Authors: Patrick French
The prime minister was also assailed from left and right by those who believed he was being too cautious. Surely a new civil code was meaningless unless it applied to all Indian citizens, regardless of their religion? Originally, the intention had been to reform “Anglo-Mohammedan law” as well, which was a mish-mash of sharia and legal precedent, as determined by judgements made in courts under British rule. Often, Muslim personal law was mysterious even to those who were dispensing it. Nehru’s patronizing and practical view was that partition had left the Muslims a broken community, and that while a common civil code was desirable, this was not the time to make it happen. Vocal parliamentarians were opposed to any changes to family and inheritance laws, and paradoxically the more progressive and reformist voices in Muslim society, the intellectual descendants of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, had in most cases left for Pakistan. In the 1930s, in Lucknow, Tazeen Faridi had been the first Muslim girl in India to become president of a students’ union, and she went on to head the All Pakistan Women’s Association. In her view, women’s rights were inseparable from the freedom struggle: “We wanted laws to be standardized in their treatment of men and women. In Islam there is a tradition of powerful matriarchy—although often these women end up controlling other women—and I had no hesitation in speaking out about the need for changes in our society.”
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When Nehru’s attempts to pass a new Hindu civil code into law were rebuffed, he decided to implement the legislation piecemeal, over time. Ambedkar believed the prime minister was capitulating to reactionary upper-caste Hindu forces in Parliament, and he resigned as law minister in 1951. He was underestimating Nehru’s determination, the subtlety of his
strategy and how important he believed these changes to be. By the late 1950s most of the original civil code bill had been pushed through Parliament, and Hindu traditionalists were dragged, kicking and struggling, to social reform. These changes, in combination, transformed the nature of Hindu society. It would take many years for orthodox injustices to alter, and in some parts of the country they would barely change at all, but at least the law was now on the side of a progressive interpretation of individual human rights.
Maulana Mahmood Madani was in his early forties, an MP in the Rajya Sabha. In 2009 he berated the retired General Musharraf at a public forum in Delhi, telling him Indian Muslims did not want him coming there to play politics, and did not need help from Pakistan in solving their problems. “You say terrorism is happening on both sides,” he told Musharraf in Urdu, “but whether or not it’s happening on both sides, at least now it’s confirmed it’s happening on your side. More than 70 percent of Indian civil society would support us and stand with India’s Muslims for our rights.”
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An embarrassed Musharraf told the maulana he was glad he was happy—if the situation was as he said it was. The audience of Delhi intellectuals and socialites lapped up this exchange, which seemed to confirm their feeling that the Nehruvian vision of communal harmony still resonated. The knowledge, unexpressed, was that Muslims who embraced the idea of India came from the same raw material—the pre-1947 community—that had under different political pressures spawned Pakistan’s jihadi movement. Madani’s approach was like that of the superstar actor Shah Rukh Khan, who said during a concert at India Gate in the same year: “No one can have two viewpoints about terrorism. There is no religion of terrorism. I am often asked my viewpoint on this, maybe because I am a Muslim and I am very proud to be a Muslim. But I have read the Quran, listened to the Gita, acted in Ram Leela … Indian civilization does not distinguish in terms of religion. We are an impossible achievement in the world, and I’m very proud to be an Indian.”
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Although they have a much lower international profile than the citizens of Pakistan, there are nearly as many Indian Muslims as there are Pakistanis. Osama bin Laden’s attempts to rebrand Islam have not caught fire in India. Occasional acts of violence—bomb blasts in crowded markets by organizations like Indian Mujahideen—can often feel closer to the attacks between rival political groupings in India than to global jihadism. Loyalty to the Constitution is imbued in children across communities from an early age: it is a kind of brainwashing, but has been remarkably effective, and
underpins India’s common identity. The nation has thrown up almost no international Islamist terrorists, unlike other countries with large Muslim populations. The exceptions are the Bangalore-born Kafeel Ahmed (who burned himself to death in a failed car bomb attack at Glasgow airport) and the al-Qaeda linkman Dhiren Barot (a convert from a Hindu family and now in prison), both of whom were radicalized in Britain. Despite communal feeling, rioting and suspicion at times of trouble, most Muslims show exceptional loyalty to the idea of India.
Maulana Madani lived in a spacious compound in New Delhi, in a house reserved for an MP. A guard sat in a low watchtower outside the gate, but he was there more for show than for protection, and displayed no interest when I entered the house by a side door. Like many Indian politicians, Madani sported a white kurta pyjama, and in his case the outfit was offset by a pinstriped waistcoat and pale socks with a CK logo at the ankle. His beard was substantial and his turban tied carefully, with a little tail hanging down at the back. Madani came from a long line of Islamic scholars and had a calm, relaxed manner. His servant brought dates and glasses of lemongrass tea.
“Muslims are the most backward community in India—economically, educationally, socially,” he said in English. “The backwardness is not only because of government policies. In 1947 the Muslim intellectuals and civil servants went to Pakistan. Look at who was left behind. Mainly it was the poor, the illiterate and labourers who were left, and they had trouble participating in society. Our next generation are changing. They see education as a weapon. I see people in their twenties who want employment and economic advancement, and I think that the younger generation has some hopes, alhamdulillah [praise god]. They aren’t interested in radicalizing like in other countries. In India, there are different forms of thought in Islam, but in this Indian environment most people are basically peaceful and peace-loving.” Increasingly, in his opinion, Indian Muslims were seeking a modern and secular education for their children.
As well as the political role he played (he had switched parties twice and was presently with the Rashtriya Lok Dal), Madani was a leader of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind. This was an organization started after the First World War which had gone on to oppose the creation of Pakistan in 1947. He saw his present role in the context of this history.
“Over the last two years, the Deobandi school has for the first time in the subcontinent issued a fatwa condemning all terrorism and violence.” He was referring to the Darul Uloom religious school in Deoband in Uttar
Pradesh. “Islam cannot allow the killing of innocent people or the use of suicide bombing. The Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind has held more than forty public meetings, attended by millions of people, to protest against terrorism. Muslims in India are all agreed at this point that Islam cannot allow any sort of violence where innocents are the target.”
The fatwa was proclaimed at a meeting in Deoband attended by representatives of more than 6,000 organizations. A senior cleric had said explicitly: “We reject terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. Terrorism completely negates the teachings of Islam.”
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The message was aimed principally at Muslims in India, but the community hoped it would reach other countries too, which were often in a very different political and intellectual place when it came to an interpretation of the word “jihad.” The complication was that Deobandi Islam had mutated in Pakistan, with General Zia’s assistance, into an extremist force which talked of martyrdom, and its hardline message had spread around the world. Deobandis controlled 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques, and had a lock on the training of new preachers.
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The faith had followed a curious progression, becoming more radical in Pakistan than it was in Deoband itself, and in some cases more radical in Britain than it was in Pakistan. In a curious historical loop, activists back in England denounced Mohammad Ali Jinnah and all his works. Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s magazine
Khilafah
announced: “Jinnah went one step further than most traitors … How dare this man associate a Kufr [infidel] concept such as democracy with our Prophet (SAW)?”
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(SAW was short for “sallaallahu alaihi wasallam,” a religious utterance.)
Madani did not want to comment on Deoband’s export trends. He had recently been in trouble with some religious opponents (although I felt that in practice they were political opponents) for praising the Dalai Lama, and he did not want to pick another fight. “Their conflict is a political conflict. I don’t believe in the concept of Islam against the others. Muslims in our country had an opportunity to migrate to Pakistan, and they decided to stay in their homeland. It’s our home. We learned patriotism from our forefathers, who wanted to be Indian. Many freedom fighters in our country came from an Islamic background. For us, this is the most beautiful place to live.”
The one area where Madani was a firm conformist was on Muslim personal law. The failure to agree on a common civil code after independence meant, for instance, that polygamy was still permitted for Muslims, which in an orthodox household could leave women in an intolerable position. Archaic rules that had been abolished in other Muslim jurisdictions remained
in place in India, enabling courts peopled in the main by elderly men with beards to pronounce on personal matters. Notoriously, India retained the “triple talaq,” by which a Muslim man could divorce his wife simply by saying “I divorce you” three times (there had even been debate whether sending the message by email three times constituted a dissolution of the marriage). The triple talaq was seen in many Muslim-majority countries as an outmoded historical relic, and even in Pakistan had been abolished under the Pakistani Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961. According to
Commentary on Mohammedan Law
, the guidebook presently used by lawyers in most Indian courts: “The talaq should not be ambiguous, and should ideally include the woman’s name. ‘I divorce my wife forever and render her haram [forbidden] for me,’ should be uttered to show clear intention.”
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It did not sound like a particularly reassuring law.
When I asked Madani why he opposed any changes to these rules, he spoke of unity in diversity and began a digression on Islamic jurisprudence. He pointed out that India had four different schools—the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Wahabi—and that they each followed different regulations. Reading
Commentary on Mohammedan Law
later, I realized he was speaking only of Sunnis, and that Shias could rely on interpretations offered by either the Zaidi, Ismaili or Ithna Ashari tradition, and that further personal law regulations existed for those who followed the Motazila school.
“Islam can’t change. We can change Muslims, but we can’t change Islam. We cannot accept a common civil code, because all citizens must be content with their own beliefs. Which civil code would we adopt? In south India, some communities might even like to marry their sister’s daughters. We don’t want a universal personal law.”
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It was a politician’s answer, and the truth was that men like Madani benefited from the status quo. With the disappearance of powerful families and much of the progressive Muslim leadership to the new homeland of Pakistan at the time of partition, a rudderless community had been left behind in India, struggling to shape its future. Indian Muslims were too weak to challenge whatever they were offered, and took refuge in antique conventions. At times of crisis, their Hindu neighbours might target them or ask where their true allegiance lay. Nehru’s commitment to protecting this large minority from vengeance had evolved over the decades into a stasis where political parties, and in particular the Congress, claimed to protect them and act on their behalf. Clerics on the further fringes of Islam were treated deferentially by the Indian secular media when compared to Hindu bigots.
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Madani’s statement was an expression of a conservative interpretation
of Islam, even if it abjured the extremes of the Deobandis outside India. Most Indian madrasas, although they might not be politically radical, were content to follow a syllabus that concentrated on the precise rules governing Islamic moral and social conduct, personal behaviour, dress and appropriate interaction between the sexes.
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India’s most successful Muslim business people nearly all came from backgrounds outside the Sunni mainstream—Azim Premji of the hugely successful IT services company Wipro, for instance, was an Ismaili.
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Many, perhaps most, Indian Muslim leaders shared Madani’s more traditional views, using the restraints of the past to shelter the community from external pressures. I discussed this with Qasim Rasool Ilyas of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which organized the 400 or so “darul qazas,” or sharia courts, in India. To become a judge, or qazi, you did not need a law degree, but had to have studied Islamic traditions. Each qazi made his own decisions: there were no advocates in this court system, which had been formalized in the early 1970s. India since independence has had a strong tradition of women lawyers and judges, but there was not a single female qazi.
“There’s no law against it,” said Ilyas, “but no women have done the training.” He described the darul qazas as a disputes resolution system, an alternative to going to the civil courts. “It’s cheaper and it’s faster and you can have a resolution in days or months. If you go to a civil court on a matter like inheritance or custody of a child and the other party goes to a higher court on appeal, you might not get an answer in your lifetime.” His concern about the lackadaisical workings of the legal system was a valid one. Indian courts were notorious for being clogged with old cases, and the country had a shortage of judicial posts.
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In 2004 it was found that a jail had forgotten to hang a man convicted of murdering his family. “The government woke from its slumber [seven years after the conviction],” the
Hindustan Times
reported, “when DIG Prisons (Allahabad zone) bumped into the convict during a routine inspection.”
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