Muslim Elites Research Articles

Hindu Fanaticism in British India: A Catalyst for Muslim Separatism?

A great deal of research has been devoted to the explanation of the phenomenon of Muslim separatism/communalism in British India. In the main, scholars have been divided between, on the one hand, the Primordialists (such as Francis Robinson) who argued that this separatist tendency was an inevitable corollary pre-ordained from pre-modern times given the fundamental distinctions between the Muslim culture and the Hindu one, and on the other hand, the Instrumentalists (such as Paul Brass), who saw in this separatism nothing more than a stratagem orchestrated by the Muslim elite in order to safeguard their interests. This article, however, is an attempt to look at Muslim separatism from a different angle, that of fear of the Hindu majority.

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell. Worlds of the East India Company series. Rochester, New York, Boydell Press, 2010. xviii, 318 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). In this richly contextualised double biography of two very different men from nineteenth-century Scotland, both Orientalist scholars and employees of the English East India Company and then the British Raj in India, Avril Powell has returned to examine characters who were bit-players in her first book Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, Surrey, 1993). By reconstructing the common origins, connected if divergent careers and interests, and the strikingly different personalities and opinions of the Sanskritist John Muir and the Arabist and Islamist William Muir, Powell makes an empirically substantiated argument regarding the complexity of Orientalist scholarship and its fraught relationship with the power dynamics of imperialism. In continuity with her lifelong interest in inter-cultural and inter-religious contact, especially between evangelically-minded British Christians and Urdu-speaking Muslim elites of north India, the book connects these two scholar-administrators with their Scottish intellectual heritage on one side, and their Indian interlocutors on the other, thus also making a significant new contribution to the much-studied field of Islamic modernism in India, and its best-known exponent, Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan. The book begins with a reconstruction of the Muir brothers' origins in the dense networks of familial relations, patronage, globalized commercial links and imperial rule, and their education within the Scottish Academy and University systems, where the traditions of Enlightenment scholarship lingered into the nineteenth century. The book then proceeds to trace the origins of their Orientalist interests through a deft reconstruction of the linguistic training provided at the Haileybury College for East India Company recruits. The story then moves to India where the distinct interests and personalities of the brothers emerge. While both brothers articulated a religious commitment to the moral improvement of India, and both asserted the need for the acculturation of pedagogic schemes and material, John Muir emerged as the reclusive Sanskritist with a distaste for inter-cultural denunciation, while the more careerist, combative but also sociable William Muir became the Evangelical Arabist, using his specialist knowledge to engage in public debates over the relative values of Christianity and Islam. In their respective mid-nineteenth-century magnum opus, each scholar-administrator is shown to have expressed his fully-developed social vision--John Muir rejecting, on the basis of linguistic theories popularised in the eighteenth century, the biological racism of the mid-nineteenth, and William Muir expressing the doctrinally rigid view that Islam was a false religion preached by a deluded, if historical man whose increasing personal degeneration set the pattern for the institutionalisation of an irredeemably socially damaging set of religious values. Their lives and careers diverged more widely around the time of the rebellion of 1857, with John retired and already ensconced in a life of scholarship in Edinburgh, while William remained to observe and comment on one of the biggest challenges to British rule and India, and formulate educational and social policies in post-pacification northern India. …

An Examination into the Impact of Sufism on Muslim Elites and the Development of Islam in Nigeria

AbstractSufism is a living and dynamic esoteric institution in Islam, as demonstrated by the ever increasing number of its adherents, especially in Nigeria. This article therefore, examines the impact that the Sufimovement orders have made on the Muslims elites and the growth and spread of Islam in Nigeria. In doing so, the concept of Sufism, its place in Islam, and its impact in the world of Islam will be examined. The articles reveals that the Sufis play an important role in the propagation of Islam in Nigeria. Even today, the Sufiorders are still involved in the promotion of Islamic education and the propagation of Islam. This is so because, through the efficacy of prayers derived from it, Sufis were able to solve some personal problems of Muslims in Nigeria. The article concludes that the orders have led many of their members to acquire the necessary discipline before they can acquire deeper knowledge of the true existence of Allah and his relation to Him and the universe.

The Making and Unmaking of Assam-Bengal Borders and the Sylhet Referendum

AbstractThe creation of Assam as a new province in 1874 and the transfer of Sylhet from Bengal to Assam provided a new twist in the shaping of the northeastern region of India. Sylhet remained part of Assam from 1874 to 1947, which had significant consequences in this frontier locality. This paper re-examines archival sources on political mobilization, rereads relevant autobiographical texts, and reviews oral evidence to discover the ‘experienced’ history of the region as distinct from the ‘imagined’ one. The sub-text of partition (Sylhet) is more intriguing than the main text (Bengal), because events in Sylhet offer us a micro-level study. Generations of historians—writing mostly in Bengali and relying on colonial archives—have tended to overlook the mindset of the people of Sylhet. This paper, on the basis of an examination of combined sources, argues that the new province was implicated in overlapping histories, across Bengal-Assam borders. The voice of the indigenous—mostly Hindus but partly Muslim—elites were dominant from 1874 onwards. However, the underdogs—particularly ‘pro-Pakistani’dalits(lower-caste Hindus) and madrasa-educated ‘pro-Indian’maulvis—emerged as crucial players in the referendum of 1947. Hardly any serious study, however, has focused on the Sylhet referendum—a defining moment in the region. This study of the Sylhet referendum will reveal a new dimension to the multiple responses to these issues and provide a glimpse of the ‘communal psyche’ of the people in this frontier district, rather than a binary opposition between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ forces.

Discourses of Contradiction – A Postcolonial Analysis of Muslim Women and the Veil

Drawing upon postcolonial and postcolonial feminist frames, this study critically analyzes the discourses of Muslim women and Western elites that serve to construct identities associated with niqab...

Rashid Jahan’s Writings

Rashid Jahan’s writings in Angaare boldly challenged the oppression of the women of the Muslim elite and took issue with the implications of patriarchy and faith. Though Muslim women writers were indeed suggesting reform in domestic and social life, Rashid Jahan’s bold attack on cherished aspects of Muslim culture and social setup marked an important departure, bringing issues of the body and sexuality to the agenda of reform. This article examines her feminist concerns and the radical thrust towards social justice that marks her writings. The coming together of the Angaare group reflects the impact of intellectual and political currents on the Muslim youth of the period. Aligarh, though not a hub for nationalist and radical politics, still afforded spaces for alternative thought, which obviously did not go uncontested. The present article seeks to contextualise Rashid Jahan’s writings within the Aligarh Movement, looking at the relations between modernist reforms and the nascent feminism represented by Rashid Jahan and the Progressive Writers’ Movement.

Some Critical Notes on the Non-Tamil Identity of the Muslims of Sri Lanka, and on Tamil–Muslim Relations

The ethnic civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities that ravaged Sri Lanka in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and which ended in May 2009 has attracted great interest from scholars of ethnic identity. Both the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic groups employ language—Tamil and Sinhalese—as their primary ethnic marker to support their distinct ethnic formations. As for the Muslims, while the vast majority living in the north and east share many things with the Tamils there including the Tamil language, Muslims in the south have divergent interests based more on trade and commerce. Under a predominantly southern leadership, the Muslims who speak the Tamil language with some borrowed Arabic words seek a social formation based on religion to win a distinct ethnic recognition—distinct from the Tamil ethnic group. The result has been a deep rift between the Muslims and the Tamils, making a permanent solution to Sri Lanka's problems elusive. These issues have been relatively under-researched. This study looks at Sri Lankan Muslim identity and the Muslims' relations with Tamils. In particular it interrogates some aspects of the identity discourse developed over the years by the south-centred Muslim elites who align with the Sinhalese political class. We argue that the Tamils' northern leadership has been insensitive to Muslims—that they have played into the hands of the Colombo government by persecuting Muslims in their midst on the pretext of responding to government-instigated violence among local Muslim youths.

CYPRIOT MUSLIMS AMONG OTTOMANS, TURKS AND TWO WORLD WARS

This article focuses on the secular Turkish identity that was being shaped during the interwar period. It examines the cleavages within the Muslim community of Cyprus and explores the formation of the Turkish Cypriot national identity. The main argument of this paper is that the rift in the Muslim community during the interwar period was a reflection of the conflict between the reformist and traditional trends that was taking place at the same time in the Republic of Turkey. During the interwar period, 1919-1939, the Muslim community of Cyprus was divided between the secularist and the traditional Muslims. As in Turkish society in the 1920s, the Turkish Cypriot community was dominated by the so-called traditional Muslims. Only the Muslim elite minority favored Kemal Ataturk’s secular views. The British colonial rule cooperated more with traditional elites. At the same time secularist Muslims were cooperating with Greek Cypriots in economic issues. The 1930s was the crucial decade in the development of a Turkish Cypriot secular identity. This internal conflict of the Muslim community was terminated after World War II, with the victory of the secularists.

How Progressive is “Progressive Islam”? The Limits of the Religious Individualization of the European Muslim Elites

The studies on the individualization processes within European Muslim populations advance two opposing theses. While some argue that religious individualization and the related fragmentation of religious authority are leading to the “liberalization and modernization of Islam” and the emergence of a “progressive Islam” in Europe, others claim that in spite of individualization and the diversification of authority structures, the current situation is characterized by a relative stability of Islamic dogmas and definitely not by a liberalization of Islam. The careful observation of processes within the Muslim communities in Europe seems to suggest that both theses are actually to some extent valid. The author contributes to this debate by shedding light on the views of the new Muslim elites on apostasy and on women marrying outside the Muslim community. His contribution shows that in spite of the strong individualist component to the religious experience of Muslims in Europe, the various dimensions of this experience do not necessarily have to be individuating.

Integrating Ireland's Muslims: Attitudes of Muslim and Irish Elites towards Value Compatibility and the Mainstreaming of Islam

This article examines the views of Irish and Irish-Muslim elites about the compatibility of Islamic and Western values and how these elites feel Islam should (or should not) be integrated into the existing church–state systems. Ireland is a theoretically revealing case to examine because Ireland lacks an officially endowed religion, and yet the Catholic Church remains a dominant force in Irish society. The results of 16 interviews with Irish and Muslim elites demonstrate that both sets of elites have significant support for the perspective that Islamic and Western values are compatible, even while among the Muslim community there is strong support for the opinion that compatibility of values is dependent on the situation and among the Irish elite there is a small, but nonetheless important, presence of support for the belief that Islamic and Western values are incompatible and that Islam should not be mainstreamed. The findings also show that Ireland lacks a clear integration strategy but there exists a desire to protect the rights of individuals to practice their own faith.

Islamic Education in the Soviet Daghestan (the late 1920s – early 1980s)

The article of Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Amir Navruzov and Shamil Shikhaliev gives a general survey of Islamic education as it was practiced and interacted with state institutions at the republican, district and village levels in early Soviet Dagestan in 1927-1986. It argues that the Soviet era was not the time of endless anti-Muslim repression as it is often portrayed by contemporary researchers. Periods of interaction between state and Muslim elites appeared to be much longer. Basing on the analysis of first-hand archival and field materials the paper proposes the following chronology of Islamic education in Dagestan under the Soviet rule: mass repressions against Muslims during the enforcement of Socialist reforms (from the end of the 1920s to the mid-1940s); the legalization of Muslim institutions after the foundation of the Muslim Directorate for the North Caucasian Muslims (from 1944 until the early 1950s); a new state attack against Islam (from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s); a stabilized relationship between the Soviet power and Muslim communities during the "stagnation" period. As such the paper continues the study by Vladimir Bobrovnikov published in PI l(2)/2009.

Elite conceptions of Muslim identity from the partition of Bengal to the creation of Bangladesh, 1947–1971

The historic partition of Bengal in 1947 caused a shift in the composition of the Muslim and Hindu political elite who were now geographically bounded into two separate newly formed provincial states of East Pakistan and West Bengal. The aim of this article is to explore the transformation in elite conceptions of identity in East Pakistan from the post-1947 era until the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. The prevalence of two new competing elites created a great dichotomy in the way identity was conceived. The change of these elite groups fundamentally altered the view of identity that was articulated during this period.

A Persian Mahabharata: The 1598-1599 Razmnama

By the time the Mughal Emperor Akbar ascended the throne in 1556, at the age of thirteen, the vast Turco-Mongol empire dominated virtually all of the northern part of the Indian subcontinent and would continue to expand during his reign. The empire was an Islamic state, but the Muslim elite were a minority. Akbar's maintenance of power depended upon the success of his strategy to incorporate Hindu and other religious and political factions into the imperial bureaucracy, and to allow a degree of autonomy in various regions of the empire. Beyond admitting non-Muslims into the royal administration and household?where Hindus worked in such positions as military commanders, finance ministers, tax collectors, scribes, cooks, and artists?Akbar abolished the bitterly resented poll tax (jizya) on non-Mus lim males, required by Islamic law, and a pilgrimage tax on Hindus traveling to their sacred sites. He also married the daughters of many high-ranking Hindus throughout the empire to further gain the loyalty of the non-Mus lim population. Akbars policies?liberal but also politically expedient? resulted in five decades of imperial reign of exceptional tolerance for non Muslim art, science, and religious views. In 1574, Akbar established a translation bureau (maktab khana) at his capital of Fatehpur Sikri. Here, the emperor's top scribes and secretaries were given the task of translating a range of Sanskrit texts, including the Rajatarangini (The History of the Kings of Kashmir) and the Ramayana, into Persian. Akbar also commissioned Persian translations of Arabic encyclopedias and histories and the complete Baburnama?the Chagatai Turkish memoirs of Babur, Akbar's grandfather and the founder of the Mughal dynasty.1 The activities of Akbar's translation bureau indicate his desire to do more than pacify Hindu opponents of his rule. The project was part of a larger, long-term effort to make Persian the official language of the Mughal Empire and the common tongue not only at court but also among lower ranking members of the imperial bureaucracy. Clerks, scribes, and secre taries were compelled to learn Persian, and, indeed, a multi-tiered curricu lum was developed to teach the official language. Large numbers of Hindus

The Eastern Muslims of Sri Lanka

Conflict in Sri Lanka between the Tamils and the Sinhalese brought the Eastern Muslims into the crossfire. Muslim elites and politicians generally cooperate with the Sinhalese ruling class. Such cohabitation irritated the Tamils. Since 1985, relations between the Tamils and the Muslims in the Eastern region have become strained, and Muslims claimed they have some problems to be solved. This study attempts to identify some special problems of the Eastern Muslims. A questionnaire on the special problems of the Eastern Muslims was distributed to the Eastern youth, students, unemployed Muslims and farmers. The population of the target group was selected randomly. More than 150 questionnaires were issued with a 75 percent response rate. Interviews were also conducted on the phone with an educated section of the Eastern Muslims. This study also suggests solutions to the protracted ethno-political conflict based on power sharing.

Challenging the Ashrafs: The Politics of Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz1

Caste is one of the important markers of Indian society, including the Muslim community in India. As an asymmetrical hierarchical ordering, caste informs concentration of political power in the hands of the upper caste Muslims. This Muslim elite, projects Muslims as a monolithic entity and denounces caste as an aberration rather than the norm in Indian society. However, over the last decade, this representation has increasingly been challenged by assertions from lower caste Muslims. This paper tries to understand the trajectory and political agenda of such a low caste articulation in North India. Called the All India Muslim Pasmanda Mahaz, for over a decade now, it has tried to critique the Ashraf (upper caste) dominated Muslim politics in India. The paper argues that in order that the Mahaz develops as a counter-hegemonic force in Indian Muslim politics, it has to consistently critique the social and religious articulation of Ashraf dominance, something which has not been successfully delivered by the Mahaz so far.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and Mirza Ghalib's Narrative of Survival

After the 1857 rebellion against the East India Company, the Muslim elite has to renegotiate their role in the new hegemonic order. This project is couched in the language of loyalty. The tendency to claim loyalty to the new regime starts as an individual project: several members of the ousted Muslim nobility rehabilitate themselves through means of contractual and openly declared loyalty, which later matures into a more public method of presenting the Muslim condition to the British. In this essay I read Mirza Assadullah Khan Ghalib's post-Rebellion diary to illustrate the early phase of this particular elite Muslim response to the British and its connection to the rise of Indian Muslim exceptionalism.

The Incorporation of Muslim Elites into the Colonial Administrative Systems of Sierra Leone, The Gambia and the Gold Coast

This article focuses on relations between British colonial administrations in three West Africa territories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sierra Leone, the Gambia and the Gold Coast were centers of trade organized by Muslim merchants and places of Muslim settlement before the British arrived and the subsequent administrations developed policies and programs which incorporated Muslim communities into the colonial system. The British adapted the existing economic, political and religious institutions to the policy of indirect rule, financially supported these institutions and successfully made alliances with Muslim elites. Colonial policies and programs contributed to the strengthening of Islamic communities throughout the colonial era.

Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative

AbstractThe Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

'We've never had a voice': memory construction and the children of the harkis (1962-1991)

When riots broke out in the Bias Camp east of Bordeaux in May 1975, few in France had heard of the harkis, the Algerian auxiliaries who fought for the French during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). This began to change, however, as the rapidly spreading protests instigated by their children garnered increasing media coverage. Seeking to end their status as les oublies de l’histoire, the children of the harkis sought recognition for the history of their parents, particularly the sacrifices they had made for France and the suffering endured as a consequence. What is particularly interesting about this campaign is that the children of the harkis were not alone in this desire and in fact were relative latecomers to the harki activist scene. The years since the end of the Algerian War had witnessed a range of representations offered by a series of self-appointed spokespeople who, in the absence of direct testimony from within the harki community and often in the service of their own objectives, took it upon themselves to speak on behalf of the harkis. This article seeks to analyse the relationship between these external narratives, put forward by actors including the Algerian and French governments, the former Muslim elite of colonial Algeria, French veterans and the pied-noir community, and those offered by the children of the harkis in order to illustrate some of the issues pertaining to the mobilization and transmission of France’s colonial past in a postcolonial context.

Muslim Elites and Ideologies in Portugal and Spain

This article reports the results of interviews with Muslim leaders in Portugal and Spain. The main finding of the article is that key Muslim leaders and principal Islamic organisations are seeking to spread views about how Islam and western democracy ought to thrive together. The political belief systems of Muslim leaders reveal a diverse set of influences, including universalist syntheses of Islam with liberalism, as some claim to find in the work of Tariq Ramadan, but also anti-modernist political Islamism and notable figures such as Hassan Al Banna, Yusef Al Qaradawi, and Ali Shariati. The research finds that the views of Muslim elites are shaped by the national political context, especially partisan polarisation vs. consensus over the political regulation of religion, and the cultural and educational resources within Muslim communities. The large majority of European citizens from Muslim descent share core European values, but they are not spreading their views on the religious market of ideas as such. This leaves that field rather open to people with a more radical vision. (Gilles Kepel – quoted in Knapp 2004)