Muslims Qua MUSLIMS

Anti-CAA protests integrate pluralist traditions of popular religion with the idea of citizenship

- Akeel Bilgrami

ISLAM arrived in India from its classical origins in the Arabian lands via travels through Persia, Turkey, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, acquiring a variety of accretions at each stage. And, having arrived, it accrued even greater variety through its regional dispersal (Punjabi, Bengali, Hindustani, Mapilla, Gujarati, Odia…), and through a highly differentiated set of spiritual traditions of worship and scholarship that developed over some centuries. To name just a very miscellaneous few, there were figures of influence such as Shah Wali Allah of the Naqshbandi tradition located in the courtly ethos of princes, the more populist Chishti Sufi tradition consolidated by Shah Abdullah Latif Bhittai, Bulleh Shah, and the poets Mir and Dard, the reformist strain of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan; Chiragh Ali, the Shia thinker Ameer Ali, the novelist Nazir Ahmad, Shibli Nomani of the Ndwatul Ulema, the famous Deoband school providing traditional learning, the even more orthodox Al-i-Hadith school favouring strict Hanafilaw, down to the more relaxed Barelwi tradition stressing very local customary practices, the Ahmadi yyas who claimed that their leader Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was all at once the Muslim Mahdi, the Christian Messiah and the avatar of Krishna, and in the 20th century the poet Muhammad Iqbal and the refined and learned Maulana Azad, representing in the last few decades of his life the ‘composite culture’ of Hindus and Muslims.

I begin with this remarkable accumulation of accretions that characterise Indian Islam not only to point out what is often said—that Islam is many things in India, not one—but also to point to the vast conceptual distance of the