IDEOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF MUSLIM NATIONALISM AND DEMOCRACY (original) (raw)
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Nationalism in the Muslim World: A Curse or Blessing?
Liberal Arts and Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ)
The paper aims to highlight some drawbacks in the approach of a section of Muslims leaders, scholars, and masses towards the idea of nationalism. They view it as a Western concept implanted in the Muslim world as a conspiracy to divide and subjugate them as well as to undermine Islamic teachings. The paper elucidates the existence of the socio-economic conditions and political situation in the Muslim world that offered apt milieu to the growth of nationalism. Rise of nationalism has not been exclusively responsible for fragmentation of Ottoman Empire. Instead, the religious elements in the Arab world and oppressive rule and suppressive measures of the Turk rulers also contributed to the process. Fairly, nationalism served as a driving force against the imperial rule and helped gain Muslims emancipation from the West. The study also illuminates the difference between territorial and Muslim nationalisms and that how Islam replaced the secularism. The study is qualitative and employs h...
Islam and Nationalism A Contemporary View
The concept of Nationalism has two aspects: negative and positive. One’s natural love for one’s people or country is not only allowed in Islam but appreciated unless no undue favor or partiality is made, or else, it will become Asabiyah which is strictly prohibited in Islam. This Asabiyah in its both three forms: Asabiyah, Qawmiyah and Wataniyah, did more harm to Muslim integrity and unity than good. Arab nationalism played major role to cause the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. The phenomenon of rivalry between Arab and Ajam is another example of pride in nationalism within the fold of Islam. Nationalism in its present form is a foreign ideology imported from Europe. Europe suffered two great wars in the twentieth century on the basis of nationalism. But the Muslim countries adopted the ideology uncritically. Nationalism effected the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Some Islamic scholars like Allama Iqbal in favor of Islamic nationalism emphasized the creation of a nation state to save the Muslims’ religion and culture from the overwhelming Hindu religion and culture. On the contrary, the scholars like Abul Kalam Azad and Husain Ahmad Madani opposed the idea of a nation state on the same basis of religion and supported united Indian nationalism. They were of the opinion that countries are formed on the basis of geography not on religion. Muslims being a universal Ummah should not confine themselves in the boundaries of nation states.
2000
(1837-1914) in his inimitable way captures the dilemma of Muslim identity as perceived by segments of the ashraf classes in nineteenth century northern India. Steeped in nostalgia for Islam's past glories and a wry sense of the Muslim predicament, Hali's Shikwa-e-Hind, or complaint to India, cannot be dismissed as simply the bigoted laments of a man who has accepted social closure on grounds of religious difference and antipathy towards non-Muslims. To challenge Hali's questionable reading of the history of Islam in the subcontinent or his spurious representations of Indian Muslims in undifferentiated terms as descendants of foreign immigrants is to concentrate on the obvious and miss out the richness of the poetic nuances. What is instructive about the poem is how a committed Muslim with more than a surfeit of airs was hard pressed to deny the decisive and irreversible impact of India on his co-religionists. As the metaphor of fire to ashes makes clear, this is an assertion of a cultural identity, once distinctive but now all too faded. Hali's grievance is precisely the loss of distinctiveness which he believes had given Muslims a measure of dignity and humanity. Bereft of any qualities of friendship or fellowship, Muslims had become selfish, inward looking, indolent and illiterate. None of this is the fault of India. Hali instead blames qismat which brought Islam to the subcontinent and made certain that unlike the Greeks the Muslims did not turn away from its frontiers in failure. India without Islam is an ingenious idea. It would certainly have obviated the need for endless scholarly outpourings on communalism. But however much Muslims may take Hali's lead in blaming qismat, Islam in India, united or divided, is a fact of history and an intrinsic feature of the subcontinent's future. What is less clear is whether communalism should continue to serve as a descriptive or analytical clincher in representations of the Muslim past, present and future in the South Asian subcontinent. In the 1990s it has once again taken center stage in academic and political debates, a consequence of the resort to what has been called Hindu majoritarian communalism seeking to preserve or capture centralized state power. Successive Congress regimes in the 1980s surreptitiously invoked a nebulous form of Hindu majoritarianism which has been crafted into a more potent political ideology by the forces of Hindutva. Neither the Congress nor the RSS, BJP and VHP combination would plead guilty to the charge of communalism. Not only the self-professedly secular Indian state and the Congress regimes at its helm, but also their challengers claim the appellation of nationalist. The original sin of being communalist for the most part has been reserved for the subcontinent's Muslims. Notwithstanding the compromises of secular nationalism with Hindu communalism, the burden of this negative term in the history of late colonial India has fallen on the Muslim minority. The establishment of a Muslim state at the moment of the British withdrawal added immeasurably to the weight of the burden. In the post-colonial scenario in general, and the conjuncture created by the Ayodhya controversy in particular, the Indian secularist response has been to tar both Hindu majoritarianism and Muslim minoritarianism with the brush of communalism. This asymmetry has expressed itself not only in state policy but also in secular academic discourse. Muslim minority 'communalism' has occupied a critical location in academic texts organized around the binary opposition between secular nationalism and religious communalism. If this neat but
Religions, 2018
Modern perspectives on nationalism tend to privilege structuralist readings which approach nationalism as entailing economic and political restructuring, thereby overlooking the necessary role of human factors in the functioning of nationalism. Religious opposition to secular nationalism is then condemned as backward, reactionary, fundamentalist, or ideological. However, a different understanding of nationalism is uncovered when the role of human factors in nationalism are scrutinized. Toward discerning the role of human factors in nationalism and its relation to religion in general, I turn to Liah Greenfeld’s analysis of social psychology of nationalism as a secular ideology. In exploring the effects of nationalist ideology on religion, I return to the earliest Muslim debates on nationalism in South Asia between two critics of nationalism, Muhammad Iqbal and Abu’l A’laa Mawdudi, and their opponents, Abul Kalam Azad and Husayn Ahmad Madani.
Title of Article Western Concept of Nationalism and Islamic Point of View Written By
Al-Adwa, 2019
ABSTRACT Nationalism has become one of the determining forces in modern era. It was not until the end of eighteenth century that nationalism in the modern sense of the word became a generally recognized sentiment increasingly molding all public and private life and now it has become a world-wide movement. Deep attachments to one’s native soil, to local traditions, language and to established territorial authority have been considered as the basic elements of nationalism. Since the very beginning of its revelation to the world, Islam as the last divine law (Sharī‛ah) and as the global religion of nations has expressed its universal message through the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). All Muslims have been encouraged towards a feeling of brotherly unity from the earliest days of Islam. All the faithful, as it is stated in the Qur'an, are brothers. The Qurān as the common sacred Book and the language of this Book, which is the language of all prayers and all theological and legal instruction, have “established a medium of communication” among Muslim nations. Due to their respective principles and characteristics, Islam and nationalism each has its own message, teachings and space. We can see in Islamic teachings that since the very beginning, Islam has discouraged tribalism, racism and prejudice in all of their forms. Despite Islam does not thoroughly reject the fundamentals of nationalism but it gives them right direction. Muslims are allowed to take pride in their nation loyalties so far they do not encourage or cause any prejudice in theory or in practice. Islam establishes the concept of Ummah Wāḥidah (A single Nation) which is in harmony with the nature of humankind. The base of this single nation is faith and Islam itself. Key Words: Islām, Nationalism, Prejudice, Nation, Ummah Wāhidah, brotherhood.
The contours of nationalism by Ziya Us Salam-The Hindu 27-02-16
With debates about the idea of nationalism raging in the country, Shamsul Islam’s book, Know the RSS, offers a look into that organisation's brand of nation-building, writes ZIYA US SALAM Certificates in nationalism are being distributed. Have you applied? To qualify, an aspirant must scream “Pakistan murdabad”. An additional qualification would be an ability to send anybody to Pakistan who does not adhere to “one language, one faith, one nation” ideology. An inability to conduct a civilised discourse shall not be a disqualification. Guess who is issuing certificates of nationalism? Lawyers who take pride in bashing up the accused on court premises. And a couple of BJP legislators: one of them having undertaken the mundane task of counting the number of used condoms, beer bottles, cigarettes, etc. in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The other is a Delhi legislator last seen manhandling an activist not matching his definition of nationalism or patriotism. He surely cannot make out one from the other. All these thoughts flitted through my mind over the past few days as, first the Rohit Vemula tragedy unfolded, then the JNU controversy erupted. Last week when I attended a march by authors, artists and academics in favour of the JNU students, I heard slogans that initially did not seem directly linked to the arrest of Kanhaiya or the disappearance of Umar Khalid. The students, asking for the release of Kanhaiya shouted, “Fasciwad murdabad” or “Fascism down, down”. Then the attention shifted to the police commissioner Bassi followed soon after by cries of “Sanghis, down, down”. Then there were noises of “Manuvad down down”. It seemed an all-encompassing cry. Besides expressing their angst at caste and class ridden society, the students seemed to be answering the charges of sedition, terrorism and anti-nationalism levelled against some of their college mates and friends. It was followed by a counter-march in which the right-wing activists agitated more vehemently, with a lawyer threatening to use a petrol bomb on Umar Khalid. It was sickening. And I wondered where do these guys draw their vitriol from? From where have they inherited that acute inability to see beyond prejudice? After all, be it the ABVP or the BJP, they all draw their ideological fuel from the RSS, the very body that for more than half a century refused to hoist the tricolour, the organisation that stood opposed to India being a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic”, and even now wants India to be a Hindu Rashtra. Around the same time I received Shamsul Islam’s thin but extremely well-researched book Know the RSS , published by Pharos Media. Based on RSS documents, the book — now into its seventh revised edition — cleared many a cobweb. My doubts about the “Fascism, down, down” slogans were answered at the beginning where Islam draws a neat parallel between Hitler and M.S. Golwalkar.