to the sessions of the Mulranrmadan Educational Conference) in fact acted as a refuge for practices such as poetic recitation, whose own public spaces had been destroyed (Hali 1967: 244). Hali claims that Sir Sayyid, as he was called, encouraged this collapsing of traditional practices into the new venue ofthe association in order to attract people to the conference and reduce its foreignness (Hali 1967: 246). This would mean that the early sharif organisation did not have an altogether clear relationship to the community or, for that matter, to the colonial state. By 1904, however, when Hali's essay was written, such practices had become atavistic to the extent that Hali, himself a prominent reciter of poetry at Aligarhist meetings, called for their suppression (Hali 1967: 245). And this meant that the association's relations with both community and state had to be redefined. The association objectified the community, even inventing it as such, by prescribing for its ills from the outside. It did not constitute or represent the qawm but rather advised it; its relationship to the community was purely didactic. And it was the dominance of this one-sided relationship that probably explains why the issue of representation does not seem to have been taken seriously within the community during the whole course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Aligarhists considered their leadership to be a kind offarz, i.e. moral obligation, which had nothing to do with representation or consent. Akbar Illalrabadi (r990: '33) ridicules this novel pedagogic duty of the association in a couplet. Kyun nahin parta aql ka saya Is ko samjhe:n farz ldfaya ('Why doesn't the shadow of intelligence fall? They consider this a collective moral obligation') FAISAL DEVJI Such a conception of leadership differed from the British idea of the Aligarhist as a natural or representative leader, an idea implying some kind of consensual relationship with the qawm. For most ofthe nineteenth century this misunderstanding remained undisturbed, hut when groups such as the Indian National Congress and non-sharif societies across the country began claiming to speak for Muslims, representationor at least a representative character- suddenly became a major issue and the gentry's qawm was destroyed forever. The Aligarhist association, however, did more than just preach to the community. Its displacement of older political practices was not simply evolutionary hut tactical, in that the latter were now rendered not irrelevant so much as unreflective; they became content, objects to be examined, and no longer sites or practices that retained the power of commentary or criticism. The split between ethics and politics this entailed is poignantly described in a verse ofAkbar lllahabadi (1990: 20). men kijiye jhar phonk Qawm Id ~id Aspitalon men woh achhi ho chuki ('Go on and pray for the community in the mosque She's already been cured at the hospital') This objectification of the community as unreflective content indicates that it had become a kind of shapeless mass that could only be grasped by the principle of form, or rather by giving it form. And this is what the association did, passing resolutions in order to give the qawm shape and order. Akbar lllahabadi (rggo: r3o) again ridicules this rather desperate effort at form in the following couplet: Resolution hi ke takhte ka sahara le kar Bahr-e tadbir-e taraqqi men bake jate haln ('With only the aid of a resolution They are tossed into the ocean of the principles of progress') Akbar Illahabadi (1990: 177) pokes fun at the result of such efforts to give the community an institution form in these words: Main ne jo kaha 'dekho to zara ab qawm pe kaysa joban hay' Woh hans ke !age kahne 'sahab yeh qawm nahin hay paltan hay' ('When I said, "Take a look now at the community's new youthfulness" He laughed, saying, "Sir, this isn't the nation, it's a regiment"') Now the community's status as object or content did impose on the organisation the task ofrepresenting it, but such representation remained n6 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM descriptive and did not translate into political representation. Furthermore, this adoption of description did not signal any alienation of subject from object because the qawm was not in fact the association's referent; it did not yet exist as an object of knowledge. What was at issue was proper practice, as in the old ethics, and not a problematic ofknowing things-in-themselves. So while the community was represented as an object, one could only be alienated from authentic practice and not from the qawm as such. This is why Akbar Illahabadi (rggo: 177) treats the separation produced by such representation so lightly, because it has simply replaced the old mystical problematic of knowing the ineffable. Apke darshan musawwir ke bhi hissa men nahin Bas liya jata hay 'photo' hi se 'photo' apka ('The sight of you is not even in the artist's fortune One can only take your photo from a photo') The Muslim community was always given to the Aligarhist organisation and not problernatised as such until the twentieth century. But what is ontologically secure is not by definition topologically fixed. Given the fact that the qawm was de-territorialised, or rather grounded only by textual and monumental fragments, how was it to be located for the purposes of the association? Or as Hall (n.d.: 127) puts it in the Musaddas dar Madd-o ]azr-e Islam ('Elegy on the Ebb and Flow of Islam'), his epic narrative of the community's decline: Khoj un ke kamalat ka lagta hay ab itna Gum dasht men ek qafilah.;, be tabl-o dara hay ('The search for the community's wonders now proceeds with such fervour Like a caravan lost in the desert with neither drum nor bell') Where then is the qawm to be found? The historian Shibli Numani, who was closely associated with the Aligarh Movement, provides an answer in his own Qawmi Musaddas ('Community Epic') of r894, composed for a gathering at the Muhammadan Anglo·Oriental College. This Tamasha• Ibrat ('Cautionary Spectacle') included the appearance on stage of Sir Sayyid and other luminaries dressed in historical garments to invoke the community, a curious spectacle indeed, and one that perhaps provides a model for the Aligarhist association. Shibli begins by comparing this spectacle to other forms of staged representation. Does the audience expect the god Indra to appear on the proscenium, he asks, referring to an early Urdu play, the 'lndar-Sabha' ('Indra's court') (Shibli Numani 1979: :zr)? Already, therefore, theatrical representation is rendered problematic by being, as it were, Hinduised. No, the community cannot FAISAL DEVJI ''7 be represented in this way, says Shibli. Doston kya tumhen sach-much tha theatre ka yaqin? Kya yeh samjhe the ke parda koi hoga rangin? Nazar ayegi jo soti hui ek zehrajabin? Ayega phul ke z.,. ko aram ka gulchin? Qawm ke bazm ko yun khel-tamasha samjhe Haye gar ap yeh samjhe bhi to bqa samjhe (Shibli Numani 1979: 2.2) ('Friends, did you really expect a theatre here? Did you expect some colourful curtain Behind which would appear some sleeping beauty? And a gardener come to pick this blossom? This would be to consider the national assembly a playful specta· cle Alas, if you expected such, you did expect it wrongly') Representation, in other words, was troublesome precisely because it transformed the community into a materiality, or even better, a fetish; into inrages of pagan deities and abducted beauties. How then was this spiritual entity to be located or made present? Not by an aesthetic or political representation, to be sure, but as a haunting, as a ghost. Thus Shibli describes the actors in this drama as persons who are possessed by the qawm, persons through whom it speaks. That is to say the Muslim becomes here not part of a community so much as its channel. Indeed, this is the only way that the qawm can be sinrultaneously present and absent. Tujh pe ay qawm asar karta hay afton jin ka Yeh wohi the ke ragon men hay tere khun jin ka (Shibli Numani '979' 24) ('The stories of those men that affect you, 0 community These were the same men in whose veins your blood flowed') Here, Shibli refers as much to the gentry's ancestors as to the actors who can only invoke the community by miming them. In the following hemistich, he describes the actors themselves and so by extension all good Muslims. Qawm ke khab-e pareshan ki yeh tabiren hain (Shibli Numani '979' 22) ('They are the builders of the community's scattered dream') Could this be the dream ofthat sleeping beauty described earlier? A dream that is the only remnant of a community spirited away? II8 6.3 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM Nationalism and the problem of representation On r6 March r888, Sir Sayyid delivered a speech at Meerut that set the tnne for Aligarh's relations with the Indian National Congress. Up until that point in time, he said, one disapproved of the congress but ignored it as having nothing to do with Muslims. But later, the Indian nationalists had begun to interfere in the affairs of the qawm by claiming its support in order to make them truly representative (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. r: 30). Sir Sayyid saw in this interference a threat to the more plural politics he advocated, and expressed his shock at the alleged pressure applied by the congress to garner tnken Muslims for their movement (Ahmad Khao 1973 Vol. r: 31). But his tirade against these unrepresentative congress Muslims also prohlernatised Aligarh's own claims tn representation. Sir Sayyid was committed to the concept of natural leadership, but in order to uphold this he had to demolish the imperious claims of the Indian nationalists. And the best way tn do this was to deny the very existence ofa representable lndiao nation. So Sir Sayyid not only calls the congress a Hindu organisation whose populist politics would end up suffocating Muslim interests (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. 2: 13-r6), but he also claims that it is basically a Bengali party that has nothing to do with the Hindus of the north, being in fact inimical tn their well-being: The Hindus of our countryfregion [mulk] should understand that while their condition is tn a certain degree better than that of the Muslims, it is not so good that they cao run and come out ahead of us. We are all the inhabitants of the same country. There are maoy Hindus who have been infiltrated by Muslim habits - such as my friend Sir Kayasth. Their customs and conditions are not so much more advanced than ours. Whatever will be our fate, so too will be the fate of the Hindus of this country [mulk]. This is why whatever I'm saying is for the good of all the inhabitants of the country. (Ahmad Khao '973 Vol. r: 34) Sir Sayyid's anxiousness to preserve the unity ofhis region was doubtless sincere. He interpreted Hindu support for the congress as a divisive move by which they gained Bengali support and attempted tn lord it over the Muslims, forcing them to abandon offensive customs like cow slaughter. But such pressure simply resulted in more conflict (Ahmad Khan '973 Vol. r: 34-35). In order to maintain the unity of his region in the face of Indian nationalism, Sir Sayyid tries to combine the sharif Hindus and Muslims of the north into an anti-Bengali alliance. Every people [qawm] not just Muslims, but all this country's Hindus, honoured kings and brave Rajputs who remember the swords of FAISAL DEVJI their fathers, will they tolerate the command ofthe Bengali who falls from his chair upon seeing a [table] knJfe? Not a piece of this country will remain where faces other than Bengali ones will be seen at the table of command and justice. We say we are happy that only our Bengali brother should progress, but the question is, what will happen to the state ofthe country's administration? In your opinion, can the Raj put or fiery Pathan, who do not fear the noose, the police, or the army, live peacefully under the Bengali? (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. 2: 14-15) Let those who live in Bengal worry themselves: they can do what they want and not do what they don't want. Neither their character [tabiat] nor their condition [hal] is that ofour countrymen. So what's the point of the people of our country joining them? (Ahmad Khan '973 Vol. r: 35-6) Stung by congress accusations of cowardice and sycophancy, Sir Sayyid responded by belittling the Bengal Agitation as a feeble scratching ofpens and a babbling of tongues that the British could afford to ignore (Ahmad Khan '973 Vol. 2: 22). But if the Muslims or Rajputs agitated, he says, they would pose a real threat and be dealt with accordingiy (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. :.: 20-r). This bluster culminates in Sir Sayyid threatening the congressmen with Muslim wrath were they to remove the British from India. At the time when our Muslim Pathan brothers emerge from their mountain valleys, they will bathe Bengal from one end to the other with rivers ofblood. (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. r: 37) Eventually, Sir Sayyid is forced to concede the possibility of a nationalist victory over his parochial pluralism and he despairingly casts the fortunes of the qawm into English hands. Our Hindu brothers in this country are leaving us and joining with the Bengalis. So we should join the people [qawm] with whom we can associate. [... ]If our Hindu brothers in this country, and the Bengalis of Bengal, and the Bralrmins ofBombay, and the Hindu Madrasis of Madras want to separate from us, let them separate and don't worry about it. We can befriend the English socially. We can eat with them. Whatever expectations ofimprovementwe have, we have from the English. The Bengalis can do nothing good for our qawm. (Abmad Khan 1973 Vol. r: 48-50) His belligerent rhetoric apart, there is no doubt that Sir Sayyid was gen- 120 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM uinely concerned by nationalism's rejection of political pluralism and its co-optation or attempted destruction oflocal polities and cultures into an abstract Indian identity. And this destruction was exacerbated for the gentry in that they were constitutionally incapable ofresponding to it with an all-Indian Muslinr nationalism of their own. It was this parochialism that resulted both in their loyalty to the Raj as a form of pluralism and in a rather distasteful form of elitist chauvinism. So at the r887 session of the Mulranrmadan Educational Conference in Ludmow, Sir Sayyid had to respond to the congress challenge with the following rhetoric: Would the squires [rais] of our country be pleased to have a lowly nation or man- even ifhe were a B.A. or M.A. and capable to bootrule over them? Have command over their property, estate, and honour? Never, not even one would like it. (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. 2: 6) And yet this parochial form ofloyalty was not lacking in intelligence. So while Sir Sayyid insisted that the colonial government was responsible and fair (Ahmad Khao 1973 Vol. :.: 7-8), he refused to consider these qualities as subject rights in the manner ofthe congress because he saw the colonial state as fundamentally foreign and therefore did not naturalise it. Has there been a world in which a foreign people [ghayr qawm] has conquered and ruled other foreign peoples who then claimed represeotative government as their right? (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. 1: 39) If Sir Sayyid' s loyalty was intellectually more independent than congress nationalism, it was perhaps also more traditional in its refusal to legitimise the colonial state by agitating for rights. For Aligarhists, the Raj, though good, was based on nothing but force. Nonetheless, Sir Sayyid softens the humiliation ofthis strength by invoking the religious relationship between Muslinrs and Christians in the following passage: The English have conquered India and us with it, and in the same way that we compelled or enslaved this country, so, too, they have compelled or enslaved us. Then what kind of principle of rule is it that they should ask us if we want to fight in Burma or not? Has such a thing ever happened, and do the principles of governance agree with it? At the time when there was Muslinr rule, and when there was military activity in any region oflndia, was it according to the principles of governance that the subjects of the Emperor of India should be asked whether or not we should conquer this region? Who could be asked? Those whom they had conquered and enslaved and whose brothers they were now planning to enslave? Our corn- FAISAL DEVJI I2I munityfnation too has ruled, and it rules even now. Are there any such principles that allow rule over a foreign people in this way? (Ahmad Khan 1973 Vol. r: 40-r) As we have seen, Sir Sayyid linked Indian nationalism to Hindu chauvinism. Indeed, for the gentry of the nineteenth century, religious conflict seems to have meant nothing more than a hostility in which their position as contestants or arbitrators was increasingly reduced because the parochial sh"rifq"wm was unable to deal with more widely organised Hindu elites, not to mention the alien politics of the Muslim masses. In other words, it was Indian nationalism, with its creation of countrywide identities, that made these Muslims into a minority, imposing upon them all the disempowerment of such a status. Given this, the Aligarhists could offer no solutions to the problem of Hindu-Muslim conflict and indeed could not even conceive of a realistic Hindu-Muslim relationship. Sir Sayyid used to call for religious harmony by comparing India to a bride, each of whose eyes were the Hindus and the Muslims; he would then point out that enmity between these two orbs would be a great pity since it would make the bride cross-eyed. This analogy is interesting in the way it transforms traditional images ofthe body politic. Previously the political body was imagined as a man put together by the interaction ofgroups defined as limbs and organs. Siyasat was the external management of this body by the king. As the Ain-e Akbari (' Akbarian Edicts') says of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He is continually attentive to the health of the body politic, and applies remedies to the several diseases thereof. And in the same manner that the equilibrium of the animal constitution depends upon an equal mixture of the elements, so also does the political constitution become well tempered by a proper division of ranks; and by means of the warmth of the ray of unanimity and concord, a multitude of people become fused into one body. (AIIami r965: 4) Sir Sayyid' s body politic, however, was not a metaphor for hierarchical activity, but for India as a woman possessed by the British. It is true, of course, that in the Ain-e Akbari the world is also referred to as the emperor's bride, but then it is not seen as a political body so much as a symbol of metaphysical union. In other words, Hindus and Muslims are not organs that constitute the body politic by their interaction, but unrelated constituents of a body that exists apart from them. This body was nothing but an inert space or mass, providing a ground for the colonial state as a third party and offering it a framework for violence and politics. Hindus and Muslims can now only be related to each other through this body, one that is not simply managed by siyasat but rather compelled to act by English 122 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM law as a kind ofhusbanding. So Sir Sayyid's India was nothing more than a colonised, feminised body unable to act on its own, a body whose organs were incapable ofany real relationship apart from violence or forbearance, which was the most that could be hoped for. 6.4 A special relationship Now the power of European colonialism, whether political or intellectual, resulted in the Aligarhist construction of a special relationship between Christians and Muslims, one from which Hindus were excluded. This relationship was based upon a shared religious and political history over a long period of time and across several continents. We can see how this relationship worked by looking at the controversy surrounding a book, published in r871, by the Bengal civilian W. W. Hunter. This work, which became a standard textbook for the colonial service, is entitled The Indian Mussulmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen? And the question that formed the subtitle, one it attempted to answer, emanated from the Viceroy Lord Mayo himself. Hunter's book spoke with the voice of authority, which might explain why there is little originality in it. In fact, the book simply assembles a few well-worn themes about the politically rebellious nature of Islam, the inherent tendency of Muslims towards fanaticism and the threat of pan-Islamism into an argument that is itself rather problematic. Hunter concludes that while the colonial state is not dar ul-Islam, the 'abode of! slam', Muslim rebels are still not obliged to rise against it. The Indian Mussulmans is thus a work that is important not by reason of its conclusions, which never gained wide acceptance given the fact that the colonial state took to calling itself dar ui-Islam in its claim to constitute the world's largest 'Mohammedan Empire' - but because it makes hegemonic a certain way of considering the Indian Muslim. Does he feel obliged to dissent in a Christian sense? Is his conquering spirit comparable to the civilising mission of colonialism? Hunter begins by claiming that he is concerned exclusively with Muslim revivalism in Bengal, primarily the Faraizi Movement (Hunter rg6g: r). Over the course of the book, however, he goes on to consider SayyidAhmad Barelvi's mujalridin on the North-WestFrontierandindeed Muslim agitation throughout India, including even the Wahhabis of Arabia. This mysterious expansion ofhis subject tells us two things. One, that Muslims are the same everywhere because it is Islam as some kind oftrans-historical essence that stirs them. And two, that it is in the nature oflslam to spread. It is not the Traitors themselves whom we have to fear, but the seditious masses in the heart of our Empire, and the superstitious FAISAL DEVJI 123 tribes on our Frontier, both of whom the Fanatics have again and again combined in a Religious War against us. During nine centuries the lnclian people have been accustomed to look for invasion from the north; and no one can predict the proportions to which this Rebel Camp, backed by the Musalman hordes from the westward, might attain, under a leader who koew how to weld the nations of Asia in a Crescentade. (Hunter r969: 34-35) This passage performs a series of displacements. First, by emphasising a specifically Muslim menace, which is to say the threat of a minority concentrated on the borders ofthe Raj, Hunter is able to ignore or repress the possible danger of a Hindu majority in the heartland. The artificiality ofthis threat is made clear in Hunter's examples ofMuslim dissent, which are all insigoificant, for no Islamic movement posed a serious threat to the empire until well into the twentieth century. And in fact, the slightly ludicrous character of Britain's Muslim bogey was apparent to many of Hunter's contemporaries. So the Islamic scholar Wilfred Scawen Blunt remarks, in reference to the gentry. I told them, ifthe Mohammedans only koewtheirpowertheywould not be neglected and ill-treated by the Government, as they now were. In England we were perpetually scared at the idea of a Mohammedan rising in Inclia, and any word uttered by the Mohammedans was paid more attention then that of twenty Hindus. (Blunt I909: IOJ·I04) Second, considering only the threat of outside agitators and their foreigo supporters permits Hunter to suppress the possibility ofa rebellion inside the minority Muslim community. His denial of real responsibility to lnclian Muslims makes possible and justifies a strategy of policing borders to stop the spread of foreigo subversion. Indeed, a belief in the effectiveness of this form of surveillance, which vastly reduces the number of people who have to be dealt with, is important enough to make Hunter stress the foreigo agitator aspect of Muslim revivalism repeatedly, as in the following: The obligation of the Indian Musalrnans to rebel or not rebel, hung for some months on the deliberations of three priests in the Holy City of Arabia. (Hunter 1969: 3) Third, Hunter's preoccupation with the bogey ofpan-Islamism allows him to repress any discussion ofhistoricallndian revolts, such as the Mutiny ofr857, which might indicate a rational dissatisfaction with colonialism. And finally, Hunter's use ofthe term 'crescentade', which evokes crusade, 124 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM takes the issue out of the historical present altogether. His consideration of Muslim revivalism in terms of an exclusive Christian-Muslim relationship does more than simply exclude a third, dangerous element, the Hindu. It also allows the Christian and the Muslim to trade places, for Hunter has a Muslim revivalist take the Christian's place both as Crusader and as Puritan, while transforming the Anglican coloniser into both a Muslim and a Catholic. Thus Hunter's work is sprinkled with words of praise and admiration for these Islamic puritans, whom he compares to the reformers of the Catholic Churclr (Hunter 1969: 51, 67, roo). This sympathy for the simple dissenters is condescending and reveals a dislike of gentle-born and educated Muslims, whom Hunter compares to their Anglican colonisers, comfortable upholders ofthe establishedclrurclr who are opposed by Anabaptists (Hunter 1969: ror-roz). But this valorisation of the Islamic puritan is not determined by a corresponding fear of members ofthe established clrurclr. Rather, Hunter invests the rebels with nostalgia for his own dissenting ancestors. Speaking of these Churclr of England Muslims, he writes: But important as these [... ] sections of the Muhammadans may be from a political point of view, it has always seemed to me an inexpressibly painful incident of our position in India that the best men are not on our side. (Hunter 1969: r36) Overcoming his regret, Hunter goes on to advocate destroying Muslim Puritanism through education. We should thus at length have the Muhammadan youth educated upon our own plan. Without interfering in any way with their religion, and in the very process ofenabling them to learn their religious duties, we should render that religion perhaps less sincere, but certainly less fanatical. The rising generation of Muhammadans would tread the steps whiclr have conducted the Hindus, not long ago the most bigoted nation on earth, into their present state of easy tolerance. Suclr a tolerance implies a less earnest belief thao their fathers had; but it has freed them, as it would liberate the Musalmans, from the cruelties whiclr they inflicted, the crimes whiclr they perpetrated, and the miseries whiclr they endured, in the name of a mistaken religion. I do not permit myself here to touclr upon the means by whiclr, through a state of indifference, the Hindus aod Musalmans alike may yet reaclr a higher level of belie[ But I fumly believe that that day will come, and that our system of education, which has hitherto produced only negative virtues, is the first stage towards it. Hitherto the Engiish in India have been but poor iconoclasts after all. (Hunter r969: 205) FAISAL DEVJI Hunter recovers his own ancestral Puritanism in this remarkable passage by an act of iconoclasm that makes the Muslim dissenters just like the backsliding English. And in so doing, he reveals the fundamentally therapeutic character of his book, which raises false or insignificant fears only to allay them, while forgetting real threats in the process. The English version of their special relationship with India's Muslims was based upon a series of displacements and repressions resulting from the uncertainties of colonial rule. The Muslim or Aligarhist version ofthis relationship was, we may expect, rather clifferent. In his review ofH unter's Indian Mussulmans, Sir Sayyid thus begins by warning the Engiish to censor their views on Muslims, as 'natives anxiously con all articles bearing upon the feelings with which their rulers regard them' (Ahmad Khan 1974: 5-6). Now, on the one hand, this interesting advocacy of secrecy no doubt reflects on Sir Sayyid's efforts to represent the English in a good light, efforts that were defeated by books such as Hunter's. On the other hand, Sir Sayyid's call for censorship simply allows him to put the Aligarhists forward as brokers between English and Muslims by playing on the former's fear oflslamic Puritanism. The evils that now exist, however, owe their origin greatly to the want of union and sympathy between the rulers and the ruled, and ideas like Dr. Hunter's only tend to widen the gap. I admit that owing to the difference in the mode oflife, there is but a limited number of native gentlemen with whom European gentlemen can have cordial intercourse; but this number will, I trust, increase largely every year. (Ahmad Khan I974: 50) In order to achieve this brokering arobition, Sir Sayyid insistently raises the possibility of a Muslim threat in a work, and indeed a career, that was ostensibly devoted to proving the loyalty oflndia's Muslims. And he uses this threat quite consciously to obtain the maximum advantage, as in the following passage: I cannot, however, predict what the actual conduct ofthe Musalmans would be in the event of an invasion of India by a Mahomedan or any other power. He would be a bold man indeed who wouid answer for more than his intimate friends and relations, perhaps not even for them. The civil wars in Engiand saw fathers fighting against sons, and brothers against brothers; and no one can tell what the conduct of the whole community would be in any great political convulsion. I have no doubt, but that the Musalmans would do what their political status - favourable or the contrary -would prompt them to do. (Ahmad Khan r974: 45) !26 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM This barely veiled threat raises two more themes in the English fear of Islam: pan-lslamism and Protestant iconoclasm, the latter implied in Sir Sayyid's reference to the English Civil War. Again, Sir Sayyid plays on these fears while simultaneously using them to tie the English and Muslims together historically in a special relationship. So he says about Hunter's 'Malromedan Puritans': 'In my opinion, what the Protestant is to the Roman Catholic, so is the Walrabi to the other Malromedan creeds' (Ahmad Khan 1974: 7)It is important to recognise that this manipulation of colonial fears, while it was certainly tactical, was also internalised by the gentry into a kind of machismo that was expressed more often than not in some selfpraising bluster at meetings of the Muhammadan Educational Conference. Sinrilarly, the common, exclusive history that the gentry supposedly shared with their Christian masters ended up becoming the site for an Aligarhist apologetics driven by shame and humiliation, one where Europeans were said to have developed their civilisation on the intellectual foundations provided by medieval Islam- a fact that made Europeanisation merely into a reclamation of this tradition. Such a shame did not interfere with the political advantages ofcalling for openness to the English based on the fact that they were ahl al-kitab, 'People of the Book', but it only made a genuine ecumenism impossible. As Akbar Illalrabadi puts it: Tujhe unse hay sar-e dosti, teri arzu bhi ajib hay Woh hay takht par, tu hay khak par, woh amir hain, tu gharib hay (lllahabadi rggo: 59) ('You want to befriend him, what a strange desire! He's on the throne, you're in the dust, he's exalted, you're a pauper') 6.5 The return of the political The following passage from India's The Tribune of 26 November rgor signals the increasingly evident failure of a parochlal Muslim community in the new, all-lndia politics of the Raj. It is certain that there is general dissatisfaction in the community with the present condition of affairs. In some parts oflndia a fairly large section ofMalrommedans has been hitherto content to receive their opinions on matters political ready made from Aligarh. But of late there has been a suspicion that in the things and men ofAligarh all that glitters is not gold, and consequently there has been muclr searching of hearts, whiclr has naturally fluttered the dovecots at Aligarh. A Malrommedan friend ofours very felicitously but correct- FAISAL DEVJI ly characterised the existing situation of affairs as 'the Revolt against Aligarh'. There can be no doubt that Aligarh is no longer to dominate the political opinions of Mahommedans in the different parts ofthecmmtry. For the Mahommedancommunitythis freedom from a yoke that bad become very heavy and almost unbearable will itselfbe no small gain. (Mubammad 1980: 29) Unlike the Indian National Congress, Aligarhists bad never attempted to establish countrywide networks. Sir Sayyid had reserved the community's institutions (primarily the Muhammadan Educational Conference and the Mubammadan Anglo-Oriental College) for the North Indian gentry (Ali Khan 1913 Vol. r: 491). This was true to such an extent that when his lieutenant, Nawab Muhsin ul-Mulk, had wanted simply to establish contacts with the new Muslim politics developing in Bombay, Sir Sayyid refused to do so (Ali Khan 1913 Vol. r: 484-485). Faced, then, with an Indiawide congress and the mushrooming of independent Muslim organisations among non-sharif elites in other parts of the country, the Aligarhist community suddenly seemed unrepresentative of Muslim interests, not only from the point of view of the congress, non-Aligarhist Muslims or the colonial government, but also ofthe young men who were the first products of Aligarh, men for whom the monopolisation of leadership by a clique of old gentlemen posed an obstacle to their own progress. In fact, the old idea of natural leadership, which had nothing to do with being validated by a constituency, died with Sir Sayyid, something that was duly noted by one of his successors, Nawab Viqar ul-Mulk, in a letter to the Pioneer on r6 August r903 (Muhammad r98o: 40). Given this, members ofAligarh's old and young generations convened a meeting in Lucknow on 21 October rgor, at which they determined to found the All-India Mahommedan Political Association (Mubammad r98o: 40). Reporting on this gathering, the Aligarn Institute Gazette made its fundamental importance clear. On the one hand, it notes the novel composition of the meeting, which comprised ten barristers, four young aristocrats, three pleaders and only two 'influential gentlemen representing the learning and enlightenment of an older generation', namely Viqar ul- Mulk and Masih U2-Zaman, a former tutor to the Nizam ofHyderabad (Mubammad r98o: 42-43). On the other hand, the gazette points out that all these people were from the north and warns that representation requires much more than this. Is it feasible or warrantable to make it an All India organisation? If so, what evidence is there to show that the two presidencies- Madras and Bombay- Sindh, Central Provinces, and Berar are even remotely and partially in touch with the organisation? [... ] The principle of representation being in the ascendant, it is advisable that Ma- 128 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM hommedans should learn to act on it. It should, however, be remembered that there are certain tests which are applicable and which, as a matter offact, are applied by the press and critics generally to such institutions as claim a representative character. (Muhammad 1980: 44) Yet representation, as Sir Sayyid well knew, had its risks, chief among them being the loss of sharij1eadership to other sorts of elites. Indeed, it was probably this desire to preserve a North Indian qawm that informed the reformists' ambivalent relations with other Muslim organisations, which literally invaded Aligarh at the end of the nineteenth century. The Muhamrnadan Educational Conference was in 1900 thus invited to Calcutta, in 1901 to Madras and to Bombay in 1903. The gentry did not quite know what to make of this attention. In a speech at Madras, for instance, Mulrsin ul-Mulk confessed that he had never thought that Muslinrs of different regions could come together (Ali Khan 1913 Vol. r: 418). And in 1903, at Delhi, he admitted that he had never even thought about Sindh until Muslims from that province asked to be included in the Conference (Ali Khan 1913 Vol. r: 484). The Aligarhists were certainly pleased with this attention, but they still did not consider these other Muslims anything more than sympathetic acquaintances. At most they could provide examples for the gentry. Thus Mulrsin ul-Mulk addresses the merchant-princes of Bombay with these words: 0 people of Bombay, having met you and seen your condition and wealth, they [the gentry] will reflect that although you do not rule, by God's grace you are the masters of millions of rupees [... ] and when they reflect upon the reasons for your wealth, they will leave off complaining about fortune and crying over fate. Some spirit will be born in them, and they will make manly efforts toward industry and commerce. (Ali Khan '9'3 Vol. r: 489) But it was at this meeting in Bombay that Muslim outsiders finally infiltrated Aligarh's bastion. In response to a resolution that demanded changing the conference's rules to accommodate Muslinrs from all parts oflndia, Mulrsin ul-Mulk wonderingiy remarked that whereas the Muslims of Calcutta and Madras had thought of the Muhamrnadan Educational Conference as an organ of the 'Aligarh Party', and had not seen it fit to demand rights in its constitution, Bombay had broken its bounds for the first time (Ali Khan 19r3 Vol. r: 492). And this as yet ill-defined rupture, which was probably permitted at all because of Bombay's inclination to pour money into the coffers of Aligarh, was to constitute a site of struggle for years to come. Mulrsin ui-Mulk's speech on commerce and industry quoted above FAISAL DEVJI 129 illustrates that representation was not the only factor bringing the old qawm to crisis, for the provincial constituency Aligarh had created seemed to be unable even to sustain itself financially. For instance, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Sir Sayyid's flagship project, moved from one economic crisis to another. Thus, when Sir Sayyid died in 1899, the institution had a shortfall of rso,ooo rupees, and its architects, masons, etc., had suspended work because they had not been paid (Aii Khan '9'3 Vol. r: 405). Such a situation was possible both because the system of donations upon which the college relied was slow, inefficient and costly and because the gentry did not or could not generate the kind of money Aligarh required. So of the 9,ooo rupees pledged for scholarships at the time of Sir Sayyid's death, onlY3,500 had been received by 1900 (Aii Khan '9'3 Vol. r: 405). Indeed, conditions were serious enough for Muhsin ulMulk to make these sad revelations for the first time at the 1900 session of the Mulramrnadan Educational Conference in Rampur. Sir Sayyid, he said, had not managed to raise more than 7oo,ooo rupees in 30 years of vigorous campaigning (Aii Khan 1913 Vol. r: 406), while the scheme for the college's development into a university required a million rupees, of which only ns,ooo had been collected in two aod a half years (Aii Khan 1913 Vol. r: 404). In other words, the community did not even have the resources to meet tire costs of its own growtlr. These troubles ofrepresentation and finance approached crisis in 1906, when tire proposed introduction of a limited franchise for legislative bodies, tire Morley-Minto Reforms, provoked a debate on tire community's competitive abilities. Something had to be done, a Muslim political party had to be formed, if young Aligarhists were not to abandon tire guidance of tlreir elders for political opportunities elsewhere. Thus we have Muhsin ul-Mulk anxiously writing to principal of Aligarh's college W. A. J. Archbold. You are aware tlrat tire Mahommedaos already feel a little disappointed, and young educated Mahommedans seem to have a sympatlry for tire 'Congress'. [... ] Altlrough tlrere is little reason to believe tlrat any Mahommedans, except tire young educated ones will join tlrat body, tlrere is still a general complaint on tlreir part tlrat we (Aiigarh people) take no part in politics, and do not safeguard tire political rights of Mahommedans, tlrey say that we do not suggest any plans for preserving tlreir rights, and particularly do nothing and care notlring for tire Mahommedans beyond asking for fimds to help tire college. [...] I feelit is a very important matter, and if we remain silent, I am afraid, people will leave us to go tlreir own way and act up to tlreir own personal opinions. (Muhammad r98o: 175-176) 130 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM No doubt playing to British fears ofan uncontrolled Muslim intelligentsia, the community's leaders petitioned their rulers for the right to become political, thus chipping away at the foundation of Sir Sayyid's policy. They were granted this right in a much-publicised staging of their grievances before the Viceroy, Lord Minto, on I October 1906. 1bis meeting, which resulted in the policy of separate electorates, effectively counterposed the Muslim community to congress' representative claims. In order to do this, the Muslim leadership had to prove its own representative character to the world in a new way. Indeed, this concern with representation assumed the status of a mania, as is indicated by the opening words of the Muslim deputation's address. Availing ourselves of the permission awarded to us, we, the undersigned nobles, jagirdars, taluqdars, lawyers, zenrindars, merchants and others representing a large body of the Malrommedan subjects of His Majesty the King-Emperor in different parts of India, beg most respectfully to approach your Excellency with the following address for your favourable consideration. (Mulrammad 1980: 192) The Viceroy's response was just as emphatic on the subject of representation. I welcome the representative character ofyour deputation as expressing the views and aspirations of the enlightened Muslim community in India. I feel that all you have said emanates from a representative body basing its opinions on a matured consideration of the existing political conditions of India, totally apart from the small personal or political sympathies and antipathies of scattered localities[... ]. (MuJrammad 1980: I98-199) These quotations make two things clear. First, the Muslim representatives were still supposedly natural leaders in a certain sense, men of enlightenment who were representative only in the variety of their vocations and places of origin. Second, they were dominated by aristocrats, merchants and lawyers: a new Muslim elite, and for a large part a non-Aligarhist one. So the Muslim delegation was led by the Aga Khan, a capitalist prince and Shia leader from Bombay who raised the funds needed to make Aligarh's college into a university. it was these men who broke Aligarh' s parochialism and went on to lead a new kind of community under the auspices of the Muslim League. FAISAL DEVJI 6.6 '3' Conclusion We know that further adventures awaited the qawm as a political entity. from its transformation into a nation at the end of the rg3os to its achievement of a homeland at the end of the rg4os. But though it is difficult to overestimate the transformative importance of these historical events, we should recognise that they occurred suddenly and at least initially without the backing of any popular demand. Thus Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Bombay lawyer of Shia background who was president of the Muslim League during this period, switched from describing Muslims as a minority to calling them a nation practically overnight, in response to congress victories in the 1937 elections. Similarly, his demand for a separate Muslim state was made in the absence of any serious debate about or popular movement for Pakistan, all of which means that the new politics inaugurated by the Muslim League had to be worked out after the partition oflndia, and remains an incomplete project to this day. So even when Pakistan was declared the world's first Islamic Republic in r956, the Muslim community continued to be invoked on all sides as a collectivity that retained its nineteenth-century character, neither a mere nation in Pakistan nor simply a minority in India, but something more ambiguous. For though it had become a dead letter by the early twentieth century, the qawm that was created in the Aligarh Movement has continued to provide the template and model for all broad-based conceptions of the Muslim community in contemporary South Asia. And this community remains true to its colonial roots even today, as a non-political entity that is able to take on any number of political forms without disappearing into them. Indeed it can even be argued that the political contestation and fragmentation of Islam in all three successor states of the Raj is due at least in part to the fact that the Muslim community remains in many respects a colonial entity whose politicisation was left incomplete by the Muslim League and has today been taken up by various pietistic, fundamentalist and militant groups. Both qawm and community, in other words, remain by their very usage caught between minority and nation, politics and the non-political. References Ahmad Khan, S. (1974), Review on Dr. Hunter's Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to R<b<l Against the Queen? Lahore: Premier Book House. Ahmad Khan, S. (1973), Khutbat-e Sir Sayyid, Vols. rand 2. Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Adab. Ali Khan, M. (rgr3). Majmuah-e Lectures-o Speeches, Vol. r. Lahore: Nawal Kishore Printing Works. 132 COLONIAL AND POST~CLNIA GOVERNANCE OF ISLAM Allami, A.-F. (r965), The Ain-I Akbari. Trans. H. Blochmann. Delhi: Andiesh Book Depot. Blunt, W. S. (rgog), India Under Ripon. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Devji, F. (2oo7a), 'Apologetic modernity', Modem /ntellectiUII History4 (r): 6r-76. Devji, F. (zoo7b), 'A shadow nation: The making of Muslim India', bi K. Grant, P. Levine & F. Trenttnann (eds.), Beyona Sovmignty: Britain, Empire and Transnalionalism, I86o·I9JO, Ia6-Ljj, London: Palgrave Macrnillan. Husayn Hali, A. (r967), KuUiyat-< Nasr-e Hali, Vol. I. Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Adsb. Husayn Hali, A. (n.d.), Musadtlas-< Hali. Lahore: Taj Company. Hunter, W. W. (rg6g), The Indian Mussulmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to &bel Against the Queen? Delhi: Indological Book House. nlahabadi, A. (rggo), Tnt<:khab-e Akbar nlahabadi. New Delhi: Maktaba Jamia. Muhammad, S. (rg8o). The Inolian Muslims: A Documentary Reconl, Vol. r. Meerut/ New Delhi: Meenashi Prakashan. Shibli Numani, M. (1979), Kulliyat-e Shibli. Lahore: Data Publishers