Contesting Friendship in Colonial Muslim India

Abstract

This essay examines competing understandings of ideal publics in modern South Asian Islam by analysing a polemical debate among Muslim scholars about the boundaries of friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims. The specific context of this polemic was the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement and concomitant debates on the limits of friendship between Muslims, the British and Hindus. Through a close reading of this polemic, I show ways in which Muslim normative sources are mobilised and interpreted for radically contrasting ideological and political projects. The specific focus of this essay is on intra-Muslim contestations surrounding the category of muwalat (friendship or clientage), and it shows the opposing ways in which this category was approached by Indian Muslim scholars as either friendship between different religious communities or in terms of a citizen's relationship to a modern state. These varied understandings of muwalat, I argue, corresponded to diverging imaginaries of a moral public. This essay particularly focuses on the thoughts of the towering Indian Muslim scholars, Ahmad Raza Khan (d. 1921) and Abul Kalam Azad (d. 1958).