Ideology of Pan-Islamism
Posted by Labels: left view, Lenin's time, Marxist practice, মার্ক্সবাদ, সংখ্যালঘু
(written on April, 2013.This artilce got published in EPW , January,4, 2014 issue. )
Pan-Islamism
Indian perspective
Islamic
universalism in India was a by-product of European imperialist policies and
predated Jamaluddin al-Afghani’s efforts to rally Muslims behind the Ottoman
bid for the caliphate. Afghani’s posthumous reputation as the intellectual
progenitor of Islamic universalist politics in India was not unearned. He had preached Hindu-Muslim unity and waxed eloquent on the virtues of
territorial nationalism. There were always historical links between the ideologues
of radical Islam based on the interpretation of Jihad and anti-colonial
nationalism in south Asia and the Middle East. While sharing distaste for
Western imperialism, they avoid a rigid separation between worldly and
religious point of view. The Jihad as anti-colonial nationalism transforms
itself into Jihad as terrorism in the face of the weakening of the people’s
resistance against the imperialist and national-hegemonic subversion. During
the period of rising tide of the mass-activity of anti-colonial nationalism,
Jihadi Islam also engaged in a vibrant dialogue with Ijtihad (independent
reasoning). That’s why Iqbal applauded the Turks for vesting responsibility for
collective Ijtihad in an elected assembly. The republican form of government
was not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but had also
become a necessity in view of the new forces that were set free in the world of
Islam. There is no denying that all variants of Jihadi Islam can be used by the
state for its narrow interest and even one variant of Islam with transcendental
religious doctrine can also be pitted against another as the military regime of
General Ayub Khan (1958-68) tried to pit the Tablighi Jaamat against the
Jamati-i-Islami in west Pakistan and used Jamat-i-Islami in East Pakistan. In
the anti-colonial struggle in India, the Khilafat movement along with the
Gandhi’s Jana-Satyagraha had unleashed large-scale militant peasant movement
against the British colonialists and this united Hindu-Muslim struggle might
have led the movement to a different dimension of freedom struggle for united
India, had Gandhiji not terminated his programme of Satyagraha at a crucial
juncture. Gandhi’s desire to fuse his campaign for non-cooperation with the
Khilafat Movement launched by Indian Muslims in 1919 to prevent the
dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and ‘preserve intact the spiritual and
temporal authority of the Ottoman Sultan as the ‘Caliph of Islam’ – was an
organisational success in Gorakhpur. In the winter of 1921-22 the Khilafat and
Congress Volunteer Organisations were merged into a composite National
Volunteer Corps. After the incident of Chauri Chaura and in the backdrop of
rising peasant militancy emerged from Hindu--Muslim unity, Gandhiji suspended
the satyagraha (mass civil disobedience) movement and thus paved the way for
disunity and left the people branded with violence to endure all manner of
sufferings for years to come.
Leninist formulation
Despite the
pan-Islamic faith of Barkatullah, he was a nationalist, and Lenin himself
attached great importance to a united nationalist front for the colonies.
Lenin’s imperialism followed by Colonial Theses, was adopted at the Second
Congress of Comintern in 1920. Lenin’s formulation that Commintern was required
to extend support to nationalist movement in the colonial countries was
rejected by M. N. Roy, a position very similar to the position of Trotsky who
believed in the proletarian revolution in the colony like India. In consonance
with this theoretical position IRA (Indian revolutionary association) was
formed with Lenin’s support and despite its strong inclination towards
Pan-Islamism, Lenin had no difficulty in considering the IRA as a possible ally
while formulating the strategy of anti-imperialist struggle. The rest of the
history of anti-colonialist struggle did not in any way underline the Lenin’s
strategic mistake in formulating a broad anti-imperialist united front.
So to relate the
failure of Lenin’s strategy in one particular case with his stand on Islamic
movement and to advocate a uniform strategic line denouncing the movement of
the radical Islam instead of taking a stand through a concrete class-analysis
of the concrete situation is guided by a deterministic approach.
Jihad against imperialism
A multilayered
concept like Jihad is best understood with reference to historical evolution of
the idea in response to the shifting requirements of the Muslim community. So,
Jihad in the postcolonial era has been more effective instrument of political
opposition to the secular modernity promoted by Muslim nation-states than of
resistance to Western domination. The present phase of capitalist
neo-liberalism has further eroded the content of resistance of the political
Islam against the oppressor. Evidently, only the new socialist project can
transcend the capitalist neo-liberalism which has the capacity to absorb not
only all variants of Jihadi Pan-Islamist resistance against imperialist
oppression, but also certain kinds of modernists’ movements. But this does not
mean that the left should not distinguish between the Pan-Islamist forces
promoted and patronised by the imperialists and the Pan-Islamist mass
resistance against direct imperialist onslaught.
Statist outlook
Going a step
further, these left ideologues lament that the left has not strived much to
impel the Indian state to take measure to stop the propagation of fascist
ideology under the garb of religious freedom. They even envisages that the left
should engage themselves in a pitched battle on the street with the Islamic
forces to ensure the freedom of litterateurs like Taslima Nasrin and Salman
Rushdie. This one-dimensional approach to define the democracy and the limits
of tolerance in democracy do not take two different but interdependent
contradictions prevailing in the here and now into cognisance. The people
cannot live without their past, but they always face a civilisational pull of
progress for not to live within it, and people identify themselves with the
separate cause of the oppressor and the oppressed community in a developing
country like India and also at the same time likes to engage themselves in the on-going
struggle for eradication of this division of inequality for a common cause.
While advocating the British cultural tendency to conceive of democracy
instrumentally, one should remember that at one level, modern British history
may be a history of progressive democratisation, but at another it is also a
history of expanding state authority and coercion. Instead of imposing a strict
rule of behavioural democracy, we should rely more on the internal dynamics of
contending opinions operating within the garb of community rights and freedom
and make a space for the internal debates to flourish through democratic
empowerment. If the left does not recognise this internal dynamics and imposes
the behavioural norms decided by the left groups and the state, then what will
happen to the Lenin’s distinction between the role of the communists from
oppressed community and from oppressor community?
Notes : (1) Partisan of Allah
: Jihad in South Asia – Ayesha Jalal (2) Islam in Globalised World – Mushirul Hussein,
(3) Commintern and the destiny of Communism in India – Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta
(4) Event, Metaphor, Memory : Chauri Chaura 1922-1992, Shahid Amin.
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