Indian Muslims and Palestine waqfs

By Dr. Omar Khalidi for TwoCircles.net




At the dawn of the twentieth century, British India contained slightly over 70 million Muslims--more than the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The Indian Muslim elite—of which many claimed descent from various Arab, Iranian and Turkish ethnicities—were always conscious of membership in trans-Indian, pan-Islamic world ummah beyond the borders of their own homeland. Trade and pilgrimage to the Haramayn Sharifayn in Hijaz, Jerusalem in Palestine, Karbala and Najaf in Iraq, kept a steady, annual stream of Indian travel to and from the Middle East. In addition, some Muslim princely rulers such as the Nizam of Hyderabad welcomed migrants from Hijaz and Hadramawt to settle in his Dominions from late eighteenth century.[1] The Indian Muslim elite maintained deep interest in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire, considering it to be the last vestige of Muslim political power as the rest of the Islamic world had been colonized or controlled by the European powers.[2]



The Indian Muslims’ interest in the Ottoman Empire manifested in at least four ways. One was through political support to the independence and territorial integrity of Ottoman Empire as shown by the Khilafat movement;[3] the second was financial support to projects like the Hijaz Railway;[4] the third was the monetary aid for relief from natural and man made calamities in the Empire,[5] and fourth, through financial assistance to the advancement and preservation of Muslim religious and cultural institutions. Indian Muslim financial support to the Haramayn Sharifayn, Karbala and Najaf is manifested by the Nizam of Hyderabad’s involvement in the preservation of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madina and Awadh nawabs in Shiite shrines. In 1924, the Nizam deputed an engineer to undertake the repairs to the Prophet’s mosque in Madina.[6] The Shiite nawabs of Awadh in northern India gifted endowments for the shrines in Najaf and Karbala.[7]











A View of Zawiyah Hindiyyah, 1945. © Ahmad al-Ansari.





This article is concerned with Indian Muslim support to the projects of religious and educational purposes in one part of the former Ottoman Empire, Palestine during the British Mandate, from 1918 to 1948. In Jerusalem, Indian Muslim presence dates back to thirteenth century CE, exemplified by the case of Zawiyat al-Hindiyyah or Zawiyat Faridiyyah. With the spread of Sufism in Jerusalem during the 16th Century, many Sufi centers or Zawiyas were established to accommodate the followers of Sufi Orders. There were over 70 Sufi orders in Jerusalem at the time. The Indian Sufis of the Chishti order took the "Chilla" (the word stems from the Persian, Urdu word for the 40, symbolizing the number of days spent in seclusion in prayers) where Shaykh Farid al-Din spent 40 days, as a meeting place for them, which was originally the Zawiyah of the Rifai Order. The Indian Sufis purchased this piece of land and declared it as Waqf in the name of Shaykh Farid, later on the Indian residents purchased the surrounding lands to be as a Waqf as the Takiya Faridi in Jerusalem. This Zawiyah is thus named after Farid al-Din Mas’ud, (1175-1265), a Sufi shaykh hailing from the Punjab province in northern India. Farid al-Din Mas’ud is also known by his Persian/Urdu honorific Ganj-i Shakar, repository of sugar. The Zawiyah, now a public, non hereditary utility Waqf property measuring nearly 1.5 acres is a prime real estate site meant as a home for visiting Indians.



The Islamic Higher Council of Jerusalem is the overall supervisor of all waqfs including the Zawiyah. The Zawiyah has been extensively documented.[8] The medieval traveler Evliya Chelebi identified it as one of the largest Zawiyahs in the city in 1671. The old structure was largely replaced by a new building in 1869-1870, according to Taysir Jabbarah.[9] In 1922, Hajj Amin al-Husayni (1895-1974) requested the Indian Khilafat movement leader Mawlana Muhammad Ali (1878-1931) to send someone to look after the Zawiyah. Consequently, Khwaja Nazir Hasan Ansari (1880-1951) of Saharanpur, U.P. arrived in Jerusalem in 1924 to look after the Zawiyah.











Khwaja Nazir Hasan Ansari © Ahmad al-Ansari.





Hajj Amin (center) presenting Palestinian flag to Mawlana Shawkat Ali, (left of Hajj Amin) a leader of Indian Khilafat movement; next to Shawkat Ali is Shaykh Khwaja Nazir Hasan Ansari, 1931. © Ahmad al-Ansari.





Upon arrival, he found “the Hospice in a dilapidated condition with a few old houses which were later badly damaged during the 1927 earthquake.” [10] Ansari made several trips to his native India to raise funds for the rebuilding of the hospice between the two world wars. In 1931-1940, Shaykh Nazir Hasan Ansari successfully raised money in India from the Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan (reigned 1911-48), the Nawab of Rampur and the Nawab of Bahawalpur. The main building in the hospice was named as Osman Manzil after the Nizam’s name.











A View of Osman Manzil, the main building in Zawiyat Hindiyyah, 1945. © Ahmad al-Ansari.





During 1939-1947, the Zawiyah became a leave center for the Indian army soldiers stationed in the Middle East. Two large dormitories built by the Indian army were named Travancore Wing and Delhi Wing. By 1945, the construction of the Zawiyah was completed changing it from merely a name to a living institution. The visiting Commander in Chief of the Nizam’s army Major General Sayyid Ahmad al-Aydarus wrote in the visitors’ book of the hospice, “Shaykh Nazir has converted a bit of Jerusalem into a little India.”[11]











Indian Muslim pilgrims in al-Quds, in the center is Begum Mariyam Ansari, wife of Shaykh Khwaja Nazir Hasan Ansari, 1945. © Ahmad al-Ansari.









Indian Muslim pilgrims in front of the Dome of the Rock, in the center is Begum Mariyam Ansari, wife of Shaykh Khwaja Nazir Hasan Ansari, 1965. © Ahmad al-Ansari.





The hospice was partly damaged during the Israeli air raid on Jerusalem on June 9th during 1967 war killing Shaykh Nazir Hasan Ansari’s mother, sister and her nephew. The Shaykh’s Indian wife Maryam was badly injured as were her two daughters and son. At the Indian government’s request, the family was transferred to Beirut by the British Consulate in Jerusalem. The Indian government’s help enabled the hospice trustees to repair the damage but more remains to be done, according to a former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral.[12] A series of distinguished Indians visited the Zawiyah since the 1930s culminating in the visit of Gujral in 1996, where he found the hospice to be “an oasis of Indian hospitality.”[13] Currently, the Shaykh’s Palestinian wife and her son Munir al-Ansari are in control of the Zawiyah.[14] Evidently, the Zawiyah is only one of the many Indian Islamic (and some Indian Christian) endowments in Palestine. In the Islamic court of Jerusalem, Taysir Jabbarah found a record dated 1656 CE/1067 A.H. documenting a Waqf created by Salih, son of Jawhar al-Hindi al-Kashmiri.[15] The Waqf in question was a house to accommodate pilgrims from Kashmir. Beyond Jerusalem, Indian Muslims purchased lands in Ramallah and Gaza dedicated as Waqfs.[16] In Gaza town of Gaza Strip, on Sharia al-Zawiyah, located near Suq al-Khudaar near Omar Mukhtar Street are a number of shops built as waqfs for Zawiyat al-Hindiyyah. The Waqfs were created out of money given by Shaykh Nazir before 1948 to late Hasan Yusuf Abu-Shaaban. The official document of the Waqf is held by Ihsan Abu Shaaban in Gaza town. The income of the shops goes to Dairat al-Awqaf in Gaza.[17] The former Indian diplomat in Ramallah, Zikrur Rahman has identified Waqfs in Gaza (the Indian mosque with attached shops), Haifa, Jaffa, Jusur Binat Yaaqub, Lod, and is documenting Indian Muslim and Indian Christian endowments in all parts of Palestine, before and after 1948 to inventory the Indian legacy in the Holy Land.[18]



As noted earlier, India’s Muslims constituted the largest segment of the Muslim ummah until the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Before the era of large scale oil revenues in the Middle East, many in the Arab world looked up to India’s rich princes and businessmen for financial aid for religious and charitable projects. A Palestinian delegation to the Hijaz allegedly issued an appeal in 1922 to “India and other Muslim countries to help foil an attempt to convert the al-Aqsa Mosque into a place of worship for Jews,” consequently “fears of an intense Pan-Islamic response to this matter threw the British Colonial Office into a dither.”[19] It was under these circumstances that a three man Palestinian delegation headed by Jamal al-Husyani (1892-1982), Secretary of Palestine Muslim-Christian Association visited India from November 1923 to June 1924 to collect funds for the restoration of the al-Aqsa Mosque.[20] The other two members of the delegation were Shaykh Muhammad Murad, Mufti of Haifa and Shaykh Ibrahim al-Ansari.[21] In addition to the first delegation, Hajj Amin himself headed another delegation that went to India via Syria, Iraq and Kuwait. The Palestine High Commissioner sent a message to his counterpart in Iraq asking him to assist the delegates in Baghdad and Indian cities. During this trip Hajj Amin collected some funds which were sent through the High Commissioner of Palestine to the SMC.[22] The visit also provided Hajj Amin to build lasting bonds with Indian Muslim elite leadership. Thus he visited India again in 1933, 1952 and 1961. He also had close ties with the leaders of newly created Pakistan in the late 1940s till his death in 1974 in Beirut.











Leaders attending the World Islamic Congress, Jerusalem, 1931. From right, Riyad al-Sulh, a prime minister of Lebanon, fourth, Mawlana Shawkat Ali, leader of the Indian Khilafat movement, ninth from right is Hajj Amin; third from left is Shukri al-Quwatly, a President of Syria. © Ahmad al-Ansari.





Respecting Indian Muslim sensitivities and driven by fears of revolt, Lord Reading, the Viceroy of India received the Palestinian delegation on 6 November, giving it the official sanction and approval. The delegates subsequently toured several cities in India collecting funds. The Indian Muslim leaders of the time, the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shawkat Ali, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Sayf al-Din Kitchlew, and Dr M.A. Ansari accompanied the delegates. The Palestinians goal was to raise £1, 50,000 but they could collect only £25,000, of which major amounts—over Indian Rupees 100,000 came from the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Bohra Dai Mutlaq Tahir Sayf al-Din.[23] In addition to donating funds, the Nizam wrote to the Turkish leader Mustafa Kamal Ataturk urging him to send funds and restoration experts. But the Turks were engaged in fighting back invading armies, and Ataturk responded that no money or experts could be spared at the time.[24] Evidently, a rivalry between al-Husyani and al-Nashashibi clans in Palestine played part in a relatively small collection made in India.[25] According to Raef Yusuf Najm, a Jordanian scholar, “the enemies of Supreme Islamic Council wrote to the princes and leaders of Arab and Islamic countries warning them against making contributions and claiming that the members of the Islamic Council used these contributions to assassinate their political opponents, not to restore the al-Aqsa Mosque.[26] Regardless of the amount collected and irrespective of Turkish preoccupation with the war of liberation, the renowned Ottoman architect Ahmad Kamal al-Din restored the al-Aqsa mosque between the years 1922 and 1926 earning him worldwide acclaim.[27] The opening ceremony of the restoration was held on 30 August 1928, when the Mufti thanked all the financial contributors to the project. He was hailed throughout the Muslim world as the “restorer of al-Haram al-Sharif and the defender of holy places.”[28]



During the three decades of British Mandate in Palestine (1918-48), twenty-one assets were turned into Waqfs. The largest of them was the donation of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The man who was instrumental in getting the donation was Hajj Amin al-Husayni (1895-1974). Hajj Amin was appointed by High Commissioner Herbert Samuel as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on 8 May 1921, a post on which he remained until 1937. He was also appointed by Samuel as President of the newly established Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) in Jerusalem in March 1922. He led a campaign between 1928 and 1929 rousing the Arabs of Palestine to stand against the threat to the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. Hajj Amin took his campaign beyond the border of his native land to neighboring Trans Jordan, Syria, Iraq and India. Accompanied by the Egyptian Pan-Islamist Muhammad Ali Allouba Pasha, the Mufti arrived in Hyderabad on 21 July 1933. The duo was the guests of the state. Among others, the Mufti met Bahadur Yar Jang, (1905-44), the leader of Muslims in Hyderabad, and a steadfast supporter of the Palestinians who had met the Mufti in Jerusalem earlier.[29]











Shaykh Nazir Hasan al-Ansari calling on H.M. King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan during the first visit of the King to Jerusalem, 1949. © Ahmad al-Ansari.





After the visit, the Mufti wrote a long letter to the Nizam on 27 July thanking him for his philanthropy for the al-Aqsa project. The Mufti further requested the Nizam as a pious Muslim ruler to donate funds for a projected Islamic university in Jerusalem, which the SMC had resolved to establish.[30] The Nizam, whose fabulous wealth and famed generosity toward Islamic causes had spread outside India into the Middle East, obliged. Soon, correspondence ensued between the Prime Minister of Hyderabad and the British Residency, through which the colonial authorities compelled the Nizam to conduct his foreign affairs. Through British diplomatic channels, the Nizam contributed £7, 543 for the Islamic university.[31] The sum was deposited in a bank and not sued until 1938. According to Yitzhak Reiter, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni used this money to purchase 1,000 donums [properly dunum, unit of land measure, four dunum equal approximately one acre or 1,000 square meters] of agricultural land in Kafr Zayta (in Tulkaram sub district) as part of the struggle over land purchases in Palestine, and to dedicate that land as a Waqf for the foundation of the Islamic university in Jerusalem (rather than using the funds directly for university, as the founder had intended). His purpose was to keep the land out of Jewish hands…The land purchase by SMC was to set a pattern fro the Muslim community to thwart land acquisition by Jews.”[32] It is thus unsurprising that the Palestinian leadership of the time held a high regard for Indian Muslims. When Mawlana Muhammad Ali, the leader of the Khilafat movement in India and the staunch backer of the Palestinians died in London on 4 January 1931, Hajj Amin requested his survivors to bury him in the sacred precincts of Masjid al-Aqsa.[33]











Hajj Amin in Hyderabad, Deccan, India, July 1933. From right to left, Unidentified; Muhammad Ali Alluba Pasha, an Egyptian leader accompanying Hajj Amin; Maharaja Kishen Pershad; Hajj Amin, Nawab Bahadur Yar Jang; the rest of the two are unidentified. © Omar Khalidi.





The idea of burying Muhammad Ali in Jerusalem was to “strengthen the attachment of Muslims all over the world to the sanctuary…and to encourage Muslims of India to look to Jerusalem as the seat of their religion equal to Mecca and Medina…The Mufti invited Muslims from abroad to come to Jerusalem to attend the funeral which was to be held on 24 January 1931.[34] Attended by a large gathering of Muslim leaders, Muhammad Ali was laid to rest in the company of some of the most famous men of the time who lie buried in the same area: Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi, al-Shahid Abd al-Qadir al-Husyani, Musa Kazim al-Husyani, and Abd al-Hamid Shoman, founder of the Arab Bank.[35] The funeral helped Hajj Amin achieve his purpose. Few Indian Muslims had visited Jerusalem before 1931, but after Muhammad Ali’s funeral, Indian Muslims visiting Jerusalem increased to hundreds.[36] Shortly after Muhammad Ali’s funeral, the Hyderabad leader Bahadur Yar Jang came to visit the Mufti on 7 June 1931. Since then, there have been numerous Indian visitors to Jerusalem in general and to al-Haram al-Sharif in particular. In turn, some members of the Palestinian elite turned to the ruler of Hyderabad for aid for their projects in Jerusalem and elsewhere, inspired by the Nizam’s bequest to the restoration of al-Aqsa and the Islamic university project.[37] This is exemplified by the pleas made to the Nizam for mosque building projects in London and Washington, D.C.[38] The year 1948 was tragic both for Palestine and Hyderabad. The departure of British heralded a nationalistic era in Indian subcontinent and the Nehru administration demanded Hyderabad’s immediate accession to India, despite its distinct history and culture. Even while engrossed in complex negotiation with the Nehru administration, the Nizam announced a donation of “one million rupees (then US$300,000) for Palestine Arab refugees in response to an appeal by King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan,” on August 25, 1948 as reported by Reuters and published in international press.[39]











Maulana Muhammad Ali's grave is within the complex(ihata) of Al Aqsa Mosque. Incidently, he is the only foreigner to be buried here. [Picture: Niloufar Haque, 2006.]





Through the activities of the Mufti and the fundraising in India for causes in Palestine, Jerusalem became firmly embedded in Indian Muslim consciousness as the first Qibla to which the believers had turned for prayers, and thus the third holiest city in Islam’s sacred geography. Thus, it is unsurprising that when an Australian madman tried to burn the al-Aqsa mosque on 21 August 1969, there was massive outrage all over India. One of the largest processions condemning the mosque burning took place in Bombay where an estimated 100,000 people poured out into the streets to demand action against the perpetrator. Despite the division of India into Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Muslims of the Subcontinent remain the most steadfast supporters of Palestine. The Indian government has changed its policy of supporting Palestinians since the early 1990s leading to a vast increase in cooperation between the military and intelligence establishments of Israel and India. However, the Indian Muslims remain firmly behind the Palestinians. The visit of Sheikh Ikrima Said Sabri, Mufti of Jerusalem to India in 1998 and the warm welcome he received was a reminder to everyone of the unbroken ties between Palestine and the Subcontinent.[40]



Author’s note: I am grateful to Dr. Salim Tamari whose fellowship at MIT in Spring 2009 inspired me to finish the research on Indian Muslim waqfs in Palestine; many thanks to Ahmad al-Ansari and to Aliya Khalidi for improving the text.



References:



1. Omar Khalidi, “Sayyids of Hadramawt in Medieval and Early Modern India,” Asian Journal of Social Science 32, 2 (2004): 329-351, Arabic translation by AbuBakr Baqadir, in al-Masar (Virginia) 3:2 (2002): 59-74. idem, “The Hadhrami Role in the Politics and Society of Colonial India, 1750s-1950s,” pp. 67-81, in Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s-1960s, edited by Ulrike Freitag & William G. Clarence-Smith, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997).



2. Azmi Ozcan, “The Ottomans and the Muslims of India During the Reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II” pp. 299-303, in The Turks, v. 4 edited by Hasan Celal Guzel et al, (Ankara: Yeni Turkiye, 2002).



3. Azmi Ozcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain, 1877-1924, (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); A.C. Niemeyer, The Khilafat Movement in India, (The Hague: Nijohff, 1972).



4. William Ochsenwald, The Hijaz Railroad, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980), pp. 69-74. Syed Tanvir Wasti, “Muhammad Inshaullah and the Hijaz Railway,” Middle Eastern Studies 34, 2 (April 1998): 60-72.



5. Takashi Oishi, “Muslim Merchant Capital and the Relief Movement of the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1924,” Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 11 (October 1999): 71-103.



6. Islam: Political Impact, 1908-1972: British Documentary Sources, V, edited by Jane Priestland, (Slough, UK: Archives Edition, 2004), p. 530, identifies Engineer Ata Husayn surveying the Prophet’s tomb in 1926.



7. Meir Litvak, “Money, Religion and Politics: the Oudh Bequest in Najaf and Karbala,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 33, 1 (2001): 1-21; idem, “A Failed Manipulation: the Oudh Bequest and the Shii Ulama of Karbala and Najaf,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27, 1(2000): 69-89.



8. Taysir Jabbarah, al-Muslimun al-Hunud wa Qidyat Filastin, (Amman: Dar al-Shuruq, 1998), pp. 57-60.



9. Taysir Jabbarah, al-Muslimun al-Hunud wa Qidyat Filastin, op.cit. p. 57-60.



10. Ahmad Nazir Hasan Ansari, “How Jerusalem’s Indian Hospice Lost Hindi Touch,” The Milli Gazette (16-31 October 2007), p. 13. Ahmad Ansari is completing a thesis on Indian Islamic Heritage in Jerusalem, email from the author living in Beirut to the present writer dated 12 April 2009.



11. Information provided by Ahmad Ansari, Beirut, June 11, 2009.



12. I.K. Gujral, “Saga of Indian Hospitality in Jerusalem,” India Abroad (New York, 15 March 1996).



13. I.K. Gujral, “Saga of Indian Hospitality in Jerusalem,” India Abroad (New York, 15 March 1996).



14. Ahmad Nazir Hasan Ansari, op. cit.



15. Email from Dr Taysir Jabbarah, 10 March 2009.



16. Taysir Jabbarah, al-Muslimun al-Hunud, op.cit., p. 58.



17. Information provided by Ahmad Ansari from Beirut 11 June 15, 2009.



18. Conversation with Zikrur Rahman in New Delhi, 16 July 2009 at Arab Cultural Center, Jamia Millia Islamia. He is also publishing a book in Arabic entitled Alhind wa Filastin.



19. Sandeep Chawla, “The Palestine Issue in India Politics in 1920s,” pp. 27-42, in Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, edited by Mushirul Hasan, (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), p.29.



20. Muslim Outlook (Lahore) 7 June 1924, as cited in Sandeep Chawla, “The Palestine Issue in India Politics in 1920s,” pp. 27-42, in Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, edited by Mushirul Hasan, (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), p. 31, footnote 23, citing Colonial Office to India Office 4 August 1922, unpublished archival documents preserved in the British Library’s India Office Records. Further details in Taysir Jabbarah, al-Muslimun al-Hunud, op.cit. pp. 107-124.



21. British Viceroy Lord Reading’s Telegram to Secretary of State for India in London dated 7 August 1923, as cited in Sandeep Chawla, op.cit. footnote 39, page 39.



22. Taysir Jabbarah, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin al-Husyani: Mufti of Jerusalem, (Princeton, NJ: The Kingston Press, 1985), p. 63.



23. British Resident at Hyderabad’s telegram to Political Secretary, Government of India 14 December 1923, as cited in Sandeep Chawla, op.cit., p. 29.



24. Nizam of Hyderabad’s letter and Ataturk’s response in Turkish Presidential Archives, located in the Presidential Palace, Ankara. I am grateful to Professor Yildirim Yavuz of Middle East Technical University for this valuable information. Email dated 10 June 2009.



25. Taysir Jabbarah alludes briefly to conflict between the clans, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin al-Husyani, op. cit. p. 121.



26. Raef Yusuf Najm, “Jordan’s Role in Ensuring the Protection of Islamic and Christian Holy Sites in al-Quds al-Sharif,” posted on the website of Isesco, see

http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/Protection%20of%20islamic%... accessed on 6 June 12, 2009. Najm lists the amount of contributions received worldwide, which seems to have been obtained from p. 114 of Taysir Jabbarah, al-Muslimun al-Hunud, op. cit. For the documents in Hyderabad about the restoration, see Sayyid Dawud Ashraf, Awraq-i Muarrikh, op.cit. Chapter, Masjid-i Aqsa ki Maramat aur Tazin-i Nau, pp. 126-130.



27. Yildirim Yavuz, “The Restoration Project of the Masjid al-Aqsa by Mimar Kemalettin (1922-26),” Muqarnas 13 (1996): 149-164. The article is available online via Archnet.org

http://www.archnet.org/library/documents/one-document.jsp?document_id=52...



28. Taysir Jabbarah, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin al-Husyani, op. cit., p. 65.



29. Nadhir al-Din Ahmad, Sawanih Bahadur Yar Jang, (Hyderabad: Bahadur Yar Jang Academy, 1986), p. 298.



30. Taysir Jabbarah, al-Muslimun al-Hunud, op. cit. pp. 201-214.



31. Sayyid Dawud Ashraf, Awraq-i Muarrikh, (Haydarabad: Shugofa Publishers, 1998)., pp. 1091-114, the Urdu book’s chapter entitled “Filastin University ke Liye Giran Qadr Atiya,” is based on archival records in State Archives, Haydarabad, India.



32. Yitzhak Reiter, Islamic Endowments in Jerusalem under British Mandate, (London: Frank Cass, 1996), p. 68.



33. Taysir Jabbarah, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin, op. cit., pp. 104-105.



34. Taysir Jabbarah, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin, op. cit., pp. 104-105.



35. Taysir Jabbarah, al-Muslimun al-Hunud, op. cit. see the chapter Darih al-Zaim Mawlana Muhammad Ali al-Hindi fi Bahat al-Masjid al-Aqsa al-Mubarak, pp. 171-178.



36. Taysir Jabbarah, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin, op. cit., p. 105.



37. Letter from Muhammad Said al-Husyani Al Abd al-Qadir, 14 February 1927, cited in Nadhir al-Din Ahmad, Sawanih Bahadur Yar Jang, op. cit. pp. 393-396.



38. London’s largest mosque began as Nizamia Mosque in 1936, see A.L. Tibawi, “History of the London Central Mosque and the Islamic Cultural Center, 1910-1980,” Welt des Islams 21 (1981):193-208; Islamic Cultural Center of Washington DC.



39. “Nizam Gives to Refugees Aid,” The New York Times (25 August 1948).



40. Omar Farooq, “Al-Quds Imam Gets Great Response in Hyderabad,” Saudi Gazette (19 December 1998), p. 12.



http://twocircles.net/2010apr28/indian_muslims_and_palestine_waqfs.html

M Rafi – A man who guided 17 Muslim youths to top jobs in Bihar

By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,




Patna: M Rafi is a Calcutta University graduate from Arts stream. Fifteen years ago he came to Patna with a dream. He tried and again tried for Indian as well as Bihar Civil Services. Many times he cleared Preliminary as well as Mains but could not clear interview. Then he set up a coaching institute in Bihar’s capital so that the dream of others like him is not broken. This year his centre created a history – its 17 Muslim candidates got success in Bihar Public Service Commission examination 2010. Some of them will become SDM and some others DSP.



In an exclusive interview with Mumtaz Alam Falahi of TwoCircles.net M Rafi talks about his Sarvodaya Civil Services coaching institute, his coaching modules and techniques and his own life.



















In total 82 Muslim candidates faced the interview for Bihar Public Service Commission 2010, 46 were from Sarvodaya Civil Services. Of 82, 37 got success, 17 were from this coaching institute. This is the greatest success ever of any coaching institute in Patna that coaches for Bihar Public Service Commission. Excerpts from the interview:



How did you get this big success?



The guideline of the institute, devotion and guidance of the faculty and the quality students – all three factors ensured this success. For final success, the marks of Mains play a crucial role. Our students got very good marks in the Mains. However, marks obtained in interview are also key to ensure your success. For this, we hired cream of teaching faculty in Patna. We put the teachers before the students to clear all their queries about the interview. We conducted 10 rounds of mock interview at our institute. We taught them skills to present their views in a clear and impressive way, and to come out of the net created during interview to confuse students. I am grateful to Allah for this great success.











After Mains 2.5 students against one seat are selected for interview. In total 46 students from our institute sat in the interview, of which 17 got success, that is almost in line with the official ratio for interview. No other institute has got success in that ratio. I am happy that all 17 are minority students.



My education, My dream



I studied from primary to graduation in Calcutta. I did graduation from Calcutta University. When I was in class 8 I read an interview of a newly recruited civil servant in a CSR magazine. I got inspired and dreamt to be like him. After graduation I moved to Patna in 1995 and started preparation for civil services. I cleared preliminary and mains many times but could not clear interview. In 1999 I thought when I could not achieve my dream how I can face my parents. I also felt sad while thinking about others like me and then decided to do something so that the dream of youngsters is not broken. And I set up a coaching institute.













About the institute, and its history of success



We established this institute in 1999. Then it was IAS Study Centre. In 2002 we shifted location in the city and changed name also. It was now Sarvodaya Civil Services. In the beginning we faced great difficulty. In the beginning we got success in railways examinations and SSC examinations. My first student Pervez Akhtar competed CISF also. Now I think our students have entered in all railway boards in India. Last year we coached 250 youths for head constable posts and 106 got success.













We started the institute with one student. Today we have 200 students in all batches. Of them 50 are sponsored by central govt -- 30 for SSC and 20 for IAS. In 2008 Bihar govt sent 50 students, 13 of them have got success. Two have qualified for UPSC.



Suggestion for subjects



Candidates should chose subjects for which they can get teachers, books and peer guidance easily. He prefers History, Anthropology, Public Administration and Geography to other subjects.



Your message to the educationally backward community



The Muslim community will have to give some dream to their kids. They themselves have to have a dream. If they set a high goal before their kids, they will of course walk towards that. They will face difficulty but will get success. If one could not get success, the younger will push him or take his place. The community needs to send their kids to civil services to improve their presence in administration. I appeal to the community to send their kids to administration and spend on them.



http://twocircles.net/2010apr28/m_rafi_man_who_guided_17_muslim_youths_top_jobs_bihar.html

AIUDF appeal to PM to protect Dhubri from Brahmaputra River

By TCN News,




New Delhi: All India United Democratic Front President Badruddin Ajmal has appealed to the Central Government as well as Assam Government to take urgent measures to protect the embankment in Dhubri district from the River Brahamputra. Otherwise, 2.5 lakh people will be rendered homeless and the district will have an open watery border with Bangladesh.



AIUDF President yesterday wrote a letter to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh besides Union Home Minister, Finance Minister and Water Resource Minister and Assam Chief Minister and reiterated his demand for urgent and emergency protection at Assaemer/Kaler Alga area in Dhubri district of Assam.



If emergency measures are not taken within 10 days, the left out 10 meters distance from embankment and fencing will be submerged by River Brahmaputra. He informed that the ultimate result will be an open border with Bangladesh and loss of homes for 2.5 lakh people.



http://twocircles.net/2010apr28/aiudf_appeal_pm_protect_dhubri_brahmaputra_river.html

Bogey of indigenous identity fuels Assamese militancy

By M. Burhanuddin Qasmi,




The Census 2011 has begun nationwide on 1st April 2010. Though the Schedules for Census of India 2011 and National Population Register have no columns to enrol one’s language or religion this time, yet it had fuelled past differences of Assamese and Bengalis in Assam. Following is an historic account of this language dispute in Assam, a north-eastern state of India.



The six year long Assam Movement between 1979 and 1985 by All Assam Students Union (AASU) was initially against all ‘outsiders’. Slogans like, “Assam is for the Assamese, “Drive out Indian dogs from Assam” were dominantly inscribed in public places in parts of upper and central Assam. The direction of the agitation was, later, diverted against linguistic and religious minorities – both Bengali Hindus and Muslims and then gradually poor Bengali Muslims become an only easy target.



On February 18th, 1983 Bengali-speaking Muslims alone had to pay the cost of ‘saving democracy’ during infamous Nellie massacre. Both the State and Central governments but miserably failed to protect around 2000 innocent Muslims from extremist butchers at Nellie in Nagoan district of Assam who dared to come out for vote against AASU’s diktat. Even after 27 years a proper enquiry has not been constituted into the pogrom, let alone compensation to the victims or to bring the culprits to justice.



So-called Identity Crises of Indigenous People

The entire propaganda machinery for the Assam Agitation was based on two hypotheses – one majority Muslims are coming from across the open borders of Bangladesh and silently settling in Assam and two because of the unabated infiltration of huge number of Bengalese – both Hindu refugees and Muslims settlers from Bangladesh, the ‘indigenous’ Assamese were being linguistically reduced to a minority and losing their socio-cultural identity in their own land.



The two propositions are totally baseless and falsely propagated to fuel violent separatist and militant movements such as the – United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and instigate a political party – Assam Gana Parishad (AGP) by the AASU leadership 30 years ago. We should shortly analyse the second proposition only in this column that the Bengalis of Assam are not indigenous people of the state and their growing number is endangering Assamese language and culture.



The question of Assamese speaking – the so-called indigenous people becoming a minority in Assam does not arise in the first place because the Assamese speaking people, as a race were never a majority in Assam at any point of time in the history of Assam. As a matter of fact Assam, being a natural place of abode of different linguistic, ethnic, cultural and religious groups of people, has always been a composite state since its inception. Assam is very much like a miniature India, where different races of people lived together and maintained their own identities.



Geneses of Assamese Language

Going by the pre-colonial history, part of present Assam was under Mughal rule through nawabs of Bengal and by their instructions the peasantry from Bengal migrated from East to West Bengal to settle on both sides of the river Brahmaputra for fishing, cultivation and as a way of fighting regular floods that ravaged the area they were then inhabiting. The areas where immigrant Bengali Muslims live for centuries is now known as lower Assam.



The British annexed the remaining parts of Assam (then Ahom) – present upper and parts of central Assam in 1826 and brought it under the provincial administration of Bengal. They also brought English knowing educated Bengalese, skilled farmers and labourers particularly Muslim for assisting in administration, cultivation and construction of public infrastructure which again resulted in large scale migration from the densely populated East Bengal to Brahmaputra valley.



Bengali was the language of the courts and Government schools of Assam in 1837. As per pre-independent census in 1931 the Assamese speaking people constituted only 34 percent of the state population.



In 1951 their number shot up to 64 percent of state population and that is only because of recording of Assamese as the mother tongue in the census by the Bengali speaking Muslims of the Brahmaputra valley.



It is notable that during the period of 20 years from 1951 to 1971, the percentage of growth of Assamese speaking people rose to 80 percent of the state population. An obvious question arises, then where the Assamese had migrated from? The only logical answer is that the Bengalese, especially Muslims, who migrated from lower to upper valleys of the Brahmaputra River till 1971 have largely contributed to the Assamese language and culture and they recorded Assamese as their mother tongue in the census.



But factually the Assamese speaking people do not constitute a majority race in Assam even today. Thus, despite the fact that Assamese language is not a majority language in the state, there is preponderance of the Assamese language and culture with voluntary concurrence and cooperation of Bengali Muslims alone.



Assamese language is a newly evolved offshoot of rich Bangla itself with the minor changes in the script and pronunciation and keeping intact the original Bangla vocabulary.



Bengalese residing in the lower and central regions of Assam in districts like – Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon, Goalpara, Barpeta, Nalbari, Kamrup, Darrang, Udalguri, Sonitpur, Lakhimpur, Dhemaji, Morigaon and Nagaon have converted their official mother tongue to Assamese, thus making the language spoken by the majority in one of the states of India after independence only.



Assamese language became an official language of the state through the Assam Official Language Act, in 1960 only. (Published in the Assam Gazette, Extraordinary, dated the 19th December, 1960)



Bangla Language Movement of Assam

The Bengalese of Barak Valley – both Hindus and Muslims set off a language movement (Second Bangla Bhasha Andolan) demanding due recognition of Assam’s former official Bangla language and their mother tongue following the Assam Legislative Assembly’s introduction of a bill to make Assamese the only official language of the state in early 1960.



The movement reached its climax in 1961 when the Assam Government, under the then chief minister Bimala Prasad Chaliha, issued a circular to make Assamese mandatory, in all parts of Assam to which Bengalese of Barak Valley strongly objected.



On 19th May, 1961, Assam Police opened fire on unarmed protesters at Silchar Railway Station in Cachar district where 11 youth were killed and many more wounded. Coming under intense pressure following the bloodbath in Silchar and ensuing popular revolt, the Government of Assam withdrew the circular. And later through a separate legislation Bengali was given an official status in the three districts – Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi of Barak Valley.



The issue of Bangla language came to the forefront once again when Gauhati University sought to introduce Assamese as the only medium of instruction at University level. This led to another mass movement at Barak Valley which saw similar repression and killing. Two youths in Karimganj were killed by police on 21 July 1986, many suffered jail confinement while many more were injured and rendered incapacitated.



An Eye-opener for the Cultural Chauvinist



Going by the present demographic condition in Assam, out of total 27 districts of the state only six districts of upper Assam – Golaghat, Lakhimpur, Jorhat, Sibsagar, Dibrugarh and Tinsukia can be counted as culturally Assamese populous region with a special note, however, that the tea-tribe people who have their own Hindi or Bhojpuri language and culture live in these areas too.



In at least nine districts – Cachar, Karimganj, Hailakandi, Dhubri, Bongaigaon, Goalpara, Barpeta, Morigaon and Nagaon Bengalis form the majority. Four more – Karbi Anglong, N.C. Hills, Kokrajhar and Baksa have different tribal cultures and languages of their own. The remaining eight districts – Nalbari, Kamrup city, Kamrup rural, Darrang, Sonitpur, Dhemaji, Udalguri and Chirag have mixed population of Assamese, Bengalese, tribals and tea labourers.



With the aforementioned details, the obvious conclusion of this linguistic and cultural debate in Assam should be that the Bengalis in Assam are losing their age-old and rich linguistic and cultural grip in the state to newly evolved Assamese language and culture with the voluntary conversion of some Bengalis living in lower and central parts of the state, and not the visa versa at all.



Nonetheless, because of the undue stress on the ‘identity crisis’ of Assamese by some politically astray and chauvinistic youth, the voluntary and natural process of different tribals and Bengalese assimilation into Assamese language and culture in post-independence India has got a big jolt. It rather became counter productive.



Different linguistic, ethnic and cultural groups living in the state are fighting to save their own identities. This not only has disturbed the natural progress and growth of the state along with its language and culture but also endangered the state’s own unity, sovereignty and multicultural fabric.

The north-eastern states of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Mizoram have fought and got separate statehood primarily on the issue of cultural identity. On 20 February 1987 Mizoram got the formal recognition as the last independent state that was broken away from Assam by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.



Thanks to the lingual and cultural chauvinism; in the name of saving the ‘indigenous identity’ it is helping the mushrooming of new independent state seekers. At least three more regions – Bodo Autonomous Council, North Cachar Autonomous Council and Karbi Anglong are now following militant ways for their independent statehood to break away from Assam.



I am afraid, if things continue like this, Bengalis of the Barak Valley may seek their separate state to save their culture and language. Then Bengalis living in the lower Assam may follow their democratic right of living by using their own language and culture rather than becoming unwanted members of an Assamese culture? And then present Assam will be reduced into Ahom once again!



(M. Burhanuddin Qasmi is editor of Eastern Crescent magazine and director of Mumbai based Markazul Ma’arif Education & Research Centre. He can be contacted at manager@markazulmaarif.org)



http://twocircles.net/2010apr28/bogey_indigenous_identity_fuels_assamese_militancy.html

The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat – Part 6

By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,




A clear sign that many younger generation Meos are now beginning to give more importance to worldly success than what the Tablighi authorities might approve of is the enthusiasm with which they are now taking to modern, secular education. The general practice in much of Mewat now seems to be that young boys and girls are sent to the village maktab early in the morning or late in the evening, while the rest of the day the boys usually spend at a regular school where secular education is imparted. In line with the trend elsewhere in India, growing numbers of Meo parents now aspire to send their sons to relatively expensive English-medium schools. Modern education is now increasingly being seen as the road to success. Articles regularly appear in the Meo press stressing the lack of modern education, and not just the lack of faith in Islam, as the root cause of Meo backwardness.



Traditional madrasa education is now no longer the source of prestige it once was when madaris themselves were but few in Mewat. Today, nearly every Meo village, at least in the more Islamised Meo tracts in Haryana, has a maktab, and the number of higher dini madaris in Mewat is now considerable. These madaris seem to attract mainly students from families of humble means to whom they offer free boarding and lodging, and the prospect of working as teachers at makatib and madaris or as religious specialists in mosques once they graduate, occupations which are not particularly lucrative. Most of the better-off Meo families, however, would clearly want their sons to go in for more modern professions that carry more prestige and earn greater financial reward, such as teaching, law, business, politics, medicine and, most of all, government service. For them the pathway to success in achieving this goal is through modern secular education. Many of them would, therefore, agree with a Meo writer and educationist when he lashes out at the traditional Islamic schools, saying:



“The system of maktab education in Mewat presents a miserable picture today. Our 'lovers of [Islamic] education' are under no circumstances willing to emerge out from the environment of the sixth century [...] Their sort of education encourages asceticism and withdrawal from the world, which is forbidden in Islam. As regards the syllabus, the children are taught such things as might enable them to become mullahs and pesh imams at mosques and madaris at best, but cannot succeed in setting off a revolution in their minds (quoted in Arya 1994:20).



Selective Path



It would, however, be misleading to suggest that the TJ is fast disappearing from Mewat today. Many young Meos still do go on tabligh tours and most Meos still display a strong emotional attachment to the TJ, although this does not necessarily imply active participation in its activities. While critics are not wanting who allege that many among those who regularly go off for jama'at work do so to gain social prestige as pious men or even because they have no other work to do or have no food in their homes (jama'ats are often invited for meals by the local people), what is undeniable is that the TJ has become, in some sense, an integral part of many Meos' sense of community identity. According to a Meo teacher at a school in Ferozepur-Jhirka:



“We may not be very active in jama'at work today but our attachment to the Tablighi Jama'at will always remain. After all, it put Mewat on the map of the world! Before that who knew about us? Now, when we meet Muslims from outside they kiss our hands and say that we are like the Ansars of Medina of the Prophet's time. Just as they gave shelter to the Prophet, we, too, gave shelter to Maulana Ilyas.”



What seems to be the case is that the Meos have over time managed to work out a creative yet highly selective adoption of the Tablighi message. Thus, for instance, the Tablighi insistence on men growing their beards is almost universally followed by the Meos today, even by those who are not particularly religious themselves. Likewise, all Meonis or Meo women now wear the 'Islamic' shalwar-qamiz, though not, it is significant to note, the burqa (veil). This seems to have much to do, as we have earlier remarked, with the role of dress and external appearance as community boundary markers, separating Meos from Hindus, enabling, in the process, the construction of a distinct Meo-Muslim identity. Such a separate identity assumes particular salience at crucial times such as elections to local body councils, the state legislatures and the national parliament, when Islam is often invoked by Jvleo politicians to garner Meo support, especially in cases where the opposing candidates are non-Meos. The TJ has an interesting dual purpose to play in Mewati politics. On the one hand, because it remains aloof from party politics it allows space for the Meos to associate with secular political forces, this being no small advantage in a context wherein, as a result of Muslims being a marginalised minority, Islamic or Muslim communal political parties do not appear as a viable option. On the other hand, the TJ provides key Islamic symbols around which Meo politicians seek to garner Meo votes in a political system where communities generally tend to vote together en bloc. In this regard it is interesting to note that the vast gatherings that the TJ holds periodically in Mewat, which attract thousands of Meos, provide the Meos an arena for the display of strength, a symbol of assertion of considerable political import in a context wherein the Meos find themselves a beleaguered minority. More generally, the links which the TJ opens up for the Meos with the wider Indian Muslim world and, indeed, with the Muslim ummah as a whole, provides, in symbolic terms, a crucial sense of empowerment in a situation of considerable social and political marginalisation.



Not all, or even most, Meos would, of course, see the external symbols of Islam that the TJ provides them with as performing just a boundary-making function. Many would actually invest them with deep religious significance, for they are said to have been part of the sunnat of the Prophet. According to a Meo peasant from Ferozepur-Jhirka:



“The reason why even the most irreligious Meo keeps a beard is that on the day of judgment at least Allah will be able to recognise him as a Muslim and thereby save him from hell-fire.”



It is not that the Meos are themselves completely unaware of their selective adoption of the teaching of the TJ, accepting and acting upon those that suit them and paying lip service to the others. While for many Meos their own expression of religion is itself seen as unproblematically Islamic, several others will readily concede that in many respects they still cling tenaciously to their customary Hindu practices which, they admit, may not be in accordance with the shari'ah. Thus, the Meos continue to maintain a strong sense of ethnic identity quite distinct from other Muslims, with whom they do not marry. In matters of Islamic law, too, such discrepancies are glaring between theory and practice. Thus, although the shari'ah gives considerable inheritance rights to Muslim women, Meonis are almost nowhere allowed to exercise these rights. While under the shari'ah dower in the form of mehr should be paid to the bride by her husband at the time of marriage, among the Meos the practice is precisely the reverse. Dowry is rapidly becoming a major social evil among the Meos today, driving the parents of many girls into penury and debt (Habib 1996:47). Then again, while the shari'ah, as the TJ authorities would interpret it, enjoins upon Muslim women to confine themselves just to housework and to heavily drape themselves when going out, if at all, the burqa is almost non-existent in Mewat. This is because, barring the ploughing of the fields, almost all the agricultural work in Mewat is performed by the Meonis in the full gaze of 'strange' males, helped only very occasionally by their menfolk. Obviously, this would have been impossible if they were to wear the burqa and remained confined at home. In this context Mayaram (1997:265) quotes a Meo peasant as saying that the local mufti of the village mosque who teaches that women should be kept at home in strict pardah himself makes his own wife work in the fields.



In several other spheres, too, the Meos continue with their customary practices and social institutions which are not in consonance with the shari'ah. In some of the more remote parts of Rajasthan, where Tablighi influence is still slight, Hindu customs and festivals are still observed by many Meos. Even in the core region of Tablighi influence in Mewat—the Nuri and Ferozepur-Jhirka tehsils in Haryana—Meo customary laws are still followed widely. Thus, zakat, the charity tax incumbent upon all Muslims who can afford it, and one of the 'five pillars' of Islam, is said to be paid by just a few Meos who are eligible for it. Adoption of sons is a common practice among the Meos, though this goes against Islamic law. An important customary Meo institution that has withstood numerous onslaughts from Tablighi-influenced maulvis is the got-pal system. Under this system, marital relations among the Meos are governed by a strict and very complex set of rules governing family, lineage, clan and village exogamy. Violation of these rules is considered to be a crime tantamount to incest. Some Meo maulvis seem to regard these rules of exogamy, while not specifically as un-Islamic, as a jahili institution that the Meos should discard, the reason being that marriage between close kin is a preferred form of marital relationship among Muslim communities elsewhere. According to a Meo informant, sometime in the 1950s, when the TJ was at its peak in Mewat, a group of maulvis began preaching against the Meo custom of got exogamy, branding it as a jahili practice, calling upon the Meos to lift the ban on intra-family marriages. This is said to have so provoked the Meos that they called a large panchayat of the entire community, in which some leading chaudhris went so far as to threaten that the Meos would renounce Islam if the maulvis were to carry on with their crusade. More recently, Amir Ali cites the instance of a young Meo man being burnt to death by angry relatives for having married his own female cousin (Ali 1970:45). Consequently, it is said, the TJ authorities in Delhi sent a hurried message to the maulvis, instructing them not to raise any contentious matter that night antagonise the Meos. As a result, TJ workers now studiously avoid raising the issue of the Meo ban on marriage between cousins, and have even gone so far as to refrain from insisting that the Meo women remain in purdah (Mayaram 1997:262-63).



Given the resilience of Meo tradition in the face of decades of TJ efforts in Mewat, Ilyas' dream of complete Islamisation of the community has hardly been fulfilled. Put simply, then, the TJ has yet a long way to go in bringing about a total transformation in the lives of the Meos. Mayaram (1997:263) sees the limited impact of the TJ in Mewat as a reflection of the dilemma between a sense of a new Islamic spirituality, on the one hand, and a strong resistance to the ideology of Deoband and the Tablighi Jama'at on the other. Many Meos themselves see this as a continued tension between what they claim to be their Rajput traditions and the laws of Islam, and, as one informant put it, 'in this clash, when it suits Meo interests, the Rajput traditions are given the upper hand.' A Meo writer notes that while as far as external symbols of Islam are concerned, considerable change has occurred because of the TJ, 'at root their old customs still reign supreme among the Meos' (Habib 1996:74), as a result of which, 'in actual fact religion does not exercise a great influence on them' (ibid.:51). In general, what has happened, notes this Meo scholar, is that the Meos 'have replaced one set of customs and external symbols for another'. This is, then, he says, largely a 'ritualistic' change rather than 'genuine' or 'proper' Islamisation. Ironically, this has been facilitated by the TJ itself. By focussing almost entirely on the faza'il and deliberately remaining silent on the ikhtelafi masa'il, the TJ provides the Meos a way out to carry on with those customs and practices—which fall within the realm of the masa'il—which are in contrast to the dictates of Islamic law. Thus, according to Hafiz Ismail, a teacher at the madrasa. at the Jami'a Masjid, Malab, near Nuh:



“Hardly any Meo ever asks his maulvi about the injunctions of the shari'at on matters relating to the masa'il other than those about rituals—matters such as inheritance rights, business dealings, dowry and mehr and so on. In these matters they prefer to follow their old customs. If they do at all approach the maulvis it is for largely inconsequential things that don't make too much of a difference in the eyes of Allah—things like how high on your chest you should place your hands while praying in the standing posture or, according to the shari'ah, how many buckets of water to remove from a well if a lizard falls inside it and so on. We, in the Tablighi Jama'at, too, don't talk about the masa'il in our public lectures. Maybe, the Meos find that this suits them.”



Babri Masjid Crisis



The destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya by fiercely anti-Muslim Hindu mobs on 6 December 1992 marked a major turning point in Indian politics.64 This tragic event, which was followed by large-scale killings of Muslims, had a major impact on inter-communal relations in Mewat. Hindu chauvinist groups known for their extreme hostility towards the Muslims enjoy particularly widespread support among the Jain and Bania traders of the small townships of Mewat where they are concentrated. In the weeks just before as well as immediately after the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, Hindu leaders began touring Mewat, whipping up Hindu sentiments and spewing venom against the Muslims. It is said that several young Bania men from Nuh even went to far-away Ayodhya to participate in the demolition of the mosque. The mosque having been torn down, exultant Hindus celebrated in the streets of Mewat's townships, bursting crackers, excitedly singing and dancing and distributing sweets.



The Meos were not slow to react. Some Meo college students attacked a small Hindu temple at a village near Nuh. This was followed by clashes between Hindus and Muslims, and the killing of four Meo men at Ujina, near Nuh. Security forces were rushed to Mewat and, the Meos say, the whole area was turned overnight into a vast military cantonment According to Meo accounts, the government administration itself had by this time turned completely communally partisan and blatantly anti-Muslim. Licenses for firearms are said to have been freely issued to a large number of Hindus but none to the Meos. The security forces are said to have gone on a rampage in the Meo villages, beating up innocent villagers and forcing them to flee to the forests and hills nearby for refuge.



When the tension finally eased some weeks later, inter-communal relations in Mewat had undergone a vast transformation. According to a Meo college student:



“Today, we Meos are more insecure than ever before. Not even in the days of the Partition riots did we feel so threatened. At least then we had a strong leader of our own—Chaudhri Yasin Khan. Also, we had Gandhi and Nehru in Delhi who could keep the Hindu communalists at bay. But today, not only do we have no strong and popular leaders of our own, but all political parties have turned anti-Muslim, whether overtly or covertly. The entire administration has now turned against us, determined as they are to make this a Hindu country where we will be nothing better than slaves.”



At several places, Meos reacted to the destruction of the mosque and the ensuing wave of anti-Muslim violence by boycotting Hindu businesses. One redeeming consequence of this was that it led some Meos to open little shops of their own in townships such as Nuh and Ferozepur-Jhirka, where previously they had none, thus striking at the Bania monopoly over trade in Mewat. This move towards increasing economic self-reliance and prosperity is gradually making the Meos aware of the desperate need for modern education among them if they are ever to be saved from what they see as living completely at the mercy of the unscrupulous Banias. There is, today, a greater degree of awareness of religious identities thin in the recent past, a direct fallout of the Ayodhya controversy. This, however, may not itself lead in the direction of strengthening the Meos' participation in the TJ. Indeed, the reverse might actually turn out to be the case. The issue at stake today is not religion per se but communal identity and community interests, which, typically, are seen in purely worldly terms such as access to modern education and well-paid jobs. This would suggest a possible further heightening of the Muslim component of the Meo community consciousness in time to come, with an increasing focus on the worldly interests of the community, the latter, one might expect, much to the disapproval of the Tablighi authorities.



Summing up



That the Meos, whose popular religious traditions played a vital role in sustaining their claims to Rajput status in the local caste hierarchy, were pressed into a radical re definition of self-identity beginning at the turn of the twentieth century can, in large measure, be seen as a pragmatic response to a growing social, economic and political crisis. It was here that the TJ seems to have played a range of crucial social functions. Of central importance was its role in consolidating a Meo Muslim sense of identity, sharply setting the community apart from an increasingly hostile and menacing Hindu 'other'. Ilyas seems to have served as a charismatic leader, the pivot around which the new Islamic identity began to emerge. As a pious man of God and as a non-Meo standing above internal Meo squabbles, Ilyas soon emerged as an arbiter of inter-got disputes among the Meos. This was a particularly crucial function at a time when, faced with strong external pressures, a closing in of Meo ranks and a heightened sense of unity were called for. For the Meos, Ilyas and his movement also seem to have served a 'civilising' function, turning them away from what begin to be seen as superstitious and wasteful Hindu customs and towards shari'ah-centred Islam. In this, the TJ seems to hare opened up new avenues for upward social mobility by granting the Meos access to valuable symbolic resources that had earlier been the sole preserve of the ashraf and, in Mewat itself, of the Khanzada elite. With its stress on the equality of all believers, the TJ offered the Meos a more democratic expression of Islam in sharp contrast to the steeply hierarchical local ‘syncretistic’ Islamic tradition as represented by the cults controlled by the Sayyeds and Diwans. Alongside this, and equally importantly, Ilyas' message provided the Meos a meaningful theodicy and a vision for an alternate future, a world in the hereafter where social hierarchies would be overturned and limitless riches and splendour would be made available for the poor and oppressed to enjoy forever.



While it was Ilyas who launched the TJ as we know it today in Mewat, it was during the leadership of his son, Yusuf, in particular in the wake of the 1947 riots, that the TJ managed to strike deep roots in the region. Virtual genocide of the Meos at the hands of Hindu mobs backed by fiercely anti-Muslim Hindu groups led to a dramatic shift towards an increased Islamisation and away from their more obviously Hindu customs. The loss of dominant caste status, the increasing challenge to Meo power by the 'low'-castes and the rapid breakdown of the jajmani system all made for an increasing irrelevance of the earlier Meo popular tradition, pushing the community towards a heightened Islamisation as represented by the TJ. Faced with increasing marginalisation within Mewat itself, the Meos now turned, at least symbolically, towards identifying with the wider Indian Muslim community, and the worldwide Muslim ummah for a sense of empowerment, and in this the TJ's wide international network served a particularly vital purpose. This could also be laid to have been the case for the Muslims of post-1947 India more generally. For an increasingly threatened and insecure minority, faced with the rapid upsurge of Hindu chauvinism based on a vehemently anti-Muslim agenda, the TJ's appeal for community consolidation and cultural retreatism now began exercising a wider appeal than ever before. In part, this represented a changed political strategy, with the quietism the TJ promoted replacing an earlier forceful assertiveness, as a pragmatic response to the post-1947 Indian context. In Mewat, as also in the rest of India, this political role of the TJ, one that has escaped the notice of most observers, enabled pragmatic Muslim involvement in the realm of party politics, though to the TJ, party politics, being a this-worldly concern, is outside its immediate focus of attention. On the other hand, the powerful impetus to Muslim communal consolidation provided by the TJ has, in Mewat, and probably elsewhere in India, too, served to consolidate the Muslim vote in a political system based on vote banks defined on caste and religious lines.



Central to the TJ's ability to serve a diverse range of social functions in Mewat over time, and hence to its own success in the region, is the movement's own unique tariqa-i-tabligh. Its strategy of gradualism, its silence on masa'il other than those related to 'ibadat and its focus on the ma'ruf rather than on the munkar provide a crucially important means for a selective adoption of the Deobandi reformist message on the part of the Meos, in the process of which Meo customs and institutions that are in obvious opposition to the reformist agenda are preserved. This, however, may not ensure continued support for the TJ among the younger, more educated, generation of Meos, many of whom see the movement as outmoded, inflexible, unresponsive to their existential concerns and, as often as not, itself 'un-Islamic'.



1. A qualification needs to be made here, though. In Haryana, two young government school teachers are in charge of coordinating Tablighi activities. It is interesting to note that both of them are teachers of Urdu, which, in Mewat, is considered as an 'Islamic' subject. Likewise, some Meo trainees at the Urdu wing of the teacher's training centre at Pcrozepur-Namak are also said to be active in the TJ.



2. Most dini madaris in Mewat run by people associated with the TJ do not offer training for their students in secular subjects required for modern occupations. The syllabus of most of these madaris has remained largely unchanged over the decades.



3. Interview with Muhammad Qasim, Ferozepur-Jhirka, 3 December 1994.



4. Interestingly, the custom of paying dowry among the Meos seems to have been a post-1947 phenomenon, coming to the fore at the same time as the TJ was expanding its influence in Mewat.



http://twocircles.net/2010apr28/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_6.html

One-third of world population in 2050 will be Muslim

By Anis Ansari,




Recently many studies have been published about composition of the world population in 2050. People are fascinated by the changes that will happen in the next few decades. Many of us may not be alive to see these changes. However, it is interesting to know what will be the regional and geographic shift. Europe will see negative growth while Asia a population explosion. Muslims will be one-third of the world population in 2050.



Survival of civilization depends on its fertility rate. In order to maintain the same population composition, birth rate of two or more is required. U.S. has fertility rate of 2.1, partly due to immigration. At this time more than 80% of the babies born are in Asia and Africa. Japanese are aging so rapidly that by 2040 senior citizens will account for 40% of their population.









While Africa and Asia will have population explosion, twenty countries will have negative or zero population growth. They are all in Europe except for Japan. This is unprecedented in history. Only Austria in Europe will have positive population growth while Russia will lose 28% of its population (46.8 to 33.4 million). Due to low fertility rate, Germany and Italy are encouraging parenthood with cash payments. European population is expected to decrease by 7% by 2050.



World population is expected to grow from 6.8 billion now to 9.3 billion. Population of developing countries will grow from 5.8 to 8 billion. Developed countries will go from 1.2 to 1.3 billion according to the October 19, 2009 issue of Newsweek magazine.



Demographic changes will be dramatic in U.S. White majority will become minority by 2050 while Hispanic population is expected to triple according to Pew Research Center. Portion of White population will decrease from 67% in 2005 to 47% while Hispanic portion will increase from 24% to 29%. African-American population is expected to stay at 13%. U.S. population is expected to be 438 million with most of growth coming from immigrants and high Hispanic birthrate.



Muslims account for 23% (1.57 billion) of 6.8 billion world population today. Of these 60% are in Asia (Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and 20% in the Middle East and North Africa. More than 300 million Muslims or 1/5 of the world’s Muslim world population live in countries where Islam isn’t the majority religion. Indian Muslims are the third largest worldwide. In 2005, Muslims represented 23% of world population (One out of four). This figure will attain 33% in 2050 (One out of three).



The Muslim population of the European Union is going to reach 20% in 2050 compared to only 5% in 2009.The main factors for the increase of European Muslim population are the high number of immigrants from Muslim states, and their higher birthrate compared to the European population, the BBC reported. States like the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands are going to reach the 20% Muslim population threshold much earlier than the other EU countries. In 2009, Muslims make up 9% of the population of France. In cities like Marseilles and Rotterdam the figure is 25%. In London and Copenhagen, the Muslims are 10% of the total population. Spain has seen the largest increase in its Muslim population as it has attracted 1 million Moroccan immigrants in recent years.



Population increase doesn’t need to be feared. While developing countries may be mired in poverty, disease and struggle to provide basic necessities of life (water, electricity, food and security) to its population, developed countries will march ahead in science and technology, bringing prosperity and raising the standard of living for their citizens. China, India, Brazil are the perfect examples of that.



(The writer is medical doctor based in Clinton, Iowa (U.S.)



http://www.twocircles.net/2010apr26/one_third_world_population_2050_will_be_muslim.html

The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat – Part 5

Succession Disputes




When Yusuf died of a heart attack at Lahore in 1965, a dispute of sorts seems to have arisen within the TJ leadership as to who should succeed him as amir. According to one source, a certain Maulana Rahmatullah was felt by many to be the best qualified for this post, being among the senior-most Tablighi leaders after Yusuf. However, he was sidelined in favour of Enam-ul Hassan, a grandson of Ilyas' sister, and like Yusuf, a son-in-law of the chief ideologue of the TJ, Muhammad Zakariyya. This was done despite the fact that, according to a Meo 'alim, his relations with Yusuf were far from cordial daring the latter's lifetime (Bajhotavi 1987:3). This 'alim maintains that Enam-ul Hassan had been chosen to serve as amir of the TJ only for a certain limited period, though he went on to hold the post right till his death (ibid.:5)



While the TJ continued to expand under Enam-ul Hassan's leadership elsewhere in India and abroad, it seems to have run into certain difficulties in Mewat itself. Many Meos, including local Tablighi authorities themselves, testify that since at least the 1980s, there has been a visible slackening of the movement in Mewat. This partly has to do with Enam-ul Hassan himself. Owing to his engagement with other matters and to his general reserve, he is said to have been unaware of the power conflicts that were being fought out within the top Tablighi leadership after Yusuf s death. He is accused of having removed certain very active and dedicated old-time and senior Tablighi leaders, including some Meos, from the movement's global headquarters, allegedly finding them a major challenge to his authority (ibid.:3). It was also under Enam-ul Hassan's amirship that the Meo presence in the top-level Tablighi leadership at the headquarters began to decline significantly, with the Meos and Muslims from Uttar Pradesh being gradually replaced by others, in particular, by Gujarati 'ulama such as Ahmad Lath, Sulaiman Jhanjhi, Ahmad Godhra and Umar Palanpuri. Abdullah Tariq has an interesting explanation for this development. As the TJ began to expand across the world, he says, money and wealth became a matter of increasing significance. Only rich Muslims, and not impoverished Meo peasants, could afford to travel to far off countries on long Tablighi tours or help organise massive Tablighi rallies. Even though the movement had started to grow outside India in Yusuf s time, Yusuf, says Tariq, 'made the rich his companions but did not let them ride over him'. Under Enam-ul Hassan, however, Tariq claims, Yusuf s strict principles were gradually relaxed and 'wealth began receiving greater importance than ever before'. This, he says, worked to favour the new, relatively wealthier Gujaratis from merchant families with their worldwide business contacts, who were now seeking to make their way into the central leadership of the TJ, thereby leading to a growing marginalisation of the old-time leaders from Mewat and Uttar Pradesh. Isa Ferozepuri, a Meo disciple of Ilyas and author of several Tablighi-type books, who was later eased out of the movement in Enam-ul Hassan's time, also makes the same point, albeit obliquely (Ferozepuri n.d.a: 174-76).



The rise of the non-Meo, particularly Gujarati, element in the top-level leadership of the TJ, a process that received particular impetus during Enam-ul Hassan's term as amir, is deeply resented by many Meos today, who feel cheated of what they think is their due, owing to the fact that it was among them that the TJ had started. However, probably the most serious charge levelled against Enam-ul Hassan by several Meos is his alleged nepotism. Many Meos seem to imagine that the leadership of the TJ should lie in the hands of only the direct descendants of Ilyas. The saying chaudhri ka beta chaudhri aur hazratji ka beta hazratji ('The son of the chaudhri becomes the next chaudhri and the son of the hazratji becomes the next hazratji') is a truism that requires no justification for many in Mewat. Thus, when Yusuf’s son Harun was sidelined in favour of Enam-ul Hassan for the post of the amir of the TJ, many Meos were incensed (Bajhotavi, 1987:6). During Enam-ul Hassan's tenure the Meos are said to have grown increasingly resentful owing to widespread speculation that he was grooming his own son, Zubair, to succeed him, rather than allow Sa'ad, Harun's son, who is particularly popular among the Meos, to become the next amir. One Meo 'alim went so far as to issue an 'open letter' addressed to Enam-ul Hassan, accusing him of following in the footsteps of Muawiya who, by enabling his son, the tyrant Yazid, to succeed him, had done great harm to Islam (ibid.: 6). Enam-ul Hassan's propping up his son was, said this 'alim, a serious violation of the shari'ah (ibid.:6) and an 'enormous crime', for the post of amir rightly belonged, he claimed, to Sa'ad, the true 'inheritor of the property' of Ilyas (ibid.:4). Besides, he went on to argue, Sa'ad was personally eminently qualified for the post and enjoyed widespread support not just in Mewat but elsewhere, too. Opportunists, he said, who 'had their five fingers deep in ghee', were in favour of Zubair, while the truly committed Tablighi activists were in full support of Sa'ad's case (ibid.:4). Concluding his letter, he issued a stern warning to Enam-ul Hassan that if he proceeded further with trying to prop up his son and denying Sa'ad his due, it would have serious implications for the future prospects of the TJ in Mewat, for the Meos were fiercely opposed to Zubair. If Zubair were hoisted upon them, he warned, 'both Mewat and the Tablighi Jama'at would be completely destroyed' (ibid.:6).



The TJ in Mewat Today



While in the 1990s, the TJ has continued to spread, albeit gradually, to hitherto unreached Meo villages, it has still been unable to penetrate into the more remote villages in Alwar and Bharatpur, where the Sufi cults still flourish. In these parts the Meos were more heavily outnumbered by Hindus than in Haryana, and, lying in close proximity to Braj, the historic centre of the Krishna cult, the Meos here still maintain many of their Hindu traditions. Moreover, this is a region where, unlike in Haryana, economic change has been slow in coming.



Consequently, the pressure for cultural change and redefinition of religious and community identities has been less severe. Even in Haryana itself, the TJ has been unable to elicit active participation from all sections of Meo society. Landless, poverty-stricken Meos, whose primary concern is the struggle for sheer survival, are unable to afford the luxury of taking time off from work to travel on tabligh. Rather, it is among Meo families who possess some land that the TJ has been able to generate most support. The months when there is no work in the fields are often used by them for tabligh work. For Meo families which have benefited from agricultural prosperity, their new economic status is often sought to be translated into a higher social status. Association with the TJ, with its rich symbolic resources of 'high' scripturalist Islam, functions for them as a channel of upward social mobility.



Although in geographical terms the 1990s continue to witness an expansion of Tablighi work in Mewat, a general slowing down in momentum is clearly discernible. Dissatisfaction with the top level Tablighi leadership is not the only cause of this. It seems that the enthusiasm that characterises participants in most social movements in their early and peak stages generally tends to mellow after the social crisis which gave birth to the movements is surmounted. Social movements have life paths of their own, going through the stages of birth, youth, old age and demise. In some cases that may be spared the last stage, in which case they usually become institutionalised and begin to play new social roles, different from what they were intended for by their founders. This appears to be the case with the TJ in Mewat. Here, the TJ reached its peak in the immediate aftermath of the partition riots, a period of intense trauma for the Meos. As the years passed by and the Meos gradually began to resume their routine lives, their earlier zeal and enthusiasm seem to have declined, though even today, most Meos continue to at least formally and emotionally identify with the TJ, for in much of Mewat it is still considered to be an integral part of Meo Muslim community identity. This lasting emotional commitment to the TJ can, in part, be attributed to the heightened sense of insecurity among the Muslim minority in India more generally (S.A. Hussain 1993:180-81) where pervasive discrimination and periodic pogroms against Muslims and the dramatic rise in recent years of neo-fascist and militantly anti-Muslim Hindu groups has encouraged a process of community mobilisation based on cultural retreatism and insularity among Muslims that is strongly expressed in involvement in groups such as the TJ (Tadsarkar 1996).



Objections of Youth



Despite this widespread emotional identification with the TJ in Mewat, today it is commonplace to hear elderly Meos complain that no longer do the Meos, especially the younger, more educated generation, display the same passion for Tabligh work that they used to some decades ago. The general refrain seems to be that the Meo youth have become so distressingly materialistic as to have turned almost indifferent to matters of religion. Thus, a Meo, writing in what is probably the community's only regular periodical, the New Meo Times (1 April 1995, p. 4), laments that:



“No one can beat the Meo boys in matters of fashionable clothes, but in matters of Islam they always lag far behind the rest ... When it comes to participating in the Friday prayers they are the last to attend. However, when it comes to drinking alcohol and loitering around, they are right at the top.”



Such criticism of the waywardness of today's Meo youth is routine in the Meo press. In the pages of the New Meo Times hardly ever does one come across mention of Meo youth actively participating in tabligh and other religious activities. Some elderly Meos readily admit that they sometimes have to force their sons to travel on tabligh much against their will. According to one informant, from time to time instructions are received from the TJ headquarters calling for a certain minimum number of men from each village to go out on tabligh. In some cases there seem to be no volunteers and so the village elders simply get together and decide on their own who should be made to join the jama'at. In this way, sometimes people are forced by social pressure to go on jama'at.



On their part, many young Meos are now beginning to complain that the TJ is far too ritualistic, other-worldly and neglectful of the real world concerns of their impoverished community. According to a Meo college student, it is now often the case that people who know little about Islam but have participated in a jama'at presume that they know more than the 'ulama themselves and start to raise objections to such small, inconsequential matters as wearing western clothes, shaving off the beard, sending girls to co-educational schools and even to men urinating while standing—all of these being grossly 'un-Islamic' for them. Because of this, he says, growing numbers of younger generation Meos are simply losing interest in the TJ.



To many young Meos today, the attitude and behaviour of TJ activists is not just wrong in a general sense, but, above all, un-Islamic as well. A Meo student pursuing his doctoral studies in Islam at Delhi's Jami'a Millia Islamia says:



“The division that Tablighi activists make between din and duniya is itself un-Islamic, for in Islam, the sphere of life is part of the din. They see the din as lying simply in prayers and fasting and going on tabligh tours, the rest being duniya, and these two are perceived as fundamentally opposed to each other. That is why they do not pay any attention to the worldly concerns of the Meos, dismissing them as duniyavi. In fact, I have often heard Tablighi maulvis in Mewat lament in their lectures the little economic progress that we have experienced, saying that when we were poor and nearly starving we were very pious Muslims, but that today because we are a little more comfortably off we have forgotten God. This attitude of the maulvis is something that many educated Meos resent today. Undoubtedly, this has caused a growing disillusionment with the movement on their part.”



'We only talk about the heavens above and the grave below and never the world in-between', is a refrain that Tablighi activists commonly employ when seeking to convince others that their movement has no political or worldly motives. To such great lengths will Meo Tablighi activists go in their opposition to 'worldly' affairs that some of them are known to have vociferously opposed secular education for Meo children, especially girls, seeing this as a corrupting influence. Maulana Muhammad Ishaq, head-teacher of Mewat's largest Tablighi-oriented madrasa, the Madrasa Mo'in-ul Islam, Nuh, himself confesses not to read newspapers and not to allow his students to do so, because, he says, they deal simply with worldly affairs, and acquiring such knowledge is not a religious obligation. It is, however, precisely this lack of concern with worldly matters that is making growing numbers of young Meos indifferent to, if not resentful of, the TJ. As a Meo college student puts it:



“Look at our neighbours the Jats, the Gujjars and the Ahirs. A century ago their conditions were as miserable as ours. But how is it that today they have advanced so far but we are still where we were then? This has much to do with religion. The Arya Samaj, of which most Jats are members, did not just talk in the air about religion and sit back and do nothing else. No, it built scores of schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages and training centres all over the Jat territory. That is how the Jats managed to get so far ahead. But look at the Meos! The Tablighi Jama'at says we should give up all concern with worldly affairs beyond the bare minimum needed to survive and that we should leave everything in God's hands. Not only have they not undertaken a single constructive effort for our economic and educational development, in many cases they have actually worked against such development….

“…I remember one maulvi who once issued a fatwa declaring that learning English and Hindi was haram [forbidden]. And, many maulvis are still opposed to secular education, especially among Meo girls. On the other hand, you have not a small number of maulvis who, while preaching to us the virtues of poverty, are making large sums of money for themselves through the religious rackets that they run. I have a strong feeling that these maulvis don't wish to see us progress, because if we do, and if we were to go in for secular education, which is actually a fundamental duty in Islam, they would feel that their own leadership would be threatened.”



-----------------------------------------------



i. Rahmatullah's son, Maulana Abdulah Tariq, says that his father was probably denied the post of amir because Zakariyya wanted his own son-in-law to get it. He adds that there may be a grain of truth in the oft-heard accusation of his father being sidelined because of his 'low' teli (oil-presser) caste origins or because he did not belong to the family of the Siddiqui Shaikhs of Kandhala (interview, New Delhi, 24 July 1996).



Tabish Mahdi, once a vociferous Muslim critic of the TJ, is convinced that the sidelining of Rahmatullah was simply because of caste prejudices. He says that because 'a very large section among the Indian Muslims' believe that, 'leadership and spiritual guidance [imamat] must rest only with the Sayyeds, Shaikhs, Pathans and Mughals' and that the other Muslim communities are 'not worthy of establishing social relations with', when Rahmutullah was proposed as the TJ amir, TJ activists themselves vehemently protested. These people declared that the 'hallowed seat' of ‘Hazratji’ should go only to a Shaikh from Kandhla. It was then that Zakariyya announced that he had seen a dream in which Yusuf had appeared driving a 'machine'. After he got tired of driving, he handed over the contraption of Enam-ul Hassan to drive. This, said Zakariyya, was a divine command that the post of amir of the TJ should go, not to Rahmatullah, but to Enam-ul Hassan (Mahdi n.d.: 13-14).



Interestingly, Mahdi claims that following the Rahmatullah-Enam-ul Hassan controversy, with his protege now in power, Zakariyya's own stature and influence within the TJ began to grow rapidly. Enamul Hassan, out of gratitude, is said to have begun directing his close followers to Zakariyya, and activists participating in chillah tours were advised to undertake his visitation (ziyaraf). It was also at this time, Mahdi says, that Zakariyya's Faza'il-i-'Amal became increasingly popular in TJ circles, so much so that today, 'probably no other book is so widely read in India and Pakistan as it is' (Mahdi n.d.:l4-15).



ii. According to Abduliah Tariq, there should have been a mashwara (consultation) after Yusuf s death to decide the new amir. Zakariyya, however, apparently rejected the suggestion and announced that Enam-ul Hassan and Yusufs son, Harun, would work together as joint leaders of the TJ. Some Meos were upset that Harun had not been chosen as the sole leader, but they were later pacified on being told that Enam-ul Hassan would function simply as Harun's guardian till he came of age. This was, however, not to be, and Hatun died not long after (interview).



iii. Prominent among these old Tablighi leaders, who are said to have been sidelined and made either to dissociate themselves from the TJ or else to fall in line, were Miyanji Muhammad Isa Ferozepuri, Maulana Obaidullah Baliyavi and Maulana Rahmatullah. No letter of termination needed to be issued against them, says Abdullah Tariq, since there are no official appointments or offices in the TJ. They were simply made to feel marginalised and thereby themselves realised that they were no longer wanted. According to Tariq, behind this development was, besides other factors, the new Gujarati element which increasingly found the old, established leaders a hurdle in their path. The reason for this, he says, was simply personal, perhaps reflecting caste or regional prejudices. He says that it had nothing to do with ideology, because even after they retired from active involvement in the TJ, none of the displaced leaders ever spoke against the movement.



iv. Interview with Abdullah Tariq.



v. This fact seems to be recognised by the high-level Tablighi leadership, but, as a noted Tablighi ideologue puts it, those who feel this way about the old-timers being sidelined by the new element have been 'duped by Shaytan [Satan]', this being nothing less than a 'conspiracy of the devil' (S.A. Khan 1997:77).



vi. The reference here is probably to the Gujarati and other new elements.



vii. Muhammad Swaleh Khan feels that this has much to do with the increasing enthusiasm for secular education, leading to a gradual weakening of traditional Islam in the community as a whole (Interview, Ferozepur-Jhirka, 3 January 1995).



viii. According to Qadri, because of this, things have reached such a point in Mewat that 'today instead of the tabligh of the kalima and prayers, great hue and cry is being raised by TJ activists declaring the opponents of the movement as unbelievers and apostates' (Qadri, op. cit., pp. 180-81).



ix. Interview with Rahim Khan, Nuh, 1 January 1996



x.Interview with Muhammad Habib, Delhi, 25 January 1996.



xi. Interview with Maulana Muhammad Ishaq, Nuh, 2 October 1993.



xii. Interview with Hashim Khan, Nuh, 2 October 1993.



http://www.twocircles.net/2010apr27/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_5.html

The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat – Part 4

Partition, Mewat and the TJ




In 1944, when Ilyas lay on his death-bed, he called a group of six close disciples and asked them to choose his successor from among several names he suggested. After much discussion they decided upon Ilyas' son, Maulana Muhammad Yusuf, as his successor, even though there were more capable and experienced people available and despite the fact that Yusuf had shown very little interest in his father's work, preferring scholarly pursuits to active involvement in the TJ. Yusuf, it is said, was 'hesitant, or rather averse, to meeting people who did not conform to the shari'ah', such as were most Meos, and that because of this 'he did not appear to be the proper man to succeed Ilyas' (S.A. Haq 1972:158). Yet, he was chosen as the next amir of the TJ because Ilyas finally intervened to say that, 'Yusuf can attract far larger number of Mewatis than anyone else can' (Hasni 1989:205). The leadership question thus came to be decided not on the basis of personal qualities or merit, but because, being llyas' own son, Yusuf would be seen by the Meos as the rightful inheritor of the post of amir.



After having been installed as the new amir of the TJ in 1944, Yusuf resumed the work of his father and began touring the Mewati countryside in an effort to further galvanise the movement. Such tours soon became a regular feature, and Yusuf now made it a rule that all those who came to Banglewali Masjid In Basti Hazrat Nizamuddin in New Delhi for tabligh should spend a few days doing missionary work in Mewat. In several of his own tours of Mewat, mass initiation ceremonies were conducted at which large numbers of Meo men, clutching Yusuf s spread-out turban, solemnly undertook to accept their new leader. The reportedly enthusiastic participation of many Meos in these ceremonies cannot be attributed simply to a sudden change in their religious beliefs. Rather, association with a charismatic leader like Yusuf, and participation in a movement like the TJ, was valuable because of the crucial social functions that they served. Thus, for instance, at the village of Churgadhi in Bharatput, when, during a mass initiation ceremony, Yusuf asked the Meos to repeat after him that they would renounce stealing, they all at once dropped the turban-cloth from their hands, exclaiming, 'But that is our profession!' (W. Khan 1988:72-73).



Crisis of 1947



In the months immediately preceding the partition of India in August 1947, fierce riots broke out between Meos and Hindus in Gurgaon. This was soon followed by the launching of a planned series of attacks against the Meos in Rajputana. Alwar and Bharatpur had by this time emerged as strong centres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindu Mahasabha, organisations known for their fierce opposition to Muslims. Narayan Bhaskar Khare, a one-time Congressman who later served as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, had taken over as the prime minister of Alwar. Mauli Chand Sharma, later president of the Hindu nationalist Jan Sangh, as well as leading Hindu Mahasabha ideologues such as T.J. Kedar, Girdhar Sharma Sidh and Ramachandra Vyas, were also active in the state. In Bharatpur, the state military forces worked in collaboration with the RSS, providing it arms and training. The ruler of Bharatpur, Maharaja Brijendra Singh, called an All-India conference of RSS leaders in 1946 at the state's military headquarters at Kanjori, which was presided over by the then head of the organisation, M.S. Golwalkar. At RSS meetings all over Bharatpur, Hindus were exhorted to 'drive out the Muslims' and such bloodshed was foretold, the like of which the country had 'not seen in the last two thousand years' (Mayaram 1996:133-34).



In the wake of unprecedented violent attacks unleashed against them in 1947, the entire Meo population of Alwar and Bharatpur was forced to flee their homes. An estimated 30,000 Meos are said to have been slaughtered in what Mayaram calls 'a genocide' (ibid.: 139) by the forces of the two princely states along with local non-Muslims out to grab their lands in the riots that continued till well after independence in August 1947. Orders for the 'clearing up' of Alwar and Bharatpur of all Muslims reportedly came from the new Indian home minister, the Congress leader Vallabhai Patel, who is said to have supplied the armed forces of the two states with weapons for the purpose. Many local Congressmen, besides activists of Hindu chauvinist groups, took an active part in leading murderous mobs to attack Meo villages. The princes themselves possibly saw this as a convenient means to get rid of the recalcitrant Meos, whose revolts against their authority were still fresh in their minds. The ruler of Bharatpur, Brijendra Singh, and his brother Giriraj Saran Singh, believed that once their state was cleared of the Meos they would be able to established their own Jat state, Jatistan, independent of both India and Pakistan (ibid.: 136-49).



In the wake of the launching of the genocide of the Meos in Rajputana, several hundred thousand Meos crossed into British India for safety, and following independence, almost a third of the community fled across the new international border into Pakistan. Several thousand Meos in Rajputana were forced to renounce Islam and accept Hinduism by undergoing the Arya Samaj's shuddhi ceremony, to which was added a humiliating pork-eating test. In Gurgaon, fewer such conversions were reported but there too a large number of Meos lost their lives. Scores of Meo women were raped or abducted. There were accusations that in Gurgaon 'the government [of India's] apparatus generally took the part of the Hindu rioters and fought on their side' (Haye 1966:323) and that the Jat and Sikh troops stationed there, 'far from stopping Hindu invaders, actually helped them' (ibid.:328-29).



Following the upheavals of 1947, leading Deobandi 'ulama, many of whom were also actively involved in the TJ, such as Maulana Ibrahim, Mufti Jamaluddin Qasmi, Maulana Hifzur Rahman of the Jamiat-ul ‘Ulama-i-Hind and others, did what they could to supply relief to the Meos and to get their seized lands returned to them (M.S. Miyan n.d.:35). In this tumultuous hour, besides the Jami'at leaders the Meos had few others to turn to for help. The active involvement of the Jami'at in assisting the Meos naturally worked to further strengthen the growing identification of the Meos with Islam. In this regard it is significant to note that though Yusuf had arranged for shelter, food and water for some Meo refugees who had fled to Delhi, his main focus in this period was to simply carry on with tabligh work. He is said to have gone around preaching Islam in the Meo refugee camps, for, according to his biographer, he was convinced that, 'at that crucial hour the most pressing need was to teach them the kalima and prayers' (Hasni 1989:289). Their present plight, the Meos were told, was simply an expression of the wrath of God for their not having been good Muslims (Mayaram 1996:162).



It is generally accepted that the TJ was able to draw the majority of Meos into the least formal identification with it only after the traumatic upheavals of partition. A Mewati Arya Samaj writer, obviously hostile to the TJ, has an interesting, if not convincing, explanation for this. He writes that till early 1947 the Meos had expected that the entire province of the Punjab, including Gurgaon, would be included within the borders of the proposed Muslim state of Pakistan and that the Mewati areas of Rajputana would either join it or else be granted an independent status. As a result, he says, the Meos, egged on by virulent Muslim League propagandists, began fierce attacks on neighbouring Hindu villages in a concerted effort to empty Mewat of its Hindu population. However, when the British finally announced the partition plan, according to which Gurgaon, along with the rest of the eastern Punjab, would go to India, there was a complete volte face in the Meo position. Sensing that they would be forced to remain in India, the Meos now turned to the Congress party and its allies, the Jami'at-ul 'Ulama-i-Hind and the TJ, turning off their radical anti-Hindu zeal (Arya 1994).



While this thesis can be contested, what can be said is that, as during the holocaust of 1947 in Mewat, in times of acute social crisis communities need strong and effective leaders who can give them direction, protect and promote their interests and negotiate with external forces. In the post-1947 Mewati case, the TJ seems to have played, at least in part, such a role. In 1947 and soon after, most economically better-off Muslims of Mewat, who were generally supportive of the Muslim League, fled to Pakistan, leaving behind thousands of others now bereft of any strong and effective leadership. The TJ now stepped in to fill the vacuum left by their departure, taking advantage of what Rathee (1971b:23) calls a 'leadership lag', as a result of which the movement now saw a vast expansion. Thousands of Meos turned up at the rallies that the T'J began organising in Mewat after a semblance of peace was restored, and Meo participation in the work of the jama'ats now registered a great increase. Heightened insecurity in the wake of the great sufferings that they had undergone in the partition disturbances drove the Meos to close ranks, turning inwards and stressing, in particular, their Islamic identity, for on that basis alone could they foster the social cohesion they so desperately needed in this hour of trial. Now, with the changing character of the state, no longer was physical resistance to oppressive powers, as in the Meo rebellions of the early 1930s, a realistic possibility. Uprisings against petty chieftains, whose jurisdiction at the village level had often been nominal, may have been possible in the past. But bands of Meo fighters were simply no match for the might of the new, centralised and immensely powerful post- 1947 Indian state. As Mayaram notes, 'Partition violence was a departure in terms of form from the "feud"', the traditional mode of settling disputes between groups and between groups and the state. What obtained now, she writes, was 'a modern form of political violence in which the mutuality of the feud was rendered obsolete' (Mayaram 1996:143). Consequently, protest was shifted to the symbolic sphere, with the Meos struggling in the path of tabligh seen as Allah's faithful allies against the forces of unbelief, who, although they may have appeared invincible, were certain to be ground to dust by God's wrath in time to come. Thus, it came to be that within just a few years of partition most of Mewat, barring pockets in Alwar and Bharatpur and a few villages in Gurgaon, came under the influence of the TJ.



Partition and Islamisation



The bitter humiliation and torments that the Meos had to undergo at the hands of Hindu attackers are said to have bred in them an extreme revulsion towards many of the more glaring Hindu customs that they themselves had been practising for centuries. Thus, it is said that almost as soon as they reached the comparative safety of Gurgaon after fleeing from Alwar and Bharatpur, Meo women from those areas gave up the 'Hindu' skirt and blouse for the 'Islamic' shalwar-qamiz instead.



Once a semblance of normalcy had been restored and the Meos were resettled in their homes, those who had been forced to convert to Hinduism enthusiastically re-entered the Muslim fold. Many of them seem to have been disillusioned by the fact that despite undergoing shuddhi, the Hindus still viewed them with suspicion, looked down upon them and continued practising untouchability towards them in matters such as food, refusing to accept them as co-religionists, possibly because the Hindus had their eyes on Meo lands. Further, as a Meo historian notes about the Meos who had been forcibly made Hindus,

“They intensely disliked the intrusion into the domain of their beliefs and dogmas. But what really alienated them were the attempts by some Hindu zealots to force them to eat pork in the belief that it would make their conversion permanent. It, however, produced quite the contrary effect. The Meos felt extremely antagonistic towards their oppressors” (Shams 1983:90).



This sudden reaction to Hindu customs and practices on the part of the Meos, as a response to the violence unleashed upon them by the Hindus, in turn translated itself into a close attachment to the TJ and its programme of Islamisation. Adding to this was the fact that, 'the only groups outside of Mewat which were willing to accept them socially were the Muslims. In these circumstances, the Meos felt that they had no other choice than to turn to Islam' (Aggarwal 1966:160).



Another set of factors behind increasing Islamisation, and parallel to it, de-Hinduisation, among the Meos after 1947 was economic. In the disturbances caused by the partition, much Meo-owned land was seized by 'low'-caste Hindus. Moreover, lands belonging to Meos who had fled to Pakistan were now allotted by the government to the incoming Punjabi Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab (Sharma and Vanjani 1990:1728-34). While earlier the 'low'-castes had hardly owned any land, being employed instead as hereditary servants (kamins) of the Meos, their taking over the lands of their former masters served to weaken the traditional jajmani (patron-client) system in which the Meos had occupied a high position owing to their control over the land and their claim to Rajput status. This system also came under increasing attack from the growing monetisation of the village economy, greatly reducing the earlier interdependence between the Meos and the 'low' service and artisan castes. Consequently, the powers and privileges the Meos had earlier enjoyed as a dominant caste in Mewat began to be sharply curtailed. The former kamins now increasingly began to offer their services to clients in the towns for which they were paid in cash. Consequently, as Aggarwal noted in 1966, 'today, [in Mewat] one rarely hears the word jajman mentioned' (ibid.: 160).



The 'low'-caste Hindus, in particular the leather worker Chamars, now increasingly began to adopt customs and practices associated with the 'high'-caste Brahminical tradition in an attempt to improve their own social standing. As part of this process, which sociologists have called Sanskritisation, the Chamars even gave up eating food cooked or handled by Meos, emulating the higher-caste Hindu in their practice of a sort of untouchability towards them. The 'low'-castes also now began asserting themselves politically, having got the right to vote as well as representation in village councils. Since the former kamins had now got land of their own and the Meo monopoly over land ownership in Mewat had been severely eroded, no longer were others willing to accord the Meos the exalted status of Rajputs that they had in the past claimed for themselves.



Consequently, the Meos, too, saw little advantage or point in persisting with their claim to that status and in preserving the customs associated with that identity. According to Aggarwal, the increasing defiance by their former kamins 'irks the Meos intensely' and they now realise that 'it is futile to try to regain their high rank in the Hindu caste hierarchy'. Consequently, he says, 'the Meos think it is better for them to become full Muslims' (Aggarwal 1969:1679). In post-1947 India no longer was the earlier 'liminality' that questioned conventional communal categorisation a feasible proposition. The modern nation-state itself was unable to deal with ambiguities of religious identity, having internalised the colonial logic of monolithic 'Muslim' and 'Hindu' communities, seeing parochial religious identities as a sign of superstition and backwardness. As a Meo respondent said to Mayaram:



“In 1947, they [the Hindus] called us 'Muslim' when all along we'd been saying that we were Jadubanshis from Kishanji's khandan [Krishna's family]. We realised that there is no point in riding two horses” (Mayaram 1996:162).



Once the TJ had drawn most of the Meos into at least formal allegiance to it, Islamisation carried on apace under the influence of new external factors. Improved means of communication resulted in the rapid promotion of tabligh tours of Mewat by outside Muslims and by Meo missionaries both inside and outside the region. The opening up of Mewat to the outside world enabled Meos to travel to great centres of Islamic learning and to enrol therein. The expansion of the education system—of both Islamic madrasas as well as modern public and private schools—equipped increasing numbers of Meos with reading skills that enabled them to gain greater access to Islamic literature. All this was slowly translated into increasing identification with Islam and the rest of the Indian Muslim community on the part of the Meos.



The Islamisation of the Meos has also been a consequence of the crisis of traditional religion in a rapidly changing world. This shift from a parochial religious identity tied to local cults, spirits and deities to a world religion parallels the process observed by Hefner in his study of the Hinduisation of the Tengger in Java in recent years, where growing affiliation with a 'world religion' provides people with 'readymade cosmological tools' with which to handle 'the intellectual challenges posed by a person's involvement in a vastly expanded and unfamiliar terrain'. Modernisation, entailing the incorporation of small village communities into 'a larger social macrocosm of unfamiliar peoples, territories and customs', says Hefner, causes an immense crisis of religious identity. No longer do the local spirits and deities of traditional cosmology possess a 'sufficiently encompassing explanatory range' appropriate in the new context. Hence, religion is redefined in more global terms, being 'sufficiently general to be widely applicable to the widened social horizon' (Hefner 1989: 260-61). This same process seems to have been at work in the Islamisation of the Meos, particularly in the post-1947 era.



1. For details of Yusuf s succession, see Hasni (1989:201-05).



2. Tablighi sources, however, seek to justify Yusufs appointment by taking recourse to the Sufi theory of intiqal-i-nisbat or 'relocation of attributes', according to which, after the death of a shaikh, his attributes are believed to be transferred to his successor. For a rebuttal of the intiqal-i-nisbat theory and its alleged misuse by the TJ, see H. Nadwi (1986:57-65).



3. A qualification must be made here. In matters of politics, after 1947 Meos continued to follow the lead of Yasin Khan. Khan was a disciple of the Sufi Miyanji Raj Shah of Sundh, and no supporter of the TJ. The popularity among the Meos of both Ilyas and Yasin Khan, one for religious leadership and the other for political guidance, is itself intriguing, pointing to the Meos' selective adoption of the Tablighi message.



4. Interview with Muhammad Swaleh Khan, Ferozepur-Jhirka, 3 January 1995.



5. In many villages in Mewat today, the Chamars are far ahead of the Meos in terms of education and government employment, sections of them having considerably benefited from the affirmative action policies of the state for the ‘low’ castes.



http://twocircles.net/2010apr26/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_4.html