As with the Muslim world more widely, the single most important thing to understand about patterns both of Muslim history and of Muslim consciousness in South Asia is the tremendous rise of Muslim power up to the seventeenth century, and its steep decline thereafter.
Before 1947, the glorious history of Muslim rule and cultural achievement in South Asia helped make it impossible for Muslims to accept a subordinate position in what they saw as a future Hindu- dominated India. By the same token, for a long time after independence and to a degree even today, Pakistanis have felt that they not only compete with India, but must compete on an equal footing; and that to accept anything less would be a humiliating betrayal. This history also contributes to the fact that, in the words of Iqbal Akhund,
The Pakistani Muslim thinks of himself as heir to the Muslim empire, descended from a race of conquerors and rulers. There is therefore a streak of militarism in Pakistan’s ethos, even at the popular level.
By 1682, when Ottoman Muslim troops were battering the walls of Vienna, the Mughal empire ruled (albeit often very loosely) almost the whole of South Asia. The Mughals built on previous Muslim sultanates of Delhi that had ruled most of north India since the thirteenth century. Even after the Mughal empire began to fall to pieces in the first half of the eighteenth century, great Muslim successor dynasties in Awadh, Bengal, Bhopal, Hyderabad and Mysore continued to rule over most of what is now India.
While Muslim soldiers conquered, Muslim missionaries converted — but much more slowly. Outside what is now Pakistan, only in Bengal was a majority of the population over a large area converted to Islam. A central tragedy of modern Muslim history in South Asia has been that, as a result, the greatest centres of Muslim civilisation in South Asia were established in the midst of Hindu populations, far from the areas of Muslim majority population. The decline of Muslim power, and the partition of 1947, left almost all the greatest Muslim cities, monuments and institutions of South Asia as islands in an Indian sea, towards which Pakistanis look as if a distant shore towards a lost Atlantis.
The old Muslim dynasties of South Asia were as a rule not severely oppressive towards their Hindu subjects. They could not afford to be, given Hindu numerical predominance and continued existence of innumerable local Hindu princes. At the popular level, Hindu and Muslim religious practice often merged, just as in Europe Christianity took on many traditions from local pagan religions. At the highest level, the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) founded the Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith), a syncretic cult containing elements of Islam, Hinduism and Christianity.
Nonetheless, in the Muslim kingdoms there was no doubt which religion was foremost in the state, as the great mosques which dominate the old Muslim capitals testify, and were meant to testify. The Din-i-Ilahi cult failed completely to root itself, while — all attempts to dilute or syncretise Islam — provoking a severe backlash from orthodox Muslim clerics, which undermined Akbar’s authority. The last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (1618-1707), responded to the increasing problems of his empire with a programme of strict religious orthodoxy.
As elsewhere in the Muslim world, the decline of Muslim power from the early eighteenth century on produced a complex set of religious and cultural responses — the great majority of which, however, had the same ultimate goal, namely to strengthen the power of Muslims in the face of their enemies, and to strengthen Muslim unity in the face of the Muslims’ own divisions. From the late eighteenth century, Muslim fears were focused above all on the rise of the British (in 1803 the Mughal emperor became a British pensionary).
Since those days, religious forms of Muslim resistance to Western power have been a constant in South Asian history, ebbing and flowing but never disappearing. From the mid-nineteenth century on, they have been joined by a very different response, that of Westernisation. It is important to note, however, that the great majority of Westernisers have justified their programmes in public by arguing that they were necessary in order to strengthen their communities, their countries or the Muslim world in general against their non-Muslim enemies. In other words, these figures were no more necessarily pro-Western in geopolitical terms than were the Westernisers of Japan. This is something that the West would do well to remember, given its congenital illusion that anyone who shares aspects of their culture must necessarily agree with their foreign policy.
The Muslim religious response to Western power has always been a highly complex mixture of conservative and radical elements. Many of these have been reformist — but reformist in the sense of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, not of modern Western ‘reform’. They have also shared the ‘fundamentalism’ of parts of the Protestant tradition, in the sense of a return to the ‘fundamentals’ of the original religious scriptures. All have stressed the need for Muslims to wage the ‘greater jihad’ for spiritual struggle and personal and social purification as well as the ‘lesser jihad’ of war against Islam’s enemies.
Underpinning intellectual and political responses by Muslim elites has been a diffuse but widespread sense among the Muslim masses of ‘Islam in danger’. This has contributed to episodes both of mass mobilisation and of savage local violence against non-Muslims (or other Muslims portrayed as non-Muslims). These combined in the developments leading to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
This sense of an endangered Islam has long been fueled not only by local or even regional events but developments in the wider Muslim world (for example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fall of the Ottoman empire in the face of attack from Christian powers). The role of the Ummah in the minds of most South Asians therefore might be seen as vaguely analogous to that of ‘Christendom’ in the European Middle Ages: not something that could ever trump local powers and allegiances and lead to a universal state, but nonetheless a potent idea with important cultural, intellectual, emotional, political and international consequences — not least in the form of the Crusades.
With the disappearance of France and Britain as ruling powers in the Muslim world, the focus of Muslim fears concerning Western threats to the wider Muslim world naturally shifted to the new state of Israel (in occupation of Islam’s third holiest shrine, as Pakistanis are continually reminded by both their mosques and their media) and Israel’s sponsor, the United States.
In Pakistan, however, hostility to the US was for a long time damped down by the fact that Pakistan was facing far more pressing dangers, against which the US provided at least a measure of security: India and the Soviet Union. Thus, in the 1980s, President Zia’s Islamisation programme contained no hint of anti-Americanism, for the obvious reason that the US was both an essential ally in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and an essential financial sponsor of Pakistan and Zia’s administration. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made considerable play with anti-American sentiment and with the idea of Pakistan as a leader of the Muslim world (including his rhetoric of a Pakistani ‘Islamic bomb’), but his own anti-Americanism owed more to the fashionable left-wing thought of the time. The collapse of left-wing nationalism in the Muslim world in the last quarter of the twentieth century has left the Islamists as the last political homeland of anti-American (and anti-colonial) sentiment.
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The above excerpts are taken from Anatol Lieven’s book Pakistan: A Hard Country.
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