“Over the last two years, the Deobandi school has for the first time in the subcontinent issued a fatwa condemning all terrorism and violence.” He was referring to the Darul Uloom religious school in Deoband in Uttar Pradesh. “Islam cannot allow the killing of innocent people or the use of suicide bombing. The Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind has held more than forty public meetings, attended by millions of people, to protest against terrorism. Muslims in India are all agreed at this point that Islam cannot allow any sort of violence where innocents are the target.”
The fatwa was proclaimed at a meeting in Deoband attended by representatives of more than 6,000 organizations. A senior cleric had said explicitly: “We reject terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. Terrorism completely negates the teachings of Islam.”32 The message was aimed principally at Muslims in India, but the community hoped it would reach other countries too, which were often in a very different political and intellectual place when it came to an interpretation of the word “jihad.” The complication was that Deobandi Islam had mutated in Pakistan, with General Zia’s assistance, into an extremist force which talked of martyrdom, and its hardline message had spread around the world. Deobandis controlled 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques, and had a lock on the training of new preachers.33 The faith had followed a curious progression, becoming more radical in Pakistan than it was in Deoband itself, and in some cases more radical in Britain than it was in Pakistan. In a curious historical loop, activists back in England denounced Mohammad Ali Jinnah and all his works. Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s magazine Khilafah announced: “Jinnah went one step further than most traitors … How dare this man associate a Kufr [infidel] concept such as democracy with our Prophet (SAW)?”34 (SAW was short for “sallaallahu alaihi wasallam,” a religious utterance.)
Madani did not want to comment on Deoband’s export trends. He had recently been in trouble with some religious opponents (although I felt that in practice they were political opponents) for praising the Dalai Lama, and he did not want to pick another fight. “Their conflict is a political conflict. I don’t believe in the concept of Islam against the others. Muslims in our country had an opportunity to migrate to Pakistan, and they decided to stay in their homeland. It’s our home. We learned patriotism from our forefathers, who wanted to be Indian. Many freedom fighters in our country came from an Islamic background. For us, this is the most beautiful place to live.”
The one area where Madani was a firm conformist was on Muslim personal law. The failure to agree on a common civil code after independence meant, for instance, that polygamy was still permitted for Muslims, which in an orthodox household could leave women in an intolerable position. Archaic rules that had been abolished in other Muslim jurisdictions remained in place in India, enabling courts peopled in the main by elderly men with beards to pronounce on personal matters. Notoriously, India retained the “triple talaq,” by which a Muslim man could divorce his wife simply by saying “I divorce you” three times (there had even been debate whether sending the message by email three times constituted a dissolution of the marriage). The triple talaq was seen in many Muslim-majority countries as an outmoded historical relic, and even in Pakistan had been abolished under the Pakistani Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961. According to Commentary on Mohammedan Law, the guidebook presently used by lawyers in most Indian courts: “The talaq should not be ambiguous, and should ideally include the woman’s name. ‘I divorce my wife forever and render her haram [forbidden] for me,’ should be uttered to show clear intention.”35 It did not sound like a particularly reassuring law.
When I asked Madani why he opposed any changes to these rules, he spoke of unity in diversity and began a digression on Islamic jurisprudence. He pointed out that India had four different schools—the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Wahabi—and that they each followed different regulations. Reading Commentary on Mohammedan Law later, I realized he was speaking only of Sunnis, and that Shias could rely on interpretations offered by either the Zaidi, Ismaili or Ithna Ashari tradition, and that further personal law regulations existed for those who followed the Motazila school.
“Islam can’t change. We can change Muslims, but we can’t change Islam. We cannot accept a common civil code, because all citizens must be content with their own beliefs. Which civil code would we adopt? In south India, some communities might even like to marry their sister’s daughters. We don’t want a universal personal law.”36
It was a politician’s answer, and the truth was that men like Madani benefited from the status quo. With the disappearance of powerful families and much of the progressive Muslim leadership to the new homeland of Pakistan at the time of partition, a rudderless community had been left behind in India, struggling to shape its future. Indian Muslims were too weak to challenge whatever they were offered, and took refuge in antique conventions. At times of crisis, their Hindu neighbours might target them or ask where their true allegiance lay. Nehru’s commitment to protecting this large minority from vengeance had evolved over the decades into a stasis where political parties, and in particular the Congress, claimed to protect them and act on their behalf. Clerics on the further fringes of Islam were treated deferentially by the Indian secular media when compared to Hindu bigots.37 Madani’s statement was an expression of a conservative interpretation of Islam, even if it abjured the extremes of the Deobandis outside India. Most Indian madrasas, although they might not be politically radical, were content to follow a syllabus that concentrated on the precise rules governing Islamic moral and social conduct, personal behaviour, dress and appropriate interaction between the sexes.38 India’s most successful Muslim business people nearly all came from backgrounds outside the Sunni mainstream—Azim Premji of the hugely successful IT services company Wipro, for instance, was an Ismaili.39
Many, perhaps most, Indian Muslim leaders shared Madani’s more traditional views, using the restraints of the past to shelter the community from external pressures. I discussed this with Qasim Rasool Ilyas of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which organized the 400 or so “darul qazas,” or sharia courts, in India. To become a judge, or qazi, you did not need a law degree, but had to have studied Islamic traditions. Each qazi made his own decisions: there were no advocates in this court system, which had been formalized in the early 1970s. India since independence has had a strong tradition of women lawyers and judges, but there was not a single female qazi.
“There’s no law against it,” said Ilyas, “but no women have done the training.” He described the darul qazas as a disputes resolution system, an alternative to going to the civil courts. “It’s cheaper and it’s faster and you can have a resolution in days or months. If you go to a civil court on a matter like inheritance or custody of a child and the other party goes to a higher court on appeal, you might not get an answer in your lifetime.” His concern about the lackadaisical workings of the legal system was a valid one. Indian courts were notorious for being clogged with old cases, and the country had a shortage of judicial posts.40 In 2004 it was found that a jail had forgotten to hang a man convicted of murdering his family. “The government woke from its slumber [seven years after the conviction],” the Hindustan Times reported, “when DIG Prisons (Allahabad zone) bumped into the convict during a routine inspection.”41
What Ilyas did not mention was the pressure within the Muslim community to avoid civil courts, and that the judgements of the darul qazas were often reactionary. He did not want Muslim law to be codified in the way Hindu personal law had been in the 1950s, saying it would give power to Parliament rather than to the judges, the qazis. I asked him why Muslims could not rely on a system that was acceptable to Hindus and to many others. “Hindu core belief is not based on a particular scripture. Our laws are based on the Quran and the Sunnah. Nobody can touch these laws. Everything there is eternal. To say there should be a uniform civil code is like saying there should be a uniform religion.” Ilyas’s point was absurd: numerous countries have universal laws on matters like marriage and inhe
ritance, but still guarantee religious freedom.
Politically, his case was unanswerable. He knew, as Madani and others knew too, that if any government sought to implement a uniform civil code, it would give men like himself a platform to display their strength as community leaders. It would not be difficult to mobilize the community, many of whom were poor and uneducated, by saying the foundations of Islam were under attack from the Hindu majority. The situation was a fudge between the proclaimed secularists of Congress and other parties, and the Muslim leaders who benefited from the existing situation. So the latter-day Nehruvians colluded in an arrangement that kept Indian Muslims in a socially regressive position and bred resentment among conservative Hindus, who could see no reason why they should not be given a similar separatist privilege. “There is a common agreement in the community,” Ilyas said, “that we are opposed to any changes.”42
Attempts by reformist voices in Muslim India to codify personal law, arguing that in doing so they would be bringing it closer to the Quran, which had an emphasis on women’s rights that had been lost in later legal accretions, had not yet been successful. Despite all of this, puritanical or extreme voices within Islam in India had little chance of gaining mass support: there was no popular mood running in their favour. When I visited mosques in different parts of the country, I almost always received a sense that the community’s concerns were little different to those of Hindus and others in the same locality. For most people, religion was far from being the defining interest in their life. At the Jama Masjid in Bangalore, within the coolness and beauty of the mosque with its thick white walls, Faisal Dawood spoke of educational projects and computer courses. He had retired from a government factory, where he had worked on a machine line making aeronautical parts. Now, his time was devoted to the practical improvement of the lives of Muslims in the suburbs of Bangalore. “I have helped to build schools and mosques, and I arrange the marriage of poor boys and girls, who do not have any family.”43
When a Muslim students’ association sought to prevent a Valentine’s Day dance from taking place in Aligarh in 2002, citing fears of “obscenity” because Muslim girls would be wearing jeans and dancing to Western music, they were ignored. When they told the Muslim owners of local Internet cafés to block access to pornographic websites in order to avoid a descent into immorality, the owners agreed—and promptly did nothing.44 If Indian Muslims engaged in political violence, it was usually in response to a specific threat or after attacks such as the destruction of the Babri Masjid or the killings in Gujarat in 2002. An organization like Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (in its original Indian avatar, as opposed to its transmuted Pakistani form, which was encouraged by General Zia) stressed the importance of fighting for state secularism as a means of protecting Muslims. Although in the decades immediately after independence the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind had stuck with the philosophy of its founder, Abul Ala Maududi, who held that secularism and democracy were “haram,” the movement had over time evolved and moved towards moderation in response to the fluid demands of the wider community it sought to represent.
For poor or vulnerable Muslims (in most places in south India, their position was more integrated and less fraught) the choice was often between turning to a leader like Maulana Madani, or to a more aggressive community representative like the mafia don Mukhtar Ansari. Political parties liked to communicate with Muslims through male religious leaders, who were usually conservative, in a way that would not have been considered with Hindus. Come election time, the assumption was that if you wanted Muslim votes, you needed to secure the support of a cleric by any means necessary. In such a situation, it was logical that Muslim leaders held on to power by maintaining outdated traditions, as well as their own positions on assorted influential outfits like minority commissions, Haj committees (official bodies to send Indian Muslims on a subsidized pilgrimage to Mecca) and wakf boards (trusts that look after Muslim property).45 Wakf boards owned an estimated 600,000 acres of land in India, most of which had been endowed to the community in perpetuity many generations ago, but this property was often leased or sold off to developers. Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey house in Mumbai was built on land originally owned by the Wakf Board of Maharashtra.46
The greatest threat facing Indian Muslims was practical: it was poverty. An official report in 2006 investigated their representation and employment in different sectors. Although nearly 14 percent of the Indian population was Muslim, in security-related areas like the police, fire service, prison and court staff, they made up only around 6 percent; in the railway, post and telegraph services, 5 percent; in public sector banks, 2 percent. More than any other community, including the Scheduled Castes, Muslims tended to have jobs which lacked a written contract or a regular salary. There was not a single state government which employed them in proportion with their share of the population. In many industries it was hard to obtain accurate data, but in the highly competitive cadres of the Indian Administrative Service (civil servants), Indian Foreign Service (diplomats) and Indian Police Service (senior police officers), the authors of the official report had guessed religion from a list of names, since Muslim names are usually distinctive. Out of 8,827 entrants to these services in 2006, the figures for Muslim representation were a paltry 3 percent, 2 percent and 4 percent respectively.47 The results had improved slightly since then. The “topper” in India’s 2010 civil service entrance examination was Shah Faesal, a young Kashmiri Muslim who specialized in public administration and Urdu literature, and whose father had been murdered by militants in 2002.48
The position of people like Hemant from the CRPF, and poorly equipped jawans who were killed with alacrity by Maoists, showed the failure of the state to take care of its own people. During the 26/11 attacks in 2008, when Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists from Pakistan arrived by boat in Mumbai to seek blood and death, the poor suffered along with the rich at the Taj and Oberoi hotels. Television viewers could watch as policemen in khaki uniforms at Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station used antique .303 rifles to try to pick off the attackers, who were shooting members of the public with machine guns. One policeman even threw a plastic chair at the gunmen in frustration. The Taj hotel went up in flames, and a terrorist in a fake Versace T-shirt strolled through the streets with a gun and a rucksack of grenades. Even senior officers lacked proper bulletproof vests, and it took half a day for specialist commandos to arrive from Delhi. More lives were saved by ingenuity than by security planning: an announcer at the railway station, Vishnu Zende, crouched in his booth overlooking the concourse even as his viewing window was sprayed with gunfire, redirected passengers as they alighted from trains. “I made sure I didn’t mention a terror attack in my announcement,” he said later, “as that would have created panic.”49
The phone conversations between the Mumbai gunmen and their handlers back in Pakistan, intercepted by the Indian police, were chilling and warped. Coming from poor village backgrounds, these men were awed by the grandeur of the Taj hotel.
KILLER: There are so many lights, so many buttons … and lots of computers with 22-inch and 30-inch screens.
HANDLER: Computers? Haven’t you burned them yet?
KILLER: We’re just doing it … The entrance to this room is fantastic. The mirrors are really grand.
Over at the Jewish centre in Nariman House, other militants were torturing and killing Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who was five months pregnant. The irony here was that none of the young Pakistani men would ever have met a Jew, but had been conditioned as part of their training, or indoctrination, to hate them. The handler told them over the phone that a dead Jew was worth 500 others, and that it was especially important they themselves died as martyrs, rather than being taken alive. They must go out and die when they were surrounded by commandos.
HANDLER: A stronghold can only last for as long as you can handle it. We’re crossing that limit …
KILLER: Please god.
HANDLER: It’s Friday today, so it’s a good d
ay to finish it … Put the phone in your pocket and fire back.
(Soon, Indian commandos stormed the building.)
KILLER: I’ve been shot … Pray for me … My arm. And one in my leg …
HANDLER: Praise god, praise god.
KILLER: Bye.50
A survivor—Shameem Khan, a Muslim—described how six members of his extended family had been shot dead. Still in shock, he said, “A calamity has fallen on my house. What shall I do?” His neighbours helped to pay for the funerals. Mumbai’s Muslim Council refused to let the terrorists be buried in its graveyards. A senior mufti said this was “to show they will never get any support from Indian Muslims, even in the slightest possible terms. As for their burial or last rites, their bodies should be sent back to the place from where they came.”51
The bodies could not, however, be sent back to where they came from, because Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, denied they were Pakistani. This was part of a pattern of constructive denial in modern Pakistan, where facts were not allowed to stand in the way of the idea that terrorism always originated elsewhere. The only surviving gunman, Ajmal Kasab, came from a decrepit village south of Lahore, and a senior retired bureaucrat popped up on one of Pakistan’s many wacky TV channels suggesting he could not, therefore, have known his way around Mumbai—and must be an Indian plant. “Why would young Muslims from Pakistan be interested in Mumbai?” asked a lawyer on the same show. “They don’t know the language there, and surely they wouldn’t have gone there to ogle Bollywood actresses.”52 When terrorists attacked and injured the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore the following year, there were suggestions from a government minister that India was to blame, rather than homegrown militants. Comments of this kind were underpinned by the assumption—which was rooted in the events and consequences of the 1970s—that India had nothing better to do than plot the break-up of Pakistan.
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