Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

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Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 11

by Ilyse R Morgenstein Fuerst


  his contemporaries, Hunter imagined Wahhabism in both frightful

  and laudatory terms; it was, to their eyes, a reform movement bent

  toward purity and simplicity, but one that jeopardized colonial and

  imperial projects. Certain Wahhabi Muslims, like those who were part

  of the Wahhabi Trials, 52 figure essentially as exemplars of legalism

  and literalism rather heavily in Hunter’s analysis. Hunter’s read of

  Wahhabism allowed him to use “fanatic” or “rebel” claims to represent

  normative Indian Islam. It also demonstrates how his elisions of

  divergent histories and diverse populations, even within the relatively

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  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  limited arena of South Asia, both perpetuate and produce anew a

  universalized Muslim and a totalized Islam.

  It is clear throughout Indian Musalmans that Hunter considered

  Muslims a unique group: one with an imagined center somewhere outside

  the Indian subcontinent and with an imagined legal loyalty to pan-Islamic

  ideals always located apart from and in antithesis to those of a (non-

  Muslim) empire. Hunter dissected Indian history, Muslim scriptural

  sources, and Muslim legal documents and rulings in order to demonstrate

  that “The Musalmańs of India are, and have been for many years, a source

  of chronic danger to the British Power in India. ”53 In short, then, Hunter

  ultimately argued that Muslims were, indeed, bound by religious doctrine

  to laws that both specifically and obtusely demand rebellion.

  Hunter began Indian Musalmans with his conclusion. The first

  paragraphs of his first chapter observe, “While the more fanatical

  Musalmans have thus engaged in overt sedition, the whole

  Muhammadan community has been openly deliberating upon their

  obligation to rebel.” 54 The entire community is implicated here: the

  fanatical Muslims were roundly seditious, and everyone else – “the

  whole Muhammadan community” – overtly discussed how they ought

  to revolt. Hunter did not discuss the possibility that subjects of any

  empire might rebel, nor did he contextualize Muslims within a wider

  landscape of rebellious South Asians – after all, the Great Rebellion was

  not a rebellion of Muslims, but rather comprised a multitude of castes,

  classes, and religio-ethnic actors. Hunter instead worried about Muslim

  subjects in particular, concluding in his introduction that these subjects

  – both the “fanatics” and, as is implied, their “moderate” or “liberal”

  counterparts – were obligated to rebel. He saw no alternative model for

  subjecthood, nor did he imagine that fanatics were fanatical, which is to

  say exceptional examples. Hunter concluded that all Muslims were

  bound by laws beyond the pale of British authority.

  Hunter foregrounded his argument in the borderlands of the Raj and

  competing ideologies. Geographically, he drew heavily upon regions of

  contestation, like the North-West Provinces; similarly, he drew heavily

  on sites of ideological contestation, like support for and resistance to

  jihad and the legal status of India. These authorial choices support his

  conclusions and aims while distorting his depictions of both normative

  and normalized Islam. Hunter located periods and places of debate and

  dispute as exemplars of authenticity, and in so doing, he conflated

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  63

  literalism and legalism with what Muslims did in their daily lives, and

  how they thought about Britons. He also placed heavy weight upon “law

  doctors” (muftis), and many of his particular arguments relied on an

  assumption that Muslims, because of their “natural” legalism, 55 would

  necessarily follow anything proclaimed and ruled by muftis.

  In his opening pages, Hunter claimed that “Muhammadan law

  doctors”:

  will convince every reasonable mind, that while the more reckless

  among the Musalmańs have for years been engaged in overt

  treason, the whole community has been agitated by the greatest

  state question that has ever occupied the thoughts of a people. The

  duty of rebellion has been formally and publicly reduced to a nice

  point of Muhammadan law. 56

  He continued by stating:

  Somehow or other, every Musalmań seems to have found himself

  called on to declare his faith; to state, in the face of his co-

  religionists, whether he will or will not contribute to the Traitors’

  Camp on our Frontier; and to elect, once and for all, whether he

  shall play the part of a devoted follower of Isla´m, or of a peaceable

  subject of the Queen.57

  These powerful introductory selections demonstrate Hunter’s over-

  arching argument, sensibility, and presuppositions. Muslims, for him,

  could and would be convinced by legal rule to be treasonous – it was a

  duty to rebel, and one that would touch each and every Muslim. This is

  not, however, an argument in the abstract or the hypothetical: to Hunter,

  Muslims were called to declare their faith specifically by contributing to

  warfare and rebellion on the frontiers of the British Empire in India. For

  Hunter, to be Muslim was to declare rebellion against the Crown.

  Hunter consequently framed Muslims as having dual allegiances, at

  best, or outright traitors, at worst. He explicitly called attention to the

  Muslim masses of people in terms of a source of fear:

  It is not the traitors themselves whom we have to fear, but the

  seditious masses in the heart of our Empire, and the superstitious

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  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  tribes on our frontier, both of whom the Fanatics have again and

  again combined in a religious war against us. 58

  This short quote packs in many assumptions requiring analysis. Most

  pressingly, perhaps, are the “Fanatics,” a term Hunter used categorically

  to describe a singular threat. Upon closer inspection, “Fanatics”

  encompassed a range of distinct and in some cases unrelated groups. The

  term is occasionally applied to “law doctors,” especially those from

  Mecca;59 more often, however, he used “fanatic” to refer to anti-British

  authors, rebels, and, in a few places, populations living on frontiers, be

  they Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or “tribal.” 60 Earlier in the Indian

  Musalmans, he subtitled a section “Fanatic War of 1857,” which he

  linked to but held apart from the Sepoy Rebellion properly; he claimed

  that the Fanatic War of 1857 was but the first of such major rebellious

  acts that demanded retaliation, denoting this event as the event that

  spurred a British response.61 Fanatic, it seems, functions both as a loose

  term – those who oppose British rule, a particular British agent, or a

  specific event with an organizing reference to a religious identity – and

  most commonly as a particular category for Muslims engaging in anti-

  Empire ideas or activities.

  Hunter was preoccupied by rebellious actions, which is why the 1857

  events figured so centrally in Indian Musalmans. He declined to outline

  all of the events of 1857 – 8, instead stating that the “whole period” was
/>
  characterized by “fanatics [who] kept the border tribes in a state of

  chronic hostility to the British Power.” 62 He traced the dramatic

  increase of fighters and the reciprocal increase in a need for British

  armies.63 Hunter may have only spent a few pages directly with the

  specificities of 1857 – 8, but he repeatedly returned to those events as he

  explored how Britons might know that Muslims posed a true and unique

  threat. Further, by tying the Great Rebellion to concurrent and

  subsequent massacres, insurgencies, and, most importantly, the virulent

  spread of revolts, Hunter accomplished two things: he made the

  rebellion catching; and he made it religious and especially Muslim.64

  This equation yields a conceptualization of Islam as a contagious

  revolutionary force.

  The virulence of Islam and rebellion in his book speaks to Hunter’s

  focus on the threat of religious war. Hunter spent a good deal of

  space on what he saw as antagonistic, violent Muslim “armies”65 and the

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  65

  inimitable, religiously articulated threats they posed to the throne.

  He employed the term “Muhammadan Crescentaders,” which suggested

  a recognizable religious zeal informing these armies, and simultaneously

  conjured images of a medieval strain of zealotry. 66 The linkages between

  medieval Crusades and modern threats ought not be read as a mere

  analogy: this connection played into an ideology of European superiority.

  In this gloss, Muslims are Crescentaders in their medieval religious

  observance as well as in terms of the threat of armed warfare on behalf of

  their religion.

  When Hunter referenced the physical Empire – “the seditious masses

  in the heart of our Empire, and the superstitious tribes on our frontier” 67

  – he indicated another of his primary concerns, namely, the borders and

  boundaries of the British Raj. Though they are left specifically unnamed,

  one can infer that the borderlands in question included the Frontier

  Settlement68 of Bengal, where Hunter lived and about which he wrote

  for a majority of his career. He wrote:

  The truth is, while we have been trying to stamp out the Frontier

  Settlement beneath the heel of a military force, the Fanatical sects

  among our Muhammadan subjects have been feeding it with an

  inexhaustible supply of money and men; pouring oil on the embers

  which we had left for dead, and nursing them again into a flame. 69

  Hunter raised two issues here: first, that the frontier represented

  dangerous, contentious space rife with religious rebellion; and second,

  that the rebels themselves were independently funded, with inexhaustible

  financial and human resources.

  He positioned Muslims as an overwhelming threat. They were also

  imagined as uniquely connected, supported, and cogent: the fanatical

  sects, whomever that included (for Hunter or his readers), were

  actively funding rebellion. Hunter, to reiterate, did not define the

  fanatical sects – either in name or in an umbrella, categorical manner

  – and so did not enumerate their collective or specific religious

  interpretations, presence in the Empire, or the very revenue sources he

  cited as evidence above. Hunter gave no indication that Muslims

  might differ in opinion, that the “sects” might differ from one another,

  or that regional, linguistic, or ethnic identifications might supersede

  or influence a Muslim one.

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  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  We must bear in mind that data was Hunter’s primary trade: careful

  histories, demographies, geographies, cartographies, and geologies form

  the bulk of Hunter’s significant written output. In other words, the data

  missing in Indian Musalmans are present not only in other passages in

  this text but elsewhere, like The Imperial Gazetteer, History of British India

  (1899), and A Statistical Account of Bengal (1875 – 9), to name a few.

  Hunter proved himself capable of better specificity, and so his lack of

  support is notable with respect to these fanatical sects, their outside

  financial support, and their influence upon other Muslims. This lack

  speaks to fear but also to Hunter’s obvious disinterest in specificity in

  this case – after all, his argument hinges upon Muslims as a unique and

  unified entity.

  He argued:

  They [Fanatics] preached that the Almighty had withdrawn

  him from a fainthearted generation; but that when the Indian

  Musalmans, with singleness of mind, should join in a Holy War

  against the English Infidels, their Prophet would return and lead

  them to victory. In all this there was nothing incredible to a

  Musalman. 70

  The danger of Indian Muslims coming together is foregrounded above,

  as is the claim that they should – and the implication that they would –

  join a holy war against the English, infidels by definition. In fact, that

  Muhammad would return to earth and lead the Indian Muslims to

  victory, Hunter claimed, is not incredible; it is, in his gloss of Muslims as

  necessarily fanatical, a typical expectation held by Muslims. Hunter’s

  claim is not benign, as it linked what he considered fanatic preachers and

  their lessons to the “average” Muslim living under British rule.

  A concern for these “average” Muslims – the ones who would think

  nothing of their Prophet leading them to victory under the banner of

  Holy War against infidels (the British) – belied a concern about good

  Muslims. More frankly, this characterization questioned whether a

  “good” Muslim could be trustworthy. To illustrate, Hunter quoted the

  Magistrate of Patna, a city in the current Indian state of Bihar on the

  Ganges River, as saying: “They [Muslims] have, under the very nose and

  protection of Government authorities, openly preached sedition in every

  village of our most populous districts, unsettling the minds of the

  SUSPECT SUBJECTS

  67

  Musalman population, and obtaining an influence for evil as

  extraordinary as it is certain.”71 Using the Magistrate’s words, Hunter

  moved his suspicions of Muslims beyond outwardly fanatics, whom he

  would label bad, “destructive,” or “radical,” to include those Muslims

  that the British government assumed to be “good.”72

  Thus, there are fanatic, “bad” Muslims who, according to Hunter,

  actively – with money and armies – sought rebellion and revolution

  (which he both conflated with and attributed to jihad). The insinuation

  and overt assertion he made is that even the trustworthy, good, friends-

  of-the-Empire Muslims were, at their core, not quite as good as they

  would have one believe. Like their fanatical co-religionists, they were

  bound in conscience to rebel against the Queen, no matter how “good”

  they appeared at first, second, or third glance. It is this inherent

  untrustworthiness – the inherent loyalty to rules, laws, and institutions

  outside those of the British Empire – that marked Muslims in the

  British Raj as inherently deficient subjects.

  Hunter referenced �
��the treasonist” Syed Ahmed Barelvi (Hunter’s

  rendering was Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareili [d. 1831]) as an inspirational

  Wahhabi for other Muslims; in one place, he called Syed Ahmed a

  “prophet,” noting that this was his term, and not that of his followers. 73

  Syed Ahmed had long figured as the link between South Asia and

  Wahhabism, having reportedly gone on hajj in 1824 and returned from

  Mecca with a zealous urge to reform his community. Contemporary

  historians, however, complicate and even refute this well-rehearsed

  history. Charles Allen, for example, bluntly declares that “the argument

  that Syed Ahmad picked up his ideas of Wahhabi intolerance and jihad

  while in Arabia is untenable.”74 Similarly, Harlan Pearson observes:

  “There is no direct evidence that Sayyid Ahmad Bre¯lwı¯ was preaching

  jihad before his pilgrimage or that any experience in the holy cities

  inspired him.” 75 For Hunter, however, Syed Ahmed’s leadership in

  bringing Wahhabism to India was both undeniable and cataclysmic:

  though Hunter explicitly warned against conflating Wahhabis with

  “traitors,” 76 he also provided numerous examples of Wahhabi and

  Wahhabi-influenced tracts, fatwas, and pamphlets that announced

  Muslims’ responsibility for rebellion.

  As Hunter delineated the specific threat Muslims posed to the British

  Empire, he explained that Wahhabis “ha[d] developed a copious

  literature filled with prophecies of the downfall of British Power, and

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  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  devoted to the duty of Rebellion.” 77 Hunter was an historian, and as we

  might expect of a researcher, did not leave his reader wanting for

  evidence. He quoted Jama Tafasıŕ in the Calcutta Review:

  No true believer can live loyal to our Government without

  perdition to his soul. Those who would deter others from Holy

  War or Flight [i.e., jiha¯d or hijra] are in heart hypocrites. Let all

  know this. In a country where the ruling religion is other than

  Muhammadanism, the religious precepts of Muhammad cannot be

  enforced. It is incumbent on Musalmańs to join together, and wage

  war on the Infidels. Those who are unable to fight should emigrate

  to a country of True Faith. At the present time in India, Flight is a

  stern duty. 78

  Jama Tafasıŕ clearly explicated the duty of Muslims, in one statement

 

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