- Illustration by Abro

The roots of the modern-day Hindu-Muslim antipathy in India and sectarian violence in Pakistan lie not in the distant past, but a mere 150 years back in history; or soon after the failure of the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

As the British became a lot more imposing after the failed mutiny, they also began introducing a greater number of modern ideas and technology, some of which suddenly awakened the Muslims to a stark reality. Muslims realised that they were actually a minority in India, something that was ignored by them due to hundreds of years of Muslim rule in India.

As the region’s Muslims finally resigned to the fact that the age of Muslim kings was as good as over, a number of Muslim scholars and reformers emerged and attempted to tackle this dilemma. Four strains of such reforms emerged: The conservative Deobandi movement, the puritanical Ahl-i-Hadidh movement, the ‘folk-Islam’ of the majority Berelvi creed of Islam and the modernist Islam.

The conservative as well as modernist reformers, though disagreeing on a number of issues, agreed that to tackle their community’s sudden minority mindset, Muslims of the region must now start identifying themselves as citizens of a worldwide Muslim ummah. It is also interesting to note that in spite of the fact that many among the modern-day Pakistani clergy and sectarian elements insist that their actions are tied to ideas of the first communities of Islam, a lot of literary material used in Pakistan ever since the 1980s in the shaping of various ‘Islamic’ laws and the rhetoric used to fan sectarian/communal hatred first emerged among the subcontinent’s Muslims not more than 200 years ago.

For example, the Mughals and the Muslims of the subcontinent weren’t all that bothered by the whole concept of the caliphate or for that matter the imposition of Sharia. The Mughals, though Central Asian by decent, were deeply entrenched in the political and social traditions of the subcontinent and so was their Muslim polity.

Also, till even the reign of the last major Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb, there are only a handful of documented episodes involving any serious physical clashes between the Hindu majority and the ruling Muslim minority.

Compared to the communal violence between the two groups in India and sectarian violence in Pakistan today, relations between the two communities and between Islamic sects were largely harmonious—especially during the reigns of Akbar and Shahjehan. What’s more, even after the emergence of the 18/19th century Islamic reformist movements, some of which attempted to reorganise India’s Muslim identity through a more strict and puritanical theology, tolerance between various competing sects amongst Muslims was a lot greater—until (beginning in the 20th century) the intellectual battles between these sects began degenerating into sectarian violence.

As tensions between Muslims and the Hindus and between Muslim sects began to grow, conservative Muslim scholars started reshaping Muslim history of the region as well. To them Mughal kings in general, and Akbar in particular, became villains, mainly for their ‘liberal views’ and detachment from the Ottoman caliphate (which ironically was largely secular and based on kingship). Yet, according to such scholars, it led to the downfall of Islam (secular Mughal rule?) in India.

Of course there was nothing academically or historically sound about such theories, and the scholars espousing them simply failed to look into the obvious political and economic reasons behind the fall of the Muslim rule, but the emotionally-charged claims in this respect resonated with a Muslim milieu ruing its lost status. The rewriting of the history of Muslim India by such scholars soon saw the Muslims of India talking more about ancient Muslim conquerors, and gleefully celebrating plunderers like Mehmood Ghaznavi and Muhammad Ghori, all the while downplaying Muslim rulers who had made India their home and played a leading role in uniting the region as a distinct and diverse empire.

The legacy of communalism in India and anti-Hindu sentiment in Pakistan today are a product of two main historical events: The suddenly discovered political majority status amongst the extremist Hindu fringe, and the Utopian intellectualisation of the Muslims’ minority complex, who were urged to look outside India for inspiration and somewhat ignore the brilliant legacy of (the supposedly Hindu-friendly) Muslim rulers of the region.

Today in Pakistan Muslims comprise a huge majority. So why do many Pakistanis spend more time celebrating Islamic history of regions outside India (especially Arabia), and seem to show more concern over what is happening to their brethren in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir, while drowning out the havoc being perpetrated by Muslims against Muslims inside their own country?

If we study the recent trend of intransigent thinking and of denials doing the rounds, we will notice this denial has now become the vocation of the urban middle class. In an era of populist democracy (mostly associated with the urban working class and the rural peasantry), the middle class feels that it is a minority. Thus, it can be suggested that this class too seems to be suffering from the same kind of a minority complex that Muslims of the subcontinent suffered from after 1857.

Perhaps that’s why, comparatively speaking, it is this class that is today enthusiastically responding to all the retro-Islamic paraphernalia (Caliphate, Sharia, etc.), anti-democracy sentiment and empty, rhetorical muscle-flexing based on glorified fables and myths of “Muslim power” doing the rounds today in the drawing rooms, the popular media and cyber space.