23 Islamic Reform Movement

Najeeb V R

Introduction

Every religious ideal belongs to a historical time and context. The circumstances for its realization will always be insufficient to contain any perpetual decree or pronouncement in an ever enduring manner. The reform process is inevitable to bring a religious ideal up to date providing for its dynamic existence, inclusiveness, flexibility etc. While the reform advocates the change which preserves the existing values, norms, ideals, decrees etc. it provides the improved means of implementing them simultaneously. It stands to make gradual change in certain aspects of social, religious, ideological etc. realms, rather than rapid, fundamental or revolutionary ways. While the conservative opposition negates the possibility of reform, the radical reform rejects the feasibility of it.

In the case of Islam, reform was not a single decisive event like the Protestant Reformation of European Christianity, but rather that which was repeated in cycles of events throughout several centuries and its roots extended to the founding era of Islam.

In this module, we shall discuss the Islamic reform in India in two different sections. In section one, we shall concentrate on the reforms both internal and external to the teachings of Islam. In section two, we will look at the Islamic reformist tendencies and movements in pre and post independent India respectively.

Section-I

Reform from within

The Arabic terminologies such as tajdid, islah, nahdhah were widely used to signify the existence of reform within Islamic teachings. These variations signified different kinds of reform endeavors. While tajdid manifests the more traditional religious reformation, islah is widely utilized by Salfi/Wahhabi political and religious outfits to express their idea of reform. At the same time, the word nahdhah, which also means reform, renovation etc. was used to describe mainly the European Renaissance and its resonances in the Muslim world and its consequent literal, social and political awakenings.1 But the word tajdid which connotes a going back to the original religious teachings is widely accepted by almost every sect within Islam.

Even though the ijithihad which does independent research on the Quran (Hadith) to resolve issues of day-to-day human life, the qualification for doing this research and the authenticity of Hadith are matters of controversy throughout Islamic history. After the formation of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh) in the first 150 years of Islam, these schools witnessed differential growth, spread, splits and even absorption by other schools. Notwithstanding these changes the majority of Muslims everywhere continued to adhere to Taqlid which is to follow the traditions and finding out solutions from the Islamic texts for their newly emerging problems as well as for justifying the stands of religious scholarship.2

• For example, while talking about the Islamism and social reform in Kerala, Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, also categorizing reform in accordance with its proximity to European modernity and the Christian reformation tendencies. They says: ‘While a reformist tradition is perhaps as old as Islam itself, reformism appears in this literature as an engagement with the ‘modern’: a universalistic and rationalizing orientation-often compared to the Christian reformation articulated in a complex dialogue with (at times in opposition to) colonial and postcolonial ‘western’ modernities’. See Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala, South India, Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2/3, Islam in South Asia (Mar. – May, 2008), Published by: Cambridge University Press, Page 319.
• Basically these researches started in the Abbasid period after 150 years of the emergence of Islam to deduce evidence and to connect the religious teachings with the new-born issues of life, and the Abbasid dynasty wants the help of legal civil and criminal codes and other kinds of regulations based on the Islamic texts to rule their vast territory of land. On that way they promoted and utilized these ijithihad. At the same time, paradoxically, out of these four mainstream leaders (imam) of four schools of thought i. e. Shafi, Hanafi, Hambali and Maliki, three were

Outside Influence

William Montgomery Watt (1985) argues that three ‘Hellenistic waves’ which affected the Muslim world and reshaped the intellectualism of the community.3 The first was the introduction of Greek philosophy and teachings4 (750 – 850 AD) with its ensuing Mu‘tazilite 5 and Ash‘arite 6 killed by the same dynasty because of either political or theological or ideological differences. Only Shafi was narrowly escaped. For example Ahmad ibn Hanbal; the imam of Hambali School was murdered, because his theological stand which was the Quran is not the ‘creation’ of God, which was contrary to the stand of the regime. Muslims in general accepted the view that the Quran is the speech or word of God not the creation. Here the Ulama want to justify his stand in accordance with the Islamic teachings. For further details see The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, William Montgomery Watt,

3 Islamic Philosophy and Theology; An Extended Survey, William Montgomery Watt, The University Press, Edinburgh, Second edition 1985.

4  ‘A system of Hellinistic education had been established in Iraq under the Sasanians and was continued under the Muslims. The main Subject of instructions was probably medicine; but philosophy and other ‘Greek Sciences’ were always taught as well. The teaching was mainly in the hands of Christians, and the best-known college was at Gunde-Shapur (about 150 Km north-east of Basra). Later, when a hospital was set up in Baghdad there were probably philosophical lectures in connection with the medical teaching. This system of Hellinistic education was thus complete in itself, and was spread over a number of instructions’. Islamic Philosophy and Theology; An Extended Survey, William Montgomery Watt, The University Press, Edinburgh, Second edition 1985. Page 37.

5  Mu‘tazilite were the followers of Dirar ibn Amr who involved in the process of bringing Greek conceptions in the discussion of Islamic dogma, that was, in the first elaboration of the discussion of Islamic theology (Kalam). The afore mentioned theological debate; the ‘createdness’ of the Quran raised by the Mu‘tazilites and they further argued that several attributes which were widely used by the community such as knowledge, Power, Will etc. corresponding to God’s names which were mentioned in the Quran is contrary to the unity of God’s nature and essence. In sum, their almost all rational arguments were theological or metaphysical and those rational thoughts in metaphysical realms were strictly prohibited by Islamic belief.

6   Abu-l- Hasan al- Ash‘ari is the founder of the Ash‘arite group studied under the head of Mu‘tazilites in Basra, Iraq, recognized that the significance of Mu‘tazilism getting to be increasingly irrelevant and he emphasized the idea that the Quran is uncreated and is the very speech of God. With regard to the anthropomorphic expressions in the Quran he insisted that scholarship. The second wave in the first half of the tenth century when several Muslim philosophers and intellectuals such as Al Farabi (872-950), Al Kindi (801- 873) Avicenna (980 – 1037) etc. further developed the Greek philosophy and fused it with Islamic thought, which resulted in the emergence of pseudo-Islamic, Neo-Platonic intellectual groups like Ikhwan as-Safa or Brethren of Purity 7. But this scholarship was demolished by the influential Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111), who rejected the certainties of sense perception stressing instead the importance of the transcendental revelation.

‘The third wave of Hellenism’ starts with the intellectual, cultural, commercial and political dealings of Europe with the Muslim world, which further escalated after the eighteenth century, and its subsequent political encounters with each other throughout the African and Asian continents.8 These engagements of European modernity with the Muslim world actually began with the discovery of the commercial route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1498. In due course, commerce led to political interference and finally to political domination. By Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, the Ottoman and Persian empires felt the full impact of European presence everywhere. These successive two centuries of perennial warfare further prevented the these must simply be accepted ‘without specifying how’. The Mu‘tazilites, on the other hand, had held that, for example, where the Quran speaks about God’s ‘hand’ what is meant is his grace. And Ash‘arites insisted that various eschatological matters must be taken as they stand and not explained as metaphors. Finally they rejected the Mu‘tazilite doctrine of free will or man’s free ability to do an act or its opposite as he like without the interference of God. These are may feel like conservative ideas but they utilized the Mu‘tazilite rationality to prove their theological doctrines.

7  ‘They seem to have been a secret society engaged in a mystical quest for the purification of the soul with a view to attaining happiness in the life of eternity. Modern scholars have to discover their identity, but none has found a convincing solution of the problem. What we have is the collection of fifty-two epistles dealing with mathematics, natural sciences, philosophical disciplines and theology’. Ibid, page 73 – 74

8  In the second half of the eighteenth century several African regions were under the rule of European colonial powers. Algeria, Mali Niger etc. were French colonies, Libya was under Italian rule and Egypt was a British colony. In Asia from fifteenth to eighteenth century there were three major Muslim dynasties such as Mugal, Safavid and Ottoman and these were uprooted by European colonialism. Several central Asian regions and dynasties including Safavid and Khajar were destroyed by Russian colonialism also.

Muslim world from accessing European modernity and its’ scholarship.9 Even in this aggravated situation, some historians argue that, the Ulama stand for reform of the community and expedited the tendency of internal criticism to a large extent.10 Such criticisms were to be witnessed in the revulsion against colonialism on the one hand, and on the other, an exposure to secular ideas through their contact with European modernity. Both these influences sought to highlight the backwardness of the traditional Ulama which continued to display a disinterest in the new ideas that were entering the Islamic world. It is this dynamic between traditional religious scholarship and the onset of western educated intellectuals which foregrounds the reform period in pre-Independent period.

Section-II

Reform in pre-Independent India

Modern education developed by the British rulers was hugely appropriated by the Hindu community. As for the Muslims, their position after the mutiny of 1857 further weakened their position reducing them to a marginalized community. They themselves kept aloof from colonial modern education on the basis of their religious ideas and the loss of Muslim rule posed serious problem to their identity. This further worsened the condition of the community, sharpening the sense of superiority of the Western Christian civilization.

In this context, several religious scholars had emerged to defend the community from these external influences by resorting to a rational interpretation of Islamic text. The towering figure Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703 – 1762) was one of them. He was a prominent scholar, an expert

9  For further reading, See, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire, Hamid Dabashi, Routledge, 2008.

10  The  Ulama  in  Contemporary  Islam:  Custodians  of  Change,  Muhammad  Qasim  Zaman,

Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, n2007. And Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, Religious Authorities and Internal Criticism, by the same author, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

in the prophetic teachings (Hadith) and was an influential reformer. His magnum opus Hujjat Allah al Baligha is a very renowned book in the Islamic world even now, it deals with spiritual and metaphysical themes related to the human mind and was very important for the development of Sufism. He was the contemporary of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703 – 1792) of Arabia, the founder of the Wahhabi movement. Dehlawi was considered one of the prominent Islamic reformers and he has interpreted Islam in a simple and systematic way. K. A Nizami (1967) says that: “All the socio-religious activities of Indian Muslims that followed at a later period centered around the thoughts of Shah Waliyullah who contributed essential elements to the growth of progressive thoughts in Islam”11. The main contribution of Shah Waliyullah was his insistence on speculative thinking among Muslims in India with his renewed emphasis on ijthihad. His use of reason and arguments have perhaps a more fundamentalist significance but, they inspired the formula of neo-mutazili modernism of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, who had received his early education in the seminary of Waliyullah’s successors in Delhi, of Shibli’s scholasticism and of religious reconstruction in the thought of Iqbal. Aziz Ahmed (1969) argues that: “the more classical influences of Waliyullah’s concept of ijthihad are reflected in the workshop of the Ulama of Deoband, whose religious ideology was directly shaped by his school”.12

The Wahabi movement was one of the earliest and most important, influential and still relevant movement which focused on the puritanical pedantic version of Islam which emerged in the first half of the eighteenth century in Arabia and later made its pervasive presence throughout the Islamic world including the Indian subcontinent. Muhammed Ibn AbdulWahab; the founder of the Wahhabi movement, further developed the puritanical ideas of the medieval Islamic theologian Imam Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 -1328) and he fully focused on his own version of Islamic monotheism in a more radical way. H.A. R. Gibb and J.H. Kramers (1974) conclude the very important doctrines of Wahabism with their emphasis on a rigid puritanical monotheistic adherence of the faith had a deep impact on the traditional Islamic world. Bassam Tibi (1990) argues that “Wahhabi movement was not only a religious revivalist movement, it had political

11 “Socio-religious Movements in Indian Islam” K. A. Nizami, Indian and Contemporary Islam, ed. by Lokhandwalla S. T., Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Simla, 1967, Page 99.

12 Studies in Islamic Culture in Indian Environment, Aziz Ahmad, Oxford University Press, London, 1969, Page 205.

content also. Its potentially nationalistic aspirations were directed against the Ottoman foreign rule” (20).13

The Indian branch of the Wahhabi movement of Ahmad Shah Barelvei (1786-1831)14 has also actively participated in Indian freedom struggle and that offered a serious threat to British supremacy in the nineteenth century. Ahmad Shah Barelvi was greatly influenced by the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab and Shah Waliulla Dehlawi, both the leaders condemned all the changes and innovations to Islam and they believed that the return to the pristine form of Islam is the only way to survive the socio-political atrocities facing the Muslim community. Ahmed Shah Barelvi’s movement had two distinct objectives like those of almost all religious rebellion, those were: to purify the Islamic religious ideals and preserve it in its pristine form and it was marked by a fight against the alien rulers of India thereby aiming at a reinstatement of an Islamic State. Shah Waliyullah’s and Shah Abdul Aziz’s (1745-1823) political thought developed into its practical culmination through Ahmed Shah Barelvi and his Wahabi movement. The political career of Ahmed Shah Barelvi was revolutionary, and he waged war against the British. But he was killed in the Battle of Balakkot on 6th May, 1831; a battle against the Sikhs. After his death, Wilayat Ali and Enayat Ali, the two brothers of the Sadiquepur family of Patna, were influenced by his ideas and in 1847; they started full preparation for an absolute war against the British rule in India from their base camp in Sitana. The British took up brutal measures and the period between1863-65, witnessed a series of trials by which all the principal leaders of the Wahabi movement were arrested. Through the Ambala trial of 1864 and Patna trial of 1865 the leaders were deported to Andamans.

Later, after the failure of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Muslims were roused from their pessimism and inactivity by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) and his followers, and he persuaded the community to accept the western education and to cooperate with the British and his efforts

13 Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, Bassam Tibi, Boulder, West View Press, 1990, Page

14 Ahmad Shah Barelvi was the founder of the Indian version of Wahhabi movement. He was born in Rai Bareli (now in Uttar Pradesh) and travelled to Delhi where he met Shah Abdul Aziz (1746- 1824); the spiritual successor of Shah Waliullah. His affirmation of the strong version of Islamic monotheism and the rejection of religious innovations and the advocacy of ijtihad and his aversion on Sufis were the noteworthy characters of him. See The Wahhabi Movement in India, Qeyamuddin Ahmad, Manohar Publishers and Distributers, New Delhi, 1994.

finally led to the establishment of a college; The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, which eventually turned out to be a university, Aligarh Muslim University, that combined the new type of education with the adherence to Islamic doctrine. Several other reformers like Justice Ameer Ali, Nawab Muhsinul Mulk, Maulvi Khudabakhsh and others followed him, Even though the Aligarh Movement was primarily a North Indian phenomenon, its intellectual influence extended much beyond the borders of India. The founders of this movement were belonged to a class of professional or salaried gentry, known as the shurafa, which had furnished administrators to pre-colonial states and now attempted to do the same for colonial India. Sayyid Ahmad Khan was himself a minor aristocrat, and the Aligarh group or movement called itself a party or school in English, and a movement or tahrik in Urdu, and whose important activities, the college apart, comprised the Muhammadan Educational Conference and voluminous writings, including a journal, the Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq or Refinement of Morals. He was criticized by many of the traditional religious scholars for his rational religious views. He was famous for his comparative religious study and rational interpretation of the Quran and Hadith. The Aligarh Movement’s efforts to modernize Muslim lives by rejecting ‘superstition’ and inculcating English education and Victorian forms of organization have received ample scholarly attention worldwide. He completely rejected the pan-Islamist ideology of Jamal ud-din Al-Afgani;15 a staunch anti-

15 The pan-Islamic Jamal ud-din al-Afghani (1838-1897); an Afgan origin, and his disciple Muhammad Abdu (d. 1905); an Egyptian, who became Grand Mufti of Egypt were confronted by the imperial dominance of the European powers over the Islamic world, and like their secular nationalist counterparts, sought the remedy in the Islamic nations following the path that gave Europe its power: science and rationality, economic and military reforms and rational organization of state and society. These steps were perfectly in harmony with Islam, they argued: not the corrupted Islam of recent history (as they saw it), but the pristine Islam of the Prophet and the first generation of Muslims. They read modern political concepts into Islamic origins: the Prophet commanded shura, consultation among the believers on the affairs of the community, and this was elemental democracy. The Caliph of the Muslims obtained his legitimacy from the bay`a, a pledge of allegiance from the members of the community, another element of conditional consent. Maslaha is the principle of public interest, according to which the sacred law was to be interpreted. See Islamic Reform?, Sami Zubaida, Open Democracy, Free thinking for the world, 5 Jan 2016, this article is available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/sami-zubaida/islamic-reformationcolonial Muslim reformer and his ideas acted as a catalyst to oust the colonial powers from Muslim lands, and Al-Afgani regarded vice versa Ahmed Khan’s religious views and his educational program as ancillaries to his political servitude to the British interest in India and therefore he considered Ahmed Khan as his main adversary in India.

As the aftermath of the same incident, unlike Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the two English educated Muhammad Qasim Nanotvi (1833-1880) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829-1905) established a Madrasa in a small north Indian town called Deoband in the United Province (now Uttar Pradesh) in 1867 to disseminate the Islamic culture and law and the tradition attributed to the prophet and to preserve it from the onslaught of British colonialism and in that regard they decided to garner money only from inside the community.16 Thousands of other Madrassas, all called Deobandi even without any formal affiliation with the parent Madrassa, share the same doctrinal orientation. ‘Within modern South Asian Islam, the “Deobandis” distinguish themselves not only from the Shi‘a but also from other Sunni rivals such as the “Berelawis” and the Ahl-i Hadith, both of which also emerged in India in the second half of the nineteenth century’.17 Berelawis emphasize the authority not just of the prophet but of the saints and holy people too, to whom they were looking for guidance and considering them as vehicles of mediation between God and human beings. At the same time, the Ahl-i Hadith; broadly known as the Salafis or Wahhabis (the usage Wahhabi is a bit derogatory), who were giving more 

16 Barbara Metcalf’s studies on the early history of Deoband show that the Muslim response to colonial rule was not exclusively in terms of adoption to Western norms and institutions, even they used the Western technology of print and they utilized the vernacular Urdu language. Rather, their effort was to retrieve the facets of Islamic religious tradition and to affirm the primacy of Muslim identity in a hostile and unfamiliar environment. See, Islamic Revival in British India – Deoband, 1860 – 1900, Metcalf, Daly Barbara, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982.

17 Ulema in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2007, page 11.

importance to prophetic teachings (Hadith) than the saints and holy people, even than traditional four schools of laws and they stringently insisting on the Quran and Hadith as the exclusive and directly accessible sources of guidance. But the Deobandi Ulama have preached against the vision of shrine and cult-based Islam, in other words, a soft form of Ahl-i Hadith and they want to revive the teachings of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564 – 1624)18 and Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703 – 1762) etc., who have the tradition of rich metaphysical intelligibility of Islamic Sufism, and they want to follow the chronological interpretation of Islam historically such as Hanafi, Ashari and so on. And later, the Tabligi movement; a conservative group of people emerged from India but have international presence focusing mainly on the promulgation of extremely traditional way of Islamic teachings, attached with the Deobandi tradition.

Several Sufi orders also emerged in India not only as a moral but also as comprehensive socio-religious force. They emphasized on personal piety and retained attitudes of accommodation and adaptation and declined religious or communal conflicts and showed a love for humanity. One of the earliest Sufis is Khwaja Mu‘inuddin Sijzi (1141 – 1236), but the historical information about the early period of his life is not survived to this day. He arrived in India through Lahore in the year 1185, and later he settled in Ajmer, which was a part of Qutbuddin Aibek’s (1150-1210) empire. After his demise in AD 1236, the image of this Sufi saint became more famous. Another very important Sufi is Shaikh Nizamuddin Awliya (1242 – 1325) who exerted ennobling influence, weather it is in religion, politics, education, literature, music or, above all, the style of human relations.19 He also developed the Chishti concept of non-violence into a doctrine of socio-religious tolerance and pacifism. He refused to extent moral support to the policy of the

18 Ahmad Sirhindi was an influential scholar, a Hanafi jurist, and a prominent member of the Naqshabandi Sufi order. The conflict between the Sharia and Sufism had a long history in India. Sheikh Ahammed Sir- Hindi was the one who renewed and strengthened the Sharia from being corrupted by innovations and by the apostasy of the extremist Sufis. His discord and armed rebellion against the heterodox ideas of Mugal emperor Akbar is well detailed in history.

19   See Muslim Saints of South Asia, The eleventh to fifteenth centuries, Anna Suvorova, Routledge Curzon, Taylors & Francis Group, London and New York, 2004, Page 105.

expansion of the Delhi Sultans, which turned out to be the actual cause of his conflict with the authorities.20

Beyond the mere return to original Islam and envisaging some reforming measures some groups brought in another idea that for the full expression of Islam it needs statehood, the idea articulated by Mawdoodi’s (1903- 1979) Jama‘at-i-Islami. Some other very important attempts were made in defense of Islamic doctrine in terms of modern Western thought were, first, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, by Iqbal (1877- 1938), and the Second, The Tarjuman al-Quran of Mawlana Abdul Kalam Azad (1888 – 1958); which is primarily a commentary on the Quran but his interpretation and understanding of other religions was dazzling unlike those of Wahhabis.

Reform in post independent India

After the independence India opted to be a secular country, but the Constitution makers reached to the compromise of the application of the personal laws of all the communities under the Directive Principles of the Constitution. Earlier the topmost leaders of the Indian National Congress such as Gandhi and Nehru had given assurances to the leaders of Jami’at-ul-’Ulama-i-Hind21 that no Islamic laws will be abolished after the independence. But in this period neither

20 Ibid, Page 108.

21. Jami’at-ul-’Ulama-i-Hind is a prominent organization of traditional religious scholars under the leadership of the Deobandi Ulama who fought vehemently against the British rule side by side with the leaders of Congress. And it is important to note that the orthodox ‘Ulama led by Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani; an influential Deobandi scholar and leader and a theologian of great eminence had intensely opposed the two nation theory and fully supported the cause of composite nationalism and he had successfully countered it on theological grounds. Mawlana Mawdoodi; the founder of Jama‘at-i-Islami and Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1876 – 1938); the Cambridge Ph.D. holder and the great poet, severely criticized him for his ‘anti-religious’ stand. While the modern educated Aligarh scholars and the leaders of Muslim league – Muhammad Ali Jinna was a highly Western style modernist – stand for a separate Muslim state, it will be astonishing to think the orthodox Ulama led by Madani are strongly rejecting the theory of separate Muslim state and defending the nationalist ideas of the Indian National Congress. This kind of dilemma we will face throughout the Islamic history in deciding the ‘reformists’ and ‘traditionalists’.

the endeavors to reform the community nor the reform of the personal laws take place. However, after the partition the middle class intelligentsia of the Muslim community had almost fully migrated to Pakistan leaving behind poor and illiterate Muslims completely under the influence of conservative theologians who were deeply resistant to ideas of modernity, and educationally and economically further backward. Muslim populace naturally could not beget any vital reform leader or movement. We should keep in mind that almost all the pre-independent reformers come

from good family backgrounds. Unlike the pre-independence period Ulama, who enthusiastically participated in the freedom struggle and because of that they enjoyed high social status, the post-independence Ulama did not have any mass base and they were quite unsure of their prestige. Furthermore, the involvement of some Ulama in realpolitik and the beefing up of caste, religious, regional and identity politics further deteriorated an already worsened position of the Ulama in the community. Besides, unlike Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s effort to undermine some of the evils of Brahmanism, Muslim leaders blindly buttressed the uniform civil code and they were quick to hype that the Muslims are basically rigid and fanatics and would never change. As a consequence, when the conservatives adopted a more rigid stand and launched the counter-campaign that there was a ‘conspiracy’ going on to destroy Islamic belief, it made almost impossible the any attempt to reform the personal laws, even though the same reformation was implemented by Ayub Khan in 1962 through a presidential ordinance with the consensus of religious scholars and modernists.22

The theory of conspiracy and the incessant anti Muslim riots23 in India impede any kind of inside reform, which further reflected in the unfortunate, aggressive response of the Muslim community with regard to the Shah Bano case of 1986. Apart from this, among several Western-educated Muslim intellectuals; while some of them focused on the political and social reform, others focused on the application of the contemporary literary and philosophical criticism to the study of the Quran and Islamic history. It is also important to note that, among the Muslim women

22   See, Indian Islam and Reform Movements in Post-Independence India, Asghar Ali Engineer,

23 For more details of how the ‘institutionalized riot system’ works in post-independent India See: Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India, Paul R. Brass, Three Essays Collective, May 2011.

some significant endeavors to devise a nikahnama; which stipulate conditions against triple divorce and polygamy in the marriage contract. For the goal of achieving gender equality under Muslim Personal Law some Islamic feminist groups are also taking the initiative of reform in accordance not with the Indian Constitution or the universalistic human rights principles, rather with the Quranic teachings which, they claim, grant Muslim women numerous rights that in practice are routinely denied them by the ‘patriarchal’ interpretations of the conservative Ulama.24

Conclusion

In Islam reform is a perennial recurring process which includes inside the Islamic framework, with different views on its meaning and content. Different milieus which induced and sometimes compelled the community to reform from within, and outward intellectual influences also persuaded the reform process alike. But, in the case of India, the reasons and incentives of pre and post independent period are varied because of its different political and religious

24 Islamic Feminism in India: Indian Muslim Women Activists and the Reform of Muslim Personal Law, Sylvia Vatuk, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2/3, Islam in South Asia (Mar. – May, 2008), pp. 489-518, Cambridge University Press.

circumstances. Especially in Personal Laws and Muslim women emancipation there are more paces to put forward.

Reference bibliography

• Ahmad Aziz (1969), Studies in Islamic Culture in Indian Environment, Oxford University Press, London, (Page 205).
• Barbara Daly Metcalf (1982), Islamic Revival in British India – Deoband, 1860 – 1900, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
• Brill E.J (1974), Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, Netherlands, Leiden, (Page 618).
• Dabashi Hamid (2008), Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire, Routledge.
• Engineer Ali Asghar (1997), Indian Islam and Reform Movements in Post-Independence India, , Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai, August 1997, Available in internet at: http://www.wluml.org/node/311.
• Osella Filippo and Osella Caroline (Mar. – May, 2008), Islamism and Social Reform in Kerala, South India, , Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2/3, Islam in South Asia, Cambridge University Press, (Page 319).
• Nizami K. A. (1967), “Socio-religious Movements in Indian Islam” in Indian and Contemporary Islam, ed. by Lokhandwalla S. T., Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Simla, ( Page 99).
• Suvorova Anna (2004), Muslim Saints of South Asia, The eleventh to fifteenth centuries, Routledge Curzon, Taylors & Francis Group, London and New York, Page 105.
• Tibi Bassam (1990), Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, Boulder, West View Press, (Page 20).
• Vatuk Sylvia (Mar. – May, 2008), Islamic Feminism in India: Indian Muslim Women Activists and the Reform of Muslim Personal Law, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2/3, Islam in South Asia pp. 489-518, Cambridge University Press.
• Watt William Montgomery (1985), Islamic Philosophy and Theology; An Extended Survey, The University Press, Edinburgh, Second edition.
• Zaman Qasim Muhammad (2007), The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.
• Zaman Qasim Muhammad (2012), Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, Religious Authorities and Internal Criticism, Cambridge University Press.