Dr Imtiaz Ahmad (*)

Islam as a religion is based upon the Holy Quran, and Muslims practice what is prescribed within its writings. There are no different variations of Islam. In fact, it is the one religion that has maintained a certain consistency. It does not have the diverse manifestations of Hinduism that we see in its various sects and conglomerate of beliefs and traditions. There is one practice and the five pillars of Islam are accepted by the world. So variations in Islamic practices are very few. Hence Indian Islam and Islam elsewhere are two different entities. What we have seen in India is a gentler face of Islam, which is perhaps why the differences are not sharper today than they might have been. There are not two reasons for this; firstly, by the time the Muslim invaders came, the Sufi saints had already come to India and set up the silsilas of preaching Islam, secondly they encountered the Bhakti movement started in India at the same time. The two religions started moving towards each other and trying to find a common ground. This probably explains why what is seen in India is a less violent form of Islam, it can still erupt in violence, but less so than in the other parts of the Islamic world.

Islam has non reciprocal approach to tolerance. For example, a temple cannot be built in Jeddah, you cannot have a crematorium in Abu Dhabi, thus there are restrictions placed upon those who do not practice Islam in countries where they have a kind of state religion. However, in other countries, even in countries where there is some form of state religion, there is a greater degree of tolerance. Muslims have built mosques in London and there is no issue with this practice in the UK. In Washington D.C., a large mosque was built within a few kilometers of the white house, without any objections being raised. To outsiders there appears to be a non – reciprocity of tolerance, not only the tolerance vis-à-vis non-practitioners of Islam, but a lack of tolerance within Islamic society itself. For example, Muslim women can drive cars when they go abroad, yet women cannot drive cars in certain parts of the Islamic world. They cannot drive cars except in Kuwait and possibly in Bahrain, the entire gulf area. Women are not given the same rights as men. There is an imbalance in tolerance; certain non-Islamic practices are not tolerated within Islamic countries, whereas many Islamic practices are tolerated in other countries and for this, Muslims must give credible answers.

In India, the Pakistan movement fought for a separate homeland and succeeded in bringing about its creation. The mainstream supported a unified, multi religious pluralistic India. Unfortunately, there was a belief that the British conspired or jinnah fought for his rights and won a separate Pakistan. The fact is that they acheived a separate homeland for themselves. There have been sporadic eruptions of violence amongst the Muslims but violence has erupted within other strata of Indian society so it cannot be said that any particular community has been immune to the practice of violence.

Hindus were also involved in violence such as the communal riots, which took place in Gujarat. Muslim versus Muslim violence has been and is a feature of Shia-Sunni conflict, mohorrum sessions are brutally attacked by the Sunnis. However, in overall terms the quantum of violence is very low compared to elsewhere in the world. This can probably be explained by the general spirit of tolerance present in India's cultural representation and the fact that Indians have welcomed all religions of the world to flourish in India. 

There remain two basic differences though. One is that western democracy has had longer to evolve. Today India is attacked for corruption within society and deviating from what constitutes democracy, but it is often forgotten that corruption was rampant in 17th and 18th century Britain. Inequalities were there too, women were only given the right to vote in the early part of the 20th century. Britain had a longer time to evolve and come to its present position, but India has had to acquire sophistication within a shorter period. India had democratic traditions in history, but a different process of education. When western countries were evolving democracies, India was under colonial domination and were denied the same rights. India has accepted multiple challenges within a shorter period – of keeping the nation together, of the nation's integrity, of social inequalities, and the practice of democracy following the adoption of a democratic constitution. The other major difference is that western democracies evolved under a higher level of economic prosperity so for them, the struggle for consistency could not be as acute as in India. In the beginning it was assumed that democracy could have no meaning for people who were living at a subsistence level, that it did not matter what a person's liberties were, if they were not getting enough food, or facing deprivation and social inequality. Thus, we had to deal with this in a peculiarly Indian way and this is where the preamble of our constitution which in addition to library, equality and fraternity and social justice, was accepted as the bedrock of democracy. This was something that Dr. Ambedkhar fought for and gained general acceptance within the constituent assembly. Therefore, this emphasis on social justice is something that is peculiar to India and we have tried to implement it through democracy.

There are two questions that arise. The first is what has the Indian government done to implement its constitution? India is fortunate to have had two principle leaders of our freedom movement, Gandhi and Nehru, and there is no doubt that both believed in religious tolerance.  This meant that the concept of secularism became a part of the ethos through the constitutional mechanism and because India was fortunate to we have pandit Nehru becoming the prime minister and leading the nation till 1964. The foundations of secularism were established because at every step there was a dilemma to establish them. Whether a law was secular or not, how to segregate religion from matters of state. Pandit Nehru envisioned that religious beliefs would not cloud the activities of the government although this was particularly difficult with a population that was eighty percent Hindu, so to maintain a distance from Hinduism was a difficult challenge. Pandit Nehru made it clear that he wanted secularism to be practiced, and in a way we have backtracked from what he tried to do because in his mind secularism mean absence of religion. This is slightly different from Gandhi's interpretation of secularism, which was to involve all religions to be equally respectful and cognizant of each other. Nehru remained clear of this. Now that imbalance has been certified.

India is a nation more at ease with religion than twenty years ago, largely because Hinduism is part religion, part culture, so when Hinduism is denied, a part of our culture is also denied. Some aspects of Hindu culture have been inherited by every religion within India. Thus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and Parsis all take part in Diwali, despite its being a Hindu festival by custom, so this culture is "a weapon of comfort" in dealing with India's religious past.

The second question to be addressed is whether the state discriminates against Muslims?  The answer to this is certainly not! Does the society discriminate against the Muslims?  The answer here is either perhaps or yes, and that is why India has minorities commission and there are special bodies to make sure discrimination is not practiced based on religion. It is not only Muslims who are potentially subject to societal discrimination. Every religion is protected because aside from Hinduism, the followers of every other religion are minorities, so Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Sikh, can all experience a level of discrimination. Therefore, we not only need to apply the law which prohibits discrimination but we also must make sure that society develops a tolerance to ensure that it is not practiced.

We have had had sixty years of practice in the constitution, that is roughly fifty five years. For a country of India's size and complexity, it is not possible to achieve complete social justice in such a short period. Considerable progress has been made but the ideal has not yet been reached, though there has been progress in the erosion of the practice of un-touchability. It is much lower in the urban areas and decreasing in the rural areas, but social inequalities continue in the form of caste preferences. This is why India has had so much agitation about quotas, affirmative actions and so on. It is apparent from this that the ideal has not yet been reached. One can say that Indian society has reached one level of perfection, in that it is anti discrimination and believes in social justice. Of course, there is no society which has reached such a level. The British government commissioned a study to discover whether there was racism within the British government, and the report confirmed that there was indeed institutional racism within the British government. Since institutional racism has not been weeded out within governments who have had far longer to develop, India has done well in it's progress, however the ideal has not reached.

In the United Kingdom the society is tolerant, in the sense that no one prevents the other from practicing his/her faith. However in practice what has tended to happen is that Muslims live in "ghettos" economic deprivation explain where Muslim children are brought up differently (FUNNILY ENOUGH) kind of atmosphere than an average white British kind and so there is this peculiar phenomenon of young Muslims growing up in an affluent state but developing this great rage against western society, against western culture and against the economic and military power of the west. 

There is a tremendous sense of anger and it has disproved one of the early theses that terrorism is a product of deprivation. If the average terrorist is a product of deprivation and the average terrorist, in those days, was believed to be poor Muslim who couldn’t afford to go school and therefore he was accepted in a Madrasa which gave him food and shelter but also taught him religious intolerance and then eventually he became a jihadi terrorist.  This is how the Madrasa, which are now flourishing in Pakistan is the recruiting ground for the Al-Qaeda in the Taliban. In Britain people did not realize that the same phenomenon was taking place. Jack Straw, the then home security, refused to take any action against Muslims in Britain who were involved in terrorist activities in India because they were not violating British laws. However, they might not have violated the British laws then but unfortunately they experienced it last year. That’s when they realized that they were also harboring terrorist as much as the Al- Qaeda or the Taliban elsewhere. In addition, the riots that have taken place in France were mainly conducted by young unemployed Muslim youth who went on a rampage, burnt property, looted, set fire... etc, and so on. Throughout the western world little pockets of violence and people who are angry with their society are flourishing. Thus in a "tolerant" society there is still intolerance.

9/11 was carried out mostly by people who came from outside and that again disproved the myth that it was a Madrasa created jihadi terrorist. Basically they were Saudi nationals, young Saudi who came from affluent and middle class background, who were not the stereotype terrorists having long beards, they were quite different. They came with a mission, to cary out acts, suicide bombings etc so this again opened the eyes of Americans into realizing that this new phenomenon was spreading like a virus undetected and the traditional means of dealing with it was not effective which is not led to roughly the action against the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda but within the united states; the reform of the system, the creation of homeland security department, entirely new systems of vigilance at airports, surveillance of people; there is raging debate going on as to whether tapping of telephones is permissible in a democratic society like the united states. These are requisition which are being debated and answers have to com. So there is no perfect answer to this new phenomenon that we are seeing, of the nebulous kind of Islamic jihadi terrorism which is spreading in different parts of the world.

During the 80s in the gulf region, the oil wealth was creating new strains upon traditional Muslim society, especially as Bedouin, desert life had remained virtually unchanged since the time of the prophet. Then the sudden explosion of petrol money meant that countries with very sparse population suddenly saw an exponential growth. For example UAE that had only hundred and twenty thousand people in what year, doubled to fifty thousand people in what year. Their wealth is about thirty to forty million dollars from what. How then can they maintain a traditional lifestyle with integrity to their religion? The outward symbols of material wealth combined with Islam as a religion that has a focus on discipline, especially during the fasting month of Ramadan. The new wealth created a new kind of crisis for these traditional Muslim societies. There was the phenomenon of young Arabs who used to fly off to western countries during Ramadan. This was justified appeared in the Holy Qu'ran it is said that if you are a musaafir then you don’t have to fast so, so technically if you fly to another country then you don’t keep your Roza. So during the month of Ramadan anybody who could afford would go for a vacation to avoid fasting. , Sheikh Syed realized the absurdity of using a technicality in the Holy Qu'ran to avoid a basic requirement of the Muslim religion and issued an order to all Sheikhs to remain in the country during the holy month of Ramadan. The state apparatus used to enforce this meant that no food and drink was served in restaurants during the period regardless of non-Muslim customers. This is just one example of people finding it hard to cope with it. Also it got them in contact with the outside world, the style of life was changing, people were getting exposed to the west, they were having holidays in western countries and coming across liberal societies, permissive societies where children were sent to school and college, they were watching television. Thus the mindset was changed, yet they followed a very rigid, rule bound brand of Islam with strict lifestyle specifications. This contradiction continues to this day, and because they are such conservative societies, they are slow in changing. It is now that Saudi Arabia has given limited rights to the Muslim women. Even in Iran, where shias are the progressive element, all women must wear the burqa when they go out, even though they are free to go to college and university certain restrictions are placed on them. In away they cope with it by diverting attention to what was happening within the society. So in order to maintain the rigidity of their society they allow the jihadis to fight their battles outside the Muslim world and thus the violence in Afghanistan spreading out to other countries attacking western countries and trying to fight jihad outside. whereas actually the phenomenon was that their was frustration within Muslim society, within Muslim society, within their own territory. Osama bin laden is a phenomenon of this contradiction in Saudi society. He wanted change within Saudi society and was not allowed to bring about agenda of radicalization. However, the Saudi authorities had no ideological problem in asking him to move to Afghanistan and carry on jihad from outside their society. One cannot ask for change in their society, it is a society in transition and this theory that every religion passes through certain phases and the early phase is always violent and intolerant holds good even for Islam. Because the Hindu religion is such an old religion, we have forgotten that we also had passed through it, a period of intense violence. This whole story of the Ramayana that the rishis were waylaid by the rakshas who were stopping their religious practices, the king defending the rishis, killing the rakshasas is a mythological account of the intense violence that took place between the early Hindus and the non- Hindus and even the battle between Ram and Ravana is a clash between our indigenous tribal. It is well known that Hinduism clashed violently for nearly thousand years, that hindus destroyed Buddhists temples and Buddhists destroyed Hindu temples, but since the history is so far back it is rarely recalled. So we are seeing what we passed through 2000 years ago, we see that happening with Islam, because this is the world's youngest religion, Its like the Sikhs have also passed through it, this violent phase, they still have that kind of violence in Islam   while the older religions have passed through it. Christianity was violent when you think of the Crusades and what they did, what vasco- da-gama did here in India butchering Hindus, Muslims and others, this sense of violence took place only about 500 years ago.

Indian Muslims not joining the Al-Qaeda has to do with the kind of Islam which is practiced. We have to go back to the history of Islam that religious ideology was not the way that Islam spread in India. It spread through religious ideology in a lot of other parts of the world like the whole of North Africa people were converter through violence and they were made to convert to Islam and that was through coercion. Islam in India did not spread through coercion and because the Sufis represented the gentler face of Islam and therefore our Muslims are not prone to this ideological fervor. It is true, you cannot segregate their sentiments. The khilafat movement for instance had a powerful effect on the thinking of our Muslims and Gandhiji sort of embraced the khilafat cause and got the Muslims joint the freedom struggle but sympathy is not intolerance, sympathy is not a call for violence. They will not take to arms and violence in order to support their beliefs and that is why we don’t have Indian Muslim generally in Al- Qaeda. There may be isolated examples. Certainly they have been violent in promoting causes within India- the Kashmir issue has generated violence and more recently we have seen religious intolerances resulting in violence like the attack in Varanasi. But it is not a mainstream Muslim preoccupation. Muslims share the same concerns as every other Indian citizen, that of family, social welfare, education and emplyment. That’s what they have been struggling for and that’s broadly every Indian citizen looking for, no matter what religion or what community they belong to. The basic concern of an average Indian family is also reflected in Muslims who have gone abroad from India. For example in Black pearl the Indian Muslims were so ahead of others is because they were aspirational. Like the average aspirations of an Indian family, they wanted their kids to get education, they wanted their girls to get education, they incorage their girls to take up jobs and generally they were more prosperous, more liberal, more successful, and more integrated in the society. That’s because they went from India and not from another Islamic country where the adjustment to modernization is more difficult.

One has to go back in history and remember that it was during the 11 to the 14th century when the Sufis came. By the time the Lodhis and the Mughals had come to India, the Sufi silsilas were well established. Thus, Akbar was so influenced by the Sufis that he became a follower of the chisti silsila and built a darga in Ajmer and in Agra. The Sufis found common ground with the bhakti movement to the extent that today it is unclear whether kabir was a Hindu or Muslim. Both the Bhakti movement and the Sufi movement lay claim to him, demonstrating that there was a meeting ground and the emphasis was not upon their religious differences but upon the similarities of the other religions. Akbar was certainly an apolitical Sufi because he created this religious dialogue and he enjoyed setting up the maulanas against the pandits and asked them to debate. He particularly enjoyed the intellectual duals. The Mullas wanted Akbar to be firmer in promoting Islam, but Akbar's priority was it's improvement through debate. He believed that if it was truly the superior religion, it should be proved in argument so these differences, extremists' forces were kept under control. Every Muslim king was supposed to be the defender of the Islamic way and was required to promote Islam but Akbar did not find it necessary to do it through coercion. If people converted to Islam it was accepted, but he would not allow violence to be used. Therefore, they grew up independently. The Sufis and the Bhakti movement developed separately yet they found common ground in areas of literature, music and even dance, not accepted as legitimate in some areas of the Islamic world. Hence the result that Islam, considered incompatible with any other religion, finally found compatibility in India due to the co- mingling of the Sufi and Bhakit streams in India.

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(*) Researcher in Islam and Democracy Issues, Professor of Social Science, India.