Islamic Revival in Nepal

Religion and a New Nation

Megan Adamson Sijapati

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136701337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Politics

This book draws on extensive fieldwork among Muslims in Nepal to examine the local and global factors that shape contemporary Muslim identity and the emerging Islamic revival movement based in the Kathmandu valley. Nepal's Muslims are active participants in the larger global movement of Sunni revival as well as in Nepal's own local politics of representation. The book traces how these two worlds are lived and brought together in the context of Nepal's transition to secularism, and explores Muslim struggles for self-definition and belonging against a backdrop of historical marginalization and an unprecedented episode of anti-Muslim violence in 2004.

Through the voices and experiences of Muslims themselves, the book examines Nepal's most influential Islamic organizations for what they reveal about contemporary movements of revival among religious minorities on the margins--both geographic and social--of the so-called Islamic world. It reveals that Islamic revival is both a complex response to the challenges faced by modern minority communities in this historically Hindu kingdom and a movement to cultivate new modes of thought and piety among Nepal's Muslims.

1 Introduction

This book offers a view into a growing movement of Islamic revival as it is taking place in the small, historically Hindu kingdom of Nepal on the northern Himalayan edge of the Indian subcontinent. A newly declared secular republic, Nepal presents a rich and highly unique context in which to examine the complex issue of how a Muslim minority population adapts to and claims a place within its non-Islamic environment, as well as in the global umma, at a time of significant social and political change. In recent decades, many of Nepal’s Muslims have become active participants in both a larger global movement of Sunni revival and in Nepal’s own local politics of representation. Through this process, many have developed a heightened sense of religious identity—at both the individual and collective levels—and have begun to cultivate a new piety-driven reform and revival-oriented community.

Based on my time spent among Nepali Muslims in 2005–06, 2008, and 2009–10, I suggest that this revival represents a complex response to the opportunities and responsibilities that have arisen through the country’s dramatic transition into a secular democracy. I argue that this revival cannot be understood apart from Muslim experiences of religious violence and marginalization within a Hindu kingdom. Increasingly important is the larger context of global Islamic revival, which has served as a platform for responding to these experiences, has provided discursive tools for participating in the identity politics of Nepal’s new secular polity, and has ultimately been important for envisioning a new collective Muslim identity. The Nepali Muslim voices and perspectives that I document here speak to the processes through which the active reform and revival of Islam comes to be productive and meaningful for a Muslim minority with a history of marginalization, growing ties to the global umma, and an increasing investment in their local environment.

This book examines the conditions that have been conducive to these developments and documents and analyzes this revival as it is taking shape in contemporary Nepal. Particular attention is given to the increasingly influential Muslims whose two major organizations form the core of this revival movement. Compelled by a variety of factors, the Muslim organizations examined here seek, like other religious, political, and ethnic movements in

Figure 1.1 Map of Nepal and South Asia

the subcontinent’s past and present, “greater ideological and practical uniformity within the broad boundaries of religious affiliation.”¹ As such, the movement reflects ideological shifts in Nepal’s political and religious environment and in Muslim thought, politics, and piety. But these organizations also seek to enrich communal, political, and individual life through renewed piety and a new politicization of religion. Through an examination of Nepali Muslims’ history of alterity, an unprecedented incident of anti-Muslim violence in the nation’s capital in 2004, and the discourses and practices of the organizations at the forefront of the revival, this book questions how and why this is the case and examines what it tells us about contemporary movements of Islamic revival among minorities on the margins—both geographic and social—of the so-called Islamic world.

Islam on the Margins: Approaches and Issues

Historically, South Asia’s Islamic traditions have involved what Richard Eaton describes as the “double movement between the local cultures of South Asia and the universal norms of Islam,” in which people “living in different ages and cultures manage[d], without rejecting their local cultures, to incorporate into their lives a normative order as they [understand] it to have been revealed in the Quran.”² This book works from the perspective that movements of Islamic revival—like other religious phenomena—are windows through which to view this double movement and come to better understand it. It also argues that this concept of double-movement provides a useful framework for thinking about religious revival and reform. As a small, landlocked Hindu-majority state, which throughout most of its modern history has been ruled by a Hindu monarchy, the lives, experiences, and movements of Nepali Muslims offer unique perspectives on the development of Islamic identities, the processes compelling new movements of Islamic revival, and the intertwining of local and global processes that shape them.

In Nepal, as in other settings around the world, Muslim religious boundaries and conceptions of self and community are being drawn in terms of a reform oriented, discursive, and politicized Islamic tradition that its advocates view as more authentic and better suited for the challenges they face as a religious minority.³ For these Muslims in Nepal, the eventual goal is to develop a normative, communal, Islamic worldview for the Nepali Muslim population at large and a broad religious affiliation with political dimensions driven by a highly discursive understanding of Islamic tradition. Yet they must work within their local environment as well, and the ways that they choose to do this reveal their conceptions of the boundaries of their religious identities, community, and possibilities within the framework of Islam in a non-Islamic environment. They strive to be—and to be understood by others as—Muslims who are concurrently part of a dynamic global umma and citizens of a Hindu-majority secular state.

Towards the goal of better understanding these processes among Muslims in Nepal, it is fruitful to consider Peter Van der Veer’s theoretical conception of a “dialectic of inclusion and exclusion,”⁴ which he argues compels processes of identity formation as boundaries are negotiated between religious communities. While it is important not to overemphasize the boundaries between religious communities and the other religious communities with which they come in contact (and then negotiate through this double movement), boundaries between religious communities (both among Muslims and across religious groups) nevertheless play an integral role in many of the processes addressed in this book. As David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence have argued, processes of identity formation are generated through tensions produced in “the deployment of framing categories of commonality and the assertion of particularities of difference.”⁵ As I discuss in Chapter 3 of this study, the Nepali state has historically operated according to categories based on Hindu notions of purity and pollution. These structured the polity in such a way that marginalized Muslims by framing them as precarious, potentially dangerous outsiders. In contemporary Nepal, simultaneous claims and counterclaims of local belonging and translocal affiliation, both by the transitional secular Nepali state and Muslim themselves, shape Muslim self-understanding.

As a historically Gurkha-dominated kingdom whose history was characterized by xenophobia, preoccupation with caste purity, and the religious substantiation of social hierarchy, Nepal’s frames of commonality and difference are not only multilayered and contentious, but for most of the country’s history, unidirectional from the side of the state. Only since political changes in Nepal’s recent history (from 1952 onward), and most pointedly since its first relatively sustained period of democracy beginning in the early 1990s, have formal discourses of commonality and difference begun to be articulated by Muslims at the national level. In contemporary Nepal this is taking place at two levels: first, at the level of political representation—as Nepali Muslims grapple with what it means to be a Muslim in a non-Islamic context and to be a non-Hindu citizen of Nepal—and second, at the level of religious discourse and practice as they focus on reform-oriented forms of piety through new religious programs and political orientations.

Recent scholarship in the expanding field of Islamic traditions in South Asia has provided insights into how Muslim minorities adapt to and claim a place within their larger non-Muslim environments. Among scholars of religion in South Asia the issue of religious identity has received much attention, particularly as an entry point into an understanding of the boundaries and conflicts between religious communities. Towards this end, some have argued for the need to give greater attention to shared narratives and identities and to the ways that religious identities are multiple both within and between religious communities, particularly between Muslims and Hindus.⁶ Scholarly attention to multiplicity is important because the religious components of identity are seen as one aspect of larger multi-dimensional identities. It broadens our understanding of how and when religious dimensions of larger social identities are operative.

There are points in time and place, however, when the religious dimensions of identity become paramount to members of a religious community. At such junctures, actors deploy religious language, symbolism, and practices in authoritative, creative—and sometimes contentious and violent—ways to express new visions for their community and to stimulate broad religious affiliation. Among Nepal’s Muslims adopting new religiously determined orientations towards other Muslims and non-Muslims, some are erecting rigid boundaries between themselves and non-Muslims, and perhaps even more significantly, between themselves and other non-reformist, non-revivalist Muslims. Others, by contrast, are engaging in interfaith dialogue as representatives of the larger Muslim population.

Authoritative discourses on religious piety and politics, which Nepal’s Islamic revival movement produces, involve their own hierarchies of conflict, silencing, and contestation, much like those they themselves contest. Nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian schools of Islamic thought such as Deoband, for example, were responding to the experience of powerlessness, conflict, and contestation in the context of British colonial rule. Their very discourses and practices—and the identities that emerged powerfully through them—came to impinge upon, and in fact were understood through contrast to, the traditions of other South Asian Muslims, whose practices were condemned and targeted for reform. On a smaller scale but no less significant, Nepali Muslims are responding to over two decades of political turbulence and social transformation in Nepal, increased anti-Muslim violence, and unprecedented exposure to transnational Islamic discourses.

Muslims officially comprise 4.2 percent of Nepal’s population, which itself is a richly diverse collection of various ethnic groups and religions, though the majority of the population identifies as Hindu. There are an estimated twenty-four Muslim organizations in Nepal as of 2010, many of which are vying to be authoritative voices for the country’s Muslims and to represent the population to the country’s non-Muslims. Even a new organization, the United Muslim National Struggle Committee, established itself as the umbrella organization for these twenty-four registered Muslim organizations. Among these, there is overlap and competition in the effort to create religious and social programs for Muslims based in what they each see as the fundamentals of Islam. This is pursued in various ways such as health services, educational services, political platforms, and religious training. The two groups that are the focus of Chapters 5 and 6 of this book, the National Muslim Forum Nepal and the Islami Sangh Nepal (Islamic Association of Nepal), are the largest and most influential.

Terminology: Locating “Revivalism”

Because there is both continuity and diversity across movements of Islamic revival, each movement has to be taken on its own terms. No universal term exists for the range of Islamic movements witnessed around the globe, precisely because Islam and its movements are not monolithic. Of the English terms used by scholars, such as “Islamism,” “extremism,” or “radicalism,” the term “revival” (or “revivalism”/“revivalist”) is most apt in describing the movement one witnesses in contemporary Nepal. This is because it communicates the sense of grassroots revitalization of the religious dimensions of individual and community life in which its proponents are self-consciously engaged. Their efforts are informed by what they deem as the most vital aspects of Islam, particularly in the tricky balance of maintaining tradition and thriving in the modern world. To label the Muslim movements in Nepal “Islamist” would be inapt, as it would suggest an overt political program as the primary goal of the movement, and an implicit possibility of reaching the goal of Islamically-defined political institutions. Nepali Muslim organizations are indeed political, but as a small minority, the country’s Muslims do not realistically envision any future in which Islamic norms and ideals would determine the structure of Nepal’s national government.

The use of “revival” does not entirely obviate the problems that come with imposing definitions on movements that resist definition.⁷ To impose a definition on a phenomenon as complex as religious revivalism risks both limitation and over-determination. “Revival” can be interpreted to mean that at a prior time Islam was not fully vibrant or manifest, and only now is being given life. It can be read to suggest that there is only one “proper” form of Islam, and that previous practice was not properly Islamic. It also can be interpreted to suggest that we know how Islam was practiced prior to the time of the study and the role it played in shaping Muslim life. A senior member of the Islami Sangh (one of the two organizations leading this revival), with whom I shared many conversations in the winter of 2009–10, questioned the use of this term, concerned that it suggests that their work in Nepal is the result of something unique to the country’s Muslims. A great number of the marginalized ethnic and religious minorities in Nepal are undergoing similar movements of renewal, reform, cultural self-definition, and political organization based on ethnic or religious ideals and made possible (and even necessary) because of political transformations in the country. As a Muslim he was wary of the term “revival” since it implies that Islam was not being practiced at one point among Muslims, or that Islam as it was practiced by Nepali Muslims was somehow unusual.

His concerns speak not only to the complexity of the relationship between the members of this movement and the scholar who studies them (which I address in more detail at the end of this chapter), but they also point to the multiple dimensions of the movement and the layers of context that one must excavate to begin to understand it. This book is about the very questions that his concerns point to: what these movements are all about, how they meet the needs of some in the community, and not others, what conditions they have emerged in response to, and how best to understand them in the context of contemporary Nepal and modern Islam. The term “revival” best communicates the way that so many Muslims in this movement in Nepal think about their efforts at bringing Islamic religious values to the discourses of development and identity politics among the Muslim population in Nepal and Nepal’s population at large. Indeed they seek to add a new vitality and sense of urgency to the religious tradition that is theirs. The term evokes the sense of energy and momentum at work among individuals and organizations in Nepal working to make Islam the point of reference for Muslims in every sphere of life. The organizations and individuals I worked with all in fact seek a revival of Islam—envisioned in a variety of ways—for themselves and others. If, in their view, Muslims had already embodied the ideals of traditional Islam, their organizations, which are the lynchpins of the movement, would have no need to exist. As a senior member of both organizations emphasized, “there is no separation between religion and politics . . . as Mawdudi taught, from every side you are a Muslim.” This, he explained, requires work, and “only religion can do the work that the country and the community needs now.”⁸

Tracing the Roots of Revival in Nepal

During the 1990s various religious groups in Nepal began cultivating communal identities with explicit political dimensions as they turned to what they perceived to be the foundational, authoritative, and historically un-mutated teachings of their religious traditions.⁹ Newari Buddhists¹⁰ turned to forms of Theravada Buddhism,¹¹ perceiving them as more authentic forms of the religion, and Hindu groups emerged that were affiliated with more rigid, less tolerant forms of Hinduism connected with Indian Hindutva groups. A new politicization of religious identity was developing among Muslims as well.¹² Muslims based in the Tarai lowlands and affiliated with various reform-oriented schools in India formed new organizations and became increasingly influential at the local level.

Up to the middle of the twentieth century, Muslims in Nepal remained insulated from the larger Hindu society and state in matters of culture, politics, and religion.¹³ According to Gaborieau, by keeping a “low public profile”—a social orientation supported by the overall environment of firm boundaries between religious groups promoted by the state—Muslims benefited from a degree of safety and protection vis-à-vis the Hindu society and state.¹⁴ Internally, Muslims in Nepal, like Muslims throughout South Asia, identified themselves primarily in terms of ethnicity and caste¹⁵ (ashraf/ajlaf) status. In the Kathmandu valley, the latter came to define the terms of the ongoing opposition between Kathmandu’s Kashmiri and “Hindustani” Muslims and high and low caste Muslims throughout the country.¹⁶

Gaborieau suggests that in the early to mid-twentieth century a transition occurred from an identity model that gave ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Fragmentary pasts: the historical and social landscape of Muslim Nepal
• 3. Boundaries of purity: a Hindu kingdom and Muslim alterity
• 4. Kalo Buddhvar: religion, violence, and Muslim Nepalis
• 5. Towards a unified voice: the National Muslim Forum and a nascent Muslim ”nation”
• 6. Islamic revival, tradition, and identity: the Islami Sangh Nepal
• 7. Epilogue: Muslims in a new secular Nepal
• Notes
• Bibiliography
• Index