The following is an excerpt from the book Heartland Rising The Making of Majoritarian India by Javed Gaya, published by Westland.My own take on this is that the Khilafat Movement may well have been inclusive and pluralistic at the time, but it had resonance only because of the spectre of colonial oppression—it was aimed against a common enemy. But it did not bode well for the future of Muslims, as it reduced them to a community for which only religious demands were paramount. This appealed to Hindus politicians: it ghettoised Muslims, confining their demands to the religious sphere, most of which did not gravely prejudice Hindus, other than their demand to retain their personal laws which purportedly posed an obstacle to the chimera of a uniform civil code. Thus, the cultural and economic rights of Muslims were not taken seriously: for example, the demand to have Urdu as an official second language in UP was disregarded, and it was marginalised to the status of a third language after Hindi and Sanskrit. Javed Gaya, Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India, Westland (2026)The fact that Muslim demands were considered to be confined to religion had itself important implications for the leadership of the community. In general, the spread of Westernisation and English education in India had the effect of distancing elites from the masses in all communities. In most cases, it fostered a process that secularised the elites, in that religion became a personal matter for them, if it mattered at all. That led to the emergence of a new group of Muslims that could be called ‘cultural Muslims’—they were not very different from Hindus, Christians and Sikhs of the same class and education level, who believed in rationalism, progress and equality. In this way, they sharply differed from many of their poorer and less cosmopolitan brethren who took pride in their identity and religion, almost wearing it on their sleeve. The difficulty these cultural Muslims encountered was that the political agenda for secularism had hardened into the straitjacket of cultural uniformity in the name of ‘nation building.’ At the same time, religious demands—those that did not affect the majority community—were acceded to, allowing politicians to buy votes relatively cheaply and keep the mullahs happy. In such a political milieu, the cultural Muslim was seen as elitist and increasingly irrelevant, whereas the fundamentalist was given prominence.In fact, this caricature of the community became even more pronounced with the expansion of employment opportunities in the Gulf in the 1970s and the growing influence of the Wahhabi strain of Islam on many poor Muslims. Imported from Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism is an aridly puritanical version of Islam, which pointedly looked down on what they categorised as un-Islamic behaviour, such as drinking alcohol, listening to music, or engaging in any form of saint worship. In many ways, this dramatised what had been an existential and historical struggle for the soul of Indian Islam, particularly between the Deobandis and the Barelvis, the former seeking to Arabise the religion, and the latter, who believe in veneration of the Prophet, Sufism and saint worship. It can also be seen as a broader agenda to detach Indian Muslims from their roots in what was a syncretic culture. The consequence of this Arabisation of Indian Islam was that it profoundly contracted and reduced the cultural footprint of Muslims, since being a Muslim was increasingly being seen through a religious prism, one that was greatly influenced by Wahhabi thinking. If I have raised the issue of lack of agency of Indian Muslims, one cannot ignore the blight of the new fundamentalist ideologies which have been imported from the Middle East in which religion is not only ritualised, it is reduced to what has been described as the ‘objectification of Muslim consciousness’.2 It purports to provide ‘a self-contained system that its believers can describe, characterise and distinguish from other belief systems.’ Much of these writings refers to anecdotes from the life of the Prophet and his companions which believers are called upon to emulate. The purpose of this is to identify with the imagined persona of the Prophet and of his era; it is irredeemably revanchist in character. This atavistic thinking infects the community in terms of their attitudes and priorities as well as creates a chasm with the majority community. The danger is that believers are drilled into thinking that the temporal world is a mere illusion which distracts from the practice of true religion. Such an attitude influences perceptions of the future. For a society and its people to attain success, not only is the acquisition of education and practical skills essential, but a belief in a future which will involve planning and a sense of the long term is also needed. Admittedly, there are societies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia that are rich enough to fund large numbers of people who wholly devote themselves to religious practice at the cost of their livelihoods. This is not an option for many Indian Muslims, but unfortunately this anti-materialist sentiment combined with a disdain for Western education conspires to keep the community backward. One of the effects of this typecasting of Muslims—as essentially religious beings, who have no claims on modern society other than asking to be left alone to practise their religious beliefs—was the diminishing of the role and influence of cultural Muslims, who came to be regarded, not just by the Mullahs but even by the majority community, as not really authentic Muslims. This leads to the unspoken assumption that there are real Muslims and fake ones, and that the latter should have no real say in the future of the community. This fate is not uncommon, as other religious communities have also suffered from this suffocating attitude—the Jews spring to mind. In a biography of Sir Isaiah Berlin, there is a passage that is worth repeating. One Jew may find his identity in Israel, another in Britain; one may find it in religious faith, another in the observance of Jewish customs, and yet another in abandoning Judaism altogether. It is a form of intellectual tyranny to suppose that one of these choices must be right for everyone. If the claims of religion and tradition were to prevail over an individual’s right to shape his own life, Jews would merely exchange the externally imposed servitude they had long endured for a self-imposed one within their own community.3 I think this quotation is poignant and hugely relevant as it acknowledges the autonomy of individuals to practice their faith in the manner they want, and though this autonomy is granted to persons who belong to other religions, it is worth asking why it is denied to Muslims? The idea of the ‘elite’ Muslim sits uneasily with historical reality. If one examines North Indian culture, one sees the extraordinary contribution the Muslims have made, whether it be to handicrafts, textiles, art, literature, drama, poetry, classical and folk music, culinary arts, or cinema. With the Partition, there was a rise in fundamentalism and a decline in this sort of contribution. It is as if the narrative that Muslims are labelled with, of religious beings who are forbidden from participation in the arts, is being taken seriously. And that is not just a loss for Muslims; it is a diminishment of Indian culture.