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Secularizing Islamists?
Jama'at-e-Islami and Jama'at-ud-Da'wa in Urban Pakistan
By Humeira Iqtidar
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-38468-9
Chapter One
Colonial Secularism and Islamism in North India A RELATIONSHIP OF CREATIVITY?
We need to be more thoughtful about the complex, often quite paradoxical, role that colonial rule played in the limes of the different sections of the Indian people at different times. An important ancillary to that process would bean effort on the part of Urdu scholars to recover the life of the mind of that Urdu intelligentsia of long ago—Hindu, Muslim and Christian—who found excitement, and discovered new and creative ways to define and express themselves, in that initial sustained encounter with what eventually became an oppressive colonial rule. —C. M. Naim 2003,24
This chapter is concerned with excavating the historical context that gave rise to Islamism, particularly in North India, and the paradoxes that surround its self-defined antagonistic relationship to secularism. Modern state structures, institutions of mass education, and, critically, changes in the relationship of religious identity to political structures are a hallmark of the modern period; secularism is conceived of as an integral and constitutive element of modernity. Yet, as I discuss in this chapter, the very unevenness and variation in the manifestations of modernity require that we recognize it as a project with strong aspirational aspects to it in addition to thinking of it as a historical period. A focus on North India and then Pakistan shows that Islamism is closely related to the secularism that helped define its Jimits, its contentions, and its focus. My point of departure here is Talal Asad's (2003) insight that secularism is not a one-time separation of church and state, but a constant remodeling and refashioning of religious practice by the state, giving rise to new versions and forms of religion. I propose here that Islamism is closely related to the colonial secularism that helped define its limits, its contentions, and its focus; the relationship between Islamism and secularism is not one of straightforward antagonism, but is rather much more interactive and creative. Critically, I propose that the type of secularism that the British sought to impose in colonial India created the possibility of this novelty in Muslim thought and practice that is called Islamism.
Before we proceed, it would be useful to complicate our understanding of tradition and modernity particularly with reference to Islamism. Islamism is often conceived of as a "traditional" reaction against "modernity" It is helpful to remind ourselves here that in the case of Muslim societies, the need for the kind of secularism that took shape, at least in its reified version in Western Europe, with its insistence on a sharply delineated public and private sphere and a clear separation between church and state, did not exist (Brown 2000). There was no single centralized authority such as the pope, and historically the ulama (religious scholars) have operated as a diverse, decentralized group of scholars and practitioners (Zaman 2002). The precolonial state evolved other mechanisms for managing the diversity of religious and ethnic communities and supporting mostly peaceful coexistence (Bayly 1996; for the Ottoman Empire, see Barkey 2008). For these predominantly Muslim societies, the rupture in tradition as a result of the colonial encounter was very intense, but, I contend, has been creatively approached by different individuals and groups within these societies in rethinking religious belief and practice—their agency exhibited in the range of responses to the structures of colonialism.
Marshall Hodgson (1974) pointed out at the end of his history of Islamic civilization that Western societies have managed to retain a deeper and more continuous link with their traditions than Muslim societies. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) certainly suggests a particular religious—read: Christian—and philosophical continuity in Europe. In the sense of a relatively continuous philosophical dialogue, dependence upon largely the same authors, books, and philosophers, Western societies are more traditional than non-Western, including predominantly Muslim, ones. My suggestion here is not of an unchallenged continuity that has seen no shifts in emphasis at various geographical and historical points. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern a thick thread of continuous connections within Western political and philosophical thought, including a strong continued dependence on what must be recognized as theological texts as the basis of modern political and social theory.
At the same time, scholarship on tradition, particularly Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's widely quoted edited volume (1983), has alerted us to the possibility that many traditions, while retaining some link with past practices and modalities, are very recent creations. In this context, it is important to realize first that "tradition" put to the service of legitimizing competing claims of authenticity, whether by Islamists or others, may be of very recent origins. Second, and more importantly, contrary to a particular stream of scholarship on Islamic tradition, and indeed the claims of many Islamists, "traditional" Muslim society was not rigid and static Wael Hallaq (2001), Michael Cook (2000), Mohammed Qasim Zaman (2002), and L. Carl Brown (2000) show that adaptive creativity, dissent, and rethinking have been an integral part of traditional Islamic legal and theological thought. The imposition of colonialism and the introduction of a particular model of the state that is called "modern" led to much rethinking and reevaluation within the non-Western, and not just Muslim, societies. While the impact of colonization in terms of its disruptions was tremendous, we can see individuals and groups selectively appropriating and braiding together elements of existing ideas and practices with the newer impositions. Thus, contrary to established understanding, we should see this engagement as one of great creativity through which new schools of thought (such as the Deoband in South Asia) and new forms of organization (such as the Jama'at-e-Islami and the Tablighi Jama'at, also in South Asia) emerged. I want to suggest then that the relationship between "modernity" and "tradition" is not one of linear antagonism but of accommodation, suggestion, and creation. Social actors exhibit their agency through unexpected and unforeseen combinations of existing conceptual repertoires with the new structures and discourses imposed upon them.
Indeed, I sympathize with Akeel Bilgrami (1999, 380) when he suggests that there should be a "moratorium on termssuch as 'modernity' and the disputes surrounding them, for they are not categories that enhance explanation and understanding of political and cultural development in contemporary Indian politics and history" What he suggests instead of a rather vague notion of modernity is a more precise periodization that locates specific developments in a particular context. Moreover, the very unevenness and variation in the manifestation of modernity requires that we recognize it as a project as well as a historical period (Asad 1991). I do not suggest a complete abandonment of the term "modernity" However, I want to propose that we abandon associating normative values with the "modern" and instead focus on substantive changes in Muslim practices as a result of the colonial encounter in North India. As I discuss in the next section, the profound impact of this encounter was a result not just of outright rejection or opposition from Muslims, but of negotiation, absorption, and subtle reframing of earlier discourses. In the process, I lend further support to the contention that fundamentalism in general (Lawrence 199o; Eisenstadt 1999), and Islamism in particular, is a distinctly modern phenomenon rather than a traditional response to modernity.
What does it mean to suggest that Islamism is a particularly modern phenomenon? Are the Islamists not, by their own definition, hoping to go back to the glorious first days of Islam under the prophet Mohammed? S. N. Eisenstadt (1999, 2) suggests that fundamentalisms constitute a distinctive form of modern political movements. To him, fundamentalism is a variant of the Jacobin tendencies that are an intrinsic part of modern political movements and that arise in part because of an inherent contradiction within modernity between totalizing and more pluralistic conceptions, between reflexivity and active construction of nature and society, between autonomy and control (62). Bruce Lawrence (1990, 1998) has argued that Islamism would have been inconceivable in any other age but the modern one. His suggestion stems from a view that not only do Islamist groups use modern ways of organizing and communicating, but the very categories, notions, and laws that they hope to defy or modify are modern constructs. In the chapter below I single out the emergence of the modern state and its attempts at managing religious practice and thought within a colonial context in North India as a key development that made Islamism possible.
More critically, I point out that the particular kind of secularism that the British applied to the Indian context was one that created severe impediments to secularization. As I mentioned in my discussion of the theories of secularism and secularization, we do not have a clear roadmap of the relationship between the two. The Western European experience, albeit with much variation internally, was idealized to produce an image of secularization and secularism working in tandem. In the case of colonial India, the universal pretensions of official secularism were instrumental in codifying and highlighting particularistic religious affiliations that defeated any potential for secularization particularly in terms of relegating religion to the private sphere. Religion could hardly be privatized in a public sphere that was structured by the British around religious identities, nor could a process of demystification of religion begin seriously without apparently falling in line with the occupier's cultural framework. I shall focus on two key components of colonial secularism that I believe were critical in supporting the rise of Islamism, itself an innovation in Islamic thought and practice. The first is the structural vehicle of this secularism: the modern state that betrayed its moderness through an invasive interest in categorizing populations, intrusion, and the constant remodeling of subjectivities. The second is the substantive aspects of the project of secularism that were driven by colonizers' preoccupations and that I suggest allowed only particularistic attachment to Muslim practices, attaching universalism to those modes of belief and behavior that seemed secular to the colonial administrators but particularly Christian to the colonized.
The Intrusive Modern State
Even though it proceeded unevenly in different parts of India, the colonial imposition of a modern state, with its constant interference in everyday life, was a major break from the past. Sudipta Kaviraj (1997) has argued that, as in the case of premodern Europe, the precolonial Indian state was of limited significance in quotidian life. "The state had," he suggests elsewhere (1997, 229), "the discretion to tax severely or leniently. It could cause or end wars, but its power to reorder the structure of productive roles which determined everyday destinies of individual men and social groups was severely restricted." No doubt the colonial state built upon previous structures of power, domination, and information collection that existed in precolonial India, especially in the earlier years, and that the transition was not overnight but took more than half a century (Bayly 1996). Yet something new was also being created; this state was different both in the quality and the quantity of its intrusion into individual lives. The colonial state's interference into daily life operated on two parallel and yet intertwined levels. One encompassed the politically motivated, sometimes cynical but mostly self-righteous attempts at social and political "reform." This included the attempts at banning practices like sati, the introduction of electorates along religious lines, et cetera. The other and perhaps more critical was the less self-conscious, although admittedly no less self-righteous, ontological remapping of the individual, community, society, and polity (Cohn: 1996; Kaviraj 1997, 231). Included in this is, for instance, census activity that divided individuals into neat and hermetically sealed categories.
This interest in categorizing and shaping individuals and communities is a defining characteristic of not just the colonial state but of the modern state generally. In a perceptive analysis of this inherent compulsion within the modern state, James Scott (1998, 82) has observed:
The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in the imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission." The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.... I am suggesting that many state activities aim at transforming the population, space and nature under their jurisdiction into the closed system that offers no surprises and that can best be observed and controlled.
The intrusion of the modern, albeit colonial, state was not targeted specifically toward Muslims. Rather, this intrusive state touched all religious practices. Indeed, one of the central planks of colonial sociology was the codification of diverse practices across the geographical and social landscape of India as a single coherent whole, creating "a religion" as an analytical category. In the case of Hinduism it is often pointed out that Hinduism was not conceived of as a unified "religion" until colonial times (Hansen 1999: van der Veer 2001; Kaviraj 2007). Influential contemporary Hindu religious nationalist groups are also the result of a similar engagement with the colonial state (Hansen 1999). Yet until recently a similar analysis had not been extended to Islam, and the dramatic reconstruction of it during colonial times had not been adequately recognized. This may in part have to do with the wider geographical spread of Muslims, some structural similarity to Christianity, and the vague notions of a Muslim ummah that percolated at various levels in precolonial and early colonial periods as well. However, recent research is beginning to question this assumption of a coherently Islamic imaginary, independent of its Indian connections, as well as the specific implications of this imagination in the early colonial period .6 For the major religious groups, the diverse, regionally specific activities that were classified, under colonial rule, as one religion were often mutually contradictory.
The idea of a unified religion was closely linked to legal codification. Not surprisingly, legal codification and homogenization, important for the modern state's effective administration, was introduced in India by the British administration in a manner that was shot through with their own assumptions and perceptions. The contradictions and "looseness" of Indian textual and customary judicial practices remained a source of anxiety for early colonial administrators, such that authoritative compilations that would not just represent, but rationalize and reconstruct Indian jurisprudence were commissioned (Wilson 2007). The early colonial jurist William MacNaghten states that his Principles and Precedents of Moohummudan Law was intended to "fix" the many areas "where a contrariety of opinion has hitherto prevailed" to allow a clear determination of the case at hand (Wilson 2007, 18). The emphasis, then, was on not just recording but rationalizing and homogenizing. Shari'a had been practiced in India based on a diversified, subjective, and localized interpretation (Masud 1999, Messick, and Powers 1996; Zaman 2002; Kugle zoos). Due to their anxieties as rulers and the precariousness of their rule, the company and colonial administrators started a process of codification as early as the eighteenth century. However, the very process of such codification meant that certain views were excluded and others highlighted, distortions magnified by the interests of the administration and lack of knowledge among the administrators.
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