"The Muslims of India face what is a radically new and profound problem; namely how to live with others as equals. This is unprecedented; it has never arisen before in the whole history of Islam."/1/ So wrote Wilfred Cantwell Smith, perhaps the most perceptive Western scholar of Islam in South Asia, in his book Islam in Modern History, first published in 1957 and still of great relevance. He also observed, a few pages earlier: "The question of political power and social organization, so central to Islam, has in the past always been considered in yes-or-no terms. Muslims have either had political power or they have not. Never before have they shared it with others."/2/ (Emphasis original.)

Smith's statements reflects his analysis of how Muslims have viewed their history in accordance with their conviction that "[Islam's] purpose includes the structuring of a social community, the organization of the Muslim groups into a closed body obedient to the Law." "It is this conception," Smith continues, "that seems finally to be proving itself inept in India."/3/ He decries some of the consequences of that view and does not seem to share it entirely. However, when he underscores his point by characterising the Muslims in China and black Africa as being not free, or when he argues that the Muslims of the Soviet Union "are a minority within a vast non-Muslim domain[,] [b]ut they are not joint rulers[;] they do not participate in the choice and responsibility of the course of events," he is not merely betraying a personal preference for Western-style democracies. He is also revealing greater affinity with the way most Muslims of India have ideally tended to view themselves: an undifferentiated, consolidated community, either wielding power as a communal group or not at all.

Group or communal identity has indeed been of paramount importance to the Muslims, as can be seen in the fact that the beginning of serial time in Muslim history is marked by the moment of the emergence of a separate Muslim community in Madina. The religious experiences of the Prophet were of two kinds, the mediated revelation of the Word of God -- the wahy -- and the unmediated, direct experience of the proximity of God at the end of the Prophet's "celestial journey" -- the mi'raj. The pivotal status of the first for the whole of Islam is obvious, while the second not only places Muhammad in a unique position as compared with other Muslim prophets but also has tremendous significance for Sufistic or mystical Islam. Instead of using either of these events as a starting point, though, Umar, the second Caliph, chose the year of the hijrat, the emigration of Muhammad from Mecca, which led to the emergence of a separate, cohesive community of believers in Madina. The moment was perceived as an absolute breaking away from any space-time relationship with the past and as the beginning of a new life that is explicitly the life of the community.

The importance given to the self-image of a consolidated community and the community-forming role of the Prophet is further reflected in the fact that though all Muslims, including learned scholars of religion (the ulama), grant validity to the concept of kashf -- the unmediated, direct inspiration of humankind from God -- they have never willingly tolerated any such inspiration that also led to the formation of a separate community within Islam. This can be seen -- within the context of South Asia -- in the persecution of the messianic Mahdavis/4/ in the fifteenth century and in the harsh treatment meted out to the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in Pakistan more recently./5/ Although far apart in time and ideas, the two victimised groups share one common feature: they attempted to create a distinct community of believers within the general body of Islam. It appears as if the finality of Muhammad as a prophet is not merely with regard to the matter of wahy or revelation; rather, it also includes community formation. We can say that the original community of believers, as it took form in Madina through the temporal actions of the Prophet, has become a kind of metacommunity for all Muslims for all times. In its normative role it has completely overshadowed the experience of Islam in Mecca (which makes one wonder what the shape of Islam would have been if the Prophet had met with immediate success in Mecca.) Simultaneously, the history of that community in Madina, as that community became more consolidated and more powerful, has served as a kind of metahistory, from which must emanate the dynamics of all subsequent, serial histories. Needles to say, this emphasis on the primacy of the community has been at the cost of the significance of the individual.

In this century, with regard to the Muslims of South Asia, the pervasive power of that view of history could be seen in the popularity of the Khilafat movement/6/ as well as in the success of the Pakistan movement which, paradoxically enough, was led by a non-religious, modernist leader who had opposed the earlier movement. One also can justifiably argue that the same view of community and history was behind the attitude of the Pakistani and Indian Muslims who opposed the subsequent establishment of Bangladesh./7/

It could be seen as well in the way most of the more traditional, piety-minded Muslim leaders chose to respond to the emergent situation in India in 1947. One group, the so-called nationalist ulama, conceived of the future constitution of a free India as a contract between the Muslim community of India and the non-Muslim others, much in the manner of the contract that the Prophet had made with the Jews of Madina./8/ In doing so, they overlooked two things: first, that in the original contract the Prophet had the ultimate authority; second, and more important, that the original contract was between groups, whereas the constitution of India was a contract between the individual and the state. The result was that these learned people supported a secular polity based on adult franchise within which they nevertheless wished the Muslims to act as a consolidated group./9/

Then there were absolutists of another kind, the members of the Jama'at-e-Islami,/10/ who believed then, and continue to believe now, that the Muslims in India should be a "protected minority": in other words, a kind of dhimmi/11/ in Hindu India. Their leader, Maulana Maudoodi, advised the Hindus of India in May 1947 "to study the lives and teachings of Ramachandra, Krishnaji, Buddha, Guru Nanak, and other sages." "Please study," he said, "the Vedas, Puranas, Shastras and other books. If you cull out any divine guidance from these, we would request you to base your constitution on this guidance. We would request you to treat us exactly on the lines of the teachings of your religion. We would raise no objections."/12/ Some years later, when pressed on the later point in Pakistan, he declared that he would not mind if the Hindus applied the laws of Manu to the Muslims of India and treated them as worse than outcasts./13/

Fortunately, the Constituent Assembly of India did not oblige Maulana Maudoodi, nor, for that matter, did it enter into a contract with the "nationalist" ulama. Instead, the Indian constitution set into motion in India two historical processes of the modern age: democracy and secularism.

That brings us back to the radical problem, as phrased by Smith, that the Muslims face in India: how to live with others as equals. If the preceding discussion of the twin concepts of community and history has even some validity, it must be evident that any "rediscovery of the past as adaptation for the future" is not likely to help much. If the Indian Constitution does not wish to treat the Muslims as dhimmis, and if, as is generally believed, the Muslims of India have never in the past had to share power with others, how can they now use their past to adapt themselves for a democratic and secular future? Is there no choice for them but to reject their past?

I believe the answer is yes -- with one qualification. What is imperative is not that they reject the past out of hand -- which could be well-nigh impossible -- but that they recognise that there is no one Muslim past; that, in fact, there are as many pasts as there are Muslims. The so-called Islamic past is but an abstraction, constructed by and useful to those who traditionally have made exclusive claims to hold power. How integral this abstraction is to the question of power can be seen in the fact that Muslim modernists of the League variety, conservative ulama of assorted kinds, even sympathetic Western observers, not to mention the Orientalists, all seem to come up with almost the same, monolithic, undifferentiated Islam. When Smith wrote "Muslims have either had political power or they have not," he tacitly meant only those Muslims who could in the past hold exclusive power and did. Likewise, his statement "Never before have they shared [power] with others," no matter how much hedged with exceptions, turns our attention away from the reality that, in all the centuries of "Islamic" history in India, a very large number of Muslims have always had to share powerlessness with others. It is not in the mythology of one thousand years of exclusive power but in the centuries of shared degrees of powerlessness, or what Ashish Nandy more elegantly calls "one thousand years of conflicted but meaningful neighbourliness," that the Muslims of India can expect to find guidance for the kind of power-sharing proposed by Indian democracy. In full cognizance of their own diversity, they must turn not to some single, monolithic abstraction but to the concreteness of their own maximally differentiated pasts.

It follows, of course, that like the Muslims of India the non-Muslims of India also have a multitude of pasts. To think otherwise, to postulate a single, undifferentiated past for all the non-Muslims, would be intellectually dishonest, no matter how ideal or even pragmatic it may seem. It would also be disastrous for India at the present time when it is beset with communal violence. To my mind, only individuals have real pasts; groups do not. Groups, at best, have aggregates, or, at worst, abstractions. Abstractions can only too easily become coercive, particularly when the nature and motives of the people who construct such abstractions are lost sight of by those who subsequently want to use them for their own innocent (?) purposes. To understand this last point, we need only remind ourselves of the disastrous Khilafat movement, which was supposed to bring the Muslim masses into the nationalist movement and create greater communal harmony but ended up doing exactly the opposite.

Let us now turn to what I feel is the challenge and the opportunity before the Muslims of India, namely to gain individually creative awareness of the diversity of their pasts and thus break out from under the hegemony of that vision of a monolithic, communal past that has been and still is being used -- by their leaders as well as by their detractors -- to deny them control of their own individual destinies. No doubt that is easier said than done. Any effort on these lines would be fanatically opposed by the religious orthodoxy -- as in the recent controversy concerning the maintenance rights of divorced women -- while the modernist, bourgeois leadership already has repeatedly shown its predilection for a separate, consolidated Muslim polity. Then there is another acute problem.

The Indian national polity is still in the process of creating a viable and equitable balance between regional identities and the national identity -- the former stressing diversity over unity, the latter unity over diversity. This is indeed a critical aspect of that endless process called nation-building. However, it makes the task before the Muslims of India rather more difficult. At present, Muslim minds are being coerced on the one hand by the votaries of a monolithic Islam, and on the other by the proponents of the so-called Indian mainstream. My belief in the many pasts of the Muslims and my understanding of the present political scene suggest that there exists a third choice: the Muslims of India, after transcending their communal exclusivity, should instead recognise and strengthen their local and regional orientation. They should do so not out of any expedience -- though the expediency of avoiding violent conflict is manifestly there -- but because that orientation already exists in the specificity of their diverse pasts, even if it is not consciously recognised and thus made vital and functional as is the case with their non-Muslim compatriots.

Indian Muslims, or for that matter all South Asian Muslims, differentiate themselves from the Muslims of other nations, say, the Arabs, and one may presume that isolating those differentiating features would lead to discovery of their Indianness. But South Asian Muslims also differentiate among themselves, and, as the emergence of Bangladesh tells us, these differences are of much greater import for the people involved than any abstracted Muslim, or even Indian Muslim, identity -- particularly so when the context is of power and hegemony, whether social, cultural, or economic. Our recognition of many pasts, we should remember, entails not merely a horizontal, territorially defined differentiation, but also a vertical differentiation within any smaller unit.

This assertion of the diverse regional orientations by the Muslims of India will also contribute to the enhancement of democracy in the country. The political crisis facing India today does not arise out of any failure of secularism, even though the secularisation of the society has not kept pace with its politicisation. The bigger cause is that the process of democratisation -- that is, the devolution of power from the largest construct, the state, to the smallest actual unit, the individual -- has not only not kept pace with the tremendous rise in the political expectations of the Indian people but has in fact slowed down. Simultaneously, the arenas for democratic political action have declined both in number and in kind. And even in the arenas that exist, one saw not too long ago the imposition of a single political will. This slowing down and diminution will have to be reversed. The future of democracy in India lies in the decentralisation and diversification of the foci of power, and Indian Muslims will not be able to play their rightful role in that future if they fail to remove themselves from the concept of a consolidated Muslim polity emanating from a single Muslim past.

Being a Muslim in India is at the same time a challenge and an opportunity: to become functionally alive in the developing, secular democracy. I suggest that a way to meet that challenge is for the Muslims to discover their own individual, highly differentiated pasts and only then to engage in making aggregates of them, first at the local and regional levels, and later at the national level. I submit that there is no one Muslim or even Indian Muslim past, or for that matter even a single Indian past. Such constructs are only abstractions, and not entirely neutral. In the process of discovering the past, as we move from the individual to increasingly larger units, the quantum of abstraction increases as does the potential for the past to become restrictive. I also submit that those who seek to discover the past exist in certain objective political conditions, as did the creators of that past which is being rediscovered. If those conditions -- past and present -- are overlooked in the rediscovery process, then that abstract past can also become concretely coercive.

N O T E S

/*/ From Contemporary Indian Tradition: Voices on Culture, Nature, and the Challenge of Change, edited by Carla M. Borden, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
/1/ W. C. Smith, Islam in Modern History, New York: The New American Library, 1959, p.289.
/2/ Ibid, p.287.
/3/ Ibid, p.28.
/4/ The Mahdavis were the followers of Sayyid Ahmad of Jaunpur (1443-1504), the self-proclaimed mahdi or promised reformer at the end of the first Muslim millennium. Within a short period they formed small communities all over India, but orthodox religious leaders, hand in hand with the Sur and the Mughal state power, prevailed over them. There are, however, still some Mahdavi groups in Hyderabad and Gujarat.
/5/ Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian (1837-1908) declared himself a messiah and a mahdi in 1891 and claimed to be divinely inspired. His followers, the Ahmadis (also called the Qadianis, after Ahmad's birthplace), remarkable for their missionary zeal, are found in largest numbers in Pakistan, India and some African countries. They have frequently been persecuted in Pakistan, where in 1974 the National Assembly declared them non-Muslims. The assembly accused them of not believing in the finality of Muhammad as a prophet, a charge that has been denied by most Ahmadis.
/6/ When at the end of World War I the defeated Turks were forced to withdraw from their Arab and other non-Turk colonies, the Muslims of British India sought to protect the temporal and religious powers of the Ottoman caliph, claiming that the proposed dissolution of the Ottoman Empire would be an attack on Islam. They did so in the face of rising Arab nationalism and Turkish republicanism, and they were led in this movement by a strange triumvirate: Maulana Abdul Bari, a traditional scholar and sufi; Muhammad Ali, a graduate of Aligarh and Oxford; and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who thought that by helping the Muslims of India at what they considered to be a critical moment in their history he could win their friendship for the greater cause of Indian nationalism. Eventually, the Arabs gained their freedom and the Turks got rid of the caliphate, while the so-called Khilafat movement failed to create even a lasting political alliance between the Hindus and the Muslims. In fact, its immediate consequences were a number of extremely violent communal incidents and a consolidation of Muslim nationalist aspirations opposed to Indian nationalism. See Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
/7/ C. M. Naim, "Muslim Press in India and the Bangladesh Crisis,' Quest, Bombay, #94 (March-April 1975), pp. 27-37. (Also included in the present volume.)
/8/ W. C. Smith, op. cit., p.285. In a footnote on page 287, Smith points out: "In the case of the Madinah Jews with whom the original mu'ahadah [contract] was established, power was not really shared; it was an agreement for each community to live its own life, rather than for the two to participate in constructing a life in common." Also see Friedman, Yohannan, "The Jam'iyyat-i-'Ulama-i-Hind in the Wake of Partition," Asian and African Studies, Jerusalem, Vol. II, #2. 1976. pp. 181-211; particularly p.186, where one dissenting leader is mentioned as urging the Muslims to abandon the way of life in Madina -- "sovereignty and self-rule" -- in favour of the Meccan way "which is one of suffering and in which the most conspicuous qualities are endurance, reliance on Allah, truth and moral integrity."
/9/ Much the same thinking, though not so extremely expressed, is even now evident in the opposition of the Majlis-e-Mushawarat and other Muslim organisations in India to any legislative reform in the Muslim Personal Law.
/10/ An organisation and movement started in 1941 by Sayyid Abul A'la Maudoodi (1903-1979). "[Maudoodi] would appear to be much the most systematic thinker of modern Islam. He presents Islam as a system, one that long ago provided mankind with set answers to all its problems, rather than as a faith in which God provides mankind anew each morning the riches whereby it may answer them itself." W. C. Smith, op. cit., 235. Also see Khalid B. Sayeed, "The Jama'at-e-Islami Movement in Pakistan," Pacific Affairs, New York, 1957, pp. 59-68.
/11/ "According to Muslim canon law on the conquest of a non-Muslim country by Muslims, the population which does not embrace Islam and which is not enslaved is guaranteed life, liberty and, in a modified sense, property. They are, therefore, called ahl al-dhimma, 'People of the covenant or obligation,' or simply al-dhimma or dhimmis" ("dhimma," Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961, p. 75).
/12/ S. E. Hassnain, Indian Muslims: Challenge and Opportunity, Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1968, pp. 51-52. 
/13/ "I should have no objection even if the Muslims of India were treated in [a Hindu] form of Government as Shudra and Maliches and Manu's laws were applied to them, depriving them of all share in the Government and the rights of a citizen." (Quoted in S. E. Hassnain, op. cit., p. 52). Maulana Maudoodi's statement was made before a commission of inquiry set up by the government of Pakistan to look into the anti-Ahmadi riots of 1953.