The community wheeled about as one
Martha Nussbaum says there are liberal Muslims in India – though she doesn’t say how many or what percentage they are or how influential they are. She leaves a lot of details out of her account, which makes it less credible than it might be.
She also starts off with the familiar silly and misleading ‘community’-talk –
India’s Muslim community strongly condemned the terrorist acts and immediately took steps to demonstrate its loyalty to the nation…The world saw a deeply nationalist community, one loyal to the liberal values of a nation that has yet to treat it justly. It was not the first time India’s Muslims have demonstrated a peaceful embrace of the country’s founding values. The personal experience of Mushirul Hasan exemplifies the same commitment. A leader of the community, Hasan has been at the center of controversy for his liberal, secular views…
Come on…she’s a philosopher, so she really ought to do better than that. How can ‘India’s Muslim community’ strongly condemn anything? What does that even mean? To make any sense at all it has to mean that all Indian Muslims strongly condemned and immediately took steps, which is absurd. Perhaps she means all prominent Indian Muslims did that? But no, because she could have said that, and because that’s not what she wants to convey, either – and that’s the problem. She wants to convey, without spelling it out, that the majority of Indian Muslims strongly condemned and immediately took steps – but is that true? I don’t know, but it seems very unlikely just on the face of it, because most people are too busy with other things to do much public condemning and step-taking. But as if she had established that which she wanted to convey, she goes on in the next sentence to say what ‘India’s Muslims’ had demonstrated – when it’s vanishingly unlikely that all of them demonstrated anything. Then she dashes on to claim one person as exemplary of this commitment of ‘India’s Muslims’ and then to call him ‘a leader’ of this notional ‘community’ that all thinks with one mind. It’s all very rhetorical and sentimental and covertly manipulative, and I wish she wouldn’t do it.
It is an interesting piece though – and I hope she’s right. I would be delighted to learn that the situation is just as she describes it and that my suspicions are groundless. I’d be thrilled. I would love to know that India is packed to the rafters with people like Mushirul Hasan.
Stereotypes of the violent Muslim are so prevalent in India—as elsewhere in the world—that it is virtually impossible for Muslim liberals to be taken at their word when they say that they believe in free speech, pluralism, nonviolent persuasion, the rule of law, and the right of each person to a fair trial. ’Oh yes, a screen for darker motives,’ is the typical response, pervasive on Hindu blogs and common even in the mainstream press. You say you are a liberal, and that proves you are a radical Islamist.
Well…are stereotypes really the only reason for that? Does the Koran, and the relationship of Islam to the Koran, have nothing to do with it? Couldn’t it be that at least some people wonder if Muslim liberals still have the Koran to contend with, just as Christian liberals have the Bible, and if there is some tension? Couldn’t some people think that liberalism is just more difficult for Muslims for a lot of reasons (family pressure, customs, the Koran, friends, and so on) and that different people can mean different things by ‘liberal’? I would say it could, and that people who are slow to be convinced are not necessarily simply heeding stereotypes of the violent Muslim. They might be, but they might not.
It is a very interesting article though, and highly informative. Don’t let me put you off.
It is an interesting article, and so is the account of Jamia Millia Islamia (or the National Islamic University), and its origins in the struggle for independence. Interesting also is the fact that the Centre for Jawarharlal Nehru Studies is located at Jamia, since Nehru was by origin a Hindu and by belief an atheist.
However, there is a stress fracture running through the article. Although Nussbaum claims that a liberal Islam is possible, the only evidence she quotes is something written by Gandhi, who tended to idealise all religions, and a reference to the Islamic ideal of brotherhood. At the same time emphasis is laid on the secular, liberal character of the university.
She also claims that liberalism is not only a Western virtue, and that it was the guiding principle of the Indian struggle for independence. However, it is not clear that liberalism was ever an Indian ideal. Ashoka’s empire may have come closest to reflecting liberal values in the history of the subcontinent before 1947 (and Ashoka reigned sometime BCE), but he was really neither Hindu nor Muslim, but a convert to Buddhism, and spread Buddhism throughout India. But Buddhism is not, as Ceylon, Burma, Tibet, and other examples, testify, inherently liberal.
Indian democracy is not, I think, indigenous, and, as Nussbaum’s article makes very clear, it continues to be threatened by the forces of religion. Indian democracy is, I believe, in origin, British, and the British were shamed into granting Indian independence by the Congress Party, which demanded for Indians the same freedoms which were enjoyed by British citizens.
Of course, I may be wrong, but Nussbaum does not show that I am. And if she wanted to make the claims for liberal Islam that she makes, she should have tried.
Yeah – she should have tried.
Sen does a better job of it, in various places.
Yes, that Gandhi quotation was really unfortunate. I nearly commented on that, but wanted to keep the post on the short side. “Islam enjoins upon us tolerance towards others’ religions.” Eh?! No it doesn’t! It would be ever so nice if it did, but it doesn’t. It enjoins upon us the other thing.
“a noticeable proportion of Muslims – and this is something that, in India, you could see with your own eyes, if you were, for instance, a Hindu”
Really? Reliably? If so, how? Do all Muslims and all Hindus reliably wear completely distinctive dress, or what? Or do they just throw subtlety to the wind and wear big labels – ‘Hindu,’ ‘Muslim,’ Parsi,’ ‘Jain’ etc? Can Hindus in India really pick out all Muslims in, say, a crowded city park, on the street, in a bus?
Well, yes, they very often do wear distinctive dress. Hindus, for example, often sport religious marks on their foreheads, and are discriminable by signs of caste, often by colour of clothing. Muslim dress tends to be distinctive, and lacks indications of caste, as does that of Sikhs. At least it was a long time ago when I lived there. It may have changed. But I could have told you what religion most people I met belonged to, with a reasonable degree of reliability.
Life is lived very publicly in India. I think it would still be evident if a large number of Muslims demonstrated their loyalty by wearing black armbands. The fact that they could do that without being in danger from other Muslims would show that the feeling was fairly general. In the ‘communal’ violence (as it is called in India) in Gujarat, it would not have been difficult to pick out Muslims from Hindus. In response to the Bombay terrorism, I suspect that Muslim response was quite visible. Had it not been, there is every reason to expect that the anti-Muslim violence would have materalised.
Christians are also noticeable, because of their lack of caste. That’s one of the big problems for Christians in Hindu society, because untouchables are not distinguishable as they are in normal Hindu society. That would mean that the Brahmin might be polluted by someone whose real caste is hidden by religious conversion. Caste is supposed to have been abolished in democratic India, but that is a myth.
…a public demonstration by Muslims (by wearing black arm bands, for example), if it represented a noticeable proportion of Muslims…
So just how big would this demonstration have to be for it to be visibly representative of the 138 million muslims in India? I’m not sure that your comment makes sense.
But Bombay is a famously cosmopolitan city. I just wonder how many Muslims in Bombay really are identifiable as such.
I don’t know, Ophelia. I haven’t been to India for fifty years, but my guess is that they would be still fairly identifiable. But you’d have to ask someone who has been there more recently. Fifty years ago, you would have been able to do it.
Eric, sure, I believe you about 50 years ago – but ways of dressing have changed radically in those 50 years!
Though of course in many places, weirdly, ways of dressing have become far more conservative again – for women. It strikes me I have no idea if that’s true of India or not.
Well, yes, I agree, OB, but the video from Bombay looked very very familiar, and people did not seem to be dressed all that differently. It was on that basis that I said what I said.
Jakob, I never said he claimed to only represent his members. I said he represented his members; there’s a difference.
Eric: I have been to India recently and it can be quite hard to tell a Hindu from a Muslim from a Christian in big urban centers. Not just for me, but for Indians as well. Unless a woman is obligingly wearing a bindi or a burka or a cross around her neck (even that can sometimes be a fashion accessory!), which she often is not. Rural areas may be different.
I would also question both the veracity and the import of your claim that “Indian democracy isn’t indigenous.” The structure of Indian democracy borrowed heavily from the West, but it wasn’t a wholly foreign concept. RS Sharma’s “Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in India” describes the existence of democratic and republican institutions throughout Indian history. It’s pretty strange the way some Western commenters call the slavery-based oligarchy of Athens “democratic” while holding non-Western societies to a much higher standard for what can count as a ‘democracy.’
How much import ancient forms of democracy have today, I don’t know. But in any case, ‘not indigenous’ doesn’t mean unstable or precarious or liable to fail. If democracy is an import to India, it’s an exceedingly popular one.
And finally, I don’t think India’s democracy is under threat from “the forces of religion,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. I don’t think it’s under threat at all. It’s faced worse situations than this! I agree with this gentleman that the BJP could be the biggest threat to Indian democracy, but that it is unlikely to happen.