By Saidalavi P.C. for TwoCircles.net
A number of interesting and important questions have been raised in the context of Muslim students’ engagements with bahujan politics in the context of the spectacular performance of BAPSA in JNU. My intent here is to critique some of the arguments with the hope that there is furtherance of debates on the issues raised.
There have been three kinds of responses so far, but each one has multifaceted arguments to its credits. I am interested here to engage with the articles already written using the idea of the ‘social’. By social, I mean the questions of issues pertaining to Muslims as a community, ranging from internal reform, to social hierarchy to women’s question. I may reflect on these issues as I engage with the articles.
The first article written by Waseem RS, apart from its polemics owing to the context of criticisms of SIO by mainly left parties, offers an interesting point in relation with the social question. He argues that SIO-JNU is very much interested in addressing intra-community issues like caste, gender, and so on, though certain forms of elitism is present among Muslim communities and even SIO units in other spaces. It is one thing to acknowledge the rampant social disparities among Muslim communities, and quite another to assert that SIO-JNU is distinct by its awareness and critiques of such disparities. This idea of idiosyncrasy is not a sole characteristic of SIO in JNU, but of the students’ politics in JNU in general. I have raised this issue elsewhere as well. In this kind of argument, SIO-JNU comes across as a Muslim student organisation, should I say the only, which is self-reflexive of the social question among Muslims.
In the context of such self-righteous posturing, it is interesting to read Khalid Anis Ansari’s article. He shatters the self-righteous posturing of SIO-JNU by asking simple, but quite practical questions. The weight of his arguments lies in the position that Muslim students’ politics cannot be imagined by a pure critique. That is, the nuances in the arguments in the academia is not enough to practice a new political imaginary; rather it should begin by problematizing the existing social hierarchies within the institutional structures themselves. To walk their self-righteous talk, SIO-JNU should take their own parent organisation to task on many issues.
The third intervention to this debate is by Muhammed Shan. This article has already ignited raging debates in Kerala among Muslim circles, and as usual the debates are being reduced to bickering over the role of Jama’at-e-Islami and the relative merits of other religious organisations in the sustenance of Islam. In effect, what has happened is that the social question addressed by Shan has been relegated to the background.
Shan’s attempt is to see how Jama’at-e-Islami’s founder Abul A’ala Maududi addressed the social question, particularly caste. Let me begin by engaging with his each argument. His first argument that it is because Maududi is a new historicist in understanding many issues pertaining to authority and power in Islam that he is controversial is only a part of the issue. The significant other part lies in Maududi’s disavowal of Islamic practices among the Muslim masses, inter alia, employing Thavasssul and Isthigaaza. The revolutionary Mappila in the nineteenth century is majorly a figure employing such methods for revolutionary acts. S/he is not a rational believer as Shan wants him/her to be.
Shan’s other significant argument is that Maududi showcases a ‘Muslim theo-politics’ that transcends caste. I have a set of issues with this assumption. First, let me start with a polemical question, drawing from Khalid Anis Ansari. Why is it that the shoora of Jama’at-e-Islami is constituted of only ashraf castes among Muslims, if Jama’at-e-Islami represents a ‘theo-politics’ that transcends caste?
Shan claims that caste is understood as an ethical question in Muslim students’ politics, and the discontent with caste is a matter of pure theological conviction. It provides ‘a possibility to deconstruct the very self, it even has the radical potential for the annihilation of the remnants of caste practices among Muslim converts’. This is in line with Imtiaz Ahmad’s understanding of caste, whereby it is understood as a matter of larger cultural environment in which a Muslim is placed. Recent studies by scholars like Masood Alam Falahi posit that caste finds its rationality within Islamic religious texts themselves. I have elsewhere argued in the context of Malabar that Islamic juristic concepts of purity, morality, knowledge, and so on, have reconstructed social hierarchy among Muslims today. So, social hierarchy among Muslims should be understood as an ‘Islamic’ question, not as a remnant of the larger cultural milieu today.
More importantly, the question is whether the ‘theo-politics’ equipped to transcend the social hierarchy among Muslims. Shan claims that Maududi showcases a ‘Muslim theo-politics’ that transcends caste. One of the examples he provides for such a transcendence is nineteenth century Mappila. But the ‘rational believer’ posited by Maududi is not one with which the revolutionary Mappila of 19th century can be juxtaposed. Shan’s new historicism is quite imaginary to bring together Maududi and nineteenth century Mappila. It was to ‘purify’ the Islam that the ‘new historicist’ (as Shan would call them) organizations sprang up in Malabar since the third decade of the twentieth century. The new historicist organizations made their claim and space by initially disavowing the many practices of Muslim masses. So, to bring together two moments of Islamic movements, nineteenth century Mappila and Maududi is quite imaginary to say the least. In a sense, Shan’ contextualisation of Maududi as a new historicist is very ahistorical.
To conclude, concurring with the arguments of Khalid Anis Ansari, I would say that the question of the social cannot be addressed within the Muslim students’ politics as a pure critique, as the mainstream savarna academia do. Neither self-righteous posturing of SIO-JNU, nor the heuristic arguments by Shan might be the way to think of the social question among Muslims. It should be a revolutionary praxis where, along with larger critiques of the mainstream, Muslim student groups also engage with the institutional structures themselves among Muslims.
The author is a Ph.D candidate at Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, JNU, Delhi.