The Arabisation of South Asian Islam

The dominant narrative of Islamic connections in the contemporary world inordinately discusses how Islam has been imagined in the West or how the Oriental vs Occidental debate largely defines the Islam and the West relations. But the intellectual history from the vantage point of the present time does not talk much about, how, Islam came into South Asians’ imagination, where the largest Muslim population lived and still dominates. The linkages between South Asia and the Gulf has a common identity through a certain cosmopolitanism based on trade, migration and most importantly the religious pilgrimages through Haj and Umrah.

The crude understanding of this hazy relationship has been challenged through a notion of living history that explains this connection, that, Islam as it was practiced by large Muslims in this part of the world was not divided between the Dar ul Islam (Islamic territory) and Dar ul Harb (non-Islamic territory). Also, the concept of Jihad, which mirrors the contemporary political imagination as the ‘holy war’ against the kafirs (both non-Muslim and on sectarian lines including Shias, Sufis and others), did not find a meaningful presence in the long historical journey of South Asian Islam. This connection however, in the current period is dominated by madness of religious fundamentalists mainly attributed to Islamists and Jihadists.

The Islamic Connection - South Asia and the Gulf, edited by Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurence Louer, tries to sketch a canvas of this connection which once was dominated by Sufi brand of Islam and revealed through the history of Mughals and major Sufi orders, Naqshbandiyya, Qadiriyya, Suhrawardiyya, Chistiyya and Auliyaa.

The focus of the book according to the authors is to understand how this distortion of Islamic plurality came after the import of teachings of Salafi and Wahhabi movements from Gulf countries in general and Saudi Arabia in particular.

Although, the book is an intellectual biography of the contemporary connections but it too has its serious drawbacks. The absence of contemporary history of Indian connection except in the conclusion reduces the depth of the book. The book also needs some further editing, as it wrongly portrays Dara Shukoh as Akbar’s brother.

The authors in the edited work—The Islamic Connection—have offered a nuanced understanding of the common present of these two geographies, dominated by the contemporary geo-politics of war, security, terrorism, fundamentalism and ideology.

The book starts with an intellectual journey of how the medieval history of Islamic connection dominated by Sufi brand of Islam which later lost to Salafi-Wahhabi tradition and ultimately became a victim of Iranian Shia crescent vs Saudi’s Wahhabi ideology.  The book brings us an ultimate tale of how the Sufi mystic traditions helped the Islamic tradition to glued with local faith and developed a pluralistic society by a common culture. The book reveals that no Mughal king or Sufi saints till the reign of Aurangzeb ever went for a Haj because for them, this land is as sacred as the birth place of Islam.

The sacredness of their own land in the imagination of large sections of Indian Muslims during Mughals found a different trajectory when they lost their power to British empire.  Till then there was no such thing as pan-Islamism in political sense rather as author calls it an “Indo-Islamic civilisation”.
Till the reign of the Mughal empire, the ‘caliphate’ never had a deep resonance among Indian Muslims who were guided more by Sufi brand of Islam and located in Indian traditions. Even the ‘Khilafat Movement’, as the authors argue, were a “quest for pan-Indian Islam and less pan-Islamic” and the book finds the basis of this narrative even in the works of Iqbal and Maulana Azad and their ‘de-Arabisation of Islamic consciousness’.

The book bases its argument on two premises: first, until the British came to rule India, the Islamic Connection between South Asia and the Gulf created an Indo-Muslim civilisation only “loosely related to Arabia and deeply connected to Persia”.  The second premise is that globalisation of Muslim networks are largely influenced by Saudi-Iranian rivalry. This premise is what anchors the contemporary history of Islamic Connection. The encounter between this connection created an Islamic revivalism emanating from Saudi Arabia in the name of Wahhabism after the abolishment of Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 and on the other hand the ‘Shia Crescent’ after Islamic revolution in 1979.

One significant contribution that book provides is the genealogy of Arabisation of South Asian Islam. The influence of Wahhabi, Ahl-i-Hadith and Deobandi school on South Asian Islam muted the Sufi character of South Asian Islam and aroused a fear in the Muslim consciousness that this land has become Dar ul Harb. Later such fear helped the birth of Pakistan but the purification process as imagined in post Arab influence brought this narrative of Jihad as a Muslim Identity. This false consciousness killed the Muslim cosmopolitanism and brought the fundamentalist narrative as a central discourse and dominant character of Islam; an alien experience in its own land.

The authors brilliantly portray the jihadists rise and its deep presence in this region but more significantly how their call for purifying the land became dominant though various networks. These chapters eloquently explain the Gulf connection with South Asia especially its linkages with contemporary Pakistan.

The book also touches the Iranian presence through Shia networks in the works of Stephane Dudoignon on the role of “Iran as an interface” and Radhika Gupta’s brilliant anthropological inquiry of “Shia network in India”. Although, the book mainly covers the Gulf’s influence in South Asia but briefly it does talk about the reverse connection in Alix Phillipon work on “Pakistani Sufism in the Gulf”. The book is a transcendence of the journey of de-Arabisation to Arabisation of South Asian Islam. This is about, how Jihad which translates as a struggle rather than ‘holy war’ became synonyms with violence and hatred. The process has robbed the syncretic culture of Sufi Islam and book reveals that transformation of South Asian Islam from ‘Indo-Islamic civilisation’ to ‘Arabisation’.

Although, the book is an intellectual biography of the contemporary connections but it too has its serious drawbacks. The absence of contemporary history of Indian connection except in the conclusion reduces the depth of the book. Most significantly, the book has given much importance to political significance and less on cultural presence. The book also needs some further editing, as it wrongly portrays Dara Shukoh as Akbar’s brother.

But this edited book commands a special praise in offering us a nuanced understanding of the transformation of South Asian Islam in the last one century and how the plurality and diversity of Sufi brand of Islam which locates its own temporal authority in the sacredness of this land has been hijacked by the nexus of ideology and petrodollar of Gulf states in the name of righteousness and the true custodian of all Muslims.

(The writer is doctoral candidate at the Centre for West Asian Studies, JNU)