Al Salamu 'Alaykum.
What is this?
I can't believe it.
Are these "upper-caste Muslims" worthy of being called "Muslims" or Hindus?
LA'NAT HAI TUM PAR!
May Allah do justice.
Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilayhi Raji'un.
A Tale of Two Mosques by Khalid Anis Ansari.
On 6 December 1992, the demolition of the Babri Masjid by rightwing ‘Hindu’ forces heralded a major shift in the Indian political landscape. In a way, it signalled that the long-cherished Indian variant of ‘secularism’, or the Gandhian notion of sarva dharma sambhava (‘Let all religions prosper’), which held as its ideal the symmetrical treatment of all religions, was now increasingly outliving its utility for the ruling classes. And no wonder: since that time, the academic community in India has unleashed vigorous debates on secularism, and Indians have been greeted with all kinds of communitarian and postmodern critiques of the same. While the times to come will surely pronounce a verdict of some type on these sophisticated intellectual endeavours, let us first digress in order to explore some areas less treaded by the Indian academic elite.
Some examinations of the Babri episode have linked it to the neo-liberal shifts in the Indian economy that took place around the same time, particularly the ambitious economic reforms launched by the Congress government in 1991. Such an approach has also required studying the concomitant need to promote authoritarian and fascist tendencies by powerful interest blocs to divide and tame the working classes. While such a perspective is quite conceivable, whether there actually existed any formidable working-class challenge to bring about such a drastic response from the powers-that-be is worth investigating. Meanwhile, other readings of the event concentrate on a major incident: the acceptance of a single recommendation put forward by the Mandal Commission report by the V P Singh government in 1990, which reserved jobs for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the central government.
This one measure resulted overnight in V P Singh being hailed as a veritable messiah of social justice by the disadvantaged castes. At the same time, however, it also precipitated what has been dubbed by the sociologist Gail Omvedt as the “twice-born riot against democracy”, wherein the upper-caste youth took to the streets of North India, attempting to immolate themselves for what they saw as a ‘darkening of their futures’. After all, how could such a loud test of the upper-caste monopoly of privileged public-sector jobs have gone unchallenged? In fact, V P Singh, in his deposition before the Justice Liberhan Commission of 2001, opined clearly that, “Mr L K Advani undertook the rath yatra in 1990 to counter the Mandal Commission’s report, as the BJP was apprehensive that it might lose the middle class if the party supported the report.” Moreover, “the BJP also did not want to oppose the report as it feared that it might result in alienation of the backward classes, and thought that religious issues would be the proper answer to cloud the Mandal issue.”
Either way, the demolition of the Babri Masjid ensured that, in the conceivable future, religious identity in India would continue to dominate the political space at the expense of other identities, especially caste and gender. As a consequence, since the demolition Indian society has seen an increasing legitimacy accorded to both the forces of Hindutva and Islamism, even as the notion gained ground that religious communities are essentially monolithic. Why exactly the notion of ‘community’ has been so persistently sought to be defined monochromatically in religious terms in India is, meanwhile, an interesting but separate point.
Ashraf Dominance
When Ali Anwar, one of the leaders of the Pasmanda movement, made up of Muslim backward-castes and Dalits in Bihar, declared during a conference in 2007, “Hum shuddar hain shuddar; Bharat ke moolnivasi hain. Baad mein musalman hain” (We are Shudras first; we are the indigenous peoples of India. We are Muslims later), he was in a sense altering the semantics of Indian politics. By privileging caste over his ‘religious’ identity, Anwar was also upturning the notions of majority and minority that are commonly invoked by the mainstream political discourse. He stressed that the Pasmanda sections were a minority only when they identified themselves primarily as Muslims. But once they begin identifying themselves as Shudras, Dalits or moolnivasis (original inhabitants), they immediately transform themselves into a majority (bahujan). After all, he pointed out, even after conversion to Islam such individuals continue to be identified with their castes by the upper-caste ashrafiya Muslims. A Dalit who converts to Islam is labelled an arzal Muslim, while a Shudra who converts to Islam becomes an ajlaf Muslim. And does not the insistence on endogamy (marrying within a particular group) on the basis of caste by the ulema perpetuate and legitimise these hierarchies?
Of the three major theories on conversion to Islam in India – that is, the ‘religion of the sword’ theory, the ‘political patronage’ theory and the ‘religion of social liberation’ theory – it is the last that has been enthusiastically received by the Muslim elite classes. In a nutshell, this theory suggests that the lowest and most degraded castes in the hierarchical Hindu caste system converted to the egalitarian ideology of Islam in order to escape Brahminical oppression. However, this is a construction without much historical backing. Some historians have recently argued on the basis of their reading of the Persian primary sources that, in their presentation of Islam to Indians, traditional Muslim scholars did not stress the Islamic ideal of social equality as opposed to Hindu caste, but rather of Islamic monotheism as opposed to Hindu polytheism. Moreover, there is abundant sociological evidence to back the claim that those disadvantaged Hindu communities who converted to Islam to improve their status in the social hierarchy were scarcely successful, and caste stigma continued to weigh heavy on them. In contrast to the mythical claims made by elite Muslims, religious conversion to Islam has simply not been the great social solvent that it is often made out to be.
The ascendance of the caste movement among Muslims had political repercussions in the last assembly elections in Bihar in 2005. Ali Anwar prominently dubbed Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s so-called M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) alliance as an FM-Y (Forward Muslim-Yadav) alliance. As a consequence, a substantial number of lower-caste Muslims voted for Nitish Kumar, leading to Yadav’s defeat – and leading to one prominent journalist to dub Ali Anwar a “minority spoiler”. One of the key aspirations of the Pasmanda movement has been to contest the emotive politics of symbols that have been fostered by the Muslim caste elite – the issues surrounding Urdu, the Uniform Civil Code, Aligarh Muslim University and the Babri Masjid itself – and instead to concentrate on more organic, development-based issues facing the community. Along these lines, a few years back another leader of Dalit Muslims, Ejaz Ali, offered a provocative though arguably simplistic slogan: “Babri masjid le lo, article 341 de do” (Take Babri Mosque, give us Article 341). Notably, the movement around Article 341 presses for the scrapping of the Presidential Order of 1951 that ejected the non-Hindu Scheduled Caste segments from the Scheduled Caste list, thus depriving them ..... read the rest here...http://drabutamim.blogspot.com/2011/07/rampur-bairiya-mosque.html
What is this?
I can't believe it.
Are these "upper-caste Muslims" worthy of being called "Muslims" or Hindus?
LA'NAT HAI TUM PAR!
May Allah do justice.
Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilayhi Raji'un.
A Tale of Two Mosques by Khalid Anis Ansari.
On 6 December 1992, the demolition of the Babri Masjid by rightwing ‘Hindu’ forces heralded a major shift in the Indian political landscape. In a way, it signalled that the long-cherished Indian variant of ‘secularism’, or the Gandhian notion of sarva dharma sambhava (‘Let all religions prosper’), which held as its ideal the symmetrical treatment of all religions, was now increasingly outliving its utility for the ruling classes. And no wonder: since that time, the academic community in India has unleashed vigorous debates on secularism, and Indians have been greeted with all kinds of communitarian and postmodern critiques of the same. While the times to come will surely pronounce a verdict of some type on these sophisticated intellectual endeavours, let us first digress in order to explore some areas less treaded by the Indian academic elite.
Some examinations of the Babri episode have linked it to the neo-liberal shifts in the Indian economy that took place around the same time, particularly the ambitious economic reforms launched by the Congress government in 1991. Such an approach has also required studying the concomitant need to promote authoritarian and fascist tendencies by powerful interest blocs to divide and tame the working classes. While such a perspective is quite conceivable, whether there actually existed any formidable working-class challenge to bring about such a drastic response from the powers-that-be is worth investigating. Meanwhile, other readings of the event concentrate on a major incident: the acceptance of a single recommendation put forward by the Mandal Commission report by the V P Singh government in 1990, which reserved jobs for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the central government.
This one measure resulted overnight in V P Singh being hailed as a veritable messiah of social justice by the disadvantaged castes. At the same time, however, it also precipitated what has been dubbed by the sociologist Gail Omvedt as the “twice-born riot against democracy”, wherein the upper-caste youth took to the streets of North India, attempting to immolate themselves for what they saw as a ‘darkening of their futures’. After all, how could such a loud test of the upper-caste monopoly of privileged public-sector jobs have gone unchallenged? In fact, V P Singh, in his deposition before the Justice Liberhan Commission of 2001, opined clearly that, “Mr L K Advani undertook the rath yatra in 1990 to counter the Mandal Commission’s report, as the BJP was apprehensive that it might lose the middle class if the party supported the report.” Moreover, “the BJP also did not want to oppose the report as it feared that it might result in alienation of the backward classes, and thought that religious issues would be the proper answer to cloud the Mandal issue.”
Either way, the demolition of the Babri Masjid ensured that, in the conceivable future, religious identity in India would continue to dominate the political space at the expense of other identities, especially caste and gender. As a consequence, since the demolition Indian society has seen an increasing legitimacy accorded to both the forces of Hindutva and Islamism, even as the notion gained ground that religious communities are essentially monolithic. Why exactly the notion of ‘community’ has been so persistently sought to be defined monochromatically in religious terms in India is, meanwhile, an interesting but separate point.
Ashraf Dominance
When Ali Anwar, one of the leaders of the Pasmanda movement, made up of Muslim backward-castes and Dalits in Bihar, declared during a conference in 2007, “Hum shuddar hain shuddar; Bharat ke moolnivasi hain. Baad mein musalman hain” (We are Shudras first; we are the indigenous peoples of India. We are Muslims later), he was in a sense altering the semantics of Indian politics. By privileging caste over his ‘religious’ identity, Anwar was also upturning the notions of majority and minority that are commonly invoked by the mainstream political discourse. He stressed that the Pasmanda sections were a minority only when they identified themselves primarily as Muslims. But once they begin identifying themselves as Shudras, Dalits or moolnivasis (original inhabitants), they immediately transform themselves into a majority (bahujan). After all, he pointed out, even after conversion to Islam such individuals continue to be identified with their castes by the upper-caste ashrafiya Muslims. A Dalit who converts to Islam is labelled an arzal Muslim, while a Shudra who converts to Islam becomes an ajlaf Muslim. And does not the insistence on endogamy (marrying within a particular group) on the basis of caste by the ulema perpetuate and legitimise these hierarchies?
Of the three major theories on conversion to Islam in India – that is, the ‘religion of the sword’ theory, the ‘political patronage’ theory and the ‘religion of social liberation’ theory – it is the last that has been enthusiastically received by the Muslim elite classes. In a nutshell, this theory suggests that the lowest and most degraded castes in the hierarchical Hindu caste system converted to the egalitarian ideology of Islam in order to escape Brahminical oppression. However, this is a construction without much historical backing. Some historians have recently argued on the basis of their reading of the Persian primary sources that, in their presentation of Islam to Indians, traditional Muslim scholars did not stress the Islamic ideal of social equality as opposed to Hindu caste, but rather of Islamic monotheism as opposed to Hindu polytheism. Moreover, there is abundant sociological evidence to back the claim that those disadvantaged Hindu communities who converted to Islam to improve their status in the social hierarchy were scarcely successful, and caste stigma continued to weigh heavy on them. In contrast to the mythical claims made by elite Muslims, religious conversion to Islam has simply not been the great social solvent that it is often made out to be.
The ascendance of the caste movement among Muslims had political repercussions in the last assembly elections in Bihar in 2005. Ali Anwar prominently dubbed Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s so-called M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) alliance as an FM-Y (Forward Muslim-Yadav) alliance. As a consequence, a substantial number of lower-caste Muslims voted for Nitish Kumar, leading to Yadav’s defeat – and leading to one prominent journalist to dub Ali Anwar a “minority spoiler”. One of the key aspirations of the Pasmanda movement has been to contest the emotive politics of symbols that have been fostered by the Muslim caste elite – the issues surrounding Urdu, the Uniform Civil Code, Aligarh Muslim University and the Babri Masjid itself – and instead to concentrate on more organic, development-based issues facing the community. Along these lines, a few years back another leader of Dalit Muslims, Ejaz Ali, offered a provocative though arguably simplistic slogan: “Babri masjid le lo, article 341 de do” (Take Babri Mosque, give us Article 341). Notably, the movement around Article 341 presses for the scrapping of the Presidential Order of 1951 that ejected the non-Hindu Scheduled Caste segments from the Scheduled Caste list, thus depriving them ..... read the rest here...http://drabutamim.blogspot.com/2011/07/rampur-bairiya-mosque.html
