A 'Muslim' way of thinking?

What were the Muslim leaders thinking about politics and law in the years that finally culminated in their demand for a separate country? Adeel Hussain's book tells us what, or tries to

Back in 1987, the late poet A K Ramanujan wrote an essay called “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?”. A more appropriate title might have been “Is There a Hindu Way of Thinking?” because that’s what the essay was about.

Ramanujan had assumed that all Indians were Hindus, I think, a common enough feature. The essay was devoted to moral issues and how for the Hindus morality was contextual.

But recently I read a book that talks about how Muslim Indians thought about legal and political issues in the 1920s and 1930s. As the Americans say, we get a sense of where they were coming from, at least according to the author.

Thus, what were the Muslim leaders thinking about politics and law in the years that finally culminated in their demand for a separate country? This book tells us what, or tries to.

It is called, altogether too precisely in my opinion, Law and Muslim Political Thought in Late Colonial North India. The author, Adeel Hussain, couldn’t have got more  specific than that.

The core attempt of the book is to figure out how Muslims engaged with the new British-inspired laws — new because in 1860 the governance of India became the responsibility of the British government — and the consequences for Muslim politics over the next 87 years.

The author skips over how such politics was also, or mainly, the result of British policies of divide and rule.

(I am always astonished by how Indian and Pakistani historians always manage to blame their own leaders while simply ignoring what the British were up to.)

 But let’s not go there. Let’s just stick to what the book is about. The central question it tries to answer is how Muslim separatism became an intellectually acceptable idea, at least to the Muslim elites, between 1927 and 1940. It does so by examining court cases which, one must admit, is a very new way of recalling those years.

There is one major influence and two major influencers, according to Mr Hussain. The influence was the dispute in Lahore between Muslims and Sikhs over a mosque, known as the Shahidganj mosque. The influencers, much later were Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal.

The building had originally been intended as a mosque but after Ranjit Singh conquered the area it was turned into a gurdwara. At the start of the 20th century, the Muslims claimed it back. I can’t help wondering who instigated them.

The matter dragged on till one day in 1935 the Sikhs simply demolished the building. Having stated the facts the author goes off into intellectual conjecture and jargon-ridden calisthenics. At issue was whether man-made law had any jurisdiction over Wakf property, which was created by religious law.

To cut a very long story very short, the Muslims eventually started viewing themselves “as a minority under threat” because the courts had rejected the idea of religious law.

The Congress, says the author, supported the Muslims.

Then Jinnah and Iqbal came along. Plenty has been written about Jinnah who persuaded himself that Muslims as a minority would be ruined. The author gives an interesting account of that transformation. As things turned out, it was the Muslims who got ruined in Pakistan while Muslim Indians have had a good ride, till recently at least.

Of the two, Iqbal is the less studied person. How did he traverse the distance from Sare Jahan se Accha, Hindustan Hamara to Pakistan yahin banega?

The author tries to show that Iqbal’s main concern was Muslim unity on the subcontinent, followed by constitutionalism and political authority. And that for him divinity and its principles stood above everything else. The author quotes Iqbal, the “word of God as embodied in the Quran was ‘final and authoritative’.”

His cogitations led Iqbal to “shape the Indian Muslims as a distinct political fraternity from the Levant, the colonial state and the Congress.” The author says Iqbal wanted to unite India’s Muslims but that could not be done only through “liberal political practices”. Hence “the legal order had to recognise theological differences.”

 In other words, if I have got it right, constitutional values had a set of boss values which were contained in Islam. Hence, a separate homeland for the Muslims of India was a necessary condition.

The pity is that it wasn’t sufficient, at least amongst the Punjabi component of Pakistan. The Bengalis, who probably did not enter Iqbal’s thought processes as Bengalis, have turned out to be different.