New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century / A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments

by John Morrison

CHAPTER XII

THE NEW MAHOMEDANS

The national anti-British feeling not manifested among Mahomedans.

Mahomedan religious movements.

The Mahomedans, the other great religious community of India,[59] have been far less stirred by the new era than the Hindus, whom hitherto we have been chiefly considering. Only a small number of Mahomedans belong to the professional class, so that modern education and the awakening have not reached Mahomedans in the same degree as Hindus. Quite outnumbered also by Hindus, they identify themselves politically with the British rather than with the Hindus, so that as a body they do not support the Congress, the great Indian Political Association, and have no anti-British consciousness. Mahomedan solidarity is strong enough, but it is religious not national, and so it is only in the religious sphere that we find the new era telling upon Mahomedans. Two small religious movements may be noted curiously parallel to the Ārya

and Brāhma movements among Hindus, and suggesting the operation of like influences.

The Wahabbi movement analogous to Āryaism.

As the Āryas preach a return to the pure original Hinduism of the Vedas, the first Mahomedan movement inculcates a return to the pure original Mahomedanism of the Koran. In particular, it urges a casting off of the Hindu customs and superstitions that the Indian converts to Mahomedanism have frequently retained,—the offerings to the dead, for example. In the first instance, the movement came from a seventeenth century Arabian sect, the Wahabbis, but the movement reached India only about the year 1820, and therefore is a feature of the period we are surveying. The movement belongs specially to Bengal and the United Provinces north-west of Bengal, and is known by a variety of local names, Wahabbi and other. Significant, as supporting what has been said regarding the absence of anti-British feeling among present-day Mahomedans, is the fact that in the first stages of the Wahabbi movement, both in Eastern and Western Bengal, the duty of war upon infidels—on the British and the Hindus in this case—was a prominent doctrine of the crusade. In Mahomedan language, India was Daru-l-harb or a Mansion of War. In these

later years, on the contrary, it is generally recognised by Mahomedans that India under the British rule is not Daru-l-harb, but Daru-l-Islam, or a Mansion of Islamism, in which war on infidels is not incumbent.[60] It may be noted that the decree, recently issued from Mecca, that British territory is Daru-l-Islam, can only refer to India.

The Aligarh movement analogous to Brahmaism.