Review of Sohal’s The Muslim Secular | Raheel Bashir & Aamir Jamal Khan

BOOK REVIEW

The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India’s Partition

by Amar Sohal

Oxford University Press
2023 xiii + 323pp.,
(hardback), ISBN: 9780198887638

Reviewed by Raheel Bashir & Aamir Jamal Khan

The debut work by Amar Sohal stands out for its multilayered explorations, adding a formidable depth to a creative one-of-its-kind conceptual coupling of the sacred with the profane – the Muslim with the Secular. The conceptual figure of Muslim Secular is given a rendition of three distinct yet comparable protagonists – Maulana Azad, Sheikh Abdullah, and Abdul Gaffar Khan. The book weaves together ideas of these ‘actor-thinkers’ who belong to diverse subject positions, underscoring a political and intellectual defence of the secular public sphere. Being in the thick of politics elevated their intellectual thought from a mere dissociated form of thinking to an embedded social commentary regarding the possibility and constitution of secularism. Each thinker articulated a broad range of arguments that engage with religious experiences, regional diversities, and nationalist imaginations, aiming to conceptualise an accommodative and integrationist mode of living in a pluralistic yet fissured society. Their vision of secularism transcends parochial identitarian instrumentalism, offering instead an inclusive form that ensures the promise of mutuality across the silos of identity. The Hindu right-wing, as well as some liberals, assert that India’s secularism stems only from its civilisational ethos attributable to Hinduism, and Muslims are passive recipients of this majoritarian largesse. Sohal refutes these shibboleths by highlighting the noteworthy contributions of these three prominent Muslim figures to the conceptualisation of Indian secularism.

Secular culture in a liberal democracy

Sohal begins by flagging the political conundrum underlying liberal democracies, predicated on the spirit of abstract equivalence across individuals. The democratic path to ascertain the division of rights and resources through a numerical weightage gives rise to the predicament of permanent majorities and minorities. This liberal predicament accompanied the promise of decolonisation in the Global South, which aimed to guarantee popular sovereignty through a recourse to democratic procedures. For Jinnah and his followers in the Muslim League, the impending democratisation of the sub- continent was foreshadowed by the perils of Hindu majoritarianism. In this vein, Azad emerged as a pivotal thinker who conceptually challenged the deterministic modality of pro-partition thought of the Muslim League. He envisions a culturalist model of the secular public sphere that accommodates distinct religious diversities, contrary to a unidimensional liberal model that assimilates difference.

After the fall of the Ottoman caliphate, Azad retracted from his earlier emphasis on the transhistorical forms of solidarity mediated through transcendental confessional ties to a more historically rooted form of affinity drawn along the national lines. Whereas the Jalal (2007) emphasises the universality of Azad’s religious philosophy in his theorisation of trans-national jihad, Sohal’s work elaborates the productive dialect between the nationalist and trans-nationalist strands of thought in Azad. Azad’s profundity lies in the creative endeavour to counter the minority-hood of Muslims; from both epistemic and ontological fronts. He stresses the underestimated numeric weightage of Muslims, which accounted for a majority in five out of ten provinces in pre-partition India. Secondly, on the epistemic front, Azad highlights the unmistakable influence of Muslims on the making of India’s civilisational past. Muslims, whose civilisational contributions spanned over a millennium, were progenitors of various syncretic art forms, architecture, music and sui generis literary styles. Moreover, Azad counters the muslim minority-hood through a justificatory discourse that grounds the constitutional ideal of political pluralism in Islamic principles. In the process, Azad nationalises the minority religion as it partakes in shaping India’s founding moment (Rodrigues 2020).
Sohal employs the concept of ‘equality as parity’ to explicate Azad’s proposal for a ‘thicker version of equality’, combining aspirations of secular equivalence with claims to cultural and religious autonomy (p. 32). It ensures protection from liberal assimilation by sustaining a thicker version of the public self, guaranteeing diverse communitarian distinctions. Azad posits secularity as a form of social cohesion that holds together various communities shaped by supra-religious concerns like arts, literature, and language. This cohesion is irreducible to the contribution of one single community; instead, it comes about through a parity-driven partaking of diverse social actors. Azad is able to attenuate the apprehensions of religious conflicts by reversing the role of enmities that exist between the two religious communities. He interestingly posits the potential enmity among religious denominations as a catalyst towards an enduring amity of a secular culture. Although Azad elevates the conceptual worth of the Muslim community as a significant partaker in shaping the historical possibility of a composite nationalism, he downplays the significance of legal guarantees in modern nation-states. The recourse to such politics ended up depoliticising the interest-driven concerns of the community. Moreover, securing the guarantees of cultural preservation came as a trade-off for more empowering acts of political and institutional representation (Anil 2023). A mere reliance on the inherited legacy of the cultural goods in the absence of institutional guarantees has proven ill-fated for the Muslim minority of India.

Three nation theory

Turning to the second protagonist of the book, Sheikh Abdullah – rechristened Sher-i-Kashmir (Lion of Kashmir) by his supporters – Sohal examines with great nuance his engagements with the region, religion, and Indian nationalism. In the early 1930s, Sheikh Abdullah, like most of his educated coreligionists, was denied government employment by the Dogra regime. The Hindu Dogra rulers presided over the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir (1846-1947) by presenting themselves as the chief patrons of Hinduism and the Hindu community. The overt hinduness of the state entailed that the Muslim majority was ‘marginalised in the battle for political, economic, cultural and symbolic resources of the state’ (Rai 2004). Soon, he was propelled to the forefront of a popular movement demanding equitable representation of Kashmiri Muslims in the state administration. Amid the rising tide of anti-colonialism and socialism, Sheikh Abdullah founded the Muslim Conference in 1932 to unite the state’s pauperised Muslims. The party was subsequently renamed the National Conference in 1939, indicating a shift towards a vision of unity that transcended confessional allegiances. Abdullah aligned the party with the Indian National Congress and fostered a close relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru. While Abdullah’s efforts were firmly rooted in secular concerns, such as alleviating the economic hardship of Maharaja’s browbeaten subjects, he consistently invoked Islamic symbolism and retained mosques and shrines as the sites of popular mobilisation.

For Abdullah, there was no politics without history, and he marshalled the latter to advance his political cause. He regarded Kashmir as a nation—a perspective that positioned it, in the comity of nations, as a distinct entity with a rich cultural heritage, and a population united by shared historical experiences of collective subjugation under foreign rulers. However, Abdullah relinquished the aspirations for the ‘absolute sovereignty enjoyed by other nations’, instead advocated ‘incorporation of Kashmir within an Indian federation’ (p. 161). This ‘compact with loss’ signified an attempt to maintain an equipoise between safeguarding the ethnolinguistic particularity of Kashmir and finding a place in a shared Indian nation. Whitehead (2016) notes that Abdullah envisioned a relationship between Kashmir and India based on mutual esteem, whereas Nehru’s discourse of the nation was imbued with an element of hierarchy – ‘subordinating Kashmiri regional to Indian national’ (p. 177). As India inched closer to freedom, Abdullah articulated a framework of shared sovereignty between the centre and the constituent units of India, positioning this vision as a repudiation of Jinnah’s proposal for a sovereign Muslim nation-state. For Abdullah, the dissemination of political power was a prerequisite for communities to protect their rights, and it served to ‘defang the identitarian antagonisms that prevented Indians from harnessing their apparently inherent unity’ (p. 217).

Politics of pledges

The author then draws attention to Abdul Ghaffar Khan, whose legacy of non-violent activism and ethical commitment to India’s unity is explored in relation to the book’s broader themes. The imperatives of geopolitics and the orientalist stereotypes of Pashtun bellicosity informed the British conduct in the North-West Frontier Province. The colonial violence in this region was exceptionally stark, exceeding even the harsh and oppressive norms of imperial violence. Abdul Gaffar Khan, or Bacha Khan, regarded the white colonisers as incredibly cruel, arrogant and racist with a blatant disregard for indigenous lives. In this climate of repression, he founded Khudai Khidmatgars (Servants of God) in 1929. Initially focused on promoting education and preventing internecine conflicts among Pashtuns, the Servants of God evolved into an ostensibly anti-colonial organisation and forged an alliance with Congress to advance the cause of Indian independence. When the Congress accepted the partition plan in 1947, Khan interpreted this as an act of betrayal, accusing the party of abandoning Khudai Khidmatgars to the hostile forces.

After a brief spell with an armed anti-imperialist group, Khan renounced violence, committing himself to non-violent means to resist British rule. Through a radical reinterpretation of ‘Pashtunwali’, Khan and his acolytes offered an intellectual challenge to the ethos of violent retribution, instead emphasising forgiveness. Along with ethnic mores, Khan grounded his ethical framework in Islamic theology, drawing inspiration from Quranic precepts and Prophet Muhammad’s fortitude during his persecution in Mecca. For Khan, this steadfastness exemplified non-violence as the real way of Muslim life (p. 237). In contrast to Azad and Abdullah, whose perceptions of the Indian nation were influenced by a long narrative of shared history, Khan’s national imagination was primarily shaped by ethical considerations of ‘love, honour, and obligation’ (p. 258). While colonialism had already forged national bonds between Muslim Pashtuns and Hindu Congress, Khan envisioned sustaining these ties through a ‘mutual sense of trust founded on the principle to uphold each other’s honour’ (p. 230). Although these principles were perceived to be embedded in the ethnic code of Pashtuns, Khan did not assert that they were the sole prerogative of his ethnic kin; instead, he rendered them intelligible to all. Sohal argues that this conspicuous universalism was emblematic of Khan’s broader commitment to universal brotherhood.

Sohal tactfully rescues the intellectual originality of Azad, Abdullah, and Khan from a much-hackneyed representation that reduces them to the mere footnotes of Indian secular-nationalist historiography. However, the conceptual repertoire that Sohal relies upon overlays the inherent historicity of these three protagonists by inventing a ‘mythology of coherence’ to the internally differentiated body of their respective political thought (Skinner 1969). Such a method of charting a seamless historical narrative leaves out the multi-dimensionality of thought without its proper appreciation. It culminates in a history of abstractions exemplified by impositions of pre-figured categories over an essentially elusive body of thought. Despite the criticism, The Muslim Secular is a thoroughly researched work and crafted with nuance. Through its originality and relevance, the book distinguishes itself as a profound contribution to modern intellectual history.

References

• Anil, Pratinav. Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77. London: Hurst, 2023.
• Jalal, Ayesha. “Striking a Just Balance: Maulana Azad as a Theorist of Trans-National Jihad.” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 1 (2007): 95-107.
• Rai, Mridu. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Rodrigues, Shaunna. “Abdul Kalam Azad and the Right to an Islamic Justification of the Indian Constitution.” In Dimensions in Constitutional Democracy: India and Germany, edited by Anupama Roy and Michael Becker, 125-143. Singapore: Springer, 2020.
• Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3-53.
• Whitehead, Andrew. “The Rise and Fall of New Kashmir.” In Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation, edited by Chitralekha Zutshi, 70-89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

(Review Authors: Raheel Bashir is a PhD candidate at Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University with research interests in intellectual history, neoliberalism and Kashmir Studies; Aamir Jamal Khan is a PhD candidate at Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, focusing on Muslim politics in modern India)