God’s Own War: Can Religion Alone Effect Political Unity?

History of Islam has led to the emergence of factions based on religion which will only lead to more instability.

(Photo: The Quint)

Islam’s ideological struggle for the future had begun two centuries ago. Two theologians, one Indian and the other Arab, born in the same year, 1703, offered theses that control the narrative till today. Shah Waliullah, born in Delhi, died in the 1760s; Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahab was born in Najd and died in 1787.

After witnessing Mughal impotence in 1739, Shah Waliullah offered a salient prescription: Shias were apostates (murtadd) who had betrayed Islam and hence beyond trust; he urged Sunni unity; traced Sunni decline to dynastic monarchies which had abandoned the practice of consensus in the choice of Caliph; blamed the Mughals for wasteful expenditure on monuments rather than public welfare (the Taj Mahal had been built rather recently); and, most significantly, accused Mughal elites of deviation by adopting Hindu practices, and allying with Hindus and Shias.

This was shirq, or compromise with polytheism. His list of “sins” is in fact recognition of Mughal inclusiveness, which so perturbed Aurangzeb, and certainly outlasted him.

The failure of Islam to keep Pakistan together in 1971 did nothing to weaken its hold on the social and political imagination. (Photo: iStock)

Religious Prescription

His solution for shirq was a physical and cultural “theory of distance” between believer and infidel, and advocated a line that resonates powerfully in contemporary below-the-radar discourse: ‘nearer to Arabia, closer to Allah’. His political contribution was significant.

When the Marathas entered Delhi in 1758, he invited Ahmad Shah Abdali to cross the Khyber and save Muslim rule. This is, interestingly, a “threat” which would be repeated for generations, in the rhetoric of leaders like Sir Syed Ahmad and prominent figures of the Muslim League in the pre-Partition phase.

A new force soon overshadowed such concerns. In 1803, Lord Lake entered Delhi. Shah Aziz, Shah Waliullah’s son, responded with a famous fatwa declaring India a Dar ul Harb, or House of War. The British represented, in his view, a threat to Islam. Aziz’s disciple Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi (1786-1831) launched the jihad in the 1820s that would continue under his successors till the 1870s.

Emergence of the Wahabis and Deoband

Barelvi’s manifesto, written in 1818, shows how close the ideologies of Waliullah and Abdul Wahab were, although Barelvi met Wahabis only when he went on Haj between 1822 and 1824. Barelvi attacked Indians who indulged in shrine worship (going to a dargah) and “obnoxious” behaviour like singing and dancing during weddings. It is easy to see why the Taliban venerate his shrine at Balakot, despite the injunction against “shrine worship”.

In Arabia, Wahabis might have withered but for a charismatic disciple, Muhammad ibn Saud, emir of Najd who stunned the Ottomans by conquering Mecca and Medina by 1804. In India, the British began to describe Waliullah’s followers as Wahabis, and were forced into bitter battles against the “Fanatical Host”.

In 1867, a few ulema from the Waliullah school of thought, led by Maulanas Nanotvi and Gangohi, started a seminary that has become an international force, Deoband. However, Deoband’s maulanas, having experienced 1857, accepted the need for collaboration with Hindus against the British. They remained deeply committed, though, to cultural distance, initiating what has now matured into identity politics.

But simultaneously, sections of the elite, led by Sir Syed, felt that the British were here to stay and their best interests lay in partnership with the new rulers so that they could regain the administrative and educational ascendancy they had enjoyed in the past.

The conflation of Islam and nationalism has been a guarantee for instability, because religion has never been the basis for political unity anywhere, including in the history of Muslims. (Photo: iStockphoto)

Religion as the Basis for Political Unity

Shah Waliullah’s inheritance, thereby, broke into two directions: cultural separation through Deoband, and political separation through Sir Syed. The politics of separation led inevitably to separate electorates in 1909 and Partition in 1947.

After Partition, Pakistan’s Muslim League leaders staved off cultural Wahabism for a while, but lost the political argument very quickly, when they accepted Pakistan as an Islamic state in the objectives resolution. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, from the UP landed aristocracy, thought he was conceding nothing more than words; in fact, he was setting the compass towards General Zia ul Haq’s sharia-compliant Nizam-e-Mustafa. Pakistan is the first Islamic Republic in the post-colonial era, and “Islamism” has changed not only behaviour, but also history books and polity.

The failure of Islam to keep Pakistan together in 1971 did nothing to weaken its hold on the social and political imagination. While Bangladesh reinvented itself along linguistic ethnicity, a shattered Pakistan reinforced the belief that Islam was the only glue; that it was not Islam which was to blame, but the inability of Muslims to understand their faith.

The conflation of Islam and nationalism has been a guarantee for instability, because religion has never been the basis for political unity anywhere, including in the history of Muslims. Why else would there be 22 Arab nations?

Reality of Caliphs and Imagined History

Internal conflict, which quickly grew into civil war, broke out even in Islam’s pristine age, over succession to the Prophet, leading to the Sunni-Shia divide. Of the first four “rightly-guided” Caliphs, only one, Abu Bakr, died in bed. Umar, Usman and Ali were assassinated.

Umar was murdered by a Persian servant in 644; Usman was killed in 656 by Mohammad, son of Abu Bakr, because of factional quarrels; Ali was assassinated in 660 by a rebel. In 657 Ali, who shifted his capital to Kufa, faced Muawiya at Siffin, Syria, in what is known as the Battle of the Camel. Muawiya, with the Prophet’s Aisha as an ally, accused Ali of instigating the murder of Usman.

In today’s context, therefore, small bands of terrorists believe they can destabilise superpowers, if they are ready to become martyrs. (Photo: iStockphoto)

Muawiya seized power after he forced the resignation of Ali’s son Hasan, and established the first dynasty, that of Umayyads. When Muawiya died in 680, Hasan’s brother Husain challenged Muawiya’s son Yazid, but, heavily outnumbered, was killed at Karbala in 680, a martyrdom that is central to Shia lament. Blood and confusion travelled together till the comparative stability of the reign of Abdal Malik.

Caliphates became dynasties; 14 Umayyads, 37 Abbasids; and, in the last phase, 26 Ottomans between 1517 and 1924 when Ataturk abolished the institution and turned Turkey towards modernity. In 1517, Selim I was unsentimental when he wrested the Caliphate from Arabs; he claimed the office by the right of the sword.

The office of the Caliphate has Quranic sanction. It derives from khalf, meaning ‘left behind’, or inheritor. It might surprise some hardliners to learn that the model Caliph in the Quran is King David. Verse 2:30 says: “Behold, thy Lord said to the angels, ‘I will create a viceregent (khalifah) on earth’.” The first was Adam, the second was David. The great example of faith against odds, and belief in Allah as a prerequisite for victory, is that of David who fought Goliath. Verse 2:249 says: “How oft by Allah’s will hath a small force vanquished a big one? Allah is with those who steadfastly persevere.”

This verse inspires the conviction that numbers do not matter on a battlefield as long as you have faith. In today’s context, therefore, small bands of terrorists believe they can destabilise superpowers, if they are ready to become martyrs. Since the road to paradise is under the shade of swords, it is a win-win situation for those ready to die for the cause of Allah. This is jihad fi sabil Allah: War in the cause of Allah (also, incidentally, the official motto of the Pakistan armed forces).

No poet used the phrase, shade of swords, more effectively, or evoked the romance of an Islamic past better than that great poet of loss, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, who is rightly revered in Pakistan as an intellectual architect of the two-nation theory.

(The writer is a BJP Rajya Sabha MP)

This is the final part of the series. You can read the first part here.