Part 7: Islam in 'British' India (the area now covered by India, Pakistan and Bangladesh)

Hindu and later ‘British’ India has included a large Muslim minority since the earliest years of Islam. Quite recently, most of India had in fact been ruled by the Muslim Mughals from the 16th Century to the mid 19th Century before the British, after being in effective control for some time, took full formal control after the Sepoy mutiny (otherwise referred to as the First War of Indian Independence from Britain). Modern day Bangladesh and Pakistan were majority Muslim areas of British India, the former with a majority Bengali-speaking population and the latter Urdu-speaking. After independence from 1947 until the early 1970s, when they agreed to become two separate countries, they were a single Muslim country.
While the British controlled all of these areas, that control was an issue for Muslim British Indians as well as other British Indians including those led most famously by the Mahatma Gandhi.

An important Muslim thinker in British India was Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817 – 1898). His titles and surname indicate an exalted position in the 19th Century in all of the British, political and Muslim establishments of British India. He received the knighthood late in life from the British, his surname, Khan, indicates a family relationship with government and Sayyid indicates a family link to the religious establishment.

He studied both Islamic and Western law and was effectively turned into an activist by the British crackdown following the Sepoy mutiny. He translated several English works and the Bible into Urdu in later life. He was similar to his contemporaries Afghani and ‘Abduh although more secular in his leanings (he didn’t oppose ‘Darwinism’, for example). He was less a political thinker than Afghani. His ideas were more along the lines of culture and what Muslims could learn from the West (and the errors that they should not learn). He believed local dress was neither here nor there whereas we know Atatürk believed it was a major impediment to progress and banned many elements of local Turkish and Islamic dress. In 1875, Khan founded a university now called the Aligarh Muslim University with a quite secular syllabus. When it came to Islam, he was a revivalist but used Western ideas of revivalism. He was in the ijtihad (reasoning) rather than the taqlid (copying) camp when it came to Islamic law and was prepared to acknowledge that the ulema had not always been correct in the past. He also organised the widespread teaching of civics.

Another widely regarded thinker from the region this time of the 20th Century was Sayyid Maududi (1903 – 1979). He founded a group that is infamous today called the Jama’at-i Islami (the Islamic Society) which is similar to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is more popular among Arab Muslims. Maududi lived in British India and Pakistan after its formation and independence. He had opposed the formation of a separate Pakistan, believing all of mostly Hindu India should be brought under Islamic rule. He was a revivalist like Khan but more political in his interests. He was given a further religious title, Mawlana, to go with Sayyid but some of his interpretations of the Qur’an as a non-Arab are considered somewhat suspect. He suggests for example that God is referred to in the Qur’an as the ruler and judge, al-Hākim (الحاكم), as he attempts to justify his intended political rule of Islam whereas God is actually not referred to in that way at all. The name he has confused this with appears to be "the wise", al-Hakīm (الحكيم) and his theory of hākimiyyah appears to be based upon this confusion.

Another knighted British Indian, Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877 – 1938), was arguably the father of the idea of a secularist Pakistan. He was occasionally also accorded the Islamic honorific Allama signifying scholarship in Islam although his ideas were generally quite secular with an interest in Nietzsche. He was also a noted poet in Persian who also wrote in Urdu and English and knew Arabic. His major work concerning politics was Reconstruction of Islamic Thought and he had an influence on Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, the revered father of modern Pakistan.

Jinnah (1876 – 1948), unlike Iqbal, lived (barely) to create and see the independent secular Muslim state of Pakistan in 1947. He was a secularist and a democrat. The varied ideas of his fellow Muslims discussed above, clearly ranging over a wide spectrum from religious to secular, illustrate the potential for tension that has always existed in the state of Pakistan and clearly remains an issue there today.