Mullahs and Muslim politics

Muslim politicians and mullahs are walking on a tight rope by trying to bargain with these parties

- By Dr. Ameer Ali

THE name mullah is of Persian origin crept through the Arabic world maula and denotes to a theologian and interpreter of the sacred laws or sharia in Islam. The name is also popularly used in Afghanistan. It also found a place within the Jewish communities in those countries and in Bukhara in Uzbekistan where it referred to a community leader.

However, after the 12th century when Islamic scholarship and rationalist interpretation of Islam started waning, and when the doors of ijtihad or the process of independent reasoning and interpretation were said to have been closed, the name mullah began to lose its original dignity and began to acquire a disrespectful meaning especially among Muslim intellectuals and scholars, and came to refer to a majority of so-called Muslim religious preachers who simply reduced the Quran and sharia into memorisable documents and a catalogue of dos and don'ts to be followed by believers in Islam.

The philosopher poet of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal for example, was in the forefront in condemning this pseudo-ulema and blamed them for the backwardness of Muslims. These mullahs are a battalion of religious functionaries and regurgitators of known knowledge rather than educators of critical thinking and discoverers of new knowledge. The hundreds of madrasas or religious schools in operation island-wide are the incubators of these foot soldiers of Islam.

There is no statistical data even in census reports to account for the number of mullahs in Sri Lanka. But after independence and with the arrival of Tablighi Jamaat, an increase in the number of madrasas funded privately from local and foreign sources, the number of these functionaries have proliferated. They are the product of these institutions and are all males. The All Ceylon Jamiyyathul Ulema (ACJU) with 5,000 members in 134 branches is their apex body.

Irrelevance of separate Muslim political party