In Defence of the Hypothesis of Islam as a Religion of Social Liberation

25 min readDec 13, 2018

Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 is overall a fantastic and well-researched work of history which I recommend to anyone interested in learning about that subject matter. Eaton makes important headway in refuting some of the inaccurate historical tropes which have plagued popular understanding of Islam in the Subcontinent. In particular he admits to the importance of understanding the upper and lower status Muslim societies as different, largely unrelated, and sometimes even antagonistic, groups of people. However he does not go all the way with this realisation. Instead he ignores much of his own evidence in drawing his conclusions. As a result one of his central theses — that his work refutes the notion that conversion to Islam was tied to anti-Brahminical social reform — goes unsupported and at times contradicted. It is with an eye to pointing out the flaws in this argument that I offer this supplementary, one could even say introductory, text.

Eaton’s aim is to establish a new hypothesis for understanding the spread of Islam in premodern India. As a part of this hypothesis he aims to refute the notion that the premodern converts considered Islam to be a religion of social liberation. While I find much of his argument — for example, the argument that the bulk of the converts were not from what we would now call Dalits or Scheduled Castes, but rather from urbanising tribal and semi-tribal backgrounds — to be compelling, I would argue that this only nuances the notion of social liberation, rather than refuting it. His ideological assertions are, however, in my view, dead wrong, and his argument is significantly weakened through his incomplete caste analysis of his own evidence.

This article has been released with a companion article called The Medieval Urban Muslim Poor and the Origin of Biryani. These two articles explore very similar subject matter, and between them aspire to establish both theory and practice of historical analysis.

Please consider a financial contribution to my Patreon or my Ko-Fi so that I can continue doing the kind of work I do. I do not have a wealthy family nor any sort of wealthy patron, and I am not affiliated with any political party or institute of higher learning, and am legally barred from seeking employment in India due to visa issues. Rather I have lived in poverty my entire adult life and pray one day to escape it. For the time being, I live a modest lifestyle in a shared flat in South Delhi.

i. The concerns of the upper caste Muslim society are not necessarily reflective of those of the lay convert.

As evidence that the converts in medieval India, or at least pre-modern Bengal, did not consider their religion to be one of social liberation, he correctly points out that the Muslim rulers and missionaries, which is to say a higher status society for certain, did not tend to stress this aspect of the religion in their own efforts to proselytise. The simple fact here, though, is that in understanding the lower status society, it does not much matter what the higher class societies were doing. The entire rest of his book is dedicated to the issues and concerns of the upper castes as traced through architectural trends and metaphysical and cosmological beliefs. While this information is interesting, illuminating, and profoundly useful, it must be admitted that it is reflective only of upper caste concerns. As Eaton himself correctly points out, the lower caste converts were largely illiterate, and if they were not illiterate they certainly did not have access to especially durable parchment and it would be extraordinary to believe that if anything was written, that it would have survived.¹

So we simply do not have much available data on what the people of this time were going through emotionally. The best we can do is to cross-compare with people who, today, or at least far more recently, are going through similar circumstances and seeing what it is they considered important and not.

The mass conversion of the Mahars to Buddhism was decades in the making and so probably the best well-known allegory we have. The Mahars were torn, not between two religions, but between any number of them. One of the most well-known speeches of this period, republished as What Path To Salvation, actually addresses this issue directly. This speech was an argument in favour of conversion, which elected to leave the issue of what to convert to until a later date. So one can ask, did the Mahars care much at all about metaphysical beliefs?

Ambedkar didn’t. In fact, he would toss metaphysics to the wayside completely when he wrote Buddha and His Dhamma. What he said in this particular speech is:

The religion which preaches what will happen to your soul after death may be useful for the rich. They may entertain themselves in such religion at their own leisure (by dreaming the future of their soul after death). It is quite natural that those who have enjoyed all sorts of pleasures in their lifetime may consider such religion as a real religion, which promises to them these pleasures even after death.
But what of those who by remaining in a particular religion have been reduced to the state of dust, who have been denied the basic necessities of life such as food and clothing, who have not been treated even as human beings, and have since completely lost the sense of being human? Are these people not supposed to think of religion from a material point of view? Are they expected to look at the sky and merely pray? What good is this superfluous Vedanta of the easy-going, self-satisfied, rich people, to the poor ones?

The rich, the conquerors, the intellectuals, are deeply concerned with issues of this system of metaphysics vs. the next. This is not to say that there has never been a poor person who has entertained an interest in metaphysics. I have been studying different metaphysical systems of late. It is my understanding that Kabir also made some contributions to metaphysical understanding in addition to his emphasis on social issues. But generally speaking it is a concern of those who have already met their material necessities of food, clothing, and dignity. If Islamic metaphysics failed to penetrate into the hearts of Bengal’s poor, it is not evidence that they Were Not Really Muslims. It is evidence that the values of the rich failed to have much cultural influence among the poor. But whether or not one Is A Muslim is not determined by how successfully they internalise the values of some Muslim overclass. In all likelihood, these upper class missionaries were not the impetus behind the conversions which did occur other than maybe helping to facilitate them on some level. Nobody on earth has ever heard a wild metaphysical claim from a strange man (Christ has risen! There is only one god! Call out Gouranga be happy!) and decided to convert to a new religion based on it unless that person was having kind of a weird day already.

Most of the Muslims who Eaton cites throughout the text are Sheikhs and Sayeds and other upper caste Muslims. This makes total sense because it is their words which are more likely to have survived. This is not a criticism but simply a fact. When contextualised as upper caste concerns, they do not support his point, rather mine. Consider this passage from Eaton’s Chapter 10:

The authors of this literature, Bengali Muslims, consciously presented Islamic imagery and ideas in terms readily familiar to a rural population of nominal Muslims saturated with folk Bengali and Hindu religious ideas. Yet in doing so they felt a degree of anguish. Although certain that Arabic was the appropriate literary vehicle for the transmission of Islamic ideas, they could not use a language with which their Bengali audience was unfamiliar. Referring to this dilemma, the seventeenth-century poet ‘Abd al-Nabi wrote, “I am afraid in my heart lest God should be annoyed with me for having rendered Islamic scriptures in Bengali. But I put aside my fear and firmly resolve to write for the good of common people.” Similar feelings were voiced by Saiyid Sultan, who lamented,
Nobody remembers God and the Prophet;
The consciousness of many ages has passed.
Nobody has transmitted this knowledge in the local language.
From sorrow, I determined
To talk more and more about the Prophet.
It is my misfortune that I was born a Bengali.
None of the Bengalis understand Arabic,
And so not one has understood any of the discourse of his own religion.
Such expressions of tension between Bengali culture and the perceived “foreignness” of Islam were typical among those who were outsiders to the rural experience — whether they were members of Bengal’s premodern Muslim literati, European travelers in Bengal, or modern-day observers.

‘Abd al-Nabi was a Shaykh and a grandson of a renowned mystic, while Sayid Sultan was, presumably, a Sayid. What Eaton has done is made the mistake of translating the angst of the Shaykh and Sayid and treated it as fact that it is therefore evidence that their countrymen were only “nominally” Muslim. Because to an upper caste person, metaphysics are the most important article of faith. ‘Abd al-Nabi and Sayid Sultan are therefore legitimised as gatekeepers of the true faith, when what they truly were is people coming into contact with a foreign culture which emphasised different things than theirs did. Everyone thinks their culture is right and this tends truer the higher the status and greater the power of an individual’s culture of origin. But just because a Shaykh and a Sayid thought they were right does not make it so. It is only their subjective opinion, and it is only normal that one should be frequently baffled by the workings of a culture not their own. To them, Islam meant foreign, meant Arabic. But to their countrymen it did not have those associations. And why should it have? They were just as Muslim as any Arab. This cultural difference frustrated and baffled al-Nabi and Sultan, but this should not be exaggerated in importance and nor should it surprise anyone who truly understands the difference between the grandson of a saint and a lay Bengali Muslim.

This is India. We do what we want. Although we can often usefully call ourselves a member of this or that religion, that doesn’t mean we won’t take from the rest what we like, or need, or simply are exposed to. Just because someone says they are a Muslim does not mean they are aware of, or care about, the finer points of difference between cosmologies. Today’s Muslims curse, drink, and go outside in states of dress which certain commentators may not understand as hijab compliant. But just because some out-of-touch preacher guy complains about it doesn’t actually make us worse Muslims from a social or from a religious point of view. In fact every scholar under whom I have studied has cautioned away from judging the value of a person’s worship by visible outward indicators and encouraged us to understand that there are areas in which we as well are deficient and which we can learn from those who drink and curse and don’t cover our forearms. This is the actual, universally accepted supposition of even conservative Islamic scholars today as I understand it.

In other words, there is no support for the claim that it necessarily follows logically that simply because Bengali Muslims did not adopt the cultural markers and understandings of the ruling class Muslims, like the Arabic language and some finer points of metaphysics, that the social organisational aspect of the religion was completely lost on them. For I doubt strongly that it was.

ii. The idea of social equality can be assumed to be fairly universal and certainly was not alien to the people in question.

Eaton openly mocks the idea that the Muslims of this time were aware of any idea of social equality, saying sarcastically:

Before their contact with Muslims, India’s lower castes are thought to have possessed, almost as though familiar with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Thomas Jefferson, some innate notion of the fundamental equality of all humankind denied them by an oppressive Brahmanic tyranny.

But to dismiss this idea entirely is problematic for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that a conversion to a new religion necessarily entails the adoption of new social values which are at odds with the old. If the proto-Muslims of pre-modern Bengal had no exposure to ideas of social and spiritual equality, it is sufficient to suppose that those ideas were a result of conversion to Islam. A reversal of cause and effect, certainly, but far from the decoupling of religious conversion and social liberation that Eaton supposes.

The second reason is almost as obvious. The simple fact is that ideas of social equality were present in the Subcontinent prior to the arrival of Islam, and I will name three sources of them. The first is that tribal lifestyles, which Eaton maintains that the majority of proto-Muslims in premodern Bengal lived prior to their conversion and urbanisation, simply do tend towards social equality, certainly moreso than Brahminism does. To them, assuming they’d had, as Eaton supposes, relatively little exposure to Brahminical ideas, it would not be Islam’s ideas of social equality but rather Brahminism’s ideas of permanent, hereditary enslavement and humiliation which would be foreign. Rousseau and Jefferson did not invent nor even embody² ideas of equality. As a proper reading of Ambedkar will tell us, it is philosophers who follow popular movements, and not the other way around. All they did was philosophise ideas which were already present in their society.

As Eaton himself notes, Buddhism was present in Bengal prior to this time period. Buddhism believes in, and has been understood by its Hindu opponents to believe in, social equality. This is the second source from which it can be supposed that these proto-Muslims would have encountered the idea before.

Most egregious, however, is the fact that while completely dismissing the element of social reform in conversion or practice of Islam, Eaton actually considers it to be a primary impetus behind the rise of Vishnaivism in prior centuries. Quote, Chapter 4:

[T]he true adversaries of the growing neo-Vaishnava movement were neither local Muslims nor the court at Gaur — which actually patronized Vaishnava literature — but Brahman supporters of the cults of Chandi and Manasa. First, in their view, the Vaishnava custom of communal song, the kīrtan, not only disturbed the peace but lacked scriptural authority. Second, Chaitanya had identified himself with God (“Gaurhari”). Third, he had usurped from Brahmans their monopoly over the use of mantras, or sacred oral formulae. And finally, his cult was charged with having attracted followers from amongst the lower classes, a point hinting at the social basis of the leading Hindu sects in this period. Since Goddess cults enjoyed broad popular support, the śākta Brahmans, as patrons of those cults, viewed the lower classes as their own natural constituency, even though they were sometimes ambivalent about extending their support to such cults. Chaitanya’s movement thus threatened to cut into their pool of religious clients.
Despite initial Brahman attempts to resist the movement, and later to control it by incorporating it into a broader Brahmanical framework, Vaishnavism managed to carve out and maintain for itself an autonomous identity in the delta’s religious landscape. By emphasizing non-Brahman inclusiveness as opposed to high-caste exclusiveness, the practice of devotion rather than ritual, and the use of Bengali rather than Sanskrit, the movement posed a real alternative to the Brahman-supported śaiva movement, with its ties to various Goddess cults.
[…]
Vaishnava piety spread dramatically across Bengali Hindu society. In his idealized image of a Bengali kingdom the [Brahmin] poet Mukundaram included Vaishnavas among the city’s Brahmans, referring to them as homesteaders who engaged in devotional singing, or as prosperous city-dwellers living amidst beautiful Vishnu temples adorned with golden spires and fluttering flags. This suggests that by the late sixteenth century, while the ecstatic spirit of Chaitanya’s devotional movement was still vibrant, the upper castes had already begun to ally themselves with the movement, in the process redefining it along orthodox lines. In subsequent centuries, Vaishnava piety, though originating in cities, would make deep inroads among Bengal’s Hindu artisan and cultivating castes. By 1893 James Wise could write, “It may be said with perfect truth that Vaishnavism, in one or another of its diverse forms, to the exclusion of Saivism and all other [Hindu] creeds, is the faith professed by the agricultural, artizan, and fisher tribes of Bengal.”

Eaton’s understanding of Vaishnavism is completely inseparable from caste struggle, and he supposes that the Brahmins were opposed to Chaitanya because he obsoleted their claims to priestly exclusivity and gained a following among the lower castes, and so the Brahmins sought to appropriate him. Yet the same Eaton swears up and down that there was no element of conversions to Islam which were rooted in opposition to Brahminism, because it’s impossible that the people had ever before heard of equality or inclusiveness although they existed at the same time and in the same place as the Vaishnavist movement he describes above. Surely anyone can see the contradiction. The question therefore is not the one Eaton proposes, but rather why Brahminism has failed to appropriate Islam the way it has appropriated Vaishnavism and everything else ever to happen in the Subcontinent.

“Second,” argues Eaton,

even if Indians did believe in the fundamental equality of mankind, and even if Islam had been presented to them as an ideology of social equality — though both propositions appear to be false — there is abundant evidence that Indian communities failed, upon Islamization, to improve their status in the social hierarchy. On the contrary, most simply carried into Muslim society the same birth-ascribed rank that they had formerly known in Hindu society.

But he again mischaracterises the purpose of religious conversion. Nobody makes a religious conversion under any illusions that doing so will make an immediate improvement to their socioeconomic status. Conversion is not in itself social mobility but offers a different philosophy of social mobility. Further being overlooked is the distinction between rank in Hindu society and rank in Muslim society. Rank in Muslim society is a mode of socioeconomic exploitation certainly. But Hinduism is not content to exploit its lower ranking members on a socioeconomic level. It brutalises and humiliates them.

Ambedkar is once again instructive. On the subject of this brutalisation and humiliation, he says, again in What Path To Salvation:

The instances of beating by the caste Hindus for the simple reason that you have claimed the right to enroll your children in the Government school, or the right to draw water from the public well, or the right to take out a marriage procession with the groom on horseback, are very common. You all know such instances, as they happen right before your eyes. But there are several other causes for which atrocities are committed on the Untouchables by the caste Hindus — causes which, if they are revealed, the foreigners will be surprised to hear.
The Untouchables are beaten for putting on clothes of superior quality. They are whipped because they used utensils made of metal like copper, etc. Their houses are burnt for having purchased land for cultivation. They are beaten for putting on the sacred thread on their body. They are beaten for refusing to carry away dead animals and eat the carrion, or for walking through the village road with socks and shoes on, or for not bowing down before a caste Hindu, or for taking water in a copper pot while going out in the field to defecate. Recently, an instance has been noticed where the Untouchables were beaten for serving chapatis at a dinner party.

It is understandable that a poor person may be unable to afford a certain food item or article of clothing or a metal utensil or land for cultivation. Certainly nobody converts to a religion assuming that it is a get rich quick scheme. One who has dedicated one’s life to a certain craft does not get a professional qualification or a raise in income level over the course of a religious conversion. But to be barred by physical violence from attaining these things is a different situation altogether, which Ambedkar argues is possible only due to the condition of mental slavery that Hindu religion cultivated among the Mahars and their relative logistical powerlessness, as they could not count on the support of any coreligionists:

The Hindus realise that the strength of the whole of the Muslim population in India stands behind those two houses of Muslims living in the village; and therefore they do not dare to touch them. These two houses also enjoy a free and fearless life because they are aware that if any Hindu commits aggression against them, the whole Muslim community from Punjab to Madras will rush down to protect them at any cost.
By contrast, Hindus are sure that no one will come to your rescue, nobody will help you, no financial help will reach you, nor will the officers help you in any eventuality. The Tehsildar and police belong to the caste Hindus, and in cases of disputes between the Hindus and the Untouchables, they are more faithful to their caste than towards their duty. The Hindus practise injustice and tyranny against you only because you are helpless.
[…]
From this you will understand one thing: that unless you establish close relations with some other society, unless you join some other religion, you cannot get the strength from outside. It clearly means, you must leave your present religion and assimilate yourselves with some other society. Without that, you cannot gain the strength of that society. So long as you do not have strength, you and your future generations will have to lead a life in the same pitiable condition.

In truth the bulk of the speech is dedicated to refuting this supposition of Eaton’s. To quote every relevant passage would be extraneous, especially as I would prefer that everyone, especially those interested in the subject of conversions, read it in its entirety anyway. However, in concise terms, Ambedkar says:

Most of the present-day Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians in India were formerly Hindus, the majority of them being from the Shudras and Untouchables. Do these critics mean to say that those who left the Hindu fold and embraced Sikhism or Christianity, have made no progress at all? And if this is not true, and if it is admitted that conversion has brought a distinct improvement in their condition, then to say that the Untouchables will not be benefited by conversion carries no meaning.

Suffice to say that this argument of Eaton’s had been considered, dismissed, and refuted at length. To change religion is not in itself an advance in social status. But it is a prerequisite to advance in social status. Nobody familiar with Ambedkar’s arguments could make the argument Eaton is making, that the Muslims did not advance socially at any point. Just because it was not instantaneous does not mean it did not happen. Just because a menial labourer remained a menial labourer does not mean there was no difference in social status between a Hindu labourer and a Muslim one. Even if Eaton’s offhand supposition that social equality was not an Islamic value until relatively recently (I don’t believe this to have been the case, especially not in South Asia), he underestimates the extent to which inequality was most certainly a Hindu value.

iii. If anything, the claim that the bulk of the converts were from tribal or semi-tribal backgrounds supports, rather than refutes, the claim that conversion was an anti-Brahminical decision.

Finally one last claim of Eaton’s can be quickly disposed of and that is his argument that the converts to Islam were in fact thitherto unperturbed by Brahminism’s insistence on social inequality, because they were drawn from groups which had been “only lightly exposed to Brahminic culture”. What he misses is that this deliberate avoidance is in itself a means of Brahminical oppression. Eaton himself acknowledges that the reason why the Hindus had failed to incorporate these cultures is because they believed these areas to be

“inhabited by unclean tribes considered so far beyond the pale that penances were prescribed for those who visited such places.”

In other words the Hindus regarded these people and cultures as untouchable. Nothing more needs to be said on this count because Eaton has said it himself. But for good measure, one might be tempted to quote Annihilation of Caste:

The Hindus will probably seek to account for this savage state of the aborigines by attributing to them congenital stupidity. They will probably not admit that the aborigines have remained savages because they had made no effort to civilize them, to give them medical aid, to reform them, to make them good citizens. But supposing a Hindu wished to do what the Christian missionary is doing for these aborigines, could he have done it? I submit not. Civilizing the aborigines means adopting them as your own, living in their midst, and cultivating fellow-feeling — in short, loving them. How is it possible for a Hindu to do this? His whole life is one anxious effort to preserve his caste. Caste is his precious possession which he must save at any cost. He cannot consent to lose it by establishing contact with the aborigines, the remnants of the hateful Anaryas of the Vedic days.
Not that a Hindu could not be taught the sense of duty to fallen humanity, but the trouble is that no amount of sense of duty can enable him to overcome his duty to preserve his caste. Caste is, therefore, the real explanation as to why the Hindu has let the savage remain a savage in the midst of his civilization without blushing, or without feeling any sense of remorse or repentance.

To argue that the poor incorporation of the mentioned groups is somehow not related to caste, then, is not only simply wrong but an incredible oversight. Really, who in their right mind would convert into a religion which had already considered the question of their involvement and decided it preferred them untouchable? The fact that Islam was preferred by many in these circumstances should not surprise anyone. If they were illiterate it was because Brahminism had willed that it was better for them to be so. It preferred them not only illiterate, but unarmed, exploited, and humiliated. The hypothesis that great numbers of Muslim converts were from unincorporated tribal and semi-tribal situations is nothing but a fulfilment of Ambedkar’s claim, immediately following the one above, that:

The Hindu has not realized that these aborigines are a source of potential danger. If these savages remain savages, they may not do any harm to the Hindus. But if they are reclaimed by non-Hindus and converted to their faiths, they will swell the ranks of the enemies of the Hindus. If this happens, the Hindu will have to thank himself and his Caste System.

iv. Accretion and Reform or Retainment?

Elsewhere,³ Eaton argues for a new framework of study of conversion to Islam in South Asia consisting of an Accretion phase, in which peoples are acculturated to certain ideas of Islamic origin, and reform, in which peoples accellerate their integration with Islam as a global belief system privileged above local interpretations, “perfecting” it. But this must be understood as but one reform which the religion has undergone — probably the most universal one, yes, among the most recent, yes, among the most radical, probably. But the idea of a religion reforming is not in itself exceptional and should be handled critically from a perspective concerned with social reform — a perspective which views history as an instructive process through which to orient oneself and from which to learn. As we have established not all people proceed towards this reform. Eaton’s framework therefore internalises the very much contested opinion that this “reformed” idea of Islam as the correct one. This idea becomes normative, after all, only trough being normativised discursively. This reform may be seen by its protagonists as correct and purifying, but this should not be accepted without question. There are multiple aspects of this process which one may in fact wish to check, balance, or altogether cease. In order to orient ourselves as a community calls for us to identify and remain critical of those aspects rather than splitting hairs over who’s more Muslim. From a Muslim perspective this matter is unambiguous: you are a Muslim if you say you are, regardless of how wrong you might be about anything else.

(2:115) The East and the West belong to Allah. To whichever direction you turn, you will be turning to Allah. Allah is All-Embracing, All-Knowing.

Eaton’s example of the Meo, who he claims remain “relatively indistinct” based on a handful of arbitrary markers, should not be viewed as a society “accredited, but not reformed” and therefore “nominal” as his analysis implies. What is more productive to bear in mind is that the desired level of distinction one should make between oneself and one’s surrounding culture is something which, as far as I can tell, is consistently debated among Muslims in all times and places. Different groups of Muslims come to different opinions on this matter. Anglophones debate whether to say Allah or God, Hindustani speakers debate whether to say Allah hafiz or Khoda hafiz… The reason why the Meo should not experience the same angst to distinguish themselves as the majority of India’s Muslims is that they have an appreciably different social context which does not call for the anti-assimilationist measures one might observe in a place like Bombay.⁴

As I argue in the companion piece, this angst towards differentiation comes from the need for a coalitionary communal aegis to organise under in a multicultural urban setting. Perhaps the Meo felt no need to cease to be Meo as many of the rest of us feel the need to distance ourselves from our cultures of origin. If something is not broken why should they fix it? It’s no wonder they’ve rejected the efforts of these “reform”ists! It is not that their society has remained stagnant. It is as dynamic as any other. But the conditions which lend appeal to these “reforms” are not present among the Meo.

Therefore I would rather see the question of “reform” to be a part of a broader category of anti-assimilationist measures. I would posit that this “reform” is but one of the measures which Muslims have taken in order to meaningfully differentiate themselves from the Hindu society and from their cultures of “origin”. Perhaps we can speak of “retainment” rather than “reform” — the processes by which the Muslims have successfully avoided being subsumed by Brahminism the way everything else is — the means of struggle against the Black Hole of Brahminism

Overall, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier is a fantastic work of history which is incredibly thorough and well-researched. It is just that one of its central arguments is weakened by Eaton’s overeagerness to completely decouple conversion from social struggle, while what we should be doing is contextualising the nature of this struggle and nuancing our understanding of it.

v. Thoughts towards further study.

At the cost of adding to the length of this paper, I would like to close by positing that a comparison study with the Balkans in Ottoman times may be instructive. The rural Balkans in Ottoman times were home to syncretic rural traditions, and when the urban elite came into contact with these syncretic traditions, they, whether Christian or Muslim, reacted with confusion and disgust. The Balkans by Mark Mazower contains a lengthy passage which emphasises, like Eaton, that folk magic was relatively indiscriminate, with Muslim and Christian exorcists invoking Christian saints and sometimes failing to exorcise villages of evil spirits and all celebrating when a town is successfully exorcised by, of all people, a sorceror. He goes on to describe the shock and dismay of urban elite and foreign travelers upon discovering phenomena like these, and, not unlike myself, writes:

[T]his highlighting of doctrinal ignorance usually shed more light on the particular conception of Christianity (and indeed of religion itself) held by the onlookers — the western visitors, the scholars, the senior clerics on the lookout for doctrinal error, the professional heretic-hunters — than it did on the ordinary people of the Balkans and their priests. To a French scholar of the early twentieth century, the peasants did not seem ‘very enlightened’. But such comments assumed that religion too should be a matter of ‘enlightenment’, premised upon sharply elucidated doctrine — a view which made more sense among literate, urban elites than for illiterate Orthodox country folk, for whom practice mattered far more than dogma. It assumed too that religion was a matter of the private, reflective conscience, a question of theology rather than of collective beliefs and practices […] If Orthodox priests were on the whole less literate and educated in theological niceties than their Catholic equivalents, it was because in the Balkans pietism and moral guidance mattered less than ritual and proper observance.
[…]
[T]he peasantry were free to admit that differences of doctrine were not very important to them. In poorly churched rural areas, this even led to considerable slippage between what outsiders (including the Ottoman state) regarded as distinct religions. ‘The Mahometans here are not real Mahometans,’ observed a Turkish telegraph operator in early twentieth century Albania, ‘and the Christians are not real Christians.’ As Lady Mary Wortley Montagy noted: ‘The people who live among Christians and Muslims are not versed in controversy, declare themselves to be absolutely incapable of judging which is the better religion: but to be certain of not rejecting the truth, with very great prudence they observe both and go to mosque on Friday and church on Sunday.’ Asked what religion they were, the cautious peasants of western Macedonia would cross themselves and say, ‘We are Muslims, but of the Virgin Mary.’

There is only one difference between the above passage and the kind of normal situation one might expect to see in India, and that is that whether or not one is Hindu necessarily carries with it a caste struggle component that a shared cosmology with Christianity does not. The question to me is not one of nominal vs. reformed Islam but of assimilation into the Brahminical order and of resistance thereto. The questions I would prefer to explore are: Did the Muslims resist assimilation into the Brahminical order? How? Were they conscious that they were doing so? Did the Muslims consider themselves to be a separate element, and if so to what extent? Did they work towards social reform, and if so what was the nature of it?

From a present-day perspective we should be aware of these questions as well. To what extent are we denying or condoning syncretic developments with other elements of society, how and why are we doing that, and based on what criteria do we pick our associates? Returning to Annihilation of Caste, we see much to praise in the above Balkan model:

An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. In other words there must be social endosmosis. This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards one’s fellow men.

Our primary challenge is that the self-proclaimed majority population is one which wishes to sever these points of contact between us and other groups of people. The problem which India’s Muslims have encountered time and time again, like an evil which has been repeatedly sealed but not yet truly defeated, is a simple retelling of Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: I believe that at least a significant portion of India’s Muslims have always been well aware that we need to be intolerant of, perhaps among other things, Brahminical intolerance. In the abstract, it is partially for that reason which we have been driven to distinguish ourselves to the extent that we have. This is the primary impetus behind Eaton’s “reform” and should be treated as such. Otherwise, we should like a syncretic society just fine.

Footnotes

¹ Even today, preservation of papers in Bengal is problematic owing to its climate. As recently as the early-mid 1900s, there were documented problems with Araratian Library, in the Armenian College in Calcutta, where most of its books and manuscripts were simply destroyed by climate factors despite only being a century or two old.

² Recent anarchist histories, such as Escaping Washington for Freedom, have emphasised the role of the USA’s founding fathers as reactionaries whose aim was to preserve the institution of slavery against a popular revolt which otherwise would very much have entailed its immediate abolition. This is not entirely unlike Ambedkar’s own understanding of Gandhi and the Congress Party, of which he wrote:

[T]he Congress “Fight for Freedom” is nothing more than mere tactics, the object of which is to by-pass the necessity of an agreed constitution demanded by the Untouchables.

³https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/21d4/c5d3eb8637486c05144eda9cf1dcf8eaede5.pdf

⁴ Regarding the anti-assimilationist measures taken by urban Muslims, see the companion article, The Medieval Urban Muslim Poor and the Origin of Biryani.

In Defence of the Hypothesis of Islam as a Religion of Social Liberation

Footnotes

Written by Amina Sarlas