HVK Archives: Islam in India, 50 years later: Healing split personality
Islam in India, 50 years later: Healing split personality - The Asian Age
Rashid Talib
()
12 August 1997
Title: Islam in India, 50 years later: Healing split personality
Author: Rashid Talib
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: August 12, 1997
What will be the shape of Islam when India celebrates her centennial 50
years from now? To depict Islam's future in India, and indeed that of Islam
in the world with which it is inevitably bound up, one need not look into a
crystal bowl. An answer to the latter aspect of the question was essayed
some four years ago by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington when he
published his Clash of Civilisations thesis.
Huntington came to the controversial conclusion that Islam has "bloody
borders." His recent book. in which he has fleshed out this thesis somewhat
more circumspectly, has also attracted much critical flak. Basing himself
largely on the demographic dimension of the future world order, he writes:
Muslim population growth will be a destabilising force for both Muslim
societies and their neighbours. The large number of young people with
secondary duration will continue to power the Islamic resurgence [read:
fundamentalism] and promote Muslim militancy, militarism, and migration. As
a result, the early years of the 21st century are likely to see an ongoing
resurgence of non-Western power and culture and the clash of the peoples of
non-Western civilisations with the West and with each other.
However, no one needs to lose sleep over the Huntington thesis. US
academies, under pressure from the university system, not to mention the
commercial rewards from popular publishing, chum out futurist scenarios
largely for the benefit of state policy-makers. It is not surprising if
they end up with conclusions reached apriori and buttressed by "plausible
generalisations," borrowed from the popular works of others.
Humbler social scientists should be quite content with extrapolating the
future of Indian Islam on the basis of present evidence. Some of the signs
on the Indian scene point vigorously to the prospect of change. Other signs
are ambiguous while some are downright repressive This is not unexpected.
In the wake of the trauma suffered by the Muslims in the early 1990s, the
community seems to have developed a split personality. One part of its body
politic is willing to move forward through an adaptation of its outdated
laws and practices so that these are in better accord with the cherished
human values of our times. No other part of it would like the community to
respond to the Hindutva challenge with a militant assertion of its Islamic
identity, lest a more reasonable stance be mistaken for weakness. Both
reactions stem directly from the communal frenzy unleashed by the
demolition of the mosque in 1992. One such body in Hyderabad announced that
it would "peacefully" picket Muslim women, particularly the burqa-clad,
against going to the cinema which in its eyes was a den of iniquity.
The Milli Parliament. declared that Muslims should not take part in Indian
elections until a retrograde agenda granting an Islamic dispensation to
them was politically endorsed. The third instance portends that the
negative response now affects members of the most respected body of
traditional Muslim opinion. A number of eminent divines, speaking from the
platform that played a positive role in India's freedom struggle, the
Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Hind, have come up with the absurd demand that the
"heretical" Muslim sect of Ahmadiyas be declared as apostates (kafirs) as
they have been in Islamic Pakistan.
But there are also signs of a new consciousness dawning within the
community. Below, I note briefly three instances of such reformist
expression, selected at random from recent newspaper reports:
A women's movement in Kerala has joined battle with the traditional clergy
against the denial to them of the right to take part in congregational
prayers held in a mosque.
A proactive women's group has been inaugurated, again in Kerala, demanding
reforms in the three areas in which Indian Islamic practices, by virtue of
a narrow interpretation placed on the Quranic text, give special rights to
men over women - the right to polygamy, the practice of marrying off
girl-children at the hardly ripe age of puberty and the man's unilateral
right to divorce by pronouncing the scriptural formula of "triple talaq."
Finally, in the wider perspective of South Asian Islam, two judgments were
delivered last month as widely separated as the Supreme Court in Delhi and
the Dacca High Court in Bangladesh. Each upheld on the basis of its own
reasoning that a divorced Muslim woman and the children in her custody are
entitled to receive a regular amount as maintenance, and ignored in the
case of Bangladesh the traditional practice followed under the sharia and,
in the Indian case, overrode the restrictive provisions of the Muslim
women's right to protection in the Divorce Act passed in 1986 by the Rajiv
Gandhi government, which a number of Muslim secular groups have long held
to be regressive.
These signs, tenuous though at present, indicate that the community in
general, but particularly its womenfolk who suffer most under the
ulema-driven interpretation of the Quran, feel stifled under the various
patriarchal restrictions imposed on them.
They now seem intent on taking the initiative for reform on themselves. A
heartening feature of these tentative initiatives is that the women
protesters are drawn from all classes and ranks. For the first time in the
history of Islamic reform the political base of protest has widened.
However, unless these hopeful developments balloon into a sustained mass
upsurge they will remain isolated oases of protest in the vast desert of
gender inequality and discrimination.
It is a truism to say that the greater the repression practiced the by the
ulema on women through their medieval fatwas, unrealistically demanding of
them confirmity with the ideals of a distant past, the more is the
likelihood of even the most docile of believers joining the ranks of the
reformist pioneers.
A great responsibility therefore rests on the slender shoulders of the
younger generation of Muslim women India. Their struggle is basically
against the patriarchal positions handed down to the community by an
outdated rendering of the Islamic scriptures. So it is now up to them,
standing on the threshold of the 21st century, to launch a series of
movements, however small and incipient these may seem to be, towards
reforming the traditional outlook of Islam. The modernisation of Indian
Islam is a process, one that may take decades yet to accomplish. As the
world modernises, the ulema will continue to be under pressure front below
to update their version of Islam. The transition will be slow, partly
because men enjoy a vested interest in the faith's deeply frozen customs
and practices.
Among the countries with a substantial Muslim population India's position
is unique. It is home to the second largest Muslim community in the world,
a community that constitutes the most important minority in a country that
is both liberal, democratic and secular. The traditional Indian Muslim
woman will have to overcome her reluctance to join hands with enlightened
sections of secular opinion, Muslim and non-Muslim, so that a significant
dent is made in bringing down the outdated structures of a medieval ideology.
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