Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam
140. Tradition, Reform and Modernism in the Emergence of Pakistan - 4
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Social decay led to political disintegration. A resurgent Europe, riding high on waves of new ideas and technological prowess, moved in to supplant the Islamic world. The expanding social and political rot was reflected in the Sufi world as well.
Where great Sufi Shaikhs once radiated their light to an entire subcontinent, there sprang a class of hereditary tomb keepers, the sajjada nishins. Tasawwuf, whose purpose was tazkiya (cleansing) of the self and a longing for divine presence, became synonymous with visits to shrines which became cash machines for sajjada nishins offering cures for incurable diseases with wafts of peacock feather broomsticks.
Reform movements arose to arrest the social disintegration. One of the earliest was that of Shah Waliullah of Delhi (d 1762). Born in 1703, Shah Waliullah was witness to the disintegration of the Mogul empire. India was invaded by Nadir Shah (1739) and Ahmed Shah Abdali (1761). The Marathas rose up in Central India displacing Mogul power. Shah Waliullah sought to arrest the political implosion of India through social reforms. He was a scholar (alim) of the first rank as well as a practitioner of the Qadariya tareeqa and was unique among the reformers of the 18 th century in emphasizing both the esoteric and exoteric dimensions of Islam in his writings.
In the 19 th century, as Punjab first came under Sikh domination and then under the sway of the British, attempts were made to reform Sufi practices. The effort was led by the Chishtiya tareeqa which was most widely practiced in the subcontinent. The thrust of these reforms was to bring Islam back into its traditional spiritual mold based on the Sunnah of the Prophet. This was the goal of Ahl e Sunnah wal Jamaat. This Jamaat was most active in the rural areas as it was here that Sufism and the sajjada nishins held their sway.
There was at the same time an urban based movement to reform Islam. This movement, spearheaded by the ulema, looked upon Sufism with suspicion and held it responsible for the internal decay within the Muslim body politic. The urban based ulema emphasized strict adherence to the exoteric aspects of the Shariah and its injunctions, and they sought support for their positions in the ahadith of the Prophet. Their intellectual approach and their arguments, however, had little impact on the rural folks who stayed bound by their loyalties to the local sajjada nishins.
A decayed Sufism existed side by side with a feudal structure that had grown around hereditary landlords. The Mogul rulers, and the nawabs who followed them, had granted deeds to large tracts of unsettled lands to their favorite courtiers, generals and soldiers. These titles (jagirs) were passed on from father to son, and in time the hereditary owners of these deeds became powerful landlords whose sway extended not only over their lands but also their tenants. Some of the zawiyas had also received land grants from the emperors and the nawabs so that the sajjada nishins were at once owners of the supernal talisman and temporal fiefdoms. The steady influx of cash from offerings of devotees added to their wealth. Economic power translates into political power. There grew up in Punjab and Sindh a two-tiered social structure wherein the sajjada nishins and the powerful landlords occupied the privileged upper echelons of society while the masses tilled the land and toiled in their sweat.
The British, who replaced the great Moguls in the 19 th century recognized the benefits of keeping the sajjada nishins and the landlords in a power structure that would safeguard their imperial interests. Their policies in the Pakistan region reflected these imperial interests. The Land Alienation Act of 1900 conferred on the sajjada nishins the same privileges as those for the landlords. Since land was a primary criterion for social status, many of the honorary government appointments such as the local judges went to the landlords and the sajjada nishins. The British thus successfully created a two-tiered political support structure for the Raj, the first by the maharajas and the nawabs, and the second by the landlords and the hereditary sajjada nishins. It ensured that political power in the Punjab stayed in the rural areas away from the growing political awakening in the cities and the increasing demands for self-rule.
A confluence of money, politics and religion is inimical to the spiritual development of humankind. It creates a triad of power structure which corrupts all three. To be true to its divine mission, religion must remain above wealth and politics. Else, it forfeits its spirituality and succumbs to the downward pull of profane worldliness.
The coalition of landlords and rural shrine-based interests formed the basis of support for the Unionist party which was organized by Fazl Hussain and Chotu Ram in 1923. By focusing on land reforms and emphasizing traditional culture, the Unionists created a regional Punjabi party transcending the communalism that was sweeping much of northern India. Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus alike gave their allegiance to the party and it governed the key province of Punjab for over two decades. The political and social stability of the province served British interests well. A large proportion of the Indian Army that fought in the Second World War was recruited in the Punjab. Service in the army provided another binding element for Punjabis of all faiths supplanting communal and India-centrist elements.
The Unionist Party swept the provincial elections in the Punjab in 1936-37. The Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League, with their centrist all-India agendas, were both miserable failures in that election. Even Allama Iqbal and a few candidates fielded by him were defeated. Traditional Islam, in cooperation with traditional Sikh and Hindu elements, emerged victorious. Sikandar Hayat, as the head of the Unionist party governed the province until his death in 1943.
This coalition of traditional Muslim, Sikh and Hindu elements endured until after World War II. A student of history may argue that if this coalition had survived and continued to occupy the central space in the politics of the Punjab, partition would probably not have happened. How did this coalition fall apart?
Arrayed against the traditional agenda of the Unionist party were the national agendas of the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League. These centrist agendas meant different things to the two parties. The Congress party, dominated by Hindu elements from Northern India, had the luxury of framing its agenda in all-India nationalist terms because the triumph of this agenda would in effect mean a Hindu dominated central government. The Congress party saw the Muslims as a minority. Jinnah, deeply suspicious of Congress rule and distrustful of a dominant Hindu majority, would not accept this position. His own disillusionment with the Congress had led him to believe that the Muslims could not trust a Hindu majority for safeguarding their interests. He was convinced that a dialogue between the Hindus and the Muslims must be a dialogue between equals and not a dialogue between a majority and a minority. He championed the two-nation theory, articulated first by Hindu nationalists, in which the Hindus and the Muslims each occupied their own political and social space. Were the Muslims a minority or a nation, that was the question dividing the Congress and the League.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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