Democracy,
Pluralism and Minority Rights (Final)
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
Concord, CA
Democracy comes in different packages.
As a slogan it provides a sharp cutting edge for
imperial ambitions. As a functioning process it
empowers the masses. In this final article we
survey briefly the historical experience of Muslims
in building pluralistic societies, providing guarantees
for minority rights and coming to terms with participatory
democracy. The legacies of Akbar the Great Mogul,
Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Allama Mohammed Iqbal
are highlighted.
Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar Padashah Ghazi (d 1605),
as his celebrated biographer Abul Fazal refers
to him, was one of the greatest rulers produced
by Hindustan. Muslim historians are ambiguous
about his rule. Some consider him to be one of
the greatest among Muslim rulers, while others
look at him as a renegade. In the entire span
of fourteen hundred years of Islamic history,
no Muslim emperor stretched the social and religious
envelope as an Islamic sovereign, as did Akbar,
while remaining within the fold of Islam. And
no one tackled the complex issues of Muslim interactions
with a largely non-Muslim world with the sincerity,
zeal, passion, originality, common sense and commitment
demonstrated by this complex, enigmatic, gifted,
energetic and purposeful monarch.
The orthodox thought he had become a Hindu. The
Hindus were convinced he died a Muslim. The Jesuits
in Goa believed he was a sure candidate for conversion
to Christianity. The Jains and Parsis felt at
home in his presence and considered him one of
their own. He befriended the Sikhs, and protected
mosques and temples alike. Akbar was a universal
man; he was more than any single group thought
of him. He was the purest representation of Sufic
Islam that grew up in Asia after the destruction
wrought by the Mongols (1219-1258).
Akbar was the first Muslim emperor to extend to
the Hindus the same status as that accorded to
the Christians and the Jews from the beginning
of the Islamic period. This was a bold move, one
that met resistance from the more conservative
ulema. Akbar married a Rajput princess, and allowed
her to practice her faith within his palace just
as earlier Turkish sultans had married Byzantine
Christian princesses and allowed them to practice
Christianity within their quarters. Hindus were
treated as people of the Book, the jizya was abolished,
and Hindus became generals and commanders in the
army as well as governors and divans in the empire.
By his personal example, the Emperor sought to
build family relationships with the Hindus, thus
extending the reach of Islam to the Vedic civilization.
The fourth Great Mogul, Jehangir, was a product
of Rajput-Mogul intermarriage. Akbar’s legacy
stayed with the empire well into waning years
of the empire. Some Mogul princes became scholars
of Sanskrit as well as Persian and Arabic. Dara
Shikoah, eldest son of Shah Jehan, translated
the Indian classic, Mahabharata into Persian.
The basis for governance in Akbar’s domains
was Akhlaq. As we have pointed out in earlier
articles, the classic work of Nasiruddin al Tusi
(d 1273), Akhaq e Nasiri, was required reading
in Mogul schools. Following the example of al
Tusi, many ulema of Hindustan also wrote books
on Akhlaq which were used as texts in local schools.
Akbar’s genius was to construct an egalitarian
society based on the fruit of religious experience,
namely good character, rather than sectarian interpretations
of religious rites, customs and interpretations.
Schools of fiqh were not abandoned but were used
to build character in an integrative spiritual
Sufi matrix.
Akbar succeeded in creating a pluralistic society
in which minority rights were guaranteed by the
openness of the system. Through his philosophy
of suleh e kul, and through royal edicts, he ensured
that all of his riyaya (subjects) received equal
treatment from the state and had equal access
to the royal machinery. Indeed, some suspect that
his goal was to build a Hindustani nation, transcending
allegiance to myriad faiths in the land.
The political pendulum had swung far to one side
and reaction set in. It is an irony of Islamic
history that the challenge to a Sufic emperor
came from the wombs of Sufism. The Naqshbandi
Sufi order, with deep roots in Central Asia, was
a principal player in this development. Alarmed
at the integrative thrust of Akbar’s reforms,
Shaikh Baqi Billah who was the spiritual head
of the Naqbandi silsilah, and who lived in Kabul
at the time, invited Akbar’s brother Mirza
Hakim to dethrone Akbar. Mirza Hakim marched into
the Punjab at the head of an Afghan-Uzbek army
and occupied Lahore in 1581. This brought the
Great Mogul to Lahore the same year. Akbar camped
in Lahore for almost fifteen years and it was
from this base that he conquered Sindh, Baluchistan,
the NW frontier, Afghanistan and Kashmir. The
threat from the Afghan-Uzbek quarters was eliminated.
It was however, Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi, the next
in line in the Naqshbandi silsilah who had a critical
impact on the Mogul empire. Indeed, Sirhindi,
known as Mujaddid alf e Thani, was a pivotal figure
in world history, who changed the direction of
Islamic civilization from a Sufic orientation
to a jurisprudence orientation. Through his letters
(the maktubat) to Mogul and Ottoman courtiers
he asserted the supremacy of the law over innovation.
It was a salafi response from a Sufi quarter.
Shaikh Ahmed, at least in the initial stages of
his writings, held that the Hindus be treated
as dhimmis and the experiment of Hindu-Muslim
cooption be stopped. After he passed away in 1624,
his son and grandson continued to influence the
Mogul courts. The battle lines were now drawn.
When Shah Jehan fell ill and the armies of Aurangzeb
and Dara Shikoah met on the banks of the Jamuna
in 1657 over succession rights to the Peacock
throne, it was more than a battle between two
princes. It was a contest of wills between Sufic
Islam represented by Dara Shikoah and salafi Islam
championed by Aurangzeb. In this contest, the
salafis won and Muslim India charged off in the
direction of exclusive pluralism and a rigid application
of fiqh.
It was the power of Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi’s
work that changed the direction of Islam in India
and paved the way for Emperor Aurangzeb. Indeed,
so powerful was the draft from Shaikh Ahmed’s
legacy, that one witnesses a simultaneous increase
in rigid religious zeal in the Ottoman Empire
and Safavid Persia in the early part of the eighteenth
century. India, in particular, witnessed a strict
application of fiqh in the reign of Aurangzeb,
but in the process it imploded. The Hindus, Muslims
and the Sikhs went their separate ways. India
was the first great non-Western civilization to
fall to the West. Its implosion and subsequent
subjugation by the British shifted the locus of
world history from Asia to Europe.
No survey of pluralistic experiments in Islamic
history is complete without a mention of the works
of Allama Mohammed Iqbal. Iqbal conceived of democracy
as a spiritual democracy of believers. Summarily,
his work shows four discrete steps in the evolution
of his thought. First, he asserts the supremacy
of the spirit over the physical and holds that
the fulfillment of man’s destiny on earth
lies in his spiritual attainment. His poetry is
suffused with spirituality and it is impossible
to know him without knowing tasawwuf.
Secondly, he asserts that the moving principle
of Islamic history is Ijtihad. In placing the
science of fiqh and its application through Ijtihad
at the vortex of Muslim thought, he falls in the
tradition of Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi and takes Muslim
thought away from the orthodoxy of tasawwuf. Third,
in line with the thinking of the Turkish poet
Zia, he proposes that the process of Ijtihad be
open to the layman and not be the exclusive privilege
of individual muftis. An elected legislative body,
not just an individual mujtahid, would be best
guarantee that Ijtihad maintains its dynamism.
And fourth, he asserts that only a Muslim legislature
can engage in Ijtihad. In The Reconstruction of
Religious Thought in Islam he wrote: “What
then is the principle of movement in the nature
of Islam? This is known as Ijtihad………
The transfer of the power of Ijtihad from individual
representatives of schools to a Muslim legislative
assembly which, in view of the growth of opposing
sects, is the only possible form Ijma can take
in modern times, will secure contributions to
legal discussion from laymen who happen to possess
a keen insight into affairs. In this way alone
we can stir into activity the dormant spirit of
life in our legal system, and give it an evolutionary
outlook. In India, however, difficulties are likely
to arise; for it is doubtful whether a non-Muslim
legislative assembly can exercise the power of
Ijtihad.” Democracy, pluralism and minority
rights, according to Iqbal, must stay within the
traditional framework of fiqh as it evolves through
an elected Muslim legislature. One can easily
see how this line of thinking led Iqbal in the
direction of Pakistan and away from accommodation
with the other religious traditions in India.
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