The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

India

As in other parts of the Muslim world outside the Arabian Peninsula (but perhaps even more so because of its distinct socioreligious setting), Muslim political thought in the Indian subcontinent seems to have oscillated between uncompromisingly implementing the ordinances of the shari‘a and pragmatically adjusting Muslim politics to the social reality.

Little compromise was sought when in 705 the Umayyad commander Muhammad b. Qasim al-Thaqafi (d. 715) led a military expedition, identified as a jihad against the infidels, into Sindh and southern Punjab. Even the Arab Muslim traders who settled around the same time along the Indian coast appear to have maintained a sharp distinction from their Hindu neighbors, although pragmatics increasingly demanded social interaction.

It was not until 1206, however, that a more or less autonomous Muslim power was established in India. At its zenith in the 14th century, the so-called Delhi Sultanate, in reality a succession of various slave dynasties of mainly Turkish and Afghan descent, encompassed almost the entire subcontinent. Political theory during the Delhi Sultanate period clearly reveals the tension between an Arabic tradition revolving around the shari‘a and a Persianized appropriation of kingship that left more room for pragmatic adjustments to the Indian conditions. Politically, this tension is epitomized by the fact that the sultans, although actually ruling independently, sought formal investiture by the Abbasid caliph who, by then, had been reduced to leading only a shadowy existence at the Mamluk court of Cairo. Intellectually, the two poles are represented by the 13th century Adab al-Harb wa-l-Shaja‘a (The manners of war and of fortitude) of Muhammad b. Mansur “Fakhr-i Mudabbir” (“Glory of the State”), which echoes the uncompromising stand of the Arab conquerors, and the later Fatawa-yi Jahandari (The imperial fatwas) of Ziya’ al-Din Barani (d. ca. 1357), which pleads for a compromise between religious normativeness (dīndārī) and worldly pragmatics (jahāndārī), including the incorporation of a limited number of non-Muslims into the administration of the sultanate. According to Barani, the implementation of the shari‘a constituted the ideal of governance, but given the prevailing conditions, it could only be approximated by more secular state regulations (ḍawābiṭ).

The tendency evident in Barani’s Fatawa gained strength during Mughal rule between the 16th and 19th centuries. Important in this respect was the reception of Iranian scientist-philosopher Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s (d. 1274) ethical thought as outlined in Akhlaq-i Nasiri (The Nasirean Ethics), which was repeatedly remodeled in later works, most importantly Akhlaq-i Humayuni (The Humayunian ethics) of Ikhtiyar al-Din al-Husayni (d. after 1556). The shift from politics to ethics is highly significant; political prudence became measured by the degree to which the ruler was able to promote and maintain social harmony instead of uncompromisingly enforcing the shari‘a. The political maxim of checks and balances (sulḥ-i kull), vividly outlined in the A’in-i Akbari (The Akbarian institutions) of Abu al-Fadl “ ‘Allami” (“the Learned One”; d. 1602), became the heart of Mughal political practice.

This rather liberal stance was adopted primarily because of the practical quest to govern a large and diverse polity effectively, but from the beginning it was fervently opposed by various influential ‘ulama’ and also shari‘a-minded Sufis. The arguments invoked were almost exclusively derived from the authoritative texts of Islam, awarding the revelation of God’s words in the Qur’an a higher degree of reality that overruled the need to adjust government to the circumstances of the moment. This growing opposition to rulers’ acculturalistic politics was not unique to the Muslims, and it contributed to the disintegration of Mughal imperial organization and the emergence of increasingly autonomous rule in various parts of the empire. In this situation the Sufi scholar Shah Waliullah (d. 1762) proposed a reconciliation of ethics-based rational pragmatics and shari‘a-based transmitted normativeness. But events had cast a shadow over such attempt: Persian and Afghan military interventions twice interrupted universalistic Mughal rule and paved the way for British colonial domination, which became direct in 1857 and lasted for almost a century.

The beginning of direct colonial rule forcibly confronted the Muslims with Western ideas and caused perhaps the most radical change in the history of Indo-Muslim political thought. It also drove a wedge between those who held firm to a hermetic understanding of Islam and those who borrowed creatively from Western thought to deal with the abolition of even nominal Muslim rule in the subcontinent.

The debate ignited the ideas of Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), a descendant of a Mughal notable who had collaborated with the British colonial judiciary. Analyzing the reasons for the Sepoy uprising of 1857 in a treatise titled Asbab-i Baghawat-i Hind (The causes of the Indian revolt; 1858), Khan blamed both the British for suspecting general disloyalty on the part of the Muslims and the Muslims for rigidly maintaining a traditional and rather solipsistic outlook. As a way out of what was felt to be a social, political, and economic crisis, Khan strongly advocated a reform of Muslim education by incorporation of modern Western subjects, based on a new theology that aimed to prove there was no conflict between Western scientific thought and the Qur’anic revelation. Although Khan was vehemently refuted by more traditional Indian ‘ulama’ and accused of being a “materialist” by Afghani (1838–97), it was his religious thought that paved the way for later thinkers whose strong engagement with Western thought brought about radically new political ideas.

Important in this regard was Muhammad Shah Iqbal (d. 1938), whose studies of Western philosophy led ultimately to the formulation of an innovative anthropology “from a pragmatic point of view.” It combined the Sufi idea of self-perfection with the dynamism of European life-philosophy and transferred this in a Hegelian way to the entire Muslim community as a collective subject. This seemingly abstract thinking had far-reaching practical consequences: it resulted in the idea of a distinct Indo-Muslim nation that would naturally require a distinct territory, epitomized in the idea of Pakistan.

Others, like Mawdudi (d. 1979), refused to accept the distinctiveness of the Indian Muslims or their demand for a separate state within the subcontinent. Mawdudi’s systemic conception of Islam, culminating in an idealized Muslim polity, was clearly universalist in scope. At the core of this conception, which Mawdudi claimed to have solely deduced from the Qur’an, stood the distinction between God’s absolute and unlimited sovereignty (ḥākimiyyat-i ilāhī) and man’s limited power as God’s trustee on Earth (khilāfat allāh). This “doctrine of the two kingdoms” led Mawdudi to his formulation of the Islamic state as a “theo-democracy” (jumhūriyyat-i ilāhī). The religiopolitical movement Jama‘at-i Islami, founded in 1942 and long headed by Mawdudi himself, epitomizes the search for this idealized state.

Explicitly inspired by the works of Ernst Haeckel (d. 1919) and Herbert Spencer (d. 1903), the intellectual ‘Inayatallah Khan “al-Mashriqi” (d. 1963) developed a biologistic reading of the Qur’an and reduced its message to the theme of constant warfare and survival of the fittest. Among the requirements for the survival of the Muslims, Mashriqi stressed the importance of bodily fitness and military training. His paramilitary organization Khaksar, founded in 1930, resembled to a large extent the Fascist and National Socialist storm troopers; Benito Mussolini and, to an even larger extent, Adolf Hitler were indeed explicit points of reference and inspirations for Mashriqi. While the movement played a considerable role in communalist encounters in the 1930s, it collapsed with the establishment of Pakistan in 1947.

While the thoughts of Iqbal, Mawdudi, Mashriqi, and others considerably dominated the political discourse in a young independent Pakistan, the Muslims who remained in India found themselves as a religious minority within a secularist constitutional framework. For a long time, this framework was positively perceived by Muslim leaders, as it was seen as an effective tool to prevent privileging the Hindu religious majority. Personalities such as Abu al-Kalam Azad (d. 1958) associated themselves with the Indian National Congress as the flag bearer of secularism. However, this attitude changed during the “patrimonial democracy” of Indira Gandhi (assassinated 1984) in the 1960s and even more during her second term as prime minister between 1980 and 1984, when communalism increasingly became part of the political rhetoric and practice. Muslims were forced to find a separate political lobby to advocate their interests. Due to internal disputes, such a lobby was never very successful within the parliamentary realm, but a number of religiopolitical issues helped transform the political factions of the Muslims into a variety of nonparliamentary pressure groups. The most important are the All-India Muslim Majlis-i Mushawarat, founded in 1964, and the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board, established in 1972. The debates fostered by these groups revolve around the primacy of revealed law over man-made law, which implies that whenever a conflict occurs between the two, a Muslim has no choice but to remain loyal to the divine ordinances.