Self and Sovereignty

Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850

Ayesha Jalal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134599370
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Self and Sovereignty surveys the role of individual Muslim men and women within India and Pakistan from 1850 through to decolonisation and the partition period.
Commencing in colonial times, this book explores and interprets the historical processes through which the perception of the Muslim individual and the community of Islam has been reconfigured over time. Self and Sovereignty examines the relationship between Islam and nationalism and the individual, regional, class and cultural differences that have shaped the discourse and politics of Muslim identity. As well as fascinating discussion of political and religious movements, culture and art, this book includes analysis of:
* press, poetry and politics in late nineteenth century India
* the politics of language and identity - Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi
* Muslim identity, cultural differnce and nationalism
* the Punjab and the politics of Union and Disunion
* the creation of Pakistan
Covering a period of immense upheaval and sometimes devastating violence, this work is an important and enlightening insight into the history of Muslims in South Asia.

Chapter 1
The Muslim Self and the Loss of Sovereignty:
Individual and Community Before 1858

‘I have none of the hallmarks of a Muslim; why is it that every humiliation that the Muslims suffer pains and grieves me so much?’, the great Persian and Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) once mused.¹ For a non-conformist who spurned the orthodox view of Islam, though not the basic tenets of the faith, Ghalib’s pathos for the Muslims is as touching as it is revealing. It offers an insight into the self-identification of one of the leading literary figures of nineteenth-century northern India. Associated with the court of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Ghalib was personally affected by the erosion of Muslim power which culminated in the dramatic loss of sovereignty in 1857. Yet his poetry and prose, imbued with idioms and motifs drawn from a cultural milieu that was both Muslim and Indian, tended to be more individualistic than communitarian in expression.² This was in keeping with literary conventions prior to 1857 in contrast to the dominant trend from the late-nineteenth-century when a more self-conscious attempt was made to project the collective identity of the Muslims.

The shift from the individual to the collective in the poetry and prose of Muslims need not be overdrawn to appreciate the differences in the historical contexts of Ghalib and his contemporaries, and their successors in late nineteenth century British India. To some extent the individual and the collective remained imbricated in Muslim poetry and prose even after the formal loss of sovereignty and the onset of ‘modernity’ in the mid-nineteenth century appeared to encourage the privileging of collective themes through a rapidly expanding print media. But it is the oft-cited absence of the individual in what has come to be regarded as an overwhelmingly collective Islamic ethos which makes the poetry of Ghalib and other outstanding literary figures of the time, Mir Taqi Mir (1722–1810) and Hakim Momin Khan Momin (1801–52) for instance, an excellent source to tap the individual consciousness of a Muslim.

THE MUSLIM AS INDIVIDUAL

When asked if he was a Muslim, Ghalib is known to have said that he was only half Muslim: he drank wine but did not eat pork. Mir Taqi Mir who dominated the literary scene in northern India prior to Ghalib was given to even greater impudence in matters to do with religion. ‘Do not ask of my sect or faith,’ Mir once said; he had long ago abjured Islam and with a sacred mark on the brow now kneeled in the temple.³ Displaying a visceral aversion for religious leaders, Muslim and Hindu alike, and cherishing his own individuality, Mir declared that instead of joining with the Sheikh and Brahman, he would make his kaaba separately.⁴ Such irreverence towards established religious norms did not vitiate Ghalib’s and Mir’s sense of belonging to the community of Muslims. Nor did being a Muslim inhibit them from interacting closely with members of other communities. Ghalib went to the extent of saying that even a Brahman true to his faith could die in the idol house and qualify for burial in the kaaba.⁵ His rejection of social closure on the basis of religion is underscored in a couplet where he asserts that as a muwahid, or a believer in the unity of God, he had abandoned cultural rituals which set one community apart from another. When there are no rituals to separate communities, all would believe in the unity of God and true faith could be established.⁶

So how significant was being a Muslim in the self-definition of the personal identity of these poets? It was clearly not insignificant given the frequency with which the duality between a kafir (non-believer) and a Muslim is invoked in the poetry of both Mir and Ghalib. In Muslim mystical poetry, from which the two poets drew their inspiration, the unresponsive beloved is often likened to a kafir or an idol. Mir considered the religion of love to be the hallmark of a kafir⁷ while Ghalib asserted: ‘Why should my life be dearer than the idol? Isn’t faith dear to me?’⁸ And then again: ‘Why did I give my heart deeming her faithful Asad? I erred thinking the kafir was a Muslim.’⁹ The imagery of a kafir and an idol is sustained in the more self-consciously Muslim poetry of Hakim Momin Khan Momin, an avid follower of Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly even though he did not directly participate in the so-called Wahabi movement.¹⁰ Momin’s name literally means a practising Muslim. In one verse Momin complained that the idol had always been his enemy; this is what his name had done to him.¹¹

The distinction between a non-believer and a believer in the poetry of Mir, Ghalib and Momin might suggest the all-pervasiveness of Muslim identity which many observers of Islam are wont to detect in the self-perceptions of the faithful. Yet Muslimness, however defined, cannot be seen in isolation from the myriad other social relationships informing the worldview of the individual Muslim. There is nothing particularly unusual about the attachment of Muslims to the symbols of their collective religious identity. It has nevertheless fuelled the misconception that the notion of the individual in Islam is either non-existent or at best weakly articulated. It is true that Muslims identify strongly and passionately with the Quran, their Holy Prophet and a range of other Islamic symbols. Yet identification with a common set of symbols and beliefs cannot be seen as grounds for the erasure of the individual in Muslim consciousness. Unlike other great religious traditions Islam does not acknowledge any mediation between the individual and God, whose unity is complete and absolute.¹²

The shahada or confessional statement la illah illa Allah—there is no God but God—is the foundational principle of Islam. It is the intermeshing of the Arabic letters alif for Allah and lam that have inspired some of the greatest Muslim thought and art in the Islamic world. India has been no exception.

Admiring their calligraphic uses in minor arts and architectural inscriptions, Annemarie Schimmel notes that ‘these weighty words have been ornated with so intricate and bewildering interlacing ornaments that an uninitiated would scarcely imagine that the essence of Muslim faith is concealed behind them’.¹³ According to an old Islamic saying, calligraphy is the geometry of the spirit; it is through writing and reciting the letters, words and verses of the Quran that the Muslim strives for unity with the one and only Allah.¹⁴ It is a quest which is meaningless without the initial negation followed by absolute affirmation. Removing the alif from the la leaves the lam with the vertical stem dropping into the circular

nun without the diacritical point or the nokta, invoking the visual image of the sword of negation. Since the letter nun resembles an inkpot, the calligraphic lam as sword symbolizes the pen. The missing nokta signifies the individual seeking inner spiritual union with the mysterious and original diacritical point of ba

in the bismillah, in the name of Allah, which opens the first chapter of the Quran, and by implication with all the lines and circles of divine creation.¹⁵ Not only are the proportions of calligraphy a key to the apportioning of space in Islamic art and architecture,¹⁶ but the constitutive elements linking the Quranic revelation with Muslim spirituality, the moving force in both intellectual and artistic creativity.

Defying formal laws of composition, the Quran emerges like a formless ocean, a central motif in Persian-Urdu poetry:

Joyful is the drop dissolving in the ocean
An excess of pain itself becomes the remedy.¹⁷

This was how Ghalib evoked the idea of fana or annihilation which together with that of baqa or salvation gives expression to the believer’s longing for union with divine creation. It is not the form of the Quranic revelation but its haqiqah or formless essence and the concept of tauhid or the unity of creation which has informed the artistic creations of Muslims the world over.

Untranslatable into any material form, the Quran as the word of Allah has been the main source of inspiration for Muslim arts—not only calligraphy and architecture but also poetry. In Titus Burckhardt’s astute estimation, the ‘Quran does not satisfy’; ‘it expands the soul by lending it wings, then lays it low and leaves it naked; for the believer, it is both comforting and gratifying, like a rainstorm’. As the radiation of the divine sun on the human desert, its spirit is invoked in the fluid rhythms of an arabesque and, in the abstract and crystalline nature of the architecture.¹⁸

Calligraphy is considered the noblest of Islamic arts.¹⁹ According to an early Sufi saying, there is no letter in any language which does not worship God. The calligrapher with the calamus, symbolizing the letter alif for Allah, knows something of the complex mythology of writing the sacred script. As is the wont of an abd or slave of Allah, the calligrapher invariably pleads forgiveness for daring to imitate the word of God. Every letter of the Arabic language signifies multiple meanings to Muslims, especially those of the mystical bent. As a great Sufi poet put it:

This alif was first one in origin;
Then is produced the numbers of connection
…
When the alif is bent like a reed
Then its both ends become crooked, and it is a ba
When alif becomes a horseshoe, it is a nun.²⁰

But the nun can just as well be an inkpot into which the calligrapher dips the alif of the unity of creation, presenting immense possibilities for the artistic expression of the divine idea. The imagery of the pen and the tablet is widespread in mystical poetry whose regional variations have been the more powerful influences in shaping a sense of Muslimness than the pontifications of the theologians of Islam in their different settings.

If Arabic is the language of God, Persian it is said is the language of paradise. Yet it was in Urdu that Ghalib made his most profound statement on his idea of the self: When there was nothing, there was God; if there had been nothing, there would have been God. Being drowned me; if I had not been what would there have been?’²¹ This daring couplet is explicable only in terms of the Islamic notion of the individual believer’s relationship with God. In delineating a direct and unmediated relationship between the individual and the Creator— based on outright negation, followed by an absolute affirmation— Islam allows maximum autonomy to the Muslim self which is subject only to the will of Allah, the one and only sovereign of the world. Mir acknowledged the dangers of reposing such autonomy in the individual even as he noted the responsibility it entailed:

By naming him the cro...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF MAPS
• PREFACE
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• CHAPTER 1: THE MUSLIM SELF AND THE LOSS OF SOVEREIGNTY: INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY BEFORE 1858
• CHAPTER 2: FORGING A MUSLIM COMMUNITY: PRESS, POETRY AND POLITICS IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• CHAPTER 3: COMMON LANGUAGES, CONTESTED SCRIPTS, CONFLICTED COMMUNITIES: SHIFTING IDENTITIES OF URDU, HINDI AND PUNJABI
• CHAPTER 4: MUSLIMS AS A LEGAL AND POLITICAL CATEGORY: SUBJECTHOOD IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
• CHAPTER 5: IDENTITY AND SOVEREIGNTY IN MUSLIM CONSCIOUSNESS: THE KHILAFAT CRESCENT AND THE INDIAN CHARKHA
• CHAPTER 6: CONTESTED SOVEREIGNTY IN THE PUNJAB: THE INTERPLAY OF FORMAL AND INFORMAL POLITICS
• CHAPTER 7: BETWEEN REGION AND NATION: THE MISSING CENTRE
• CHAPTER 8: AT THE CROSSROADS OF ‘PAKISTAN’: MUSLIM IMAGININGS AND TERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY
• CHAPTER 9: LOST TRACKS TO UNITY: CONFRONTATION, COMPROMISE AND CIVIL WAR
• CHAPTER 10: EPILOGUE: AN UNHEALING WOUND: PARADOXES OF MUSLIM IDENTITY, SOVEREIGNTY AND CITIZENSHIP
• GLOSSARY
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY