Global Islam And Paradoxical Emotion Of Indian Muslims

A section of Indian Muslims, especially those who are proactive on social media, celebrated the success of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye. A number of posts written on Facebook and Twitter described Erdoğan as a great Muslim figure committed to the revival of true Islam. It is also claimed that his premiership is an indication that Islam will eventually gain its lost glory and ideological supremacy in the near future. Obviously, we do not have any reliable data source to ascertain the exact number of these social media users. Their enthusiastic appreciation of Erdoğan, thus, should not be exaggerated to make any definitive comment on the attitude and anxieties of Indian Mus­lim communities. Nevertheless, one must carefully examine this phenomenon to unpack a paradoxical emotion—why do a section of fairly educated Indian Muslims admire the majoritarian regime in Türkiye while opposing Hindutva-driven majoritarianism in India?

Three ready-to-use answers—Sympathetic, Critical, Polemical

Three sets of explanations are often given to answer this question. The first claim is rather sympathetic. It is argued that Muslims are facing an unprecedented crisis of identity in contemporary India. As members of a threatened and helpless community, it is obvious for them to admire the success stories of global Islam. It gives them courage, solace, and a sense of collective achievement. This line of reasoning relies heavily on the given story of Muslim victimhood in Hindutva-dominated India. It legitimises the Muslim attraction for global Islam as a Muslim reaction.

Interestingly, the supporters of this claim—a section of self-declared liberals and a few Muslim essentialists—completely ignore the fact that their arguments, in a way, validate Hindutva’s action-reaction theory.

The Hindutva groups justify anti-Muslim feelings (and even the violent act like the lynching of innocent Muslims) as a kind of natural Hindu reaction. This action-reaction framework is used to produce competitive victimhood—a moral claim to legitimise those collective actions and moves, which cannot entirely be acceptable on ethical grounds. The contention that global Islamic terrorism provokes Hindus and nurtures anti-Muslim feelings among them is a good example.

There is a critical explanation as well. It is suggested that the Turkish state is trying to create a legitimacy for itself in the Islamic world. The historic association of the Indian Muslim community with Türkiye goes back to the Khilafat days. The revival of neo-Ottomanism in contemporary Türkiye is publicised to revive that connection. The Turkish state, hence, uses its outreach to Indian Muslim leaders to create a conducive environment and a visible global Muslim support. This is a persuasive argument which explains the actual working of ‘propaganda mechanism’. Yet, it fails to clarify the nature of Indian Muslim association with wider a Islamic ummah. The liking for Turkish majoritarianism stems from an emotional-ideological orientation, which is often ignored in serious political analysis.

Finally, there is a polemical claim. It is said that Muslims as a minority will always support democracy and constitutionalism for strategic reasons. However, the moment they become a majority, their attitude changes dramatically. As a majority, the argument goes, Muslims would always prefer to have authoritarian regimes and strict Sharia rules. In other words, there is something specific about Muslims that makes them strategic and calculative.

This argument is also cited to make a comparison between the privileged position of Indian Muslims and the plight of minorities living in Muslim-majority states, especially in Pakistan and Bangladesh. During the time of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests, the pro-government public intellectuals and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders evoked this argument to justify the amendments in the citizenship law. The alleged Muslim fascination for Turkish-style rule, in this sense, can easily be accommodated in this framework.

There is an intrinsic problem in this claim. Minorities—religious, cultural, linguistic and sexual—rely heavily on legal constitutional discourse. The very presence of effective minorities in a democratic polity ensures the sanctity of rule of law and constitutionalism. It saves the polity from the possible threat of majoritarianism. This is not specific to Muslims or Islam. For instance, Hindu organisations in the United Kingdom (UK)—and even in other parts of the western world—adhere to their minority identity as the members of BME (Black, Minority and Ethnic) communities. They support the established protective mechanism and ethnic rights. However, many individuals associated with these Hindu community organisations do not hesitate to support the internationally active right-wing Hindu groups. The success of Hindutva in India is admired and celebrated. Does it mean that Hindus also behave strategically in different situations?

Forms of Muslimness

We have to go beyond these simple and straightforward answers. Muslim admiration for Erdoğan and for that matter the wider Muslim world has to be seen in relation to the sociological diversity of Indian Muslim communities. The crucial difference between substantive Muslimness and discourse Muslimness, in my view, must be acknowledged. Substantive Muslimness refers to the multiple ways in which Muslim identity is formed in a variety of regional and local contexts. Issues like caste, language, class and region play a significant role in determining the self-perception of a Muslim individual in real-life situations.

Various survey-based studies conducted by CSDS-Lokniti clearly show that Muslim perceptions, views, opinions and attitudes do not follow any set pattern. Even we do not find any homogeneous response to the questions related to basic religious practices such as offering Namaz and observing fasts (Roza) in the month of Ramzan. This Muslim diversity underlines the fact that Indian Islam as a lived religion is practised by Muslims in a variety of ways. This is what I call substantive Muslimness.

The discourse of Muslimness, however, underlines a different aspect of Indian Muslim identity. Classification of Muslims as a religious minority in purely statistical terms, the description of med­ieval Indian history as Islamic rule and the media debates revolving around Islamic Jihad and terrorism produce a simple and undifferentiated image of a homogeneous Muslim community. Every aspect of Muslim life is seen through the prism of this discourse either to criticise Muslims for being barbaric or to celebrate Mus­lim culture as a symbol of the royal Islamic past.

The interplay between the substantive Muslimness and the discourse of Muslimness determines the actual manifestations of modern Indian Muslim identity in our public life. The substantive Muslimness gives it concrete real-life meanings; while the discourse of Muslimness converts the Muslim identity into a global question. The admiration for Turkish majoritarianism must be analysed in relation to this complex making of Muslim identity.

The Apparatus: How Does it Work?

The global Islamic community, the Muslim ummah, occupies an interesting space in the everyday universe of Indian Muslim communities. They are fully aware of the fact that Islam is the second-largest religion in the world. They also associate themselves with this fact and ultimately become a part of an imagined community of the global umma. The proliferation of ‘sacred images’ of the central Islamic religious places –the Kaaba in Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina—provides a set of believable evidence to common Muslims to get connected with global Islam in a variety of ways. In this sense, global Islam becomes one of the elements that forms substantive Muslimness at the local level.

This localisation of global Islam, however, does not become a contested issue, until it is appropriated by the Muslim elite to refashion the discou­rse of Muslimness. The Muslim communities are told that they are the part of a global umma and for that reason they have to follow certain norms to celebrate this intrinsic association. In a way, an informal two-layered apparatus is established.

Let us systematically unpack the Muslim admiration for Erdoğan to understand the actual wor­king of this apparatus. It is clear that support for Erdoğan is primarily expressed on social media. In this sense, Facebook, Twitter and Ins­t­agram emerge as the sites where an uncontes­ted emotion for the global community of Muslims is transformed into a question of Islamic identity.

Proactive Muslim social media influencers start behaving like representatives to speak on behalf of Muslims. The figure of Erdoğan is linked to a particular kind of Islamic revivalism. The reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a proper mosque is recognised as an example of it. This social media-centric performance empowers these Muslim stakeholders to legitimise their existence as conscious agents.  The intentional appropriation of this social media discourse by a section of public commentators is the second level where almost insignificant comments/posts are further changed into a national concern for a public debate. At this level of involvement, the sphere of participants expands immensely. The three arguments I highlighted above are a good example to show how social media discussions produce/rep­roduce endless debates. The unease of a few serious public commentators with pro-Turkish posts by a tiny English-educated section of Muslims on social media highlights this.

The Salman Rushdie controversy is a good exa­mple to elaborate this point. It is worth noting that for common Muslims in India, Salman Rushdie was an unknown figure. In fact, they were not fully aware of the legal-religious status of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran at that time.

Rajiv Gandhi’s proactive move to ban The Satanic Verses suddenly changed everything. The Muslim religious elite took up this opportunity to assert their status as spokespersons of Islam. The progressive Muslims took advantage of this debate to become acceptable future- oriented good Muslims. Consequen­tly, in a span of two years, The Satanic Verses became a Muslim issue! The moral of the story is simple—Muslims’ adm­iration for the global Islamic community is an uncontested emotion; it only becomes a controversial question when Muslim identity is ins­trumentally defined in civilisational terms.

(Views expressed are personal)
(This appeared in the print as 'Paradoxical Emotion')

Hilal Ahmed is an associate professor at CSDS, New Delhi and a scholar of Indian democracy and political Islam