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The Muslims of British India
... Whatever scant data is available with us, there indeed are pointers towards a relative and collective deprivation of Muslims in the arena of socio-economic outcomes in general and in economic activity in particular i . However as Hardy (1972) maintains Muslims in India before 1857 was a different community, as opposed to what they were under the direct British rule. Exposition of this transition will be made ahead in this chapter. ...
... The Bengali Muslim cultivator or the Gujarati Muslim weaver was less engaged in a common enterprise of ruling India than members of the British working classes in the nineteenth century, for at least the latter were welcome as soldiers of the ruling power (P. Hardy, 1972). A nation of glory that it was, in the 18 th century, relegated to a community unified at best by few common rituals and by the beliefs and aspirations of a majority -not the totality -of its scholars. ...
This paper is an attempt to place the emergence of Muslim community and their participation in the labor market in a historical context. Available historical information makes us to trace the origin of Islam in Indian sub-continent to around 600 A.D. This paper opens with references to the earliest Muslim settlements and follows the timeline of the rise and fall of the Muslim rule within the framework of politico-economic analysis. The Indian Muslims has a past, so rich and prosperous, that it still forms the cornerstone of the socio-economic and cultural fabric of India. However, of late this community heritage has gone into oblivion and what has come to be debated in the literature on Muslims is a story of misery, economic depravity, and political isolation. What explains this transition of an entire religious community from the seats of power to a state of perpetual economic distress? How far are the statements about religion based deprivation of Indian Muslims true? Does available data suggest religion based economic deprivation of Indian Muslims? Is there a mechanism available in the literature that could help extricate and answer these propositions on empirical lines?
... 28 Although the Hindus and the Muslims had equally participated in the 1857 Revolt, the British brunt was laid heavily upon the Muslims, whom the British regarded as the potential architects of the revolt. 29 Peter Hardy, on the authority of Thomas R. Metcalf and Sir William Muir, states: ...
India being a dynamic emerging economy, with religious and cultural diversity, is home to 0.172 billion Muslims, that is 14.2 percent of the population at all India level living as the financially excluded minority community in the country. The Indian Muslims according to Sachar Committee Report (2005) are the financially ‘excluded’ community and are not the major beneficiary of Govt. schemes.” The Reports/Commissions such as Ranganathan Misra Committee (2007); Mahmoodur Rahman Committee (2008); Sudhir Commission Report (2016) and Commission of Inquiry (Telangana 2016), reveal that Muslims in India, are living in pathetic conditions with underdeveloped socio-economic and educational setup. In this context, the current paper aims to-explore through qualitative analysis the possible dimensions of social finance and to evaluate the current socio-economic conditions of Muslims in India. This study will be an attempt to assess the potential of Islamic social finance institutions, namely the zakat and the waqf, for community upliftment in a much broader national context.
... They are free from national prejudice. Peter (1972) said that Islam's Sufi tradition simply cannot be acquated with mysticism. Sufism includes many different practice regimes and their supporting social institutions, arts and scholarly justifications. ...
The Hindi-Urdu language controversy of the 1860s in colonial India was a defining moment in the socio-political landscape, particularly for Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, a key figure in the intellectual and political history of the time. This paper explores how the controversy over the vernacular language in the North-Western Provinces significantly influenced Sir Syed’s views and actions, ultimately shaping his advocacy for the progress of Muslims. The paper examines the rise of anti-Urdu sentiment in intellectual circles, including institutions like the Banaras Institute and the Allahabad Institute, and the political ramifications of language choices on the Muslim community. It argues that the rejection of Urdu in favor of Hindi by various factions led Sir Syed to shift his focus towards the advancement of Muslims, marking a pivotal transformation in his ideology. By investigating the intricate linguistic and political dynamics, this paper highlights how the controversy played a crucial role in defining Sir Syed’s later commitment to Muslim education and social welfare, reshaping his legacy as a reformer.
Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes towards it, creating new ideas of religion and rule. Examining links between the Indian Subcontinent and the Ottoman Middle East through multilingual sources – from first-hand accounts to administrative archives of hajj – Choudhury uncovers a striking array of pilgrims who leveraged their experiences and exchanges abroad to address the decline and decentralization of an Islamic old regime at home. Hajjis crucially mediated the birth of modern Muslim political traditions around South Asia. Hajj across Empires argues they did so by channeling inter-imperial crosscurrents to successive surges of imperial revolution and regional regime change.
Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European empires extended their rule over most of the Muslim world. The present article argues that these empires promoted three interrelated political discourses; namely, a discourse on utilitarianism, a discourse on civilizational progress, and a discourse on liberal imperialism. The empires also encouraged Islamic reform movements, which entailed cooperation between Muslim thinkers, European officials, liberal intellectuals, and Orientalists. Reform movements legitimated the three aforementioned discourses in terms of premodern Islamic religious concepts (e.g. ʿaql, maṣlaḥa, maqāṣid al-šarīʿa, iǧtihād, taqlīd). These concepts were reinterpreted and tacitly linked to imperial policies concerning race, technology, industrial capitalism, and authoritarian violence. The article examines this process by considering the British Empire, and its relationship to Islamic reform projects in India and Egypt. The article discusses nineteenth century British political discourses as developed in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. The article then discusses Islamic reform in India, focusing on the Muslim thinkers Sayyid Aḥmad Ḫān and Amīr ʿAlī, as well as their relationships with British figures like William Muir and John Strachey. Next the article discusses Islamic reform in Egypt, focusing on the Muslim thinkers Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rašīd Riḍā as well as their relationships with British figures like Lord Cromer and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
We develop a scale to measure fundamentalism among the followers of the Abrahamic faiths. The scale is intended to overcome the challenges that beset the comparative analysis of the subject: variability of religious fundamentalist movements historically, cross‐nationally, and across these religions; differences in the definition of fundamentalism, and etymological ambiguity of the term. We conceptualized fundamentalism as a cluster of core orientations toward one's and others’ religion. These orientations are categorized into four components: disciplinarian deity, inerrancy or literalism, religious exclusivity, and religious intolerance. Each component is measured by four survey questions. The 16 items make a single fundamentalism scale. We discuss the scale's validity, and then verify its statistical and predictive validity on nationally representative samples from Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey, a total of 24,758 cases.
This article explores the understandings of mid-nineteenth-century colonial India through the perceptions of Bholanauth Chunder, an anglicised Bengali bhadralok and his early attempt at seeing and experiencing a historical entity called India. The role played by the middle class in forging a sense of anti-colonial nationalism has received significant attention, but this focuses on late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing on the perceptions and visions of an Indian middle class during the mid-nineteenth century, I provide an early articulation of nationalism which preceded the later nationalist movement by several decades. The ambiguous nature of the colonial middle class demonstrates that although they were concerned with articulating an incipient sense of nationalism, this did not involve a complete repudiation of the British. The influence of Western education is evident in Chunder’s strong desire for progress and modernity; his appreciation and use of history as an instrument in forging a common national past, although it is largely an imagination of a ‘Hindu’ past; and his critique of religious orthodoxy, which is inimical to progress. However, Chunder’s ethnographic observations demonstrate that his perceptions of Indian society were not entirely predetermined by colonial knowledge.
Drawing on archival and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines the public construction of personal piety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century north India (1857-1930). The emergence of reformist piety, with its emphasis on individual responsibility and a focus on the self, is supposed to mark the privatization of religion, such that the public sphere becomes the site of politics and economy, and the household displaces the community as the locus of religiosity. This dissertation critiques the thesis of separate spheres to argue that the cultivation of middle class religiosity was an extremely public act that unfolded in the myriad spaces that opened up in the late nineteenth century. The middle class household, with the conjugal couple at its center, was inextricably linked to these spaces, whether it was a university campus, a newspaper office, a political rally, a fundraiser, or an arboretum in a hill station. Central to this thesis is the use of Michael Warner’s idea of discourse publics as an alternative framework to the Habermasian conception of the bourgeois public sphere. The emphasis on physical space makes room for understanding the household as a living social site of tellings and retellings that coexists with other overlapping publics and counterpublics. The reformist piety which became the hallmark of the middle class was fashioned under the watchful eyes of peers, superiors, and spouses in these spaces. It was appraised, acknowledged, emulated, and perfected through networks that belied the public-private divide. This dissertation focuses on the institution of the household as one such site in the network to suggest that the radical reordering of the household in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enabled the emergence of personal piety. The history of reformist piety can be retold as the history of the reconfigured household. Furthermore, the re-imagination of the woman as a chaste and loyal spouse was fundamental to her elevation as an independent spiritual actor of the household. The spiritual independence of the wife, however, was predicated on her social, economic, and legal subordination to the husband.
Sur le plan des idées, la singularité d'Iqbal réside dans son élaboration du concept de xwudī, littéralement " ipséité ", affirmation créative du soi qui ne prend son plein sens que pour un musulman s'identifiant à sa communauté tout entière. Cette élaboration s'accompagne d'un vibrant appel lancé aux musulmans pour les engager à l'action, à la responsabilité, à l'unité et à la réforme en vue de l'avènement d'une utopique société islamique universelle, égalitaire, fraternelle et dynamique, rejetant traditionalismes, nationalismes, exploitation, oppression et impérialisme. L'engagement d'Iqbal en politique se fit avec un certain décalage par rapport à l'immense notoriété que lui valut sa poésie dès le début des années 1920. L'article examine son action au niveau du Panjab, de l'Inde et des affaires internationales. Il insiste sur sa contribution à la théorie des deux nations et s'interroge sur deux démarches apparemment contradictoires : Iqbal, dans les années 1930, chercha à faire prévaloir auprès du le très laïque et occidentalisé Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) son optique régionaliste et séparatiste, et d'autre part fit venir au Panjab le fondamentaliste Abul Ala Maududi (1903-1979) hostile au séparatisme pour lui confier la tâche de préparer la mise en place d'une université islamique.
During the British Raj, as part of an effort to reform the Muslim community through religious regeneration and in the absence of Muslim political power on the subcontinent, Islamic scholars (ulema) from the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary urged the setting up of separate institutions of religious education for Muslim women. The reformist discourse of the Deobandi ulema had, and still has, a profound influence on the pedagogy of madrasah education for women in South Asia, including Bangladesh. This study examines how Deobandi reformist ideals continue to be reflected in a non-government female madrasah in Bangladesh. The study provides an ethnographic account which illustrates the development of a sense of Muslim womanhood, rooted in ideas of moral guidance and the pious lifestyles of the female students of the madrasah. Madrasah education increases Muslim women's participation in religious institutions and forums, thereby heightening the possibility of a broader impact on religious life. Although madrasah education empowers female students to improve their religious consciousness, it has less impact on patriarchal ideology, which is deeply embedded in Bangladeshi society and culture.
The proliferation of the Deobandi model of religious school has been taken for granted in South Asia, although how its pedagogic method and theological stances are being replicated in Bangladesh has received little academic attention. This paper delves into the replication of the Deobandi model of religious schooling in Bangladesh by describing the replication process in a local Quomi madrasa, which received strong patronage from Deoband at the height of the Islamic revivalist-reformist movements in South Asia. This study reveals that localized versions of Deobandi madrasas in Bangladesh are concerned with the ‘other’ Muslims, that is, Muslims with doctrinal views differing from the Deobandi school of thought. The contestation between the Deobandi interpretation of Islam and the other interpretive Islamic groups within the circle of madrasas suggests that Muslim identity is a matter of contention, with differing points of view from one type of madrasa to another and from one group of ulama to another.
The Muslims of South Asia made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than the region’s Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were relatively less likely to use large-scale and long-living economic organizations, and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this paper also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families, and they were ill-suited to profit-seeking business. Whereas Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint family enterprises, Muslims tended to use ephemeral Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.
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