The Muslim Secular

Abstract

Abstract Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. The Muslim Secular complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri politician Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, and the non-violent Pashtun activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Revising the common view that they were mere acolytes of their celebrated Hindu colleagues M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, this book argues that these men produced a distinct Muslim secularity from within the grander family of secular Indian nationalism. At a time when many across the decolonizing world were separating identity-based majorities and minorities into sovereign equals, Azad, Abdullah, and Ghaffar Khan thought differently about the problem of religious pluralism in a postcolonial democracy. The minority, they contended, could conceive of the majority not just as an antagonistic entity, but as a category to which it can belong and which it can uniquely complete. Premising its claim to a united India upon Islam’s universalism, the Muslim secular jettisoned the demographic inequality between Hindus and Muslims by redefining equality itself. Rejecting its liberal definition for being too abstract and thus prone to majoritarian assimilation, these thinkers replaced it with their own rendition of parity to simultaneously evoke (cultural and ethical) commonality and (religious and regional) distinction between different Indians. Retaining their Muslimness and Indian nationality in full, equality-as-parity challenged both Gandhi and Nehru’s abstractions and Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s supposedly dangerous demand for Pakistan.