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
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat – Part 3
Early Success
Having devised or learnt, whether by divine or other means, the tariqa-i-tabligh, Ilyas called a meeting of Meos at Nuh in 1926 sometime after his return from his second haj. Along with some of his Meo disciples and Deobandi 'ulama from Delhi and elsewhere, he then set about visiting the neighbouring villages to spread his message among the Meos. Initially he seems to have met with considerable opposition. On several occasions people threw stones at him, beat him with sticks and chased him out of their villages. Yet, it is said, he did not for a moment relent.
'He accepted this persecution gracefully and thanked God that he had made him pass through the same trials and tests as the prophets had undergone in the past for the sake of spreading the din' (Mazhari 1972:40).
After Ilyas had managed to establish a firm base in the area around Nuh, he formed a jama'at composed of six Meos—Hafiz Muhammad Ishaq and Numberdar Mehrab Khan of Ferozepur-Namak, Chaudhri Namaz Khan of Raisina and three children. The titles of the first three suggest that they, as in the case of the jama'at referred to earlier, were influential local leaders and this is probably why they were chosen to join this first preaching party of what was to become the TJ. Ilyas instructed this group to spare a few days, travelling to neighbouring Meo villages to preach the kalima and ritual prayers.
This jama'at is reported to have faced considerable opposition from Meos in some villages, but they attempted to win their opponents over by humbling themselves before them. Thus, it is said that,
“They begged, with great humility, those who did not pray to follow them, so much so that they removed their own turbans and placed them at their feet, pleading that they should come to the mosque. This is how the work of Tabligh actually began” (Baliyavi n.d.:54).
The first jama'at's tour lasted three weeks. They visited several villages, performing the Friday prayers on the way at Sohna, Taoro and Nagina, all in the Gurgaon district. Ilyas, along with some other 'ulama, attended these congregational prayers, giving the missionaries advice and encouragement, and helping to strengthen their zeal for what they believed was a great divine mission.
After the successful tour of this jama'at, Ilyas began to form and send to the Mewati countryside many more such teams of itinerant Meo preachers. In 1932, he went to the Hijaz for his third haj, returning to India soon after, 'with renewed enthusiasm and a greater faith in his mission', his pilgrimage to the holy cities of Arabia firing him with added zeal (S. Nadwi 1983:34). Now, along with a large group of Meos and others, numbering over a hundred, he undertook two long tours of the Meo tracts in Gurgaon and Faridabad, each of a duration of almost a month, preaching Islam and forming jama'ats. He had maps prepared of all the villages, noting details such as the distances between villages and the names of local leaders whose help would be needed in carrying out the work of the jama'ats. He now made a significant change in the content of the work that these jama'ats were expected to do. To begin with, the activists had been instructed to preach only about the kalima and prayers, and 'respect for the 'ulama' and 'knowledge and remembrance' were added shortly after. Now, two more points were added—'purification of intention' and the importance of every Muslim to actively engage in tabligh (Ferozepuri n.d.c:40).
The western districts of the then United Provinces, with their large concentration of Muslims, had, by the early twentieth century, emerged as the epicentre of the Deobandi reformists. Ilyas now decided that the Meos should visit the Deobandi centres in this area, where they would be exposed to what he saw as a true Islamic environment (S.A. Haq 1972:115). Thus, from the late 1920s onwards, jama'ats of Meos began making regular visits to the region, preaching about the kalima and ritual worship to local Muslims, while at the same time increasing their own knowledge of Islam from the 'ulama of the Deobandi centres they visited. At first, some 'ulama were dismissive of what they saw as 'ignorant' Meo peasants being so presumptuous as to preach Islam to others. However, the success of Meo activists in their preaching efforts among the local Muslims changed the opinions of many.
A Mewati man
In the winter of 1933, Ilyas took more than 200 of his Meo followers to Delhi, where he, along with the rector of the Deoband madrasa, Husain Ahmad Madani, addressed them on the importance of tabligh work. The Meos were then divided into jama'ats and were sent to various neighbouring towns. After these jama'ats had finished their work, llyas formed another small jama'at of eight persons. This jama'at included Nambardar Mehrab Khan, Maulvi Abdullah and Hafiz Abdul Rahman of Ferozepur-Jhirka, Munshi Nasrullah of Nuh, Maulvi Ibrahim of Shyamaka, Haji Sadullah of Raisina and two others. Munshi Nasrullah was appointed the amir of this group. The group was instructed to go to Thana Bhawan, a township in western U.P., the seat of the renowned 'alim and Ilyas' own mentor, Ashraf Ali Thanawi. Apparently, when Thanawi came to know about the jama'at he was initially apprehensive, for he thought that being uneducated peasants, the Meo missionaries might turn out to actually be a source of strife (fitna). When he heard from a disciple that they were simply preaching the 'six principles' and enjoining the people to offer prayers, he sent word to them to join him for he following Friday's congregational worship (Hafizullah n.d.:21). After the prayers were over the Meos met the Maulana and explained to him the principles of tabligh. They then took him along with them on a gasht visit, in the course of which Thanawi discovered, much to his horror, that the vast majority of the local Muslims were not regular worshippers and that a large number of them did not even know the kalima. The Meos, however, tirelessly worked among these people, inviting them to the mosque and teaching them the kalima. Thanawi is said to have been so amazed at the work of the Meos that, referring to them, he said at a congregation at Thana Bhawan, 'If you want to see how the [Prophet's] companions were, look at these people!' (Ferozepuri n.d.c:24-38).
Following this, the dispatching of Meo jama'ats to western U.P. soon turned into a routine affair. Jama'ats were sent to wait upon such leading reformist Deobandi reformist ulama as Maulana Abdul Qadir (d. 1962) at Raipur, Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya at Saharanpur and Maulana Sayyed Suleiman Nadwi at Lucknow (Bakhsh 1995:78-79).
By 1934, the Meo agrarian uprising had spread all over the Meo-inhabited districts of Alwar, spilling over even into parts of British territory. Moreover, by this time the Arya Samaj had succeeded in converting to the Hindu fold tens of thousands of Malkana Muslims and was now making serious efforts to spread shuddhi work to Mewat. This seems to have galvanised Ilyas' efforts to further strengthen his movement among the Meos, greatly worried as he was that otherwise they might go the Malkana way. He stressed that now that others had come to hear about the spread of Islam among the previously little-known and only nominal Muslim Meos, they might be provoked to attempt to bring them back to the Hindu fold before it was too late. To Miyanji Isa of Ferozepur-Namak he wrote, 'Till now your ignorance was protecting you and people paid no attention to you. Now, unless you protect yourselves with the fortification of religion [Islam] you might fall a victim to other peoples' (quoted in S. Nadwi 1983:41).
In order to strengthen his movement and to meet the Arya onslaught, Ilyas called a Meo panchayat at Nuh in August 1934. The assembly was attended by over a hundred Meo title-holders, large landowners and influential leaders. In inviting them to the assembly, it appears that Ilyas aimed to direct his movement through them, it being clear to him that it was only with their active support and involvement in tabligh work that the common Meos could be won over. For, as the Meo writer Ashraf Khan (n.d.:34) notes, among the Meos, 'going against the command or advice of the chaudhris is never tolerated even to the slightest degree.'
What is significant here is the background of these and other leading early TJ activists in Mewat—upwardly mobile individuals from families with generally above average land holdings, possessing a modicum of formal education, some of them local-level officials, and aspiring for leadership roles and higher social standing through access to the valuable resources of ashraf and shari'at-centred 'high' Islamic culture. Having already experienced some improvement in their social standing, they seemed to have found further upward mobility effectively barred to them by stiff Hindu resistance. In such a situation, their growing assertion of an oppositional Islamic identity was, in some sense, a logical outcome.
Anwar-ul Haq writes that Ilyas made these Meo leaders pledge that they would observe and spread 'the principles of Islam', 'hold panchayats to carry on the work of the call for religious renewal' and 'never give this up at any time of their life'. Besides, he also stressed to them the importance of the following points: (1) The kalima; (2) ritual prayers; (3) acquisition and dissemination of religious knowledge; (4) adoption of Islamic appearance and dress; (5) seclusion of women; (6) performance of the Islamic form of marriage; (7) adherence to Muslim dress by Meo women; (8) non-deviation from Islamic beliefs and non-acceptance of any other religion; (9) protection and preservation of mutual rights; (10) participation of respectable persons in every public meeting; (11) no secular education for children before they receive basic Islamic education; (12) striving for the preaching of Islam; (13) adoption of Islamic ceremonies and rejection of non-Islamic practices; (14) observance of cleanliness; and (15) pledge to protect the dignity and respect of one another (S.A. Haq 1972:110).
These 15 points were then put down on paper and an agreement to observe them faithfully was signed by all those who were present at the panchayat.
The Nuh meeting gave a major boost to Ilyas' movement in Mewat. Large numbers of 'ulama from Deoband as well as scholars from other similar Islamic centres of northern India now began, at Ilyas' invitation, touring Mewat, addressing Meo gatherings, and spreading the message of Islam. Alongside this, the activities of the Meo jama'ats, both in as well as outside Mewat, registered a great increase.- Soon, the movement had established itself so firmly among the Meos that at a very special meeting organised by Ilyas at the Madrasa Mo'in-ul Islam, Nuh, in November 1941, nearly 25,000 Meos, apart from many leading 'ulama, took part. According to TJ sources, by Ilyas' death in 1944, the movement had sunk its roots deep into Meo society. One writer calls it a 'new revolution', with scores of madaris, makatib and mosques being set up in the Meo villages, a general 'hatred' for Hindu dress and a widespread approval of 'Islamic' clothing being established and with many Meos becoming regular worshippers, themselves going out of their homes to preach Islam to other Muslims (Falahi 1996:303). And, so it is claimed, Ilyas' most cherished dream of spreading awareness about Islam among the Meos had now, to a great extent, been fulfilled (S. Nadwi 1983:41).
Analysis
That the Meos, whose Islamic identity had been of only the most nominal concern to them for several centuries, had, in a matter of just a few years, begun responding so enthusiastically to Ilyas' effort at spreading Islamic awareness is certainly remarkable and merits an explanation. We have already alluded to the increasing importance of Islamic symbols for the Meos as community boundary markers to differentiate themselves from the Hindus, whom they were increasingly coming to see as responsible for their worsening plight. To imagine, as almost all Tablighi writers do, that this growing identification with Islam reflected some sudden realisation of the truth of Islam on their part is simplistic in the extreme and hardly corresponds to the facts as they seem to have been, (This, of course, is not to deny that genuine conviction must have motivated many Meos to join Ilyas' movement). Nor will it suffice to offer such essentialist arguments that being an 'illiterate', 'ignorant', 'emotional', 'gullible' or 'simple' people, the Meos could easily be swayed into blindly submitting to the appeals of a charismatic leader, an allegation often heard today from Meo critics of the movement. Nor, again, will conspiracy theories, which attribute the success of the TJ in Mewat to as varied sources as the alleged machinations of the British or the duplicity of the Congress party or the Hindus, suffice, denying as they do autonomy and volition to the social actors involved. It appears that there were far more complex factors at work that were impelling the Meos towards increasing identification with Islam.
What seems to have particularly appealed to the Meos was Ilyas' sheer charisma and his central role as a charismatic leader. As one writer puts it, 'The people who were involved in Tabligh work in Maulana Ilyas' time were principally attracted to it by his personality' (Hasni 1989:201). The Meos seem to have been greatly moved by the love, kindness and concern he displayed in his dealings with them. Adding to Ilyas' powerful charismatic image were stories that soon spread far and wide of miraculous happenings associated with him, is in the case of the Sufi saints of yore. What is particularly striking about some of these stories is how they seem to have been responses to intensely felt needs and concerns of the Meos themselves. Thus, according to one such story, Ilyas helped save many Meos from the throes of debt at the hands of the Banias with divine assistance. He is said to have warned the Meos that dealing in interest was an enormous sin, for both the lender as well as the borrower, a crime the equivalent of 'having sexual intercourse seventy times with one's own mother'. When the Meos heard this they were aghast. They implored him to pray to God to release them from their debts. Ilyas obliged and made the Meos repent for their sins. As a result, it is said, God answered their prayers and 'the entire community was saved from this curse [of debt] in just a few years' (Ferozepuri n.d.a:30). The role that such stories must have played in building up the image of Ilyas as a true man of God requires no elaboration. In terms of more tangible benefits, Ilyas asked the Meos to curtail their lavish spending on festivals, marriages, births and deaths that often landed them deep into debt. He appealed to them instead to abide by the simple, austere rules of the shari'ah, and seems to have struck a sympathetic chord among many of his Meo followers for whom their earlier religious traditions were proving to be an increasingly unbearable economic burden (Ali 1970:66).
Ilyas also seems to have played an important role as a mediator in intra-Meo disputes. Here, he was responding to an issue of immense concern to the Meos at a time when, faced with grave threats from without, the unity of the community was vital. Historically, the Meos lacked a fundamental sense of unity; they would often quarrel with each other over the most trifling of issues, and their gots and pals would carry on disputes over such matters as stolen women and animals over generations without their ever being resolved (M. Numani 1989:22). In the troubled early decades of the twentieth century, such internal dissensions boded ill for Meo social cohesion. A neutral leader and an impartial arbiter, one who could dispassionately mediate between the different groups and factions within the community was called for and Ilyas seems to have admirably fitted this role. Being a non-Meo as well as a religious leader, he was expected to be non-partisan and was seen as having no motive to side with one group against another. Thus, it came to be that the meetings that Ilyas organised from time to time in Mewat were also used as occasions for the resolution of intra-community disputes. According to one writer, 'Maulana Ilyas stopped all the internecine quarrels among the Meos. Because of this they began considering him a great man and started following his commands' (Hasni 1989:50).
What made the TJ particularly attractive to the Meos, as opposed, for instance, to the largely abortive efforts of earlier Muslim reformers in the region, was the particular mode that it sought to employ to incorporate Islam more fully into Meo society. This mode appears to have been well adapted to the exigencies of the then prevailing Mewati social context. Hence, the TJ's success. Ilyas' was a policy of gradual Islamic reform. The Meos were first asked to learn just the kalima and the ritual prayers, and were only then to be gradually instructed in other religious matters. Meo institutions and social practices which the Deobandis considered un-Islamic, such as the got-pal system or the cults of the Sufi shrines, were not openly or directly attacked or opposed. Instead, Ilyas merely focussed on the cultivation of personal faith, in the hope that once this had been strengthened the Meos would themselves seek to order their lives according to the dictates of God. Consequently, Meo traditions did not come in for direct attack and, at least in the short term, an accommodation was achieved between the universal basic principles of Islam such as the kalima and prayers, on the one hand, and Meo institutions and traditions, on the other, to the obvious satisfaction of most Meos. This was further facilitated by the TJ's refusal to directly deal with the masa'il, other than those related to the 'ibadat, focussing instead, largely on the faza'il alone.
What appeals to people who join a charismatic movement is not simply the personality of the leader but, equally importantly, the vision that he gives of an alternative society, wherein their trials and tribulations would be overcome. The prime purpose of the ascetic ideal preached by most charismatic religious leaders is to highlight the degeneration of the present and to constantly remind their followers that a glorious future awaits them if they participate in full faith in the movement and abide strictly by its commands. This seems to have been the case with the TJ among the Meos. The Meos were repeatedly told that all their woes and miseries stemmed from a fundamental lack of faith in God and that if only they were to become true Muslims everything would be set right. 'Complete adoption of Islam and strict obedience to Muhammad', declared Ilyas, would bring the Muslims 'success in every field of life and thus lead them to triumph over every other community' (Nadwi 1983:158). By offering to the Meos promises of great reward, both in this world as well as in the world to come, and a new approach with which to seek to overcome their problems, Ilyas was playing a crucial role characteristic of the charismatic leader, enabling, in the process, his movement to endear itself to them. This was especially significant since for many Meos at this time conditions were so bleak that there seemed to be no possibility short of superhuman intervention to end their sufferings. Ilyas' movement supplied them with a meaningful theodicy, helping them to make sense of and to cope with the grinding poverty and oppression that they were faced with, giving them hope for better days ahead. Thus, their oppression was explained as the torments that men of God, even the Prophet himself, have inevitably had to face from God's enemies. While they were woefully poor in this world, eternal comfort in heaven would await them if they sacrificed their all in this world in the struggle for Islam. In this sense, Meo participation in the TJ can be seen as a symbolic protest against social inequities and oppression, rather than simply a spiritual quest.
A significant aspect of Ilyas' Islamisation project in Mewat, and one which seems to have played no small role in the spread of the TJ in the area, was that for many Meos it came to be viewed not simply as a movement of spiritual reform, but, perhaps equally importantly, as a 'civilising mission'. Meos often stress that before the advent of the TJ, they were lawless 'dacoits' and 'cattle-lifters', constantly fighting among themselves. They were 'rough' and 'crude'. They worshipped dung-heaps (gobardhan). They dressed 'primitively' and their womenfolk freely mixed with men. They were, in short, 'barbaric' and 'ignorant', all of which made them seem low in the eyes of others, both Muslims as well as 'high'-caste Hindus. All that, they say, began to change because of the influence of the TJ, and to it they attribute their having now become 'cultured' people and 'true human beings' (sahih insan). On a visit to Mewat in 1939, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, then a journalist but shortly to become the founder of the Islamist Jamaat-i Islami, had observed that as a result of the efforts of Ilyas, 'a great change' had come about in Meo society, because of which the Meos, were 'no longer looked upon with contempt and suspicion' but were 'beginning to be held in respect by them' (Vellori n.d.:59).
Another great attraction that the TJ seems to have provided the Meos who came into contact with Ilyas was the access that it provided to symbols of 'high' Islamic culture—such as religious education and literacy in the Urdu language or 'Islamic' dress—which were formerly the preserve of the local Khanzada elite. In the changed context of the early twentieth century, the Khanzadas were no longer seen by the Meos as the menacing 'Other', and adopting aspects of the 'high' Islamic culture traditionally associated with them was now seen as a channel for upward social mobility. It was, however, not simply the 'pull' of 'high' Islamic tradition that began to draw many Meos to the TJ. Equally significant were the 'push' factors that were now drawing many Meos away from popular religion. The popular Meo religious tradition, centred as it was on the shrines of the saints, had represented a steep hierarchy of roles and functions. The shrines were controlled by religious specialists belonging to the Sayyed and Faqir or Diwan castes. Though they were dependent on the Meos for support and patronage, they tended to look down upon them as low-born. Implicitly opposed as it was to the cult of the shrines, the TJ must, then, have seemed particularly attractive for many Meos no longer willing to accept Sayyed claims to superiority.
1. Baliyavi (op. cit.:65) writes that at first Ilyas laid down 60 points that would form the basis for tabligh work. However, he later reduced them to six, realising that to work on all 60 fronts would require too much time. The similarity of this story with that about the number of daily obligatory prayers being reduced by God for the convenience of Muhammad's followers is striking.
2. Hafiz Abdus Subhan, a Meo teacher at the maktab attached to the Jamia Masjid Panj Piran, New Delhi, says that llyas would often pray to God, pleading, 'O Lord! Give me the respectable people of Mewat because, after they come, the rest will simply follow after them' (interview, New Delhi, 19 November 1994).
3. Thus, for instance, the then rector of the Nadwat-ul 'Ulama, Sayyed Abdul All, went off to Mewat to do tabligh and on his return wrote an article in the madrasa's organ, al-Nadwa (March 1940) in fulsome praise of the TJ. (S.T. Khan n.d.:409-10). Among the other 'ulama who toured Mewat to spread the tablighi message in response to Ilyas' appeals was another famous Nadwi scholar, Sayyed Abul Hassan Ali Nadwi (1913), who later emerged as a leading supporter among the ‘ulama for the movement. For details, see his Karavan-i-Zindagi (vol. I), (1983:281-90).
4. Among the important 'ulama who participated in this mammoth gathering were Maulana Khali! Ahmad from Saharanpur and Mufti Kifayatullah (1875-1952), leader of the Jamiat-ul 'Ulama-Hind.
An Urdu poet from Delhi was also present on the occasion and he recited 'stirring' Islamic verses to enthuse his audience. Ilyas, says Rahim Bakhsh, knew well the 'Meo mind' and, accordingly, instructed some Muslim poets to compose and recite verses that would 'charge their emotions' (Bakhsh 1995:69-70).
5. Husn-i-Ikhlaq, January 1995, pp. 43-44.
6. Ilyas' efforts also seem to have helped promote a better image of the Meos in general, at least in the eyes of other Muslims. Earlier, writes Wahiduddin Khan (1988:88), 'the Meos used to be called monkeys by others, but now they say that if you want to see the Prophet's companions, go and see the Meos'.
7. Interestingly, stories of miraculous happenings seem to have attached themselves to some of Ilyas' close Meo companions, who emerged as what may be called 'local charismatics' in their own right. Perhaps, the foremost of these was one Miyanji Musa (d. 1964) of Ghaseda, who was to become one of Ilyas' principal deputies in Mewat.
8. Today, many Meos consider the modicum of economic prosperity that has come to the region in recent years—though it has benefited just a few—as a gift of God for their involvement in the TJ.
9. Thus, a Tablighi activist writes that the Meos were even more degenerate than the Hindus because at least the latter 'worship beautiful statues bedecked with sparkling stones' (al-Furqan, April-June 1974, p. 209).
Having devised or learnt, whether by divine or other means, the tariqa-i-tabligh, Ilyas called a meeting of Meos at Nuh in 1926 sometime after his return from his second haj. Along with some of his Meo disciples and Deobandi 'ulama from Delhi and elsewhere, he then set about visiting the neighbouring villages to spread his message among the Meos. Initially he seems to have met with considerable opposition. On several occasions people threw stones at him, beat him with sticks and chased him out of their villages. Yet, it is said, he did not for a moment relent.
'He accepted this persecution gracefully and thanked God that he had made him pass through the same trials and tests as the prophets had undergone in the past for the sake of spreading the din' (Mazhari 1972:40).
After Ilyas had managed to establish a firm base in the area around Nuh, he formed a jama'at composed of six Meos—Hafiz Muhammad Ishaq and Numberdar Mehrab Khan of Ferozepur-Namak, Chaudhri Namaz Khan of Raisina and three children. The titles of the first three suggest that they, as in the case of the jama'at referred to earlier, were influential local leaders and this is probably why they were chosen to join this first preaching party of what was to become the TJ. Ilyas instructed this group to spare a few days, travelling to neighbouring Meo villages to preach the kalima and ritual prayers.
This jama'at is reported to have faced considerable opposition from Meos in some villages, but they attempted to win their opponents over by humbling themselves before them. Thus, it is said that,
“They begged, with great humility, those who did not pray to follow them, so much so that they removed their own turbans and placed them at their feet, pleading that they should come to the mosque. This is how the work of Tabligh actually began” (Baliyavi n.d.:54).
The first jama'at's tour lasted three weeks. They visited several villages, performing the Friday prayers on the way at Sohna, Taoro and Nagina, all in the Gurgaon district. Ilyas, along with some other 'ulama, attended these congregational prayers, giving the missionaries advice and encouragement, and helping to strengthen their zeal for what they believed was a great divine mission.
After the successful tour of this jama'at, Ilyas began to form and send to the Mewati countryside many more such teams of itinerant Meo preachers. In 1932, he went to the Hijaz for his third haj, returning to India soon after, 'with renewed enthusiasm and a greater faith in his mission', his pilgrimage to the holy cities of Arabia firing him with added zeal (S. Nadwi 1983:34). Now, along with a large group of Meos and others, numbering over a hundred, he undertook two long tours of the Meo tracts in Gurgaon and Faridabad, each of a duration of almost a month, preaching Islam and forming jama'ats. He had maps prepared of all the villages, noting details such as the distances between villages and the names of local leaders whose help would be needed in carrying out the work of the jama'ats. He now made a significant change in the content of the work that these jama'ats were expected to do. To begin with, the activists had been instructed to preach only about the kalima and prayers, and 'respect for the 'ulama' and 'knowledge and remembrance' were added shortly after. Now, two more points were added—'purification of intention' and the importance of every Muslim to actively engage in tabligh (Ferozepuri n.d.c:40).
The western districts of the then United Provinces, with their large concentration of Muslims, had, by the early twentieth century, emerged as the epicentre of the Deobandi reformists. Ilyas now decided that the Meos should visit the Deobandi centres in this area, where they would be exposed to what he saw as a true Islamic environment (S.A. Haq 1972:115). Thus, from the late 1920s onwards, jama'ats of Meos began making regular visits to the region, preaching about the kalima and ritual worship to local Muslims, while at the same time increasing their own knowledge of Islam from the 'ulama of the Deobandi centres they visited. At first, some 'ulama were dismissive of what they saw as 'ignorant' Meo peasants being so presumptuous as to preach Islam to others. However, the success of Meo activists in their preaching efforts among the local Muslims changed the opinions of many.
A Mewati man
In the winter of 1933, Ilyas took more than 200 of his Meo followers to Delhi, where he, along with the rector of the Deoband madrasa, Husain Ahmad Madani, addressed them on the importance of tabligh work. The Meos were then divided into jama'ats and were sent to various neighbouring towns. After these jama'ats had finished their work, llyas formed another small jama'at of eight persons. This jama'at included Nambardar Mehrab Khan, Maulvi Abdullah and Hafiz Abdul Rahman of Ferozepur-Jhirka, Munshi Nasrullah of Nuh, Maulvi Ibrahim of Shyamaka, Haji Sadullah of Raisina and two others. Munshi Nasrullah was appointed the amir of this group. The group was instructed to go to Thana Bhawan, a township in western U.P., the seat of the renowned 'alim and Ilyas' own mentor, Ashraf Ali Thanawi. Apparently, when Thanawi came to know about the jama'at he was initially apprehensive, for he thought that being uneducated peasants, the Meo missionaries might turn out to actually be a source of strife (fitna). When he heard from a disciple that they were simply preaching the 'six principles' and enjoining the people to offer prayers, he sent word to them to join him for he following Friday's congregational worship (Hafizullah n.d.:21). After the prayers were over the Meos met the Maulana and explained to him the principles of tabligh. They then took him along with them on a gasht visit, in the course of which Thanawi discovered, much to his horror, that the vast majority of the local Muslims were not regular worshippers and that a large number of them did not even know the kalima. The Meos, however, tirelessly worked among these people, inviting them to the mosque and teaching them the kalima. Thanawi is said to have been so amazed at the work of the Meos that, referring to them, he said at a congregation at Thana Bhawan, 'If you want to see how the [Prophet's] companions were, look at these people!' (Ferozepuri n.d.c:24-38).
Following this, the dispatching of Meo jama'ats to western U.P. soon turned into a routine affair. Jama'ats were sent to wait upon such leading reformist Deobandi reformist ulama as Maulana Abdul Qadir (d. 1962) at Raipur, Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya at Saharanpur and Maulana Sayyed Suleiman Nadwi at Lucknow (Bakhsh 1995:78-79).
By 1934, the Meo agrarian uprising had spread all over the Meo-inhabited districts of Alwar, spilling over even into parts of British territory. Moreover, by this time the Arya Samaj had succeeded in converting to the Hindu fold tens of thousands of Malkana Muslims and was now making serious efforts to spread shuddhi work to Mewat. This seems to have galvanised Ilyas' efforts to further strengthen his movement among the Meos, greatly worried as he was that otherwise they might go the Malkana way. He stressed that now that others had come to hear about the spread of Islam among the previously little-known and only nominal Muslim Meos, they might be provoked to attempt to bring them back to the Hindu fold before it was too late. To Miyanji Isa of Ferozepur-Namak he wrote, 'Till now your ignorance was protecting you and people paid no attention to you. Now, unless you protect yourselves with the fortification of religion [Islam] you might fall a victim to other peoples' (quoted in S. Nadwi 1983:41).
In order to strengthen his movement and to meet the Arya onslaught, Ilyas called a Meo panchayat at Nuh in August 1934. The assembly was attended by over a hundred Meo title-holders, large landowners and influential leaders. In inviting them to the assembly, it appears that Ilyas aimed to direct his movement through them, it being clear to him that it was only with their active support and involvement in tabligh work that the common Meos could be won over. For, as the Meo writer Ashraf Khan (n.d.:34) notes, among the Meos, 'going against the command or advice of the chaudhris is never tolerated even to the slightest degree.'
What is significant here is the background of these and other leading early TJ activists in Mewat—upwardly mobile individuals from families with generally above average land holdings, possessing a modicum of formal education, some of them local-level officials, and aspiring for leadership roles and higher social standing through access to the valuable resources of ashraf and shari'at-centred 'high' Islamic culture. Having already experienced some improvement in their social standing, they seemed to have found further upward mobility effectively barred to them by stiff Hindu resistance. In such a situation, their growing assertion of an oppositional Islamic identity was, in some sense, a logical outcome.
Anwar-ul Haq writes that Ilyas made these Meo leaders pledge that they would observe and spread 'the principles of Islam', 'hold panchayats to carry on the work of the call for religious renewal' and 'never give this up at any time of their life'. Besides, he also stressed to them the importance of the following points: (1) The kalima; (2) ritual prayers; (3) acquisition and dissemination of religious knowledge; (4) adoption of Islamic appearance and dress; (5) seclusion of women; (6) performance of the Islamic form of marriage; (7) adherence to Muslim dress by Meo women; (8) non-deviation from Islamic beliefs and non-acceptance of any other religion; (9) protection and preservation of mutual rights; (10) participation of respectable persons in every public meeting; (11) no secular education for children before they receive basic Islamic education; (12) striving for the preaching of Islam; (13) adoption of Islamic ceremonies and rejection of non-Islamic practices; (14) observance of cleanliness; and (15) pledge to protect the dignity and respect of one another (S.A. Haq 1972:110).
These 15 points were then put down on paper and an agreement to observe them faithfully was signed by all those who were present at the panchayat.
The Nuh meeting gave a major boost to Ilyas' movement in Mewat. Large numbers of 'ulama from Deoband as well as scholars from other similar Islamic centres of northern India now began, at Ilyas' invitation, touring Mewat, addressing Meo gatherings, and spreading the message of Islam. Alongside this, the activities of the Meo jama'ats, both in as well as outside Mewat, registered a great increase.- Soon, the movement had established itself so firmly among the Meos that at a very special meeting organised by Ilyas at the Madrasa Mo'in-ul Islam, Nuh, in November 1941, nearly 25,000 Meos, apart from many leading 'ulama, took part. According to TJ sources, by Ilyas' death in 1944, the movement had sunk its roots deep into Meo society. One writer calls it a 'new revolution', with scores of madaris, makatib and mosques being set up in the Meo villages, a general 'hatred' for Hindu dress and a widespread approval of 'Islamic' clothing being established and with many Meos becoming regular worshippers, themselves going out of their homes to preach Islam to other Muslims (Falahi 1996:303). And, so it is claimed, Ilyas' most cherished dream of spreading awareness about Islam among the Meos had now, to a great extent, been fulfilled (S. Nadwi 1983:41).
Analysis
That the Meos, whose Islamic identity had been of only the most nominal concern to them for several centuries, had, in a matter of just a few years, begun responding so enthusiastically to Ilyas' effort at spreading Islamic awareness is certainly remarkable and merits an explanation. We have already alluded to the increasing importance of Islamic symbols for the Meos as community boundary markers to differentiate themselves from the Hindus, whom they were increasingly coming to see as responsible for their worsening plight. To imagine, as almost all Tablighi writers do, that this growing identification with Islam reflected some sudden realisation of the truth of Islam on their part is simplistic in the extreme and hardly corresponds to the facts as they seem to have been, (This, of course, is not to deny that genuine conviction must have motivated many Meos to join Ilyas' movement). Nor will it suffice to offer such essentialist arguments that being an 'illiterate', 'ignorant', 'emotional', 'gullible' or 'simple' people, the Meos could easily be swayed into blindly submitting to the appeals of a charismatic leader, an allegation often heard today from Meo critics of the movement. Nor, again, will conspiracy theories, which attribute the success of the TJ in Mewat to as varied sources as the alleged machinations of the British or the duplicity of the Congress party or the Hindus, suffice, denying as they do autonomy and volition to the social actors involved. It appears that there were far more complex factors at work that were impelling the Meos towards increasing identification with Islam.
What seems to have particularly appealed to the Meos was Ilyas' sheer charisma and his central role as a charismatic leader. As one writer puts it, 'The people who were involved in Tabligh work in Maulana Ilyas' time were principally attracted to it by his personality' (Hasni 1989:201). The Meos seem to have been greatly moved by the love, kindness and concern he displayed in his dealings with them. Adding to Ilyas' powerful charismatic image were stories that soon spread far and wide of miraculous happenings associated with him, is in the case of the Sufi saints of yore. What is particularly striking about some of these stories is how they seem to have been responses to intensely felt needs and concerns of the Meos themselves. Thus, according to one such story, Ilyas helped save many Meos from the throes of debt at the hands of the Banias with divine assistance. He is said to have warned the Meos that dealing in interest was an enormous sin, for both the lender as well as the borrower, a crime the equivalent of 'having sexual intercourse seventy times with one's own mother'. When the Meos heard this they were aghast. They implored him to pray to God to release them from their debts. Ilyas obliged and made the Meos repent for their sins. As a result, it is said, God answered their prayers and 'the entire community was saved from this curse [of debt] in just a few years' (Ferozepuri n.d.a:30). The role that such stories must have played in building up the image of Ilyas as a true man of God requires no elaboration. In terms of more tangible benefits, Ilyas asked the Meos to curtail their lavish spending on festivals, marriages, births and deaths that often landed them deep into debt. He appealed to them instead to abide by the simple, austere rules of the shari'ah, and seems to have struck a sympathetic chord among many of his Meo followers for whom their earlier religious traditions were proving to be an increasingly unbearable economic burden (Ali 1970:66).
Ilyas also seems to have played an important role as a mediator in intra-Meo disputes. Here, he was responding to an issue of immense concern to the Meos at a time when, faced with grave threats from without, the unity of the community was vital. Historically, the Meos lacked a fundamental sense of unity; they would often quarrel with each other over the most trifling of issues, and their gots and pals would carry on disputes over such matters as stolen women and animals over generations without their ever being resolved (M. Numani 1989:22). In the troubled early decades of the twentieth century, such internal dissensions boded ill for Meo social cohesion. A neutral leader and an impartial arbiter, one who could dispassionately mediate between the different groups and factions within the community was called for and Ilyas seems to have admirably fitted this role. Being a non-Meo as well as a religious leader, he was expected to be non-partisan and was seen as having no motive to side with one group against another. Thus, it came to be that the meetings that Ilyas organised from time to time in Mewat were also used as occasions for the resolution of intra-community disputes. According to one writer, 'Maulana Ilyas stopped all the internecine quarrels among the Meos. Because of this they began considering him a great man and started following his commands' (Hasni 1989:50).
What made the TJ particularly attractive to the Meos, as opposed, for instance, to the largely abortive efforts of earlier Muslim reformers in the region, was the particular mode that it sought to employ to incorporate Islam more fully into Meo society. This mode appears to have been well adapted to the exigencies of the then prevailing Mewati social context. Hence, the TJ's success. Ilyas' was a policy of gradual Islamic reform. The Meos were first asked to learn just the kalima and the ritual prayers, and were only then to be gradually instructed in other religious matters. Meo institutions and social practices which the Deobandis considered un-Islamic, such as the got-pal system or the cults of the Sufi shrines, were not openly or directly attacked or opposed. Instead, Ilyas merely focussed on the cultivation of personal faith, in the hope that once this had been strengthened the Meos would themselves seek to order their lives according to the dictates of God. Consequently, Meo traditions did not come in for direct attack and, at least in the short term, an accommodation was achieved between the universal basic principles of Islam such as the kalima and prayers, on the one hand, and Meo institutions and traditions, on the other, to the obvious satisfaction of most Meos. This was further facilitated by the TJ's refusal to directly deal with the masa'il, other than those related to the 'ibadat, focussing instead, largely on the faza'il alone.
What appeals to people who join a charismatic movement is not simply the personality of the leader but, equally importantly, the vision that he gives of an alternative society, wherein their trials and tribulations would be overcome. The prime purpose of the ascetic ideal preached by most charismatic religious leaders is to highlight the degeneration of the present and to constantly remind their followers that a glorious future awaits them if they participate in full faith in the movement and abide strictly by its commands. This seems to have been the case with the TJ among the Meos. The Meos were repeatedly told that all their woes and miseries stemmed from a fundamental lack of faith in God and that if only they were to become true Muslims everything would be set right. 'Complete adoption of Islam and strict obedience to Muhammad', declared Ilyas, would bring the Muslims 'success in every field of life and thus lead them to triumph over every other community' (Nadwi 1983:158). By offering to the Meos promises of great reward, both in this world as well as in the world to come, and a new approach with which to seek to overcome their problems, Ilyas was playing a crucial role characteristic of the charismatic leader, enabling, in the process, his movement to endear itself to them. This was especially significant since for many Meos at this time conditions were so bleak that there seemed to be no possibility short of superhuman intervention to end their sufferings. Ilyas' movement supplied them with a meaningful theodicy, helping them to make sense of and to cope with the grinding poverty and oppression that they were faced with, giving them hope for better days ahead. Thus, their oppression was explained as the torments that men of God, even the Prophet himself, have inevitably had to face from God's enemies. While they were woefully poor in this world, eternal comfort in heaven would await them if they sacrificed their all in this world in the struggle for Islam. In this sense, Meo participation in the TJ can be seen as a symbolic protest against social inequities and oppression, rather than simply a spiritual quest.
A significant aspect of Ilyas' Islamisation project in Mewat, and one which seems to have played no small role in the spread of the TJ in the area, was that for many Meos it came to be viewed not simply as a movement of spiritual reform, but, perhaps equally importantly, as a 'civilising mission'. Meos often stress that before the advent of the TJ, they were lawless 'dacoits' and 'cattle-lifters', constantly fighting among themselves. They were 'rough' and 'crude'. They worshipped dung-heaps (gobardhan). They dressed 'primitively' and their womenfolk freely mixed with men. They were, in short, 'barbaric' and 'ignorant', all of which made them seem low in the eyes of others, both Muslims as well as 'high'-caste Hindus. All that, they say, began to change because of the influence of the TJ, and to it they attribute their having now become 'cultured' people and 'true human beings' (sahih insan). On a visit to Mewat in 1939, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, then a journalist but shortly to become the founder of the Islamist Jamaat-i Islami, had observed that as a result of the efforts of Ilyas, 'a great change' had come about in Meo society, because of which the Meos, were 'no longer looked upon with contempt and suspicion' but were 'beginning to be held in respect by them' (Vellori n.d.:59).
Another great attraction that the TJ seems to have provided the Meos who came into contact with Ilyas was the access that it provided to symbols of 'high' Islamic culture—such as religious education and literacy in the Urdu language or 'Islamic' dress—which were formerly the preserve of the local Khanzada elite. In the changed context of the early twentieth century, the Khanzadas were no longer seen by the Meos as the menacing 'Other', and adopting aspects of the 'high' Islamic culture traditionally associated with them was now seen as a channel for upward social mobility. It was, however, not simply the 'pull' of 'high' Islamic tradition that began to draw many Meos to the TJ. Equally significant were the 'push' factors that were now drawing many Meos away from popular religion. The popular Meo religious tradition, centred as it was on the shrines of the saints, had represented a steep hierarchy of roles and functions. The shrines were controlled by religious specialists belonging to the Sayyed and Faqir or Diwan castes. Though they were dependent on the Meos for support and patronage, they tended to look down upon them as low-born. Implicitly opposed as it was to the cult of the shrines, the TJ must, then, have seemed particularly attractive for many Meos no longer willing to accept Sayyed claims to superiority.
1. Baliyavi (op. cit.:65) writes that at first Ilyas laid down 60 points that would form the basis for tabligh work. However, he later reduced them to six, realising that to work on all 60 fronts would require too much time. The similarity of this story with that about the number of daily obligatory prayers being reduced by God for the convenience of Muhammad's followers is striking.
2. Hafiz Abdus Subhan, a Meo teacher at the maktab attached to the Jamia Masjid Panj Piran, New Delhi, says that llyas would often pray to God, pleading, 'O Lord! Give me the respectable people of Mewat because, after they come, the rest will simply follow after them' (interview, New Delhi, 19 November 1994).
3. Thus, for instance, the then rector of the Nadwat-ul 'Ulama, Sayyed Abdul All, went off to Mewat to do tabligh and on his return wrote an article in the madrasa's organ, al-Nadwa (March 1940) in fulsome praise of the TJ. (S.T. Khan n.d.:409-10). Among the other 'ulama who toured Mewat to spread the tablighi message in response to Ilyas' appeals was another famous Nadwi scholar, Sayyed Abul Hassan Ali Nadwi (1913), who later emerged as a leading supporter among the ‘ulama for the movement. For details, see his Karavan-i-Zindagi (vol. I), (1983:281-90).
4. Among the important 'ulama who participated in this mammoth gathering were Maulana Khali! Ahmad from Saharanpur and Mufti Kifayatullah (1875-1952), leader of the Jamiat-ul 'Ulama-Hind.
An Urdu poet from Delhi was also present on the occasion and he recited 'stirring' Islamic verses to enthuse his audience. Ilyas, says Rahim Bakhsh, knew well the 'Meo mind' and, accordingly, instructed some Muslim poets to compose and recite verses that would 'charge their emotions' (Bakhsh 1995:69-70).
5. Husn-i-Ikhlaq, January 1995, pp. 43-44.
6. Ilyas' efforts also seem to have helped promote a better image of the Meos in general, at least in the eyes of other Muslims. Earlier, writes Wahiduddin Khan (1988:88), 'the Meos used to be called monkeys by others, but now they say that if you want to see the Prophet's companions, go and see the Meos'.
7. Interestingly, stories of miraculous happenings seem to have attached themselves to some of Ilyas' close Meo companions, who emerged as what may be called 'local charismatics' in their own right. Perhaps, the foremost of these was one Miyanji Musa (d. 1964) of Ghaseda, who was to become one of Ilyas' principal deputies in Mewat.
8. Today, many Meos consider the modicum of economic prosperity that has come to the region in recent years—though it has benefited just a few—as a gift of God for their involvement in the TJ.
9. Thus, a Tablighi activist writes that the Meos were even more degenerate than the Hindus because at least the latter 'worship beautiful statues bedecked with sparkling stones' (al-Furqan, April-June 1974, p. 209).
The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat -- Part 2
By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,
The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat series
Maulana Ismail and the Meos
Even though the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) as we know it today took off in Mewat only in the late 1920s under Maulana Ilyas, it was actually the Maulana's father, Maulana Muhammad Ismail (d.1898), who first made contact with the Meos. Ismail came from a family of Siddiqui Shaikhs of Jhanjhana in the Muzaffarnagar district of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). This family, which claimed descent from Abu Bakr, the first khalifa, of the Sunnis, had for generations been renowned for its piety. Ismail is said to have been a very learned and pious Islamic scholar. So deeply engrossed in his spiritual quest was he that it is reported that he would often go for days on end without any food, forgetting that as a result his own little children had to remain hungry (Ferozepuri n.d.c:6). In Tablighi hagiography he is even credited with having possessed certain miraculous mystical powers, besides having been vehemently opposed to the British for having dispossessed the Muslims of political power (Baliyavi n.d.:38-39).
Ismail is said to have been the heir to a vast estate in Jhanjhana. According to one source, besides 4,000 bighas of agricultural land, he owned over 400 houses, all of which he had given out on rent. However, he is said to have completely renounced his wealth and taken up residence in a semi-abandoned mosque, the Banglewali Masjid in Delhi's Basti Nizamuddin, which today serves as the global headquarters of the TJ. It is said that when Ismail first got to Basti Nizamuddin, he found to his consternation that he had no one else to join him in a jama'at for congregational prayers. He did not give up hope, however, and went out onto the main road, hoping to find some fellow-Muslims. Just then, a small group of people, who, from their external appearance, seemed to be non-Muslims, passed by. Seeing them, Ismail called out to them, asking them who they were. In reply, they said they were Muslim Meos from Gurgaon, and that, owing to a severe famine in their part of the country, they were heading towards Delhi in search of work.
Curious to know more about them, Ismail asked them what they would earn if they were to work as labourers in Delhi. They answered that at the most they would earn two annas a day. On hearing this, Ismail asked them if they would be willing to work for him for the same wage. They readily agreed to his proposal. To the utter amazement of the Meos, the work that the Maulana asked them to perform every day was simply to learn how to pray in the Islamic way and to memorise selected verses from the Qur'an. At the end of each day they were paid two annas each. For the simple-minded Meos, Ismail appeared to be nothing less than a spiritually exalted wali (friend) of God, a recipient of great divine grace. Among themselves they remarked:
He seems to be Allah's wali since he not only teaches us about religion but even pays us for it. He does not tell us to press his feet, to fill water in the drums or even to sweep the mosque, all of which he does himself (Baliyavi op. cit.:43).
After a few days, the Meos returned to their homes, promising Ismail that they would soon come back to him along with their families. On their return to Mewat they excitedly spoke to their fellow-villagers about Allah's wali whom they had personally encountered, exclaiming:
He is, indeed, true and we have seen all the signs and qualities of a wali in him. He is not greedy at all. In fact, he is actually helping us both materially as well as spiritually. Truly, he is an extraordinary wali (Baliyavi op. cit.:44).
So much were these Meos awed by Ismail's kindness towards them that they sent a group of children to the madrasa that he had opened at the mosque at Basti Nizamuddin. This is dated, by one source, to around 1880 (Mahdi 1985:6). Soon, regular batches of Meo children begin being sent to the madrasa. After completing their studies they would go back to Mewat to preach Islam and a fresh batch would be admitted (Bijnori n.d.:25). There, they were given free education, food, clothes and a place to stay. Meo elders now began paying visits to Ismail at Basti Nizamuddin. He would pay for their travel and would serve them food (Baliyavi op. cit.:44).
After Ismail had been able to win the confidence of the Meos, he, along with some Meo disciples, began to undertake short tours of their villages. As a result of these efforts, he is said to have made 'nearly five hundred real servants of God, some of whom became huffaz [memorisers of the Qur'an], religious scholars and missionaries who strove to spread the name of Allah throughout the world' (Baliyavi op. cit.:46).
Ismail died in 1898 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Muhammad, as the head teacher of the madrasa at Basti Nizamuddin. Muhammad continued with his father's work among the Meos, including extensive tours of Mewat, making many followers and attempting to spread Islamic awareness in the area. After having worked among the Meos for several years, Muhammad died in 1917. His mantle was then taken up by his younger brother, Muhammad Ilyas, who was to go on to found the TJ.
Bangle Wali Masjid in Basti Hazrat Nizamuddin
Beginnings of TJ
Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, originally Akhtar Ilyas, was born in 1885 at his maternal grandfather's home at Kandhla, in the Muzaffarnagar district of the United Provinces. The youngest son of Maulana Ismail, he was brought up in a strict Islamic environment. 'The stories of Hazrat Shah 'Abdul 'Aziz and Sayyed Ahmad Shahid were constantly on the tongues of the men and women of the family', says one source, and the womenfolk 'would tell the children not stories about parrots and mynahs but about these brave and great leaders' (Baliyavi op. cit.:15).
Ilyas memorised the Qur'an at an early age. He received his primary education from his father and, at the age of 11 or 12, went to Gangoh, then an important centre of Deobandi influence. There he stayed for nine long years, studying various Islamic disciplines from Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829-1905), a leading Deobandi 'alim. Thereafter, in 1908, he proceeded to Deoband itself to study the traditions of the Prophet under the renowned scholar, Shaikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmud-ul Hasan (1851-1920), from whom, it is said, he took an oath of jihad against the British (Baliyavi op. cit.:24). While at Deoband he also came into contact with such other renowned Deobandi 'ulama as Ashraf Ali Thanawi and Shah Abdul Rahim Raipuri (d. 1919), of whom he was to declare that they were his Very body and soul' (Baliyavi op. cit.:24). From Deoband Ilyas proceeded to Saharanpur to study under the supervision of Khalil Ahmad at the Mazahir-ul Ulum, a sister institution of the Deoband madrasa. In 1910, he was appointed as a teacher at the Saharanpur madrasa (Baliyavi op. cit.:22). He probably intended to make this his career for the rest of his life, but this was not to be.
Following the death of Maulana Muhammad, a group of Meos proceeded to Saharanpur to request Ilyas to take up his late brother's position at the Basti Nizamuddin madrasa. Initially, Ilyas seems to have been reluctant to leave Saharanpur, but the Meos pleaded in desperation, saying,
Your father and brother gave us duniya and din [worldly and spiritual blessings] ... before which we were completely ignorant. You must come to Nizamuddin. [If you so desire you can even] merely sit at the Banglewali Masjid. That itself will be enough for us and we will be reformed thereby, for the entire Meo community loved and respected your brother and father (Baliyavi op. cit.:48).
Ilyas finally relented and agreed to go to Delhi to take up the responsibility of the madrasa there, but laid down one condition—that the Meos would have to send their children to the Islamic makatib (elementary schools) that he would set up in Mewat.
The Makatib experiment
After making two unsuccessful tours of Mewat, in the area near the township of Nuh, Ilyas finally seems to have managed to induce some inhabitants of the village of Ferozepur-Namak, a Meo village in Gurgaon with which his brother and father had established close ties, to send their children to the makeshift Islamic school that had already been set up there (Bakhsh 1995:43-50). Over time, as Ilyas made tours of Mewat with increasing frequency, he set up several such schools in other villages. Elementary Islamic education was provided in these makatib, supplemented with occasional lectures delivered by touring 'ulama which Ilyas arranged for (Bakhsh 1995:37). Besides, the number of Meo students at the main madrasa at the Banglewali Masjid also rose considerably. Ilyas had now succeeded in establishing a fairly extensive network of religious schools, both in Delhi as well as in Mewat, through which he thought he would be able to mobilise the Meos to Islamise themselves more fully. Some of these were simply makeshift structures, consisting of a sackcloth spread under a shady tree, with arrangement for cold drinking water and bukkahs. Teams of Ilyas' disciples sat there waiting for passersby to preach to, 'each time', it is said, 'adapting their call to the needs of particular listeners' (S.A. Haq 1972:152).
According to one writer, Ilyas soon managed to set up in Mewat, 'quite a few hundred makatib in which the Qur'an was taught', hoping thereby to spread awareness of Islam as widely as possible (Hasni 1989:201). However, a single event so deeply shocked him that it made him realise the futility of these efforts, forcing him to adopt, instead, the novel means of missionary communication that has become the single-most distinguishing feature of the TJ.
It is said that three years after the setting up of the first Islamic school in Mewat by Ilyas, its first batch of students completed their course of study. Ilyas was invited to preside over the graduation ceremony. There, he was presented with a young Meo man who had just passed out of the maktab as a hafiz, having memorised the entire Qur'an. In his appearance, this man was indistinguishable from the other Meos as well as from the local Hindu peasants. He 'had a thick, long moustache but had no beard. He wore a dhoti, the dress of the non-Muslims, and his mannerisms, too, were just like theirs'.
Ilyas was stunned beyond belief on seeing this hafiz. He 'clasped his head in his hands and began sobbing', crying out,
Oh Allah! What should I do? My life and my money have been completely wasted producing a hafiz of the Qur'an like this one!
Ilyas is said to have been so greatly pained and shocked at seeing that a hafiz of his maktab still 'appeared as a non-Muslim' despite so many years of Islamic education that he reportedly, 'nearly fell unconscious' and, in fact, 'just missed having a heart attack', but 'Allah rescued him', for 'he had chosen him to accomplish great things' (Baliyavi n.d.:52). It then dawned upon Ilyas that the makatib that he had set up had proved to be ineffective in bringing about the Islamic reform that he desired, since both the teachers as well as the students of the makatib lived in a generally un-Islamic environment from whose cultural influence they could not possibly remain immune.
Central to this narrative account is the importance that is placed on the role of apparel and facial hair as external markers of identity dividing Meos ('Muslims') from non-Meos ('Hindus'), from whom in most respects they were almost wholly indistinguishable. Religion, here, is seen not simply as an inner spiritual experience. One's religious identity must be publicly expressed and announced through the display of visible symbols that dramatically set apart one religious 'community' from the others. 'Islamic' external appearance was just one among the large ensemble of symbols that were now seen as integral to Muslim community identity. Most Meos, even those who were not particularly pious or committed Muslims, would respond enthusiastically to these calls. It seems that this probably had much to do with an urge to differentiate themselves from the Hindus, who, as we have seen, were now increasingly being seen as the oppressive 'Other'. A shared and separate external identity provided by 'Islamic' external appearance helped strengthen this sense of Meo cohesion, an identity defined essentially in opposition to the Hindus, a response to what were seen as the growing Hindu onslaughts on the community.
The method of Tabligh
While the incident involving the 'un-Islamic' looking hafiz prompted Ilyas to discontinue with his makatib in Mewat, it is not clear what made him see the jama'ats of roving missionaries as the most appropriate means to spread awareness of Islam among the Meos. There seem to be four different accounts concerning this. One, which understandably finds particular favour with Muslim opponents of the TJ, has it that Ilyas simply devised his method of tabligh work on his own and then claimed that it was divinely inspired. A variant of this thesis is that, faced with the shuddhi onslaught of the Arya Samaj, Ilyas, after considerable thought, devised a means by which he could mobilise the Meos to struggle in the path of Islam while offering this to them as an incentive to work for their own salvation in the hereafter (Habib 1996:72). Tablighi sources, however, stress that the method of tabligh was not of Ilyas' own making and that it was actually inspired by God. According to one Tablighi account, Ilyas was so upset with the failure of his makatib that he considered migrating to the Hijaz for good and actually proceeded to Mecca for his second haj in 1925—26. Though he had planned to settle down in Arabia he actually stayed just five months there, before returning to India. Apparently, at the Mosque of the Prophet at Medina, where he spent three days in silent contemplation, he saw the Prophet Muhammad in a dream, who addressed him saying, 'Oh Ilyas! Go back to India where God shall take work from you.’
Overwhelmed with fear, Ilyas approached one Maulana Qutbuddin of Mecca to interpret this dream for him. In reply he was told, 'Do not fear. Do not do anything. God shall do all through you. You cannot do anything through your own mind or intellect.'
After this, Ilyas returned to Delhi in 1926, immersing himself in prayer, continuously pleading with God to tell him 'what work he would take from him'. Then, at last, it is said, 'Allah, through a dream, taught him the tariqa-i-tabligh [the method of preaching]' (Baliyavi n.d.:52-53).
Notable in this account is that the tariqa-i-tabligh is portrayed as being of divine inspiration, it being suggested that it was taught to Ilyas by God himself. Consequently, any critique of it, or of Ilyas' own project, could possibly be interpreted as questioning the divine will itself. Since it was claimed that God had appointed Ilyas 'to take work from him', any challenge to him and his movement, then, could be capable of being construed as a challenge to God and to His din. This claim to divine inspiration seems to have been a crucial factor in building up the image of Ilyas as a charismatic figure in direct communication with God, and over time, an increasing number of Meos began to see him as such. Thus, according to one Meo writer:
Irreligiousness had become so widespread that Allah in his mercy selected Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Sahib and illumined in him [munkashf armaye] the principles for the guidance of the people of this age. The name of this method of guidance is now famous as the Tablighi movement ... All its principles are divinely inspired [iske sare usul ilhami hain]. That is why it is necessary for Muslims of all classes to join in this work. It is, in fact, the demand of the hour (Ferozepuri n.d.c:4).
This author goes so far as to invest Ilyas' birth itself with great divine significance, as a major event in God's plans for the world. Thus, he announces:
Allah, the honourable cherisher, had selected Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, may the mercy of God be upon him, on the day of creation [roz-i-azl] itself for the reformation and guidance of the Muslim community of this age, and so, from the very beginning had put this soul in him (Ferozepuri n.d.c:38).
Contrary to the above account which attributes the tariqa-i-tabligh to divine guidance, the same writer suggests another account later on, according to which Ilyas may have learnt the method of preaching from the Meos themselves. Thus, he writes that one Hafiz Muhammad Ishaq of Ferozepur-Namak, son of Munshi Nur Bakhsh, a Meo disciple of Ilyas' elder brother Muhammad, had first formed a jama'at composed, among others, of Nambardar Mehrab Khan, Munshi Umrao Khan, Munshi Nur Ali, Hafiz Abdul Rahman, Miyanji Suleiman, Patwari Nasrullah, Chaudhri Namaz Khan and himself—all, with die exception of the last, inhabitants of Ferozepur-Namak. They would pray, cook and sleep together and would go in a group around Ferozepur-Namak calling people to the mosque to pray.
At the time when the Aryas were spearheading the shuddhi campaign among the Malkana Rajputs in neighbouring Bharatpur and Agra, the members of this jama'at approached Ilyas. They told him that his visits to Mewat, for the most part only of Ferozepur-Namak and only for one or two days, were far too short and that he needed to spend at least a week each time he came to Mewat if the shuddhi onslaught were to be effectively prevented from spreading to the region. Ilyas himself was greatly troubled at the prospect that, like their neighbours, the Malkanas, the Meos, too, might fall into the Arya trap, for they also were Muslim only in name. This thought is said to have so pained him that:
He completely lost his sleep. He would cry out in anguish and would beseech God for help. He did not know what to do because he had tried the conventional way [of attempting to spread awareness about Islam through setting up makatib], but that had been a complete failure (Ferozepuri n.d.c:13).
In reply to the request of the Meo jama'at, Ilyas is reported to have said that Ferozepur-Namak was an educated village that could take care of itself. At this the Meos said to him, 'Yes, we are doing some work here. We go about enrolling children in the madrasa and, through gasht, we bring people [to the mosque] for worship.'
Ilyas was apparently greatly intrigued when he heard the word gasht (tour) mentioned and he asked the Meos what they meant by it. They explained that it involved forming a group of five to seven persons that went from house to house inviting people to the mosque. On hearing this, Ilyas said that he would like to personally witness their gasht. When he saw for himself the way the jama'at performed gasht, he was very pleased but offered some suggestions for its improvement. Among these were the appointment of an amir to lead the groups and a mutakallim or speaker; doing gasht in villages other than Ferozepur-Namak alone; and, in the gasht, not restricting the content of the speech just to the importance of prayers but also teaching and stressing the importance of the kalima (Ferozepuri n.d.c:16). This is how, according to this account, the tariqa-i-tabligh of the TJ came to be developed.
According to the fourth account, the tariqa-i-tabligh was partly divinely inspired and partly fashioned by Ilyas himself. Thus, Rahim Bakhsh, a close Meo disciple of Ilyas, writes that when the Maulana returned from his second haj he went into solitary meditation in order to learn from God the method of 'doing his work'. At last, in a dream he was told that just as the first lesson that Muhammad had given to his people was to 'recite the kalima and attain felicity', he, too, should make the kalima his first principle. Ilyas then decided that his second principle should be ritual prayers, the 'emperor of worship' (sultan-i-'ibadat). Thereafter, he pondered over what aspect of Islam his own Deobandi elders had left untouched which he could take up—religious instruction was already being done at Deoband and Saharanpur; Ashraf Ali Thanawi had taken up the task of writing Islamic books; Sa'eed Ahmad was propagating Islam through his lectures; and Hussain Ahmad Madani was serving Islam in the field of politics. He found that besides the kalima and prayers, the other four of what were to become known as the 'six principles' were not being given the attention that they deserved by the 'ulama of his day and so decided to focus on them as well.
Having drawn up his scheme of tabligh based on the 'six principles', he began his work among the Meos. Later, his Meo followers pressed him for an instructional text about the principles of tabligh. Ilyas was apparently very reluctant to prescribe any such book, because, he argued, in the Prophet's day there were no printing presses and the companions had engaged in the tabligh of Islam simply by word of mouth. However, later bowing to the repeated requests of his followers, he instructed the commissioning of three texts—the first, a slim booklet, Musalmano ki Pasti ka Wahid Ilaj ('The Sole Remedy for the Plight of the Muslims') penned by his relative, Ehtisham-ul Hassan Kandhalawi; and the other two, the Faza'il-i-Tabligh and the Faza'il-i-Namaz, compiled by Muhammad Zakariyya. This is how, says Rahim Bakhsh (1995:62-63), the unique tariqa-i-tabligh of the TJ came to be developed.
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1. See E.H. Kandhalawi (1382 A.H.) for full details. A genealogical table of the family appears in Husn-i-Ikhlaq, September 1995, pp. 45-46.
2. This figure must be treated with caution. Apparently, over time almost all the tenants managed to register these houses in their names. Ismail, however, remained unconcerned because God, he said, would give him far more luxurious mansions in heaven instead (Baliyavi op. cit.:47).
3. This school had been set up by Munshi Nur Bakhsh and Ilyas later expanded it, giving it the name of Madrasa Khaliliya, after his teacher at Saharanpur (Ferozepuri n.d.a:53).
4. As for the quality of education that was imparted in these early makatib, the example of one of the first of them to be started, at the village of Rupdaka, is instructive. After laying the foundation stone of the maktab, Ilyas told the villagers to search for a teacher. They managed to find one Karim Bakhsh, a ploughman in the service of one Miyanji Amanullah. Karim Bakhsh knew just some odd parts of the Qur'an. Ilyas appointed him as the teacher of the maktab on a monthly salary of ten rupees (Bakhsh 1995:50).
5. Ilyas himself seems to have suggested this, as for instance, when he declared that,
“The manner and magnitude in which, participating in this movement one receives the agreement, the closeness and the help and blessings [of God] is not to be found in the case of other methods [of working for the cause of Islam]. This movement of da'wat and tabligh is really a great blessing from God. Not to respect it is a sure invitation to danger” (quoted in Hafizullah n.d.:22).
6. Ferozepuri (n.d.c:40) quotes Ilyas as having announced, with regard to the supposed divine origins of the tariqa-i-tabligh, that,
I have not made the principles [of tabligh] of my own accord. Rather, they have been bestowed upon me [by God], and I have been ordained to work according to them.
7. According to Ferozepuri, once one Qari Sayyed Raza Hussain asked Ilyas if he were the mujaddid (renewer) of the age. Ilyas replied that he was not the mujaddid but the Imam, and that he had tried to keep this fact concealed so that 'thete should be no dissension among the friends (auliya) of God' (quoted in Ferozepuri n.d.a:21).
8. Ferozepuri writes that it was this group of Meos, along with some others, who had approached Ilyas at Saharanpur to request him to take up the responsibility of the Nizamuddin madrasa (Ferozepuri n.d.a:ll).
9. According to one report, by May 1923, half of the Muslim population of the Bharatpur state had been converted to Hinduism (see Aligarh Gazette, 4 May 1923). The Pratap of 29 April 1923, reported that all the Malkanas of Bharatpur had undergone shuddhi and that Shraddhanand had announced that he was shortly going to resume shuddhi work among the nau-Muslims of Gurgaon. According to the Milap of 18 January 1924, the Bharatiya Shuddhi Mandal of Agra had, from February to December, done shuddhi work in some 50 villages in Gurgaon, 16 in Bharatpur and a few in Alwar. Mayaram writes that the Aryas had made sporadic efforts that the shuddhi of the Malkanas and the Meos of Bharatpur and Alwar before the Mapilla revolt, but it seems likely that organised attempts at this started only after mass shuddhi of the Malkanas began in 1923 (Mayaram 1997:64-65).
http://twocircles.net/2010apr16/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_2.html
The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat series
Maulana Ismail and the Meos
Even though the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) as we know it today took off in Mewat only in the late 1920s under Maulana Ilyas, it was actually the Maulana's father, Maulana Muhammad Ismail (d.1898), who first made contact with the Meos. Ismail came from a family of Siddiqui Shaikhs of Jhanjhana in the Muzaffarnagar district of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). This family, which claimed descent from Abu Bakr, the first khalifa, of the Sunnis, had for generations been renowned for its piety. Ismail is said to have been a very learned and pious Islamic scholar. So deeply engrossed in his spiritual quest was he that it is reported that he would often go for days on end without any food, forgetting that as a result his own little children had to remain hungry (Ferozepuri n.d.c:6). In Tablighi hagiography he is even credited with having possessed certain miraculous mystical powers, besides having been vehemently opposed to the British for having dispossessed the Muslims of political power (Baliyavi n.d.:38-39).
Ismail is said to have been the heir to a vast estate in Jhanjhana. According to one source, besides 4,000 bighas of agricultural land, he owned over 400 houses, all of which he had given out on rent. However, he is said to have completely renounced his wealth and taken up residence in a semi-abandoned mosque, the Banglewali Masjid in Delhi's Basti Nizamuddin, which today serves as the global headquarters of the TJ. It is said that when Ismail first got to Basti Nizamuddin, he found to his consternation that he had no one else to join him in a jama'at for congregational prayers. He did not give up hope, however, and went out onto the main road, hoping to find some fellow-Muslims. Just then, a small group of people, who, from their external appearance, seemed to be non-Muslims, passed by. Seeing them, Ismail called out to them, asking them who they were. In reply, they said they were Muslim Meos from Gurgaon, and that, owing to a severe famine in their part of the country, they were heading towards Delhi in search of work.
Curious to know more about them, Ismail asked them what they would earn if they were to work as labourers in Delhi. They answered that at the most they would earn two annas a day. On hearing this, Ismail asked them if they would be willing to work for him for the same wage. They readily agreed to his proposal. To the utter amazement of the Meos, the work that the Maulana asked them to perform every day was simply to learn how to pray in the Islamic way and to memorise selected verses from the Qur'an. At the end of each day they were paid two annas each. For the simple-minded Meos, Ismail appeared to be nothing less than a spiritually exalted wali (friend) of God, a recipient of great divine grace. Among themselves they remarked:
He seems to be Allah's wali since he not only teaches us about religion but even pays us for it. He does not tell us to press his feet, to fill water in the drums or even to sweep the mosque, all of which he does himself (Baliyavi op. cit.:43).
After a few days, the Meos returned to their homes, promising Ismail that they would soon come back to him along with their families. On their return to Mewat they excitedly spoke to their fellow-villagers about Allah's wali whom they had personally encountered, exclaiming:
He is, indeed, true and we have seen all the signs and qualities of a wali in him. He is not greedy at all. In fact, he is actually helping us both materially as well as spiritually. Truly, he is an extraordinary wali (Baliyavi op. cit.:44).
So much were these Meos awed by Ismail's kindness towards them that they sent a group of children to the madrasa that he had opened at the mosque at Basti Nizamuddin. This is dated, by one source, to around 1880 (Mahdi 1985:6). Soon, regular batches of Meo children begin being sent to the madrasa. After completing their studies they would go back to Mewat to preach Islam and a fresh batch would be admitted (Bijnori n.d.:25). There, they were given free education, food, clothes and a place to stay. Meo elders now began paying visits to Ismail at Basti Nizamuddin. He would pay for their travel and would serve them food (Baliyavi op. cit.:44).
After Ismail had been able to win the confidence of the Meos, he, along with some Meo disciples, began to undertake short tours of their villages. As a result of these efforts, he is said to have made 'nearly five hundred real servants of God, some of whom became huffaz [memorisers of the Qur'an], religious scholars and missionaries who strove to spread the name of Allah throughout the world' (Baliyavi op. cit.:46).
Ismail died in 1898 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Muhammad, as the head teacher of the madrasa at Basti Nizamuddin. Muhammad continued with his father's work among the Meos, including extensive tours of Mewat, making many followers and attempting to spread Islamic awareness in the area. After having worked among the Meos for several years, Muhammad died in 1917. His mantle was then taken up by his younger brother, Muhammad Ilyas, who was to go on to found the TJ.
Bangle Wali Masjid in Basti Hazrat Nizamuddin
Beginnings of TJ
Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, originally Akhtar Ilyas, was born in 1885 at his maternal grandfather's home at Kandhla, in the Muzaffarnagar district of the United Provinces. The youngest son of Maulana Ismail, he was brought up in a strict Islamic environment. 'The stories of Hazrat Shah 'Abdul 'Aziz and Sayyed Ahmad Shahid were constantly on the tongues of the men and women of the family', says one source, and the womenfolk 'would tell the children not stories about parrots and mynahs but about these brave and great leaders' (Baliyavi op. cit.:15).
Ilyas memorised the Qur'an at an early age. He received his primary education from his father and, at the age of 11 or 12, went to Gangoh, then an important centre of Deobandi influence. There he stayed for nine long years, studying various Islamic disciplines from Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829-1905), a leading Deobandi 'alim. Thereafter, in 1908, he proceeded to Deoband itself to study the traditions of the Prophet under the renowned scholar, Shaikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmud-ul Hasan (1851-1920), from whom, it is said, he took an oath of jihad against the British (Baliyavi op. cit.:24). While at Deoband he also came into contact with such other renowned Deobandi 'ulama as Ashraf Ali Thanawi and Shah Abdul Rahim Raipuri (d. 1919), of whom he was to declare that they were his Very body and soul' (Baliyavi op. cit.:24). From Deoband Ilyas proceeded to Saharanpur to study under the supervision of Khalil Ahmad at the Mazahir-ul Ulum, a sister institution of the Deoband madrasa. In 1910, he was appointed as a teacher at the Saharanpur madrasa (Baliyavi op. cit.:22). He probably intended to make this his career for the rest of his life, but this was not to be.
Following the death of Maulana Muhammad, a group of Meos proceeded to Saharanpur to request Ilyas to take up his late brother's position at the Basti Nizamuddin madrasa. Initially, Ilyas seems to have been reluctant to leave Saharanpur, but the Meos pleaded in desperation, saying,
Your father and brother gave us duniya and din [worldly and spiritual blessings] ... before which we were completely ignorant. You must come to Nizamuddin. [If you so desire you can even] merely sit at the Banglewali Masjid. That itself will be enough for us and we will be reformed thereby, for the entire Meo community loved and respected your brother and father (Baliyavi op. cit.:48).
Ilyas finally relented and agreed to go to Delhi to take up the responsibility of the madrasa there, but laid down one condition—that the Meos would have to send their children to the Islamic makatib (elementary schools) that he would set up in Mewat.
The Makatib experiment
After making two unsuccessful tours of Mewat, in the area near the township of Nuh, Ilyas finally seems to have managed to induce some inhabitants of the village of Ferozepur-Namak, a Meo village in Gurgaon with which his brother and father had established close ties, to send their children to the makeshift Islamic school that had already been set up there (Bakhsh 1995:43-50). Over time, as Ilyas made tours of Mewat with increasing frequency, he set up several such schools in other villages. Elementary Islamic education was provided in these makatib, supplemented with occasional lectures delivered by touring 'ulama which Ilyas arranged for (Bakhsh 1995:37). Besides, the number of Meo students at the main madrasa at the Banglewali Masjid also rose considerably. Ilyas had now succeeded in establishing a fairly extensive network of religious schools, both in Delhi as well as in Mewat, through which he thought he would be able to mobilise the Meos to Islamise themselves more fully. Some of these were simply makeshift structures, consisting of a sackcloth spread under a shady tree, with arrangement for cold drinking water and bukkahs. Teams of Ilyas' disciples sat there waiting for passersby to preach to, 'each time', it is said, 'adapting their call to the needs of particular listeners' (S.A. Haq 1972:152).
According to one writer, Ilyas soon managed to set up in Mewat, 'quite a few hundred makatib in which the Qur'an was taught', hoping thereby to spread awareness of Islam as widely as possible (Hasni 1989:201). However, a single event so deeply shocked him that it made him realise the futility of these efforts, forcing him to adopt, instead, the novel means of missionary communication that has become the single-most distinguishing feature of the TJ.
It is said that three years after the setting up of the first Islamic school in Mewat by Ilyas, its first batch of students completed their course of study. Ilyas was invited to preside over the graduation ceremony. There, he was presented with a young Meo man who had just passed out of the maktab as a hafiz, having memorised the entire Qur'an. In his appearance, this man was indistinguishable from the other Meos as well as from the local Hindu peasants. He 'had a thick, long moustache but had no beard. He wore a dhoti, the dress of the non-Muslims, and his mannerisms, too, were just like theirs'.
Ilyas was stunned beyond belief on seeing this hafiz. He 'clasped his head in his hands and began sobbing', crying out,
Oh Allah! What should I do? My life and my money have been completely wasted producing a hafiz of the Qur'an like this one!
Ilyas is said to have been so greatly pained and shocked at seeing that a hafiz of his maktab still 'appeared as a non-Muslim' despite so many years of Islamic education that he reportedly, 'nearly fell unconscious' and, in fact, 'just missed having a heart attack', but 'Allah rescued him', for 'he had chosen him to accomplish great things' (Baliyavi n.d.:52). It then dawned upon Ilyas that the makatib that he had set up had proved to be ineffective in bringing about the Islamic reform that he desired, since both the teachers as well as the students of the makatib lived in a generally un-Islamic environment from whose cultural influence they could not possibly remain immune.
Central to this narrative account is the importance that is placed on the role of apparel and facial hair as external markers of identity dividing Meos ('Muslims') from non-Meos ('Hindus'), from whom in most respects they were almost wholly indistinguishable. Religion, here, is seen not simply as an inner spiritual experience. One's religious identity must be publicly expressed and announced through the display of visible symbols that dramatically set apart one religious 'community' from the others. 'Islamic' external appearance was just one among the large ensemble of symbols that were now seen as integral to Muslim community identity. Most Meos, even those who were not particularly pious or committed Muslims, would respond enthusiastically to these calls. It seems that this probably had much to do with an urge to differentiate themselves from the Hindus, who, as we have seen, were now increasingly being seen as the oppressive 'Other'. A shared and separate external identity provided by 'Islamic' external appearance helped strengthen this sense of Meo cohesion, an identity defined essentially in opposition to the Hindus, a response to what were seen as the growing Hindu onslaughts on the community.
The method of Tabligh
While the incident involving the 'un-Islamic' looking hafiz prompted Ilyas to discontinue with his makatib in Mewat, it is not clear what made him see the jama'ats of roving missionaries as the most appropriate means to spread awareness of Islam among the Meos. There seem to be four different accounts concerning this. One, which understandably finds particular favour with Muslim opponents of the TJ, has it that Ilyas simply devised his method of tabligh work on his own and then claimed that it was divinely inspired. A variant of this thesis is that, faced with the shuddhi onslaught of the Arya Samaj, Ilyas, after considerable thought, devised a means by which he could mobilise the Meos to struggle in the path of Islam while offering this to them as an incentive to work for their own salvation in the hereafter (Habib 1996:72). Tablighi sources, however, stress that the method of tabligh was not of Ilyas' own making and that it was actually inspired by God. According to one Tablighi account, Ilyas was so upset with the failure of his makatib that he considered migrating to the Hijaz for good and actually proceeded to Mecca for his second haj in 1925—26. Though he had planned to settle down in Arabia he actually stayed just five months there, before returning to India. Apparently, at the Mosque of the Prophet at Medina, where he spent three days in silent contemplation, he saw the Prophet Muhammad in a dream, who addressed him saying, 'Oh Ilyas! Go back to India where God shall take work from you.’
Overwhelmed with fear, Ilyas approached one Maulana Qutbuddin of Mecca to interpret this dream for him. In reply he was told, 'Do not fear. Do not do anything. God shall do all through you. You cannot do anything through your own mind or intellect.'
After this, Ilyas returned to Delhi in 1926, immersing himself in prayer, continuously pleading with God to tell him 'what work he would take from him'. Then, at last, it is said, 'Allah, through a dream, taught him the tariqa-i-tabligh [the method of preaching]' (Baliyavi n.d.:52-53).
Notable in this account is that the tariqa-i-tabligh is portrayed as being of divine inspiration, it being suggested that it was taught to Ilyas by God himself. Consequently, any critique of it, or of Ilyas' own project, could possibly be interpreted as questioning the divine will itself. Since it was claimed that God had appointed Ilyas 'to take work from him', any challenge to him and his movement, then, could be capable of being construed as a challenge to God and to His din. This claim to divine inspiration seems to have been a crucial factor in building up the image of Ilyas as a charismatic figure in direct communication with God, and over time, an increasing number of Meos began to see him as such. Thus, according to one Meo writer:
Irreligiousness had become so widespread that Allah in his mercy selected Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Sahib and illumined in him [munkashf armaye] the principles for the guidance of the people of this age. The name of this method of guidance is now famous as the Tablighi movement ... All its principles are divinely inspired [iske sare usul ilhami hain]. That is why it is necessary for Muslims of all classes to join in this work. It is, in fact, the demand of the hour (Ferozepuri n.d.c:4).
This author goes so far as to invest Ilyas' birth itself with great divine significance, as a major event in God's plans for the world. Thus, he announces:
Allah, the honourable cherisher, had selected Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, may the mercy of God be upon him, on the day of creation [roz-i-azl] itself for the reformation and guidance of the Muslim community of this age, and so, from the very beginning had put this soul in him (Ferozepuri n.d.c:38).
Contrary to the above account which attributes the tariqa-i-tabligh to divine guidance, the same writer suggests another account later on, according to which Ilyas may have learnt the method of preaching from the Meos themselves. Thus, he writes that one Hafiz Muhammad Ishaq of Ferozepur-Namak, son of Munshi Nur Bakhsh, a Meo disciple of Ilyas' elder brother Muhammad, had first formed a jama'at composed, among others, of Nambardar Mehrab Khan, Munshi Umrao Khan, Munshi Nur Ali, Hafiz Abdul Rahman, Miyanji Suleiman, Patwari Nasrullah, Chaudhri Namaz Khan and himself—all, with die exception of the last, inhabitants of Ferozepur-Namak. They would pray, cook and sleep together and would go in a group around Ferozepur-Namak calling people to the mosque to pray.
At the time when the Aryas were spearheading the shuddhi campaign among the Malkana Rajputs in neighbouring Bharatpur and Agra, the members of this jama'at approached Ilyas. They told him that his visits to Mewat, for the most part only of Ferozepur-Namak and only for one or two days, were far too short and that he needed to spend at least a week each time he came to Mewat if the shuddhi onslaught were to be effectively prevented from spreading to the region. Ilyas himself was greatly troubled at the prospect that, like their neighbours, the Malkanas, the Meos, too, might fall into the Arya trap, for they also were Muslim only in name. This thought is said to have so pained him that:
He completely lost his sleep. He would cry out in anguish and would beseech God for help. He did not know what to do because he had tried the conventional way [of attempting to spread awareness about Islam through setting up makatib], but that had been a complete failure (Ferozepuri n.d.c:13).
In reply to the request of the Meo jama'at, Ilyas is reported to have said that Ferozepur-Namak was an educated village that could take care of itself. At this the Meos said to him, 'Yes, we are doing some work here. We go about enrolling children in the madrasa and, through gasht, we bring people [to the mosque] for worship.'
Ilyas was apparently greatly intrigued when he heard the word gasht (tour) mentioned and he asked the Meos what they meant by it. They explained that it involved forming a group of five to seven persons that went from house to house inviting people to the mosque. On hearing this, Ilyas said that he would like to personally witness their gasht. When he saw for himself the way the jama'at performed gasht, he was very pleased but offered some suggestions for its improvement. Among these were the appointment of an amir to lead the groups and a mutakallim or speaker; doing gasht in villages other than Ferozepur-Namak alone; and, in the gasht, not restricting the content of the speech just to the importance of prayers but also teaching and stressing the importance of the kalima (Ferozepuri n.d.c:16). This is how, according to this account, the tariqa-i-tabligh of the TJ came to be developed.
According to the fourth account, the tariqa-i-tabligh was partly divinely inspired and partly fashioned by Ilyas himself. Thus, Rahim Bakhsh, a close Meo disciple of Ilyas, writes that when the Maulana returned from his second haj he went into solitary meditation in order to learn from God the method of 'doing his work'. At last, in a dream he was told that just as the first lesson that Muhammad had given to his people was to 'recite the kalima and attain felicity', he, too, should make the kalima his first principle. Ilyas then decided that his second principle should be ritual prayers, the 'emperor of worship' (sultan-i-'ibadat). Thereafter, he pondered over what aspect of Islam his own Deobandi elders had left untouched which he could take up—religious instruction was already being done at Deoband and Saharanpur; Ashraf Ali Thanawi had taken up the task of writing Islamic books; Sa'eed Ahmad was propagating Islam through his lectures; and Hussain Ahmad Madani was serving Islam in the field of politics. He found that besides the kalima and prayers, the other four of what were to become known as the 'six principles' were not being given the attention that they deserved by the 'ulama of his day and so decided to focus on them as well.
Having drawn up his scheme of tabligh based on the 'six principles', he began his work among the Meos. Later, his Meo followers pressed him for an instructional text about the principles of tabligh. Ilyas was apparently very reluctant to prescribe any such book, because, he argued, in the Prophet's day there were no printing presses and the companions had engaged in the tabligh of Islam simply by word of mouth. However, later bowing to the repeated requests of his followers, he instructed the commissioning of three texts—the first, a slim booklet, Musalmano ki Pasti ka Wahid Ilaj ('The Sole Remedy for the Plight of the Muslims') penned by his relative, Ehtisham-ul Hassan Kandhalawi; and the other two, the Faza'il-i-Tabligh and the Faza'il-i-Namaz, compiled by Muhammad Zakariyya. This is how, says Rahim Bakhsh (1995:62-63), the unique tariqa-i-tabligh of the TJ came to be developed.
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1. See E.H. Kandhalawi (1382 A.H.) for full details. A genealogical table of the family appears in Husn-i-Ikhlaq, September 1995, pp. 45-46.
2. This figure must be treated with caution. Apparently, over time almost all the tenants managed to register these houses in their names. Ismail, however, remained unconcerned because God, he said, would give him far more luxurious mansions in heaven instead (Baliyavi op. cit.:47).
3. This school had been set up by Munshi Nur Bakhsh and Ilyas later expanded it, giving it the name of Madrasa Khaliliya, after his teacher at Saharanpur (Ferozepuri n.d.a:53).
4. As for the quality of education that was imparted in these early makatib, the example of one of the first of them to be started, at the village of Rupdaka, is instructive. After laying the foundation stone of the maktab, Ilyas told the villagers to search for a teacher. They managed to find one Karim Bakhsh, a ploughman in the service of one Miyanji Amanullah. Karim Bakhsh knew just some odd parts of the Qur'an. Ilyas appointed him as the teacher of the maktab on a monthly salary of ten rupees (Bakhsh 1995:50).
5. Ilyas himself seems to have suggested this, as for instance, when he declared that,
“The manner and magnitude in which, participating in this movement one receives the agreement, the closeness and the help and blessings [of God] is not to be found in the case of other methods [of working for the cause of Islam]. This movement of da'wat and tabligh is really a great blessing from God. Not to respect it is a sure invitation to danger” (quoted in Hafizullah n.d.:22).
6. Ferozepuri (n.d.c:40) quotes Ilyas as having announced, with regard to the supposed divine origins of the tariqa-i-tabligh, that,
I have not made the principles [of tabligh] of my own accord. Rather, they have been bestowed upon me [by God], and I have been ordained to work according to them.
7. According to Ferozepuri, once one Qari Sayyed Raza Hussain asked Ilyas if he were the mujaddid (renewer) of the age. Ilyas replied that he was not the mujaddid but the Imam, and that he had tried to keep this fact concealed so that 'thete should be no dissension among the friends (auliya) of God' (quoted in Ferozepuri n.d.a:21).
8. Ferozepuri writes that it was this group of Meos, along with some others, who had approached Ilyas at Saharanpur to request him to take up the responsibility of the Nizamuddin madrasa (Ferozepuri n.d.a:ll).
9. According to one report, by May 1923, half of the Muslim population of the Bharatpur state had been converted to Hinduism (see Aligarh Gazette, 4 May 1923). The Pratap of 29 April 1923, reported that all the Malkanas of Bharatpur had undergone shuddhi and that Shraddhanand had announced that he was shortly going to resume shuddhi work among the nau-Muslims of Gurgaon. According to the Milap of 18 January 1924, the Bharatiya Shuddhi Mandal of Agra had, from February to December, done shuddhi work in some 50 villages in Gurgaon, 16 in Bharatpur and a few in Alwar. Mayaram writes that the Aryas had made sporadic efforts that the shuddhi of the Malkanas and the Meos of Bharatpur and Alwar before the Mapilla revolt, but it seems likely that organised attempts at this started only after mass shuddhi of the Malkanas began in 1923 (Mayaram 1997:64-65).
http://twocircles.net/2010apr16/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_2.html
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat— Part 1
By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,
This 6-part series of articles provides a detailed account of the historical origins and development of the Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat, focusing in particular on the social multiple roles that the movement has played in the region, which accounts, in large measure, for its deep-rooted popularity among the Meos. A sociological study of the development of Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat can provide interesting insights and parallels to understand the success and appeal of the movement in other contexts as well—Editor
The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is today the single largest Islamic movement in the world, in terms both of number of activists as well as geographical spread. No study of the history of the TJ would be complete without an account of the people among whom it first took root—the Meo peasants of Mewat, a culturally distinct region in northwestern India. Much of that which is unique to the TJ, particularly its method of tabligh or Islamic missionary work and its approach to and understanding of the process of Islamisation, seems to have been moulded largely by the social context of early twentieth-century Mewat. Mewat also provides an interesting case of shifting socio-political contexts within which the TJ has been able to establish strong roots in a local environment.
The genesis and early development of the TJ in Mewat is particularly worthy of attention. Mewat, which is seen in Tablighi circles as the movement's most successful 'experimental ground' (Ishaq 1972:4), poses a seemingly insoluble sociological paradox. The Meos had for centuries been only the most nominal Muslims as the 'ulama saw them. After three decades of Tablighi efforts among them they appear, at least in the literature, to have transformed themselves into such committed Muslims that many leading 'ulama went so far as to exclaim that they had undergone a veritable 'revolution' (Falahi 1996:301). This chapter will address this apparent paradox by tracing the origins and development of the TJ in Mewat in terms of the many social roles that it came to play in the lives of the Meos in the context of major social changes that Mewat has had to contend with starting from the last years of the nineteenth century.
Background
Extending southwards from the township of Sohna, some 65 kilometres south-west of Delhi, and covering large parts of the districts of Gurgaon and Faridabad in the present-day Indian state of Haryana and the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan, is the region of Mewat, the land of a peasant caste known as the Meos. The Meos are Muslims who have retained many of their earlier cultural and religious traditions.1 It was estimated in 1983 that they numbered around 800,000, of whom a quarter resided in present-day Pakistan and the rest in India (Shams 1983:17).2
Many Meos claim high-caste Hindu Rajput or warrior descent, and while it may well be the case that some of them are indeed of Rajput stock, it seems likely that the majority are descendants of 'low'-caste converts who, either prior to or alongside their gradual Islamisation, laid claim to Rajput ancestry to enhance their social standing (Harris 1901:23; Channing 1882:28). Evidence for this is provided by the names of many gots or exogamous lineages which the Meos have in common with such lower status Hindu castes as the Minas, the Jats and the Gujjars who live in their vicinity. It thus seems likely that, 'the Meos belonged to many different castes and not just to the Rajputs' (Aggarwal 1978:338).
Little can be said with confidence as to how Islam managed to take root in Mewat.3 Living in the vicinity of Delhi, the Meos were, from at least the twelfth century onwards, in constant conflict with the Muslim monarchs of the imperial capital (Sikand 1993:10). Ravaged by regular drought and famine, bands of Meos would often swarm into Delhi for loot and plunder, provoking violent reprisals from the Delhi Sultans. Formal acceptance of Islam often followed military defeat at the hands of the imperial army. With Mewat coming under the control of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, various Sufi orders entered the region, as a result of which, over the centuries, the Meos seem to have undergone a process of gradual, though very partial, Islamisation, in the course of which they adopted several practices associated with Islam, while retaining many of their local religious and cultural traditions. From time to time, 'ulama and Sufis attempted to do away with some of what they saw as their more glaring Hindu practices (Mewati n.d.). In the second half of the nineteenth century these included numerous 'ulama of the Waliullahi tradition (Shakur 1974:381-84).4 They were, however, unable to reach beyond a narrow circle of followers. The time was not yet ripe, it seems, for the Meos to give up their popular religious traditions and to take to scripturalist, shari'at-centred Islam instead.
The Islamisation of the Meos through the agency of the Sufis and as a result of political exigencies was, as we have observed, partial and nominal. Thus, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Major Powlett, the settlement officer of Alwar state, remarked:
The Meos are now all Musalmans in name, but their village deities are the same as those of the Hindus and they keep several Hindu festivals. Thus, the holi is with the Meos a season of rough play and is considered as important a festival as Muharram,, Id and Shabibarat, and they likewise observe the Janam Ashtami, Dashera and Diwali. They often keep Brahmin priests to write the note (pili-chitthi) fixing the date of marriage. They call themselves by Hindu names, with the exception of Ram; and Sinh is a frequent affix, though not so common as Khan. On the Amawas, or monthly conjunction of the sun and moon, the Meos, in common with the Hindu Ahirs, Gujjars, etc. cease from labour; and when they make a well the first proceeding is to erect a platform to Bairuji or Hanuman. Meos, in their customs, are half Hindu. In their villages there are hardly any mosques [...] The Meo places of worship are similar to those of their Hindu neighbours, as for example, Panchpira, Bhaiya and Chahund. Chahund or Khera Deo is dedicated to Mahadevi to whom sacrifices are made (Polett 1878:38).
In their dress, too, the Meos were indistinguishable from the other peasant castes of Mewat. Meonis (Meo women) wore the Rajasthani skirt and blouse and heavy silver jewellery. Men wore the dhoti, and also put on various ornaments. Most Meo men grew the choti or tuft of hair as was the general Hindu custom.
As for the Meos' observance of the externals of Islam, it seems to have been restricted largely to male circumcision, nikah (the Islamic form of marriage) and the burial of the dead, though even these were recast in a Hindu mould (Aggarwal op. cit.:339). Most Meos knew but little about Islam. As Powlett observed, 'As regards their own religion [Islam] the Meos are very ignorant. Few know the kalima, and fewer still the regular prayers, the seasons of which they entirely neglect' (quoted in S.A. Haq 1972:105).
According to another observer, 'Reading of the Qur'an was less popular than reading the Hindu epics Ramayan and Mahabharat. Hindu shrines far outnumbered mosques in Mewat. Few Meos prayed in the Muslim manner, but most of them performed the puja—worship at the shrines of the Hindu gods and goddesses' (Aggarwal op. cit.:339).
The popular religious tradition of the Meos appears to have proved a rewarding strategy. As cultivators of most of the agricultural land in Mewat, the Meos were a local dominant caste, at least in terms of numbers. Retaining their local, non-Islamic customs and institutions, such as their got-pal system5 and the practice of untouchability towards the 'low'-castes, enabled them to maintain their claim to a dominant status in the local social hierarchy even after having undergone a degree of Islamisation. The non-Muslim artisan and service castes as well as the Brahmins thus carried on serving their Meo patrons in return for a share in the agricultural produce. As long as their economic and social life remained undisturbed, these client castes of the Meos were quite willing to overlook their ambiguous religious identity. The Meos therefore felt, says a Meo scholar, 'no pressing need to bend in either direction [Hindu or Muslim] because their position in Mewat was secure. None of the other caste groups in Mewat questioned the Meo dominance' (Shams op. cit.:35).
On the other hand, as the Meos were often in conflict with the Muslim rulers of Delhi, their popular religious tradition provided them with a sense of unity, an identity clearly opposed to that of their imperial foes. Interestingly, the local feudal elite in Mewat, the Khanzadas6, close allies of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, were considerably more Islamised than the Meos, keeping their women in strict pardah and observing other ashraf practices. Mewati history is replete with stories of wild bloodletting between the Khanzadas and the Meos, and it is, therefore, not surprising that until the early twentieth century, when Khanzada supremacy in Mewat began to erode rapidly, the Meos do not seem to have displayed much interest in emulating the religious culture associated with a class of people whom they viewed with great hostility.
The popular religious tradition of the Meos faced little internal challenge until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. At this time, developments brought about by wider social changes began to make themselves felt in the Mewati countryside. These were to have important consequences for Meo self-perception and religious identity. Rapid social change in Mewat in the early decades of the twentieth century resulted in what may be termed a pervasive social crisis. It was this that provided the context for the emergence of the TJ among the Meos.
Socio-economic profile
Although the Meos cultivated most of the land in Mewat, barring some chaudhris (local community leaders), there were very few large landowners among them, the vast majority being small owner-cultivators, most of whom were greatly impoverished (Gibson 1909:13). The productivity of the land was low and modern irrigation facilities were minimal.7 Consequently, Mewat had to face spells of severe drought at regular intervals, driving the Meos deep into debt at the hands of Jain and Hindu Bania moneylenders.8 Their dismal economic conditions in the early twentieth century, far from improving, actually seem to have fast deteriorated. As the annual administrative report of the government of the Punjab (1916) noted:
The condition of the Meos is rapidly becoming hopeless. They live so literally from hand to mouth, carelessly contracting debt for marriages, funerals and petty luxuries even in average years that when a year of drought comes they are thrown on the moneylender who can make with them what terms he likes (Rathee 1971a:43).
According to one source, the Banias would charge an exorbitant rate of 5 per cent per month on their loans to the poverty-stricken Meos, the equivalent of an astounding 60 per cent per annum (W. Khan 1988:34). Many Meos simply could not repay their loans, as a result of which much of their land began passing into Bania hands. By 1910, nearly 40 per cent of Meo land was under mortgage to the Banias (Rathee op. cit.:43). This increasing land alienation was a direct consequence of the new conception of land ownership that the British had introduced, in which land was now seen as a commodity and as private property, capable of being bought, sold and mortgaged. Meos could now pledge their lands, and not just their crops as before, to the Banias for credit. This is precisely what their rapidly growing impoverishment was forcing them to do.
As the Meos sank deeper into poverty, they increasingly saw the Banias as not only gaining from their plight but also as the very cause of it. Insofar as the Banias were looked upon as the local repositories of 'high'-caste Hinduism, increasing resentment against them gradually translated into a distancing from Hindu religious traditions, making the Meos more receptive to Islam. This was further facilitated by the fact that, despite the Meos' claim to Rajput status, the Banias actually looked down upon them and refused to take food cooked by them, deeming them to be a source of ritual pollution.9 In this changed situation, it was no longer the Mughals or other Muslim rulers who were seen as the threatening 'Other' against whom the Meos would seek to define themselves. Rather, this role was now increasingly taken over by 'high'-caste Hindus. The emphasis that the Meos, as participants in the TJ, were to lay on their Muslim identity was in large measure a strategy to solidify community boundaries by marking off 'insider' Meos from 'outsider' Hindus.
Social dislocations by themselves do not automatically generate mass movements. For a charismatic leader from outside a community to be able to mobilise people in such a situation, there must be at least a few socially significant individuals within the community who can understand, and are receptive to, his message and who can help transmit it to their own people in their own idiom. In the case of the TJ in Mewat, this was made possible by an expanding chain of Islamic madaris as well as by the network of primary schools that the British began setting up from the late nineteenth century onwards in the Meo territory under their rule. Urdu, the language in which a large number of Islamic texts were readily available, was the medium of instruction therein. This enabled a new generation of literate Meos to gain access to Islamic literature. By the early 1910s, there were enough Meo boys who had received a primary education to call for the setting up of a high school in the region. Mewat's first secondary school, named after its founder, Frank Lugard Brayne, the then deputy commissioner of Gurgaon, was founded at Nuh in 1923. In the years that followed, a number of students of this school went on to pursue higher studies at Muslim institutions such as the Jami'a Millia Islamia at Delhi and the Aligarh Muslim University. Thus, by the time the TJ was launched in Mewat, there were Meos who were in a position to identify culturally with the message of Muslim brotherhood. Some newly educated Meos were to play a significant role in relaying this message to the wider Meo community. Ilyas was himself to come to rely, among others, on such Meos who had received a modicum of education and held important posts in the village administrative hierarchy—such as nambardars, zaildars, munshis, chaudhris—as well as madrasa students in galvanising the TJ in the Mewati countryside. Most of these, however, had not obtained high secular education, but were largely the products of the new chain of Islamic schools that had begun to appear in the region by this time.
Education gradually brought in its wake an increasing redefinition of Meo identity, an awareness of their increasing marginalisation, and a growing familiarity with Islam. Thus, commenting on the ignorance of the Meos of even the kalima, a British administrator observed that, 'this, however, applies only to the Alwar territory; in British India the effect of the schools is to make them more observant of [Islamic] religious duties' (S.A. Haq 1972:105). The Hindu ruler of Alwar had declared Hindi, instead of Urdu, to be the language of instruction in the schools of his state. At that time Islamic literature in Hindi was almost totally non-existent, the' language being seen as specifically 'Hindu'. Thus, Meos in British territory were now exposed to Islamic influences to a considerably greater degree than their brethren in the Hindu-ruled states of Alwar and Bharatpur, and in the years that followed, the Gurgaon Meos were to take the lead in spreading the message of the TJ in the rest of Mewat.
Meo peasant rebellions
Developments in the Meo countryside towards the end of 1910s, then, all pointed to a growing agrarian crisis (for details, see, M.H. Siddiqui 1986:442-67). This, combined with the gradual emergence of a class of educated men who could articulate the grievances of the peasants, provided fertile ground for the outbreak of a series of peasant uprisings in Mewat in the 1932-34, in which successful efforts were made to link up specifically Meo economic demands with a wider pan-Indian Muslim agenda, facilitating, in the process, a greater identification with Islam on the part of the Meos. The rise of the TJ in Mewat cannot be properly understood without taking into account these uprisings which broke out immediately prior to the sudden spurt of Tablighi activities in the region in the early 1930s.
Hostility towards the Muslims in the ruling circles of Alwar and Bharatpur appeared intermittently in the nineteenth century interrupted by periods in which Muslims were allowed to play a significant role in administrative affairs. Hostility surfaced again in the early decades of the twentieth century, and this time with greater intensity (Mehta and Mehta 1985:399). The ruler of Alwar, Maharaja Jai Sigh (1892-1937), introduced several policies clearly aimed against his Muslim subjects. This went alongside a deliberate Hinduisation of the Alwar administration itself. The Maharaja began to flaunt his Hindu credentials in public and established personal ties with several top leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj, organisations whose extreme antipathy for the Muslims was well known.10 Soon after it had launched its shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas of the United Provinces, the Arya Samaj extended its missionary activities to Rajputana, attempting to convert back to Hinduism the local Muslim Rajputs, Jats, Gujjars and Meos, and in this is said to have received the official backing of the rulers of Bharatpur (Mayaram 1991:10-12).11
The marked Hinduisation of the Alwar administration and its consequently growing anti-Muslim orientation had less to do with religion than with the increasing challenge by the state's subjects, both Hindus and Muslims, to the Maharaja's heavy taxation of the peasantry and fiercely autocratic rule.12 By the mid-1920s, peasant revolts had broken out in several parts of the state. One of the most serious of these occurred in 1925, in which the Alwar forces gunned down scores of Hindu Rajputs in the village of Nimuchana protesting a sudden rise of 50 per cent in the land revenue. In these uprisings both the Meos as well as the Hindu peasantry were involved. Faced with such determined opposition to him, the Maharaja appears to have felt that a policy of cultivating a fiercely pro-Hindu image for himself would help create a homogeneous Hindu community and postpone the demand for democratisation.13 Targeting the Muslims as the menacing, threatening 'Other' and fanning the flames of Hindu-Muslim rivalry would help divert the attention of his largely Hindu subjects from the oppression they were undergoing under his rule.14
It was in this communally surcharged climate that in 1932-34 the Meos of Alwar rose up in violent revolt. It seems that it was the particularly harsh and oppressive conditions under which they were labouring that ignited the sparks of rebellion. Their plight is portrayed by a Meo historian thus:
The Meo tracts in Alwar and Bharatpur were victims of the extreme authoritarianism and ruthlessness of their rulers. Government servants would do nothing without extorting heavy bribes. The peasants were being grossly overburdened with ever increasing taxes. Like birds of prey, the guards of the forest department and the sepoys of the customs department would swoop down on the hapless peasants and rob them of the paltry income that they earned through shedding their sweat and blood. The rights of the people were being mercilessly trampled upon. The Mewatis were being treated like goats and sheep, as nothing better than mere dumb animals (Haye n.d.:10).
Having already subjected the peasants to a heavy tax burden, in 1932 the Maharaja of Alwar suddenly decided to raise the revenue levy four-fold. This proved to be the last straw for the peasants, and they decided to stop paying their taxes. Soon after, the All-India Meo Panchayat, a group of Meo leaders headed by Yasin Khan (1896-1970),15 a lawyer-turned-politician, began galvanising support for the uprising, seeking to turn it into a broader struggle for the establishment of democratic rule in the state. As the rebellion gained in radicalism and strength and spread over much of Mewat, spilling across even into British tetritory, where the Meos now refused to repay their loans to the Banias, the Maharaja of Alwar decided to crush it with all the force he could command. Thus, in January 1933, when thousands of Meos had gathered at the village of Govindgarh for a demonstration, the Raja's soldiers indiscriminately opened fire, as a result of which scores lost their lives. Mewat was now in flames. Martial law was clamped in the four Meo-dominated nizamats of Ramgarh, Lacchmangarh, Kishangarh and Tijara, and reports started flooding in of widespread clashes between Hindus and Meos. Meos are reported to have attacked Bania-owned shops at many places and to have forcibly collected subscriptions from them. The violence, rooted in the economic grievances of the Meos against the Banias and the Alwar state, rapidly took on an overtly religious hue. Hindu temples were attacked and the panic-stricken Hindus, egged on by the Hindu Mahasabha, issued an urgent appeal to the Raja, 'the descendant of Raghu' (the Hindu god-king Rama), to rush to their rescue, to defend them from the Meo 'rakshasas' (demons).16 The writ of the Alwar state seems, in fact, to have ceased to run in the Meo-dominated nizamats, where the Meos managed to establish their own effective control.17
Some weeks later the situation in northern Alwar had turned so serious that the government of India was forced to intervene. British soldiers entered Alwar in January 1933 and in May the government of India forced the Maharaja to abdicate and go abroad into exile. The administration of the affairs of state was entrusted to a British officer, many of the demands of the peasants were conceded and normalcy was gradually restored.
In the course of the revolt the Meos came to establish strong ties with several Muslim leaders and organisations from outside Mewat for the first time, and it was this newly established bond with the wider Indian Muslim community that latter eased the entry of Islamic ideas among them through the missionary efforts of the TJ. It was from these outside Muslim leaders and organisations, besides some local activists, that the Meos sought leadership for their movement against the Maharaja and a means to bring their plight to the notice of the Indian public and the British authorities. Among the Muslim organisations that came to the rescue of the Meos in their uprising were the All-India Alwar Conference, the Anjuman-i-Ahrar of Bombay and Delhi, the Jami'at-ul 'Ulama-i-Islam of Budaun, and the Rajputana Muslim League, Ajmer. Several Muslim Urdu newspapers of Delhi and Lahore, too, took up and championed the Meo cause (Mayaram 1991:40-41). Significantly, the Meos received almost no Hindu support. It was only the Muslims who came to their rescue at this time of crisis.
Although these external Muslim organisations and leaders were not responsible for creating the Meo rebellion themselves, it was through their networks that, 'Meo demands received an immediate publicity' (Mayaram 1991:40). Linkages were established with the larger Muslim community of north India only after the movement had already started, and so it would be misleading to suggest that it owed itself to external Muslim instigation. Significantly, it was also only after the rebellion had taken off that the activities of the TJ really began to spread in the Mewati countryside. Moreover, at this time, the preaching teams of the TJ were by and large active only in British Mewat and had little presence in either Alwar or Bharatpur (Mayaram 1997:35). It would appear, then, that the sudden growth of the TJ in Mewat at around this time was a fallout of the agrarian crisis and the oppression which followed rather than a cause of this crisis.18 The Islamisation of the Meos through the TJ, Mayaram remarks, 'does not precede agrarian unrest as much as it is the consequence of agrarian tension and state policy'. This process cannot, then, be understood 'merely as [the introduction of] an external religious ideology', unrelated to the social conditions prevailing in Mewat at that time (Mayaram 1991:8).
Mayaram contends that the labelling of the Meo peasant uprising by the Alwar state and by Hindu organisations as an Islamic revolt was probably intended to rob it of legitimacy, to divide the peasantry on religious lines and, thereby, to divert the wrath of the Hindu peasantry away from the Maharaja's unpopular rule and towards the Meos instead. This policy, however, had the unintended consequence of making the Meos more fiercely conscious of their Muslim identity, which was now being reinforced by the state itself. The same happened in neighbouring Bharatpur, where, in 1933, the Meos rose up in revolt against the repressive measures taken by the Jat ruler, Kishan Singh.
It was thus this combination of agrarian crisis, the growth of a newly educated class among the Meos, the peasant rebellions in Alwar and Bharatpur and their brutal suppression, and the fraternal links that were now established with outside Muslim groups that provided the ideal conditions for a movement such as the TJ to emerge in Mewat at this time.
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1.'The Meos', writes a leading Tablighi ideologue, 'were even unaware of the appearance of namaz' itself. If perchance, a Muslim entered their territory and read namaz there, they would all gather together in amazement and wonder what he was up to, thinking that he might have a pain in the stomach or that he had lost complete control over his senses, because of which he was repeatedly standing up and sitting down (Numani 1989:21).
2. For details of the Meo population distribution within India, see Hashim Amir Ali (1970:6-16).
3. For some interesting insights, see Marwah (1979:85
4. Some Meos regularly attended Shah Ismail's lectures in Delhi and attempted to spread his message in their own villages (A.R. Nadwi and M.A. Khan n.d.:63-64).
5. Gots are lineages while pals are generally territorially-based groups of one or more gots. The Meos have 52 gots and 12 pals, along with a minor pal, called pallakra.
6. For more on the Khanzadas, see Makhdum (1989: 2-3).
7. For a general overview of agrarian conditions in Mewat, see Brayne (1927).
8. This process, a consequence of the imposition of British rule, seems to have occurred not just in Mewat, but in the Punjab more generally as well (Thorburn 1983).
9. Orthodox 'high'-caste Hindus throughout India considered Muslims ritually polluting. Chaudhri Afzal Haq devotes his entire Pakistan and Untouchability (1941) to this little-understood issue. In this book, he traces the demand for Pakistan to this practice.
10. For Jai Singh's increasing public identification with Brahminical Hinduism, see Joshi (1939:79-95).
11. This conversion drive of the Arya Samaj is said to have goaded some Muslim groups into action to protect their flock. Thus, Mayaram (ibid.:13) quotes a British administrator as saying, 'When 1 met Dr Ziauddin and other Muslim leaders in March, 1933, they frankly confessed to me the fear of a revival of the shuddhi movement drove them to seek to organise the Meos and turn them into better Mahommedans'.
12. The Raja was said to have been excessively devoted to wine and women, among other luxuries. The celebrations of the silver jubilee of his reign in 1929 consumed the entire annual revenue of the state, estimated at around Rs 3,000,000 (Mayaram 1997:55-61).
13. It is interesting to note in this regard that, according to one source, the Maharaja began adopting an increasingly pro-Hindu stance after 1929, when the silver jubilee of his coronation was celebrated with much fanfare Great stress was laid during the celebrations on the public display of his newfound commitment to Brahminical Hinduism. Through this, apparently, ‘the Maharaja wanted to wash away the bad name that he had earned for himself as a result of the Nimuchana massacre’ (Gahlot 1966: 285-86).
14. For more details on the Maharaja’s growing unpopularity among his Hindu subjects, see K.S. Saxena (n.d.: 188-89).
15. The Brayne Meo High School, Nuh, Mewat’s first high school that Yasin Khan had been instrumental in setting up, emerged as the centre from which the Alwar revolt was directed. Interestingly, Maulana Ilyas, founder of the TJ, and some of his followers reportedly fiercely opposed the school, warning the Meos of the ‘evil influence’ of what they called a ‘satanic institution’ (M.H.Siddiqui, 1986: 449-50).
16. Letter from G.D. Oglive, agent of the Governor-General in Rajputana to Sir Charles Watson, Political Secretary to the Government of India, 4 January 1933, in L/P&S/13/1377 Political [Internal] Department Collection, D.O. No.15-P, India Office Records, London, p.174.
17. Letter from G.D. Oglive to Charles Watson, 13 December, 1932, ibid., p.1.
18. Interestingly, the TJ later came to be seen as instrumental in controlling, rather than instigating, Meo ‘lawlessness’ and ‘rebelliousness’ against state authorities both by the British as well as by the Alwar and Bharatpur states (Maududi, quoted in Vellori, n.d.: 59).
http://twocircles.net/2010apr13/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_1.html
This 6-part series of articles provides a detailed account of the historical origins and development of the Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat, focusing in particular on the social multiple roles that the movement has played in the region, which accounts, in large measure, for its deep-rooted popularity among the Meos. A sociological study of the development of Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat can provide interesting insights and parallels to understand the success and appeal of the movement in other contexts as well—Editor
The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is today the single largest Islamic movement in the world, in terms both of number of activists as well as geographical spread. No study of the history of the TJ would be complete without an account of the people among whom it first took root—the Meo peasants of Mewat, a culturally distinct region in northwestern India. Much of that which is unique to the TJ, particularly its method of tabligh or Islamic missionary work and its approach to and understanding of the process of Islamisation, seems to have been moulded largely by the social context of early twentieth-century Mewat. Mewat also provides an interesting case of shifting socio-political contexts within which the TJ has been able to establish strong roots in a local environment.
The genesis and early development of the TJ in Mewat is particularly worthy of attention. Mewat, which is seen in Tablighi circles as the movement's most successful 'experimental ground' (Ishaq 1972:4), poses a seemingly insoluble sociological paradox. The Meos had for centuries been only the most nominal Muslims as the 'ulama saw them. After three decades of Tablighi efforts among them they appear, at least in the literature, to have transformed themselves into such committed Muslims that many leading 'ulama went so far as to exclaim that they had undergone a veritable 'revolution' (Falahi 1996:301). This chapter will address this apparent paradox by tracing the origins and development of the TJ in Mewat in terms of the many social roles that it came to play in the lives of the Meos in the context of major social changes that Mewat has had to contend with starting from the last years of the nineteenth century.
Background
Extending southwards from the township of Sohna, some 65 kilometres south-west of Delhi, and covering large parts of the districts of Gurgaon and Faridabad in the present-day Indian state of Haryana and the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan, is the region of Mewat, the land of a peasant caste known as the Meos. The Meos are Muslims who have retained many of their earlier cultural and religious traditions.1 It was estimated in 1983 that they numbered around 800,000, of whom a quarter resided in present-day Pakistan and the rest in India (Shams 1983:17).2
Many Meos claim high-caste Hindu Rajput or warrior descent, and while it may well be the case that some of them are indeed of Rajput stock, it seems likely that the majority are descendants of 'low'-caste converts who, either prior to or alongside their gradual Islamisation, laid claim to Rajput ancestry to enhance their social standing (Harris 1901:23; Channing 1882:28). Evidence for this is provided by the names of many gots or exogamous lineages which the Meos have in common with such lower status Hindu castes as the Minas, the Jats and the Gujjars who live in their vicinity. It thus seems likely that, 'the Meos belonged to many different castes and not just to the Rajputs' (Aggarwal 1978:338).
Little can be said with confidence as to how Islam managed to take root in Mewat.3 Living in the vicinity of Delhi, the Meos were, from at least the twelfth century onwards, in constant conflict with the Muslim monarchs of the imperial capital (Sikand 1993:10). Ravaged by regular drought and famine, bands of Meos would often swarm into Delhi for loot and plunder, provoking violent reprisals from the Delhi Sultans. Formal acceptance of Islam often followed military defeat at the hands of the imperial army. With Mewat coming under the control of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, various Sufi orders entered the region, as a result of which, over the centuries, the Meos seem to have undergone a process of gradual, though very partial, Islamisation, in the course of which they adopted several practices associated with Islam, while retaining many of their local religious and cultural traditions. From time to time, 'ulama and Sufis attempted to do away with some of what they saw as their more glaring Hindu practices (Mewati n.d.). In the second half of the nineteenth century these included numerous 'ulama of the Waliullahi tradition (Shakur 1974:381-84).4 They were, however, unable to reach beyond a narrow circle of followers. The time was not yet ripe, it seems, for the Meos to give up their popular religious traditions and to take to scripturalist, shari'at-centred Islam instead.
The Islamisation of the Meos through the agency of the Sufis and as a result of political exigencies was, as we have observed, partial and nominal. Thus, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Major Powlett, the settlement officer of Alwar state, remarked:
The Meos are now all Musalmans in name, but their village deities are the same as those of the Hindus and they keep several Hindu festivals. Thus, the holi is with the Meos a season of rough play and is considered as important a festival as Muharram,, Id and Shabibarat, and they likewise observe the Janam Ashtami, Dashera and Diwali. They often keep Brahmin priests to write the note (pili-chitthi) fixing the date of marriage. They call themselves by Hindu names, with the exception of Ram; and Sinh is a frequent affix, though not so common as Khan. On the Amawas, or monthly conjunction of the sun and moon, the Meos, in common with the Hindu Ahirs, Gujjars, etc. cease from labour; and when they make a well the first proceeding is to erect a platform to Bairuji or Hanuman. Meos, in their customs, are half Hindu. In their villages there are hardly any mosques [...] The Meo places of worship are similar to those of their Hindu neighbours, as for example, Panchpira, Bhaiya and Chahund. Chahund or Khera Deo is dedicated to Mahadevi to whom sacrifices are made (Polett 1878:38).
In their dress, too, the Meos were indistinguishable from the other peasant castes of Mewat. Meonis (Meo women) wore the Rajasthani skirt and blouse and heavy silver jewellery. Men wore the dhoti, and also put on various ornaments. Most Meo men grew the choti or tuft of hair as was the general Hindu custom.
As for the Meos' observance of the externals of Islam, it seems to have been restricted largely to male circumcision, nikah (the Islamic form of marriage) and the burial of the dead, though even these were recast in a Hindu mould (Aggarwal op. cit.:339). Most Meos knew but little about Islam. As Powlett observed, 'As regards their own religion [Islam] the Meos are very ignorant. Few know the kalima, and fewer still the regular prayers, the seasons of which they entirely neglect' (quoted in S.A. Haq 1972:105).
According to another observer, 'Reading of the Qur'an was less popular than reading the Hindu epics Ramayan and Mahabharat. Hindu shrines far outnumbered mosques in Mewat. Few Meos prayed in the Muslim manner, but most of them performed the puja—worship at the shrines of the Hindu gods and goddesses' (Aggarwal op. cit.:339).
The popular religious tradition of the Meos appears to have proved a rewarding strategy. As cultivators of most of the agricultural land in Mewat, the Meos were a local dominant caste, at least in terms of numbers. Retaining their local, non-Islamic customs and institutions, such as their got-pal system5 and the practice of untouchability towards the 'low'-castes, enabled them to maintain their claim to a dominant status in the local social hierarchy even after having undergone a degree of Islamisation. The non-Muslim artisan and service castes as well as the Brahmins thus carried on serving their Meo patrons in return for a share in the agricultural produce. As long as their economic and social life remained undisturbed, these client castes of the Meos were quite willing to overlook their ambiguous religious identity. The Meos therefore felt, says a Meo scholar, 'no pressing need to bend in either direction [Hindu or Muslim] because their position in Mewat was secure. None of the other caste groups in Mewat questioned the Meo dominance' (Shams op. cit.:35).
On the other hand, as the Meos were often in conflict with the Muslim rulers of Delhi, their popular religious tradition provided them with a sense of unity, an identity clearly opposed to that of their imperial foes. Interestingly, the local feudal elite in Mewat, the Khanzadas6, close allies of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, were considerably more Islamised than the Meos, keeping their women in strict pardah and observing other ashraf practices. Mewati history is replete with stories of wild bloodletting between the Khanzadas and the Meos, and it is, therefore, not surprising that until the early twentieth century, when Khanzada supremacy in Mewat began to erode rapidly, the Meos do not seem to have displayed much interest in emulating the religious culture associated with a class of people whom they viewed with great hostility.
The popular religious tradition of the Meos faced little internal challenge until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. At this time, developments brought about by wider social changes began to make themselves felt in the Mewati countryside. These were to have important consequences for Meo self-perception and religious identity. Rapid social change in Mewat in the early decades of the twentieth century resulted in what may be termed a pervasive social crisis. It was this that provided the context for the emergence of the TJ among the Meos.
Socio-economic profile
Although the Meos cultivated most of the land in Mewat, barring some chaudhris (local community leaders), there were very few large landowners among them, the vast majority being small owner-cultivators, most of whom were greatly impoverished (Gibson 1909:13). The productivity of the land was low and modern irrigation facilities were minimal.7 Consequently, Mewat had to face spells of severe drought at regular intervals, driving the Meos deep into debt at the hands of Jain and Hindu Bania moneylenders.8 Their dismal economic conditions in the early twentieth century, far from improving, actually seem to have fast deteriorated. As the annual administrative report of the government of the Punjab (1916) noted:
The condition of the Meos is rapidly becoming hopeless. They live so literally from hand to mouth, carelessly contracting debt for marriages, funerals and petty luxuries even in average years that when a year of drought comes they are thrown on the moneylender who can make with them what terms he likes (Rathee 1971a:43).
According to one source, the Banias would charge an exorbitant rate of 5 per cent per month on their loans to the poverty-stricken Meos, the equivalent of an astounding 60 per cent per annum (W. Khan 1988:34). Many Meos simply could not repay their loans, as a result of which much of their land began passing into Bania hands. By 1910, nearly 40 per cent of Meo land was under mortgage to the Banias (Rathee op. cit.:43). This increasing land alienation was a direct consequence of the new conception of land ownership that the British had introduced, in which land was now seen as a commodity and as private property, capable of being bought, sold and mortgaged. Meos could now pledge their lands, and not just their crops as before, to the Banias for credit. This is precisely what their rapidly growing impoverishment was forcing them to do.
As the Meos sank deeper into poverty, they increasingly saw the Banias as not only gaining from their plight but also as the very cause of it. Insofar as the Banias were looked upon as the local repositories of 'high'-caste Hinduism, increasing resentment against them gradually translated into a distancing from Hindu religious traditions, making the Meos more receptive to Islam. This was further facilitated by the fact that, despite the Meos' claim to Rajput status, the Banias actually looked down upon them and refused to take food cooked by them, deeming them to be a source of ritual pollution.9 In this changed situation, it was no longer the Mughals or other Muslim rulers who were seen as the threatening 'Other' against whom the Meos would seek to define themselves. Rather, this role was now increasingly taken over by 'high'-caste Hindus. The emphasis that the Meos, as participants in the TJ, were to lay on their Muslim identity was in large measure a strategy to solidify community boundaries by marking off 'insider' Meos from 'outsider' Hindus.
Social dislocations by themselves do not automatically generate mass movements. For a charismatic leader from outside a community to be able to mobilise people in such a situation, there must be at least a few socially significant individuals within the community who can understand, and are receptive to, his message and who can help transmit it to their own people in their own idiom. In the case of the TJ in Mewat, this was made possible by an expanding chain of Islamic madaris as well as by the network of primary schools that the British began setting up from the late nineteenth century onwards in the Meo territory under their rule. Urdu, the language in which a large number of Islamic texts were readily available, was the medium of instruction therein. This enabled a new generation of literate Meos to gain access to Islamic literature. By the early 1910s, there were enough Meo boys who had received a primary education to call for the setting up of a high school in the region. Mewat's first secondary school, named after its founder, Frank Lugard Brayne, the then deputy commissioner of Gurgaon, was founded at Nuh in 1923. In the years that followed, a number of students of this school went on to pursue higher studies at Muslim institutions such as the Jami'a Millia Islamia at Delhi and the Aligarh Muslim University. Thus, by the time the TJ was launched in Mewat, there were Meos who were in a position to identify culturally with the message of Muslim brotherhood. Some newly educated Meos were to play a significant role in relaying this message to the wider Meo community. Ilyas was himself to come to rely, among others, on such Meos who had received a modicum of education and held important posts in the village administrative hierarchy—such as nambardars, zaildars, munshis, chaudhris—as well as madrasa students in galvanising the TJ in the Mewati countryside. Most of these, however, had not obtained high secular education, but were largely the products of the new chain of Islamic schools that had begun to appear in the region by this time.
Education gradually brought in its wake an increasing redefinition of Meo identity, an awareness of their increasing marginalisation, and a growing familiarity with Islam. Thus, commenting on the ignorance of the Meos of even the kalima, a British administrator observed that, 'this, however, applies only to the Alwar territory; in British India the effect of the schools is to make them more observant of [Islamic] religious duties' (S.A. Haq 1972:105). The Hindu ruler of Alwar had declared Hindi, instead of Urdu, to be the language of instruction in the schools of his state. At that time Islamic literature in Hindi was almost totally non-existent, the' language being seen as specifically 'Hindu'. Thus, Meos in British territory were now exposed to Islamic influences to a considerably greater degree than their brethren in the Hindu-ruled states of Alwar and Bharatpur, and in the years that followed, the Gurgaon Meos were to take the lead in spreading the message of the TJ in the rest of Mewat.
Meo peasant rebellions
Developments in the Meo countryside towards the end of 1910s, then, all pointed to a growing agrarian crisis (for details, see, M.H. Siddiqui 1986:442-67). This, combined with the gradual emergence of a class of educated men who could articulate the grievances of the peasants, provided fertile ground for the outbreak of a series of peasant uprisings in Mewat in the 1932-34, in which successful efforts were made to link up specifically Meo economic demands with a wider pan-Indian Muslim agenda, facilitating, in the process, a greater identification with Islam on the part of the Meos. The rise of the TJ in Mewat cannot be properly understood without taking into account these uprisings which broke out immediately prior to the sudden spurt of Tablighi activities in the region in the early 1930s.
Hostility towards the Muslims in the ruling circles of Alwar and Bharatpur appeared intermittently in the nineteenth century interrupted by periods in which Muslims were allowed to play a significant role in administrative affairs. Hostility surfaced again in the early decades of the twentieth century, and this time with greater intensity (Mehta and Mehta 1985:399). The ruler of Alwar, Maharaja Jai Sigh (1892-1937), introduced several policies clearly aimed against his Muslim subjects. This went alongside a deliberate Hinduisation of the Alwar administration itself. The Maharaja began to flaunt his Hindu credentials in public and established personal ties with several top leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj, organisations whose extreme antipathy for the Muslims was well known.10 Soon after it had launched its shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas of the United Provinces, the Arya Samaj extended its missionary activities to Rajputana, attempting to convert back to Hinduism the local Muslim Rajputs, Jats, Gujjars and Meos, and in this is said to have received the official backing of the rulers of Bharatpur (Mayaram 1991:10-12).11
The marked Hinduisation of the Alwar administration and its consequently growing anti-Muslim orientation had less to do with religion than with the increasing challenge by the state's subjects, both Hindus and Muslims, to the Maharaja's heavy taxation of the peasantry and fiercely autocratic rule.12 By the mid-1920s, peasant revolts had broken out in several parts of the state. One of the most serious of these occurred in 1925, in which the Alwar forces gunned down scores of Hindu Rajputs in the village of Nimuchana protesting a sudden rise of 50 per cent in the land revenue. In these uprisings both the Meos as well as the Hindu peasantry were involved. Faced with such determined opposition to him, the Maharaja appears to have felt that a policy of cultivating a fiercely pro-Hindu image for himself would help create a homogeneous Hindu community and postpone the demand for democratisation.13 Targeting the Muslims as the menacing, threatening 'Other' and fanning the flames of Hindu-Muslim rivalry would help divert the attention of his largely Hindu subjects from the oppression they were undergoing under his rule.14
It was in this communally surcharged climate that in 1932-34 the Meos of Alwar rose up in violent revolt. It seems that it was the particularly harsh and oppressive conditions under which they were labouring that ignited the sparks of rebellion. Their plight is portrayed by a Meo historian thus:
The Meo tracts in Alwar and Bharatpur were victims of the extreme authoritarianism and ruthlessness of their rulers. Government servants would do nothing without extorting heavy bribes. The peasants were being grossly overburdened with ever increasing taxes. Like birds of prey, the guards of the forest department and the sepoys of the customs department would swoop down on the hapless peasants and rob them of the paltry income that they earned through shedding their sweat and blood. The rights of the people were being mercilessly trampled upon. The Mewatis were being treated like goats and sheep, as nothing better than mere dumb animals (Haye n.d.:10).
Having already subjected the peasants to a heavy tax burden, in 1932 the Maharaja of Alwar suddenly decided to raise the revenue levy four-fold. This proved to be the last straw for the peasants, and they decided to stop paying their taxes. Soon after, the All-India Meo Panchayat, a group of Meo leaders headed by Yasin Khan (1896-1970),15 a lawyer-turned-politician, began galvanising support for the uprising, seeking to turn it into a broader struggle for the establishment of democratic rule in the state. As the rebellion gained in radicalism and strength and spread over much of Mewat, spilling across even into British tetritory, where the Meos now refused to repay their loans to the Banias, the Maharaja of Alwar decided to crush it with all the force he could command. Thus, in January 1933, when thousands of Meos had gathered at the village of Govindgarh for a demonstration, the Raja's soldiers indiscriminately opened fire, as a result of which scores lost their lives. Mewat was now in flames. Martial law was clamped in the four Meo-dominated nizamats of Ramgarh, Lacchmangarh, Kishangarh and Tijara, and reports started flooding in of widespread clashes between Hindus and Meos. Meos are reported to have attacked Bania-owned shops at many places and to have forcibly collected subscriptions from them. The violence, rooted in the economic grievances of the Meos against the Banias and the Alwar state, rapidly took on an overtly religious hue. Hindu temples were attacked and the panic-stricken Hindus, egged on by the Hindu Mahasabha, issued an urgent appeal to the Raja, 'the descendant of Raghu' (the Hindu god-king Rama), to rush to their rescue, to defend them from the Meo 'rakshasas' (demons).16 The writ of the Alwar state seems, in fact, to have ceased to run in the Meo-dominated nizamats, where the Meos managed to establish their own effective control.17
Some weeks later the situation in northern Alwar had turned so serious that the government of India was forced to intervene. British soldiers entered Alwar in January 1933 and in May the government of India forced the Maharaja to abdicate and go abroad into exile. The administration of the affairs of state was entrusted to a British officer, many of the demands of the peasants were conceded and normalcy was gradually restored.
In the course of the revolt the Meos came to establish strong ties with several Muslim leaders and organisations from outside Mewat for the first time, and it was this newly established bond with the wider Indian Muslim community that latter eased the entry of Islamic ideas among them through the missionary efforts of the TJ. It was from these outside Muslim leaders and organisations, besides some local activists, that the Meos sought leadership for their movement against the Maharaja and a means to bring their plight to the notice of the Indian public and the British authorities. Among the Muslim organisations that came to the rescue of the Meos in their uprising were the All-India Alwar Conference, the Anjuman-i-Ahrar of Bombay and Delhi, the Jami'at-ul 'Ulama-i-Islam of Budaun, and the Rajputana Muslim League, Ajmer. Several Muslim Urdu newspapers of Delhi and Lahore, too, took up and championed the Meo cause (Mayaram 1991:40-41). Significantly, the Meos received almost no Hindu support. It was only the Muslims who came to their rescue at this time of crisis.
Although these external Muslim organisations and leaders were not responsible for creating the Meo rebellion themselves, it was through their networks that, 'Meo demands received an immediate publicity' (Mayaram 1991:40). Linkages were established with the larger Muslim community of north India only after the movement had already started, and so it would be misleading to suggest that it owed itself to external Muslim instigation. Significantly, it was also only after the rebellion had taken off that the activities of the TJ really began to spread in the Mewati countryside. Moreover, at this time, the preaching teams of the TJ were by and large active only in British Mewat and had little presence in either Alwar or Bharatpur (Mayaram 1997:35). It would appear, then, that the sudden growth of the TJ in Mewat at around this time was a fallout of the agrarian crisis and the oppression which followed rather than a cause of this crisis.18 The Islamisation of the Meos through the TJ, Mayaram remarks, 'does not precede agrarian unrest as much as it is the consequence of agrarian tension and state policy'. This process cannot, then, be understood 'merely as [the introduction of] an external religious ideology', unrelated to the social conditions prevailing in Mewat at that time (Mayaram 1991:8).
Mayaram contends that the labelling of the Meo peasant uprising by the Alwar state and by Hindu organisations as an Islamic revolt was probably intended to rob it of legitimacy, to divide the peasantry on religious lines and, thereby, to divert the wrath of the Hindu peasantry away from the Maharaja's unpopular rule and towards the Meos instead. This policy, however, had the unintended consequence of making the Meos more fiercely conscious of their Muslim identity, which was now being reinforced by the state itself. The same happened in neighbouring Bharatpur, where, in 1933, the Meos rose up in revolt against the repressive measures taken by the Jat ruler, Kishan Singh.
It was thus this combination of agrarian crisis, the growth of a newly educated class among the Meos, the peasant rebellions in Alwar and Bharatpur and their brutal suppression, and the fraternal links that were now established with outside Muslim groups that provided the ideal conditions for a movement such as the TJ to emerge in Mewat at this time.
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1.'The Meos', writes a leading Tablighi ideologue, 'were even unaware of the appearance of namaz' itself. If perchance, a Muslim entered their territory and read namaz there, they would all gather together in amazement and wonder what he was up to, thinking that he might have a pain in the stomach or that he had lost complete control over his senses, because of which he was repeatedly standing up and sitting down (Numani 1989:21).
2. For details of the Meo population distribution within India, see Hashim Amir Ali (1970:6-16).
3. For some interesting insights, see Marwah (1979:85
4. Some Meos regularly attended Shah Ismail's lectures in Delhi and attempted to spread his message in their own villages (A.R. Nadwi and M.A. Khan n.d.:63-64).
5. Gots are lineages while pals are generally territorially-based groups of one or more gots. The Meos have 52 gots and 12 pals, along with a minor pal, called pallakra.
6. For more on the Khanzadas, see Makhdum (1989: 2-3).
7. For a general overview of agrarian conditions in Mewat, see Brayne (1927).
8. This process, a consequence of the imposition of British rule, seems to have occurred not just in Mewat, but in the Punjab more generally as well (Thorburn 1983).
9. Orthodox 'high'-caste Hindus throughout India considered Muslims ritually polluting. Chaudhri Afzal Haq devotes his entire Pakistan and Untouchability (1941) to this little-understood issue. In this book, he traces the demand for Pakistan to this practice.
10. For Jai Singh's increasing public identification with Brahminical Hinduism, see Joshi (1939:79-95).
11. This conversion drive of the Arya Samaj is said to have goaded some Muslim groups into action to protect their flock. Thus, Mayaram (ibid.:13) quotes a British administrator as saying, 'When 1 met Dr Ziauddin and other Muslim leaders in March, 1933, they frankly confessed to me the fear of a revival of the shuddhi movement drove them to seek to organise the Meos and turn them into better Mahommedans'.
12. The Raja was said to have been excessively devoted to wine and women, among other luxuries. The celebrations of the silver jubilee of his reign in 1929 consumed the entire annual revenue of the state, estimated at around Rs 3,000,000 (Mayaram 1997:55-61).
13. It is interesting to note in this regard that, according to one source, the Maharaja began adopting an increasingly pro-Hindu stance after 1929, when the silver jubilee of his coronation was celebrated with much fanfare Great stress was laid during the celebrations on the public display of his newfound commitment to Brahminical Hinduism. Through this, apparently, ‘the Maharaja wanted to wash away the bad name that he had earned for himself as a result of the Nimuchana massacre’ (Gahlot 1966: 285-86).
14. For more details on the Maharaja’s growing unpopularity among his Hindu subjects, see K.S. Saxena (n.d.: 188-89).
15. The Brayne Meo High School, Nuh, Mewat’s first high school that Yasin Khan had been instrumental in setting up, emerged as the centre from which the Alwar revolt was directed. Interestingly, Maulana Ilyas, founder of the TJ, and some of his followers reportedly fiercely opposed the school, warning the Meos of the ‘evil influence’ of what they called a ‘satanic institution’ (M.H.Siddiqui, 1986: 449-50).
16. Letter from G.D. Oglive, agent of the Governor-General in Rajputana to Sir Charles Watson, Political Secretary to the Government of India, 4 January 1933, in L/P&S/13/1377 Political [Internal] Department Collection, D.O. No.15-P, India Office Records, London, p.174.
17. Letter from G.D. Oglive to Charles Watson, 13 December, 1932, ibid., p.1.
18. Interestingly, the TJ later came to be seen as instrumental in controlling, rather than instigating, Meo ‘lawlessness’ and ‘rebelliousness’ against state authorities both by the British as well as by the Alwar and Bharatpur states (Maududi, quoted in Vellori, n.d.: 59).
http://twocircles.net/2010apr13/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_1.html
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Karzai threatens to join Taliban
By IANS,
Kabul : Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reportedly threatened to join the Taliban if he continues to come under "outside pressure" to reform, a media report said Tuesday.
Karzai made the unusual comments at a closed-door meeting Saturday with select lawmakers, just days after kicking up a diplomatic row with remarks alleging foreigners were behind the fraud in the 2009 disputed elections, the China Daily website reported.
"He (Karzai) said that 'if I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban'," said Farooq Marenai, who represents the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Marenai said Karzai appeared nervous and repeatedly demanded to know why parliament last week rejected legal reforms that would have strengthened the president's authority over the country's electoral institutions.
Two other lawmakers said Karzai twice raised the threat to join the insurgency.
The lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Karzai dismissed concerns over possible damage his comments had caused to relations with the US.
The Taliban has become increasingly aggressive in Afghanistan amid reports that the US was preparing to pull out after a Pakistan-brokered deal with the "good Taliban".
Kabul : Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reportedly threatened to join the Taliban if he continues to come under "outside pressure" to reform, a media report said Tuesday.
Karzai made the unusual comments at a closed-door meeting Saturday with select lawmakers, just days after kicking up a diplomatic row with remarks alleging foreigners were behind the fraud in the 2009 disputed elections, the China Daily website reported.
"He (Karzai) said that 'if I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban'," said Farooq Marenai, who represents the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Marenai said Karzai appeared nervous and repeatedly demanded to know why parliament last week rejected legal reforms that would have strengthened the president's authority over the country's electoral institutions.
Two other lawmakers said Karzai twice raised the threat to join the insurgency.
The lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Karzai dismissed concerns over possible damage his comments had caused to relations with the US.
The Taliban has become increasingly aggressive in Afghanistan amid reports that the US was preparing to pull out after a Pakistan-brokered deal with the "good Taliban".
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