Tuesday, February 08, 2011
RE : The Maulana’s challenge
Seema Mustafa has written a very comprehensive study of issues surrounding Maulana Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi's entry into a debate that is continuing for last 150 years within Indian Muslim community (IE, 8/2/11). However, she has been using tools of analysis mostly used by progressives who have an inbuilt blind spot for anything religious. (Note her use of small m for Maulana). Her mention of Ashraaf, the status of community as a monolith as decried by the Left, the different levels of social consciousness that separates different regions; their Muslim traditions and traits, are subjects that are routine and inadequate to go to the heart of the issues. She has failed to pick up the historical perspective that has dominated the 'moments' in history that she correctly highlighted; though without elaborating that those moments were occasioned for reasons of faith, security and identity.
Be that Sir Syed, or Deoband or now Vastanvi, all three had made a breakthrough to bring Muslim community to keep pace with the times. Vastanvi inadvertently had made the same mistake that Sir Syed had made, when Sir Syed directly challenged the Ulama's turf and tried to administer a shock to the community, so that they can better grasp his message of cooperation with the new British colonial rulers. British rulers too, not unlike Modi, had inflicted genocidal massacre of Muslims in the aftermath of Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Compare this, with the shocking message of Maulana Vastanvi, albeit on mischievous prodding and front-paging by Time of India. Maulana had not grasped the depth of feeling of wider Muslim and secular reaction to Gujarat riots and enunciated his otherwise pioneering mission while assuming the office of the head of Deoband seminary on a very wrong foot! If he had properly understood his position and his mission's wider implications, he would have been able to embark on leading Indian Muslims as the second coming of Sir Syed, without any challenges from the Ulama.
While Sir Syed started from scratch and fought his religious battle side by side his message of a new beginning for Indian Muslims, Vastanvi had the enviable position to have gained his career's best achievements long before he had to take over Deoband. He had so much working for him. Unlike Sir Syed, he was not preaching modernizing in religious space, but was able to chalk out a parallel path to align the community with the times and give Muslim Madarsa education a multifaceted direction. His unfortunate aside over a political matter, added a further dimension to his mission that the people were not prepared for and that was entirely unproductive and unwarranted.
An additional boost to Vastanvi’s mission of educating the Muslim masses was the gradual decline the political power in India in comparison to the rising corporate power in line with the economic progress. India is at the threshold of a peaceful revolution that will change its oligarchic political structure without any violence. As it is, Muslims have failed to make a mark in political field in last 63 years. With the arrival of private enterprise, including foreign investments with legal compulsion to follow universal norms over equal opportunity and against discrimination, the future is brighter than ever for Indian Muslims to make a mark in meritorious competition.
All this is not lost with the announcement of Maulana to submit his resignation to the Shoora on February 23rd. There is every reason to believe that the shoora will rise above petty internal dissensions, grasp the wider implication of a Vastanvi as Mohtamim of Deoband and reject his resignation.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
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Tue, 8 Feb 2011
The maulana’s challenge
Seema ChishtiTags : seemachishti, columns
Posted: Tue Feb 08 2011, 03:49 hrs
Debate around Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, the Surat-born maulana who was elected last month to head the Darul Uloom at Deoband, provides a great moment to look at various aspects of being Muslim in India.
There have been several such moments over the past century, many of them seminal, as they have shed light on hidden truths, unpeeled stereotypes and challenged the claims of those who hope to either understand Muslim dynamics in India or play the dynamics. Sir Syed’s decision to start his Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College (later the Aligarh Muslim University) was one such. The rise of Jinnah, who challenged Indian Muslims to choose between a syncretic environment and a
“separate” one, was another. More recently, there was the Sachar Committee report. Some Muslims sneered at it: “We knew we were at the bottom of the pile.” But as it zeroed in and provided numbers and statistics on the backwardness of Indian Muslims, it shifted the debate even within the community to issues like drinking water, drainage and drop-out rates, away from daadhi-topi issues, peripheral identity questions isolated from their engagement and requirements as citizens.
Conversely, for those who thrive on portraying Muslims as the “other”, the myth of appeasement was blown apart. Findings such as the fact that just 4 per cent of Muslims were madrasa-educated were like sunlight on the cobwebbed corners of a room full of prejudices.
Vastanvi has stirred up debate on a whole range of issues. What did he mean by the Gujarat statement, should Muslims accede to Modi in Gujarat, even vote for him? Is he right in talking pharmacology when he is expected to think of deeniyat (or theology) and not duniyadari in his new role? Is Vastanvi a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the Qasimi way of doing things (Qasimi referring to those schooled at the Deobandi madrasa)? Is the fuss only because he is a backward, a non-Ashraf, a Gujarati? Is there an old UP-led order he is challenging?
The biggest realisation for those of us who subscribe to the “Muslim monolith” argument is how rich, complex and colourful the variations within the community are. As a Gujarati, Vastanvi’s orientation, his approach to business, his purpose in the world, are strikingly different. The fact that he runs engineering colleges and pharma courses has become as much as a bane for him with the purists as it is an advantage with the rest of the world. His critics went blue in the face, saying it was like offering to open a polytechnic in the Vatican.
That he is, strictly speaking, not an Ashraf is brushed aside as a non-issue by several respectable clerics who have never wanted to accept that caste divisions are prevalent amongst their community. But go down the list of the OBCs in B.P. Mandal’s report — Noniya, Dhuniya, Bhishti or Nat — and then examine where and how, far from city centres, they stay in small-town India, and you will see that caste is always a question, irrespective of where you go to pray.
Rapidly altering levels of aspiration over the past two decades have impacted the minorities as much as anyone else. Old inhibitory factors have been blown away by new pulls: opportunity, hopes for a better life for younger people, the unspoken comfort provided by a fairly long spell of governance without needing to debate or fortify themselves from destructive elements on the right. There have been pushes too: for example, the collapse of traditional crafts (which Muslims have depended upon in clusters) has forced people out of old networks. Government largesse has been more innovative; scholarships, bicycles, housing loans, education opportunities and a promise of more, even in BJP-ruled states, have expanded the space for the Indian Muslim. The virtual collapse of Pakistan as an ideal Islamic state (with Shia-Sunni conflicts and Hanafi-Wahhabi strife tearing the country apart, making even offering prayers in mosques a risky proposition) has also sobered down those who may have secretly yearned for the comfort of being “there”.
Of course, to many of those watching the Vastanvi debate from outside, it is a story of a modern game-changer being done in. But it is much more than that. Of course, the battles, debates and squabbles in the Urdu press, in English, on TV and in drawing rooms have helped the debate pan across these many faultlines. What Vastanvi’s comment on Gujarat did was to again bring to the fore the reaction of a very small minority (7 per cent in Gujarat) telling an incredulous and large minority (18.5 per cent in UP) that they have got to “adjust”, “accept” and get on with it. In states like UP, Bihar, Bengal and Assam, minorities have been able to push their interests into the political mainstream by virtue of their numbers, and they were horrified at the suggestion of a supposed direct victim being so off-key.
Navigating for the Muslim between the Hindu and the Muslim right (and others in the political spectrum happy to keep Muslims slotted) has been tight. The Modi chapter that Vastanvi opened, therefore, should be dealt with and understood.
In Gujarat, elections did not provide for any resolution. The BJP adamantly never reached out, or even did what the Congress tried after the anti-Sikh pogrom, symbolically and politically. So the oversimplified and incorrect “development versus justice” choice squeezes Muslims into a binary trap. Is saying that good roads in Gujarat help us, too, akin to saying that Modi’s politics is acceptable, or that the economic environment there is not discriminatory? Is it okay to wave away the “justice” issue as boring and ideological if a Muslim wants access to better prospects? Most importantly, is it now to be expected of all “modern” Muslims (of the “moving-on” school) to, like the British Tebbit test of nationality, say they are alright with Modi?
Most of these questions will not be answered in one go. The Supreme Court is, of course, hearing several cases on the Gujarat riots. But on the 23rd of this month, some will be addressed by the 17 clerics in the Majlis-e-Shoora in Deoband. They are expected to say what they propose to do with Maulana Vastanvi.
Irrespective of what they choose to do, one good thing that Darul Uloom has done is what it is supposed to be doing — educate us. To educate us about several dimensions of what it means to be a Muslim in India in 2011. And beyond.
seema.chishti@expressindia.com
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