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Voices of India’s Partition, Part V

by Amber Abbas

Professor Mohammad Amin is a distinguished professor of History who spent his entire career in St. Stephen’s College, one of the founding colleges of Delhi University.

During his years at Aligarh, he was trained by Professor Mohammad Habib (Father of Professor Emeritus Irfan Habib). He remarked that Aligarh was known for its liberal History Department, which “later turned completely red.” His own priorities were in writing narrative histories of the medieval period. He described his own position as a skeptic, “History is not neat and tidy. If you find that you have an answer, I am very skeptical about it. How can there be a rational explanation for the irrational acts of irrational people?”

In this interview, Professor Amin reflects on his experiences at Aligarh during late 1940s, when the Muslim League was dominant and “Aligarh really was bristling with the movement for Pakistan.” Students were being dispatched into the hinterlands to spread League propaganda in 1945 and 1946 as India prepared for elections. Aligarh was considered so important as a center of Muslim opinion-making that, he tells me, if a meeting was taking place in the Union (the seat of student government), stores would close in towns and villages nearby as the community awaited news of Aligarh’s pronouncements on the important issues of the day. This centricity to Muslim opinion was key in placing Aligarh at the heart of the Pakistan movement. Amin, like narrator Masood ul Hasan, describes an atmosphere of youthful enthusiasm in which students were caught up in the political excitement of the time.

During the partition, however, as Amin’s story reveals, Aligarh became a site of suspicion; Muslims were targeted as potential traitors to the state, and Aligarh was especially vulnerable because many students had been active in calling for independent Muslim statehood. Amin mentions that as he returned to Aligarh in late summer 1947, he had been advised to carry a book with the name of a Hindu inscribed inside, so as to distract attention from his own Muslim identity. Trains, as he reminds me, were sites of massacre during the communal unrest that accompanied partition and on both sides of the border trains pulled into stations full of dead bodies. His return to Aligarh in 1947 was tense, but uneventful.

In remembering this, Amin moves directly to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. He connects Gandhi’s assassination to the atmosphere at Aligarh by describing it as particularly “telling.” On the day of the assassination, Amin was headed into the city—the predominantly Hindu city of Aligarh separated from the precincts of the Aligarh University by a railway line and a bridge. By the time they reached the city, now a few kilometers distant from their university and its protective walls, people shouted at them to “Go back!” Though they simultaneously heard that Gandhi’s assassin had been a Hindu, the students felt the threat of violence in the city, and those around them sternly directed them to return to the right side of the tracks.

Amin remembers how important Gandhi had been in preserving a tenuous peace in Eastern India during the chaos of 1947. Having gone on a fast to the death, he refused to break it until leaders of the three major faiths of the region: Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs came together to make a joint pledge to stop the fighting. In the moments after Gandhi’s death, Amin and his friends reaped the benefit of his magnanimity- they returned safely to their school- but they knew, as did those around them, that the situation remained tense enough to go either way.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Mohammad Amin

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Jama Masjid, “AMU-Aligarh,” Decemer 23, 2009

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Unknown author, Untitled Portrait of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawharlal Nehru, July 6, 1946

AP Photo/Max Desfor via Flickr Creative Commons

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV

by Amber Abbas

Professor Masood ul Hasan was born in Moradabad in 1928. He completed high school from Hewat Muslim High School. His father was an employee of the Municipal Board. He completed his F.A. (Intermediate) from Government Inter-College, Moradabad. He studied in the Aligarh Muslim University from 1943 to 1947 where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature. He completed his Ph.D. in Liverpool while he was appointed as a Reader in the Department of English at AMU. He retired from AMU in 1988 after serving as Professor of English, Chair of Department of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He also served as the Proctor of the University. He continues to live in Aligarh, in Sir Syed Nagar.

I met Professor Masood ul Hasan first in July 2008, and I interviewed him a total of three times in 2008 and 2009 while I was living in Aligarh to conduct my dissertation research on the role and experience of Aligarh students in the freedom movement and the movement for Pakistan. He was extremely supportive of my project, and frequently introduced me to other senior and retired professors who had been his friends and colleagues for generations. I always looked forward to a visit and a cup of tea at his home during my stay in Aligarh!

Professor Hasan was also one of only a few students of the 1940s who was willing to speak about his involvement with the Muslim League in the 1945-46 elections. He frequently made sure that I understood that he regretted his involvement with the League and chalked it up to youthful enthusiasm, a desire for adventure, and naivete. He chose not to leave for Pakistan despite his involvement with the League and remained his entire career at Aligarh University as a professor of English.

In this interview he describes his experience on the day of Gandhi’s assassination, a mere five months after the partition of the country. On that day, Masood ul Hasan was traveling from Aligarh to his home in Bhopal. He took a train from Aligarh to Agra and was to buy his onward ticket in the Agra Cantonment Station. When he sat in the train, he made a deliberate choice to avoid the “minority compartment,” a concession made by the railways to protect Muslims and other minorities in the wake of the partition violence when trains became sites of massacre. It was his “little assertion of self-confidence” to ride in the general compartment, clad in a sherwani – a typically Muslim coat that was a gesture of pride in his heritage but marked him as a minority. These choices would have been only slightly risky on any other day. On this day, however, as he stepped onto the train platform at Agra and found it deserted, Masood ul Hasan felt afraid. The news of Gandhi’s assassination created a difficult position for him. If a Muslim had killed Gandhi, all Muslims would be held responsible, and the violence of partition could be reignited. As he stood on the platform, terribly alone, in the city made famous by Shah Jahan’s majestic Taj Mahal, a monument to India’s Muslim heritage, he feared what might happen if he were unable to leave.

Luckily, the ticket collector took pity on him, arranged for a ticket and Hasan was able to depart for the safer environment of his home in Bhopal. He did not become a victim of violence on that day, but the fear he experienced speaks to the uncertainty that Muslims in India felt, especially when traveling through unfamiliar environments, in the early years after India’s independence. Whereas they were supposed to have the same rights and privileges as other Indian citizens, the trauma of 1947 was still fresh, and, especially when traveling, Muslims often feared for their safety.

Hasan’s narrative picks up on some familiar themes from other stories Muslims tell about this day. It is singular, it stands out in the memory; he, like others, is able to tap into his emotions and experience with remarkable clarity. Muslims almost without exception feared a Muslim assassin. After everything they had been through in 1947 and Gandhi’s selfless efforts to protect Muslims in places they were threatened, a Muslim assassin would unseat in one shot the tenuous but safe position of Muslims in early 1948. Everyone knew this, not just Muslims. And when it was revealed that the assassin was a fundamentalist Hindu, Muslims heaved a collective sigh of relief. No conservative Hindus were targeted or held responsible for the actions of Nathuram Godse. Muslims were spared, but one of their staunch allies was lost.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Masood ul Hasan

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Yann, Gandhi in Noakhali, 1946

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Unknown author, “Group photo of Hindu Mahasabha, the group accused of successfully staging Gandhi’s assassination. Standing: Shankar Kistaiya, Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, Digambar Badge (Approver), Guruji M.S. Golwalkar. Seated: Narayan Apte, Vinayak D. Savarkar, Nathuram Godse, Vishnu Karkare.” via Wikimedia Commons

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III

by Amber Abbas

Professor Irfan Habib is probably the best-known professor in Aligarh. Born in 1931, he was a young student in the Intermediate classes during the 1940s. His father, Mohammad Habib, a staunch nationalist was the leader of the progressive factions at Aligarh. Irfan Habib is an Emeritus Professor of the Department of History but he still appears daily in the department where he sits in the office of Professor Shireen Moosvi and interacts with all of the students, other professors, Communist party activists and others who move in and out of the office throughout the day. Irfan Habib always provides hospitality to these guests: endless cups of tea and biscuits. On many occasions I had the opportunity to sit in the office and transcribe stories he would share in English or in Urdu with the people who came and went. It was some time before I could convince him to sit down with me for a formal interview about his experiences during the 1930s and 1940s in Aligarh. He was very skeptical of the methodology of my research, being as he is, a historian of medieval India and deeply invested in the investigation of documentary sources. Interviews, he reminded me, would only catch a person’s “bias,” and not “The Truth.”

In this interview, he describes the atmosphere in AMU in the years following partition and his experiences around Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. He first emphasizes the fact that though partition caused terrible disruption at the university, with thousands of students and many faculty departing for Pakistan, the university worked to minimize its effect on students’ lives. He repeatedly told me that no class was ever cancelled, even if a professor left, another instructor stepped in to cover his responsibilities. Continuity is important as a way to show that there were Muslims at the university who worked to support independent India—contrary to the narrative that has plagued the university since the 1947 partition by suggesting that its students and professors were, without exception, traitors and fifth columnists. Habib wears his nationalism on his sleeve, even if, as a Leftist, he has not really represented its mainstream.

Habib’s family had a long history of nationalist allegiance and his mother’s family had been close to Gandhi since the early years of his leadership. Habib earlier told me that Gandhi “was an idol… in our home. My mother called him ‘Bapu’ because of the family relationship, but I never heard my father referring to Gandhi as anything except ‘Mahatmaji.’ He wouldn’t even say ‘Gandhiji.’” In describing the events of Gandhi’s death, Professor Habib, however, does not emphasize his family’s grief, but the efforts of students publicly to show their solidarity with the nation. Because of the immediate suspicions that a Muslim may have committed the murder, and the anxiety that threatened the Muslims more broadly in the wake of partition, AMU stood out as a particularly sensitive site. Professor Mohammad Habib led the students from the University to the city of Aligarh, which involved crossing the railway line, the traditional boundary between the University and the majority Hindu city adjoining it. Crossing this boundary is a symbolic act of solidarity, and the Muslim students demonstrated their Indian-ness by publicly engaging in the response to Gandhi’s death. Habib also points out that many “Pakistanis”—by which he means those students whose family homes were in territories that became Pakistan in 1947: Punjab, Northwest Frontier Province, Sindh, Balochistan and Bengal—also participated in the march. Thus, even though Gandhi had been a controversial figure at the University, all students: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and even Pakistanis came together to mourn for the man who had risked his life in 1947 to stop the murder of Muslims in Bengal.

In conclusion he notes that the refugees—sharnyartis—who arrived at the university in 1947 and 1948 were welcomed with open arms, students gathered clothes for them, and “no incident” ever took place between Muslim students and refugees. This is important at Aligarh in particular because of its much-vaunted history of religious tolerance. Aligarh University had always considered itself aloof from “communal” concerns, but partition was a test of this culture. During the 1940s, even as the Muslim League mobilized students to support a Muslim homeland, no communal violence took place there. Political and national groups with differing perspectives put them aside to join in solidarity to support the university and the state in 1947 and 1948—and this is a very different kind of story from that we hear in Punjab, in Delhi, in places where violence and not peace characterized this time.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo Credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Irfan Habib

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Yann, Gandhi During the Salt March, March 1930

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Syed Gibran, Aligarh Muslim University

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

Alig Apartments, Shamshad Market, Aligarh (June 15, 2009)

Transcript:

Context Notes: I arrived at the home of S.M. Mehdi without an appointment, having been referred to him through a chance encounter with a University official. Though he was never a student of Aligarh, he has moved to the town after his daughter did her Medical degree there and is now practicing in Aligarh. S.M. Mehdi was surprised to see me, but agreed to answer my questions though he cautioned he could not be considered an expert on Aligarh. He told me, instead, of his experiences during partition as a Communist in Bombay. He worked for thirty years in the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi and has been a lifelong Communist. He is a very friendly and engaging person. He is tragically losing his vision and was eager for conversation. Though I met him only briefly, I felt very comfortable during my few visits to his home and looked forward to them.

SMM: There is another interesting incident I will tell you about that period. That is in 1948 when Gandhi was killed. That particular day I was going to Bhopal from Bombay. Thre was a very, very good friend of mine, Munish Saxena, he said, “I will come with you to the station.” So, Sardar Jafri, the Urdu poet, was getting married that day. There was a reception and so we went to the reception and then Munish said, “Come along, let us go, because then your train will be—[going].” I said, “Alright.” So we went to take a taxi. As we went there, we saw some people engaged in rioting on the road. So I asked somebody, “What is happening?” He said, “Gandhi assassinated.”

I said, “No, this is impossible, this must be some work of RSS, this propaganda business, this is nonsense.” So we took a taxi and we went to Victoria Terminus- have you been to Bombay?

AA: No.

SMM: Victoria Terminus was the name, now it is of course, changed [to] something else. So Victoria Terminus is a huge railway station! Very old! During British time it was made. And of course it was busiest area of Bombay. So we took a taxi, I had a small suitcase with me. We went to the station. And as we reached the station it was confirmed that Gandhi was killed, assassinated that time. So Munish told me, “Mehdi, if a Muslim has killed Gandhi, then there is going to be large scale trouble and I don’t think you should go because you’ll be in danger.” I said, “Yes, you are correct. So what do we do?” He said, “Let us go back and then see what happens. Who killed Gandhi, first of all?” I said, “Alright.” So I put my suitcase in the cloakroom and said, “Alright, go.” And can you believe me? As we came out of the railway station with buses and trams and taxis and whatnot and private cars, etc. I mean, Bombay! A city like Bombay, and especially that railway station! My God, what a huge thing it used to be.

And as we came out, there was nothing! Absolutely nothing on the road! No trams. No bus. No taxi. No car. Even no person! No man! Oh God, what has happened! Within two minutes, what happened? The whole city is dead! It was eerie. Terrible. What do we do now? No taxi available and miles and miles we have to go to reach where we were staying in Walkeshwar Road near Malabar Hill. So Munish said, “Let us try the local train and let us go from here, walk down to the railway station, the local train station.” I said, “Alright.” So I and Munish walked down. My God! There was no train. There were no passengers! The whole platform was deserted.

Oh God. It was such a—what do we do now? I said, “What can we do? Let us walk.” We started walking. And, I mean, there was no alternative. There was no train, there was no taxi, there no bus, that’s why. I mean, there was no person on the road! My God. So we were walking, and by this time it was sunset and it was dark now, because we were walking and walking and walking. We saw some light coming from behind us. So I thought it might be a taxi so I flagged it. As it stopped, I came to know that it was a [private] car and it was driven by a Sardarji, Sikh. He was all alone in his car.

We said, “I’m sorry, I thought it was a taxi.” He said, “My dear, there is no taxi today. Where are you going?” I said, “Na, na, na. It is alright, we are just going.” He said, “Look, today you cannot have anything so please come and sit in my car and I will reach you there.” So I looked at Munish, and Munish looked at me. He said, “Alright, baitiye. (sit)”

AA: Did you feel a little bit—?

SMM: Dar lag rahe hain ke patha nehin, Sardarji kaun? Kya kar dein?

(It was frightening, we didn’t know who this Sardarji was. What would he do?)

AA: Aur abhi tak aapko nehin maloom tha ki Mussalman nehin tha? Jinhone mara?

(Up till now you didn’t know that it wasn’t a Muslim? Who killed him?)

SMM: Nehin, nehin. Abhi kuch nehin patha! (No, no. We didn’t know anything!) Tho Sardar asked us, “Where are you going? Which locality?” We didn’t want to give him the name of the locality that we are living in Walkeshwar Road. We said, “No, no, Sardaji, you just please drop us at Opera House.” Opera House was a place, from there we could take a bus to our house. He said, “Alright.” We asked him, “Sardarji, where are you going?” He said, “I am going to Pakistan. And come along, you also come with us!” Meaning: Muslim areas. He was going to kill. So we laughed, and said, “No, no, we have got some work to do, etc. etc. So please you drop us near the Opera House. He said, “Alright.” So he dropped us and he went away.

So we walked and reached our house where Sardar Jafri and his newlywed wife were there. They asked us, “What is this?” So we told them the whole story about it. So he said, “How do we know who has done it?” By that time, it was nine o’clock in the night. There used to be a nine o’clock new bulletin everyday. That was an important news bulletin of the radio. So he said, Sardar Jafri told me, “See, on the ground floor, there is a lady, a Muslim lady, a Khoja, who stays there. If you go to her maybe she will allow you to listen to the news on the radio.” So I went there. There was only one woman living in this huge flat, it was quite a big flat. So I told her and she said, “Hanh, hanh. Yes, please go ahead and listen.” She did not know anything in the world what is happening whether Gandhi is dead or alive. She didn’t know anything!

So I just opened her radio for the nine o’clock news and Sardar Patel came out that “A Fanatic Hindu has killed Gandhi.” Oh, God. I felt so relieved! (laughs) So it was the next day that I took the train for Bhopal. (laughs)

AA: How did it strike you, emotionally, that he had been assassinated?

SMM: Hhmm? How did I?

AA: How did you feel, emotionally?

SMM: Oh, emotionally, about Gandhi. Hanh, hanh. Emotionally, about Gandhi I thought, I mean, we thought less, I suppose, than ourselves. What is going to happen to us? Presuming some one is going to stab us, kill us. Who has killed? The whole thing was, who can it be? And it always came down, it must be a Muslim, it might be a Muslim, it must be a Muslim, it might be a Muslim, that’s all. It must be a Muslim. We thought that Muslim Leaguer must have killed Gandhi. Because at that time they were saying that partition is not in favor of Pakistan but is in favor of—the Radcliffe Award is in favor of India, not Pakistan.

So, yeh dimag me baj gaya raha tha ke “Kis ne mara hoga? Mussalman hi ho sakta jisne mara hoga.” (This was bouncing in the mind that, “Who will have killed him? It could only be a Muslim who will have killed him.”) It must be a Muslim who has killed. And we were looking bhai, ke koi aa na raha ho, koi dekh na raha ho, koi marna nehin hum logon ko. (And we were looking, man, that no one should be coming, no one should be watching, no one should kill us.) And as we heard this news that a fanatic Hindu has killed Gandhi, it was a really greatly—I mean, just imagine! We, who did not believe in this nonsense of Hindus and Muslims, when we heard that a Hindu had killed Gandhi, we felt relieved. That at least a Muslim has not killed Gandhi. That was a terrible experience of my life.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II

by Amber Abbas

In 2009, I spent five months living at the Aligarh Muslim University in the town of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India.I was there to research the role and experience of Aligarh students in the movement for Pakistan during the 1940s. As part of this research, I actively sought out university employees and former students of the university from that period. I was referred to S.M. Mehdi through a chance encounter with a university official and arrived at his home without an appointment. Though he was never an Aligarh student — in fact, said he had an “allergy” to Aligarh as a young man — he moved to the town after his daughter completed her medical degree and settled there. S.M. Mehdi was surprised to see me, but agreed to answer my questions, though he cautioned that he could not be considered an expert on Aligarh. After finishing high school in Bhopal, Mehdi went on to Kanpur for his B.A. and then to Lucknow for his M.A. Degree. During his time living in both places, he was involved with the Students’ Union and began to turn towards Socialism, under the influence of his teacher Christopher Ackroyd, and then to Communism. During 1946 and 1947, he was in Bombay putting out an Urdu paper for the Communist party — a post to which he had been recruited by Sajjad Zaheer. He worked for thirty years in the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi and has been a Communist ever since.

The Communist activist and writer S.M. Mehdi

During the early years after partition, Mehdi was living in Bombay, where he made friends with many well-known Leftists and writers, including Sardar Jafri — an Aligarian — who he mentions here. Throughout 1947 and 1948 these young activists and thinkers printed and distributed the Communist Urdu paper especially in the Muslim areas. Mehdi tells me that Bombay was not affected by partition’s violence in the same way as places in Punjab; violence was sporadic and casualties were few. He himself felt little fear, but had a friend who was so terrified that he could hardly travel safely in the city without “betraying” that they were Muslims.

He tells a long story about his experiences on the day Gandhi was killed. He is one of the few people whom I interviewed who does not suggest that he or she heard “immediately” that the assassin had been a Hindu rather than a Muslim. He describes the anxiety that dogged his colleagues and him all day as they wondered whether the assassin was a Muslim, and recalls how he felt fear, to which he had previously believed himself to be immune. His story is both terrifying and funny, and thoroughly dramatic. The disjunctures that that day created are still fresh in his mind — the stillness of life outside the Victoria Terminus station, the silence on the roads. “There was no person!” he exclaims. That is, until a car pulled up besides his Hindu companion, Munish, and him. The driver of the vehicle was a Sikh off to “Pakistan,” the colloquial name for Muslim areas that, despite partition’s migrations, is still used in Indian cities today. The Sikh jovially invites these two young men along “to kill.” Betraying that Mehdi could become his first victim.

The young men free themselves from their “generous” driver and head back to the home of newlywed Sardar Jafri, who didn’t know a thing about the day’s events. Not until Mehdi hears the 9 o’clock new bulletin can he finally breathe easily that the assassin was not a Muslim, and therefore, there would be no violence, only mourning. Though he was sympathetic to Gandhi, and describes his own opposition to “communal” thinking, Mehdi depicts how the events of that day temporarily changed his outlook. He was “relieved” to learn that the assassin was not a Muslim, relieved that he belonged to a different community, he, who did not believe in that “nonsense.” The uncertainty and fear that followed him all day completely subsumed his ability to grieve for the fallen leader. Because of the tensions that the assassination threatened to unleash, almost none of the Muslims I spoke to described an immediate sense of grief at the loss. Though they realized the significance of his absence, and even now credit him with bringing peace to the subcontinent after the violent upheavals of partition, on January 30, 1948, all were too concerned for their own safety to indulge in mourning.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Genesis Media Pvt., Ltd., Untitled Portrait of S.M. Mehdi

“Mammojan Ki Diary,” a series that chronicles S.M. Mehdi’s life and experience with many famous Indian Progressive Writers of the 1950s and 1960s.

Unititled Portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, Bombay, 1944

www.mkgandhi.org via Wikimedia Commons

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold (2010)

by Joseph Parrott

There exists a fault line near the tenth parallel north of the equator where the two great proselytizing religions of the last two millennia meet. In centuries past, desert traders and merchant seamen carried Islam along with their goods, halting only where they confronted unsurpassable natural barriers or the expansion of European Christianity in the colonized regions of Asia and Africa. The diverse peoples of these lands found ways to live alongside each other, yet the past decades have seen this relative peace come unglued. New Yorker reporter and poet Eliza Griswold traveled along this increasingly chaotic border, documenting the day-to-day realities of the growing conflicts between the world’s largest monotheistic faiths. She finds that more than mere ideology motivates these men and women; instead, “growing numbers of people and an increasingly vulnerable environment are sharpening the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water.”

In Nigeria, Sudan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Griswold reveals that religious identity serves as a refuge from the constant challenges of the modern way of life. Climate change, the expansion of the nation state in search of natural resources, political conflict, and the globalization of the market economy all undermine traditional beliefs that rely heavily on local community and close association with the environment. Colonial legacies and ethnic differences have inspired deep political divides.

In these developing countries, state institutions and social organization often lag behind economic growth and fail to fill the place of ailing traditions. Here, religious community provides stability and scripture proves “a more practical rule of law than the government does.” Faith offers a support network, a form of advocacy, and a unifying identity where life is difficult and the control of valuable resources contentious. The transnational nature of both Christianity and Islam means that these parochial negotiations of power often invite foreign assistance from evangelical missionaries and radical Islamists with their own agendas, meaning that battles are “fought locally and exploited globally.” The ease of communication and common beliefs connect disparate peoples, but such interactions also work to inspire divisions among coreligionists who reject the perceived superficiality and wickedness of the more secularized spiritual practices of developed states. Griswold finds that both Christianity and Islam prove complicated beliefs, neither inherently contradictory nor monolithic, powerful stabilizing forces abused by self-interested leaders. Faith in this context becomes a coping mechanism for unfamiliar world; it “could mean whatever one wanted it to; it could hold a link to the past or forge a vision for the future.”

Displaced Persons camp in Sudan resulting from the conflict in Darfur.

Griswold offers a fascinating, poignant, and insightful account of global religious conflict. Part history, part travelogue, and part theological mediation, the work successfully dissects the “compound of multiple identities” that drives the mass conversion of whole populations and motivates pious believers to take up arms against their neighbors. The daughter of Episcopal bishop Frank Griswold, the author situates this discussion of devotional violence within the context of her own spirituality, offering a personal and accessible view of a highly charged subject. Her pithy, graceful writing clothes this complicated story in an understated elegance. The Tenth Parallel demands attention as an insightful piece of historically informed news reporting and a truly engrossing account of one woman’s theological journey across the globe.

Further reading:

Eliza Griswold discusses Christian-Muslim relations on NPR Books.

Darfur photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn by Asef Bayat (2007)

by Lior Sternfeld

In the wake of the recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, many try to predict whether Islam can exist together harmoniously with democracy. In this book, Bayat successfully dismantles the presumptions that constitute this discourse, by stating in the beginning that “the question is not whether Islam is or is not compatible with democracy, or by extension, modernity, but rather under what conditions Muslims can make them compatible.” In order to answer this question Making Islam Democratic closely examines the different trajectories of two countries with similar socio-religious backgrounds: Iran and Egypt. Specifically Bayat asks why Iran produced an Islamic revolution, while Egypt developed only an Islamic Movement.

Bayat first analyzes Iran as a “revolution without movement,” arguing that as a result of years of a repressive political system the clergy failed to build social infrastructures and thought that the way to gain political influence would be to “recruit” the intellectual elites to their side. While they were successful in creating national-religious discourse among the intellectual elites, they “lost” the masses to other ideologies, such as Socialism, Marxism, and Secularism. The public heavily consumed western cultural products, magazines, movies, and books. During the revolution in 1979, the different sectors “were pushed into the arms of Shi’a clergy” to lead the revolution, but sectarianism remained present and vital.In Egypt, on the other hand, the Islamic parties could not participate in the political game, but succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the population by establishing a wide system of education, healthcare, banking and social welfare that benefitted the poor and traditional population of Egypt. The decision of the Egyptian ‘ulema (Muslim jurists) not to attempt to take over the government but rather to win the population allowed them work and prosper with government consent, and was therefore able to influence and Islamize society, which became significant later (as recently seen). This model can be useful to some extent in looking at other instances such as Turkey and Jordan.

Bayat has succeeded in writing a clear and jargon-free book. He supports his argument on profound research in these two telling case studies. This book eloquently refutes many common beliefs and anxieties about Islam and democracy.

Securing Africa: Post-9/11 Discourses on Terrorism ed. Malinda S. Smith (2010)

by Lady Jane Acquah

Islam has a long tradition in Africa dating back to the seventh century. Today, Islam plays a crucial role in the political, socio-cultural, religious, and economic lives of the population. The inhuman event of the 9/11 attacks and the upsurge in terrorism in the world have forced western countries, especially, the United States, to re-examine their relationship with Africa. Securing Africa: Post-9/11 Discourses on Terrorism, scholars from Africa, Canada, and the US contribute cogent discourses on the significance of Africa to the US. They especially emphasize the ways that Africa is represented in public discussions of political violence and terrorism. The authors address the impact of 9/11 on Africa, and how 9/11 has informed American policies and attitudes towards Africa.

Securing Africa begins with Malinda S. Smith’s examination of the historical context in which terrorism can be placed. She claims that 9/11 gave impetus to scholars, politicians, and civil society to view terrorism as an attack on ‘civilization’ by ‘evil men’ and she engages readers on the ironies of this construct. She cautions against wholesale labeling of peoples as terrorists. She draws instances from the past such as Africans fighting colonization and the African National Congress fighting apartheid, which in her rationalization, were legitimate means of securing freedom, though labelled by the West as acts of terrorism. She analyzes how violent attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and flight bombings in Libya, Spain, and India were not treated with the same urgency as terrorist attacks.

A timeline of African decolonization. Many African anti-imperial groups were initially labelled as ‘terrorists’ in the West.

This opens discussions in “Part I: 9/11, Terrorism and the Geopolitics of the African Spaces,” that examine the role of intellectuals in questioning political authority, the place of Islam in Africa, and the impact of post 9/11 American rhetoric and policies on Africa. These chapters present the extent of the US war on terror on the African continent, especially in East Africa and the Sahel region. They also show that Africans’ inability to perceive European machinations perpetually leave them in a position “Part II: Africa in Post 9/11 International Relations” deals with the Cold War paradigms of relationships between democracies and containment, America’s interest in the oil reserves of the Gulf of Guinea and how oil factors into US security measures, and how the US foreign policy is linked with its economic interests in Kenya and Somalia.

The authors employ a rich selection of books, newspaper articles, and online materials to discuss such controversial issues such as Africa’s position in the war on terror, the significance of Africa to America’s security, and America’s foreign policies towards Africa. Cross-cultural and territorial comparisons enable readers to understand the authors’ points. The multi-disciplinary approach used by these contributors situates their arguments in specific contexts and reduces abstractions, bringing the issues at stake to non-specialist readers.

The US recognizes Africa as an important arena in its bid to win its war on terror but more importantly, African intellectuals also recognize that the US fight against terrorism has ideological, socio-economic, and political implications for Africans. This book is an important addition to the literature on terrorism. I recommend it for everyone interested in Africa.

Further reading:

Publisher information on Securing Africa, with an extract from the book.

A short essay from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the spread of Islam into Africa.

The Atlantic Monthly on terrorism in Uganda.

Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism by Zachary Lockman (2004)

by Kristin Tassin

In this work, Zachary Lockman seeks to introduce a general audience to the history of the study of Islam and the Middle East in the United States and Europe, with particular attention to US studies from the mid-twentieth century. The importance of this book lies in Lockman’s attempt to reach the general public with information about the history, politics, and culture of the Middle East. Lockman’s concern is that certain kinds of knowledge about the Middle East and Islam have been used to shape and justify dangerous policies without the consent of an informed public.

The first half of the book surveys how the “West” has imagined the Middle East from ancient times to the twentieth century. Lockman begins with the early history of different formulations of the east/west divide from the Greeks onwards. He argues the images of the “East” created by the Greeks and Romans had little to do with reality and were influenced by early conflicts with Persia and the concocted opposition between “civilized” Greeks and Romans on the one hand and “barbarians” on the other. These early theories were then adapted by western political theorists to serve particular political and military goals. In an argument reminiscent of Edward Said’s in his book Orientalism, Lockman argues that representations of Islam can be deployed for contemporary political purposes because they still have public emotional resonance.

In the second half of the book, Lockman focuses on the American and British image of the Middle East over the past fifty years. The bulk of the book is devoted to the modern development of the field of Middle Eastern Studies through the influences of empire, the Cold War, and the rise of area studies after World War II. Lockman argues that images of Eastern cultures in the West have been linked with the growth of European and American power over Muslim territories. In the final chapter, Lockman lays out what he sees to be the threats posed to Middle Eastern studies by politically-motivated anti-Eastern policy, manifested mainly in think-tanks and the media. Lockman argues that, particularly after the events of September 11^th, there has been a serious effort to censor opinions deemed too liberal or too supportive of Arab or Islamic causes.

Lockman’s work has been criticized for giving undo attention to debates in the public sphere and neglecting work produced inside academia. But this is Lockman’s point exactly. Political debates within public policy and the media have overtaken genuinely scholarly interest in the Middle East, and have influenced the types of questions addressed in colleges and universities. For this reason, Lockman’s book arrived at a perfect time to give a clear history of the study of the Middle East and Islam. The book calls attention to the social and political interests that have been served by the adoption of a certain type of one-sided scholarship.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I

by Amber Abbas

During the summer of 2005 I embarked on my first research trip. I had recently taken a class on oral history methodology and was eager to put my newly acquired skills to use. My research focuses on a tumultuous time in the history of the Indian subcontinent: the 1947 events that gave India its independence and created the new state of Pakistan. My own family hails from Aligarh, a city about 90 miles southeast of New Delhi and, as Muslims, opted to move to Pakistan. I was aware of this as a child, but because I grew up outside Pakistan, it was not until I began my research and had enough comfort speaking Urdu that I persuaded some of my elderly relatives to tell me their stories of the time of independence and partition.

Lahore's old city from the minaret of the Wazir Khan Mosque — Lahore’s old city from the minaret of the Wazir Khan Mosque. Photo by Aaron Jakes.

Mrs. Zahra Haider was married to my grandmother’s cousin, Khurshid Haider. I have known her my whole life, but it is only in the last few years that I have become close with her and her family. She was born in Dehra Dun. Her father’s name was Yaqoob Shah and her mother’s Zohra Shah. She was raised in Lahore by her Aunt because her mother was unwell. Her father was the Auditor General of Pakistan. He was posted for two years in Washington as Pakistan’s representative to the World Bank, and took his family along with him. She married Khurshid Haider, who died a few years before this interview. Currently she lives in Rawalpindi Pakistan with her son Mohsin and his family.

I interviewed Mrs. Haider at her sister’s home in Lahore, Pakistan. As it was June, and very hot, we sat in a room with the air-conditioning running. The hum is audible on the recording. Throughout the interview, Mrs. Haider’s sister, kept coming in to offer us food or fruit.

She speaks here about her experiences during the 1947 partition, an event that played out violently on the streets of Lahore. Mrs. Haider remembershaving her daily routine disrupted by partition’s displacements. Although she briefly mentions the bureaucratic imperatives of partition, she is mostly focused on personal experiences. It was unbearably hot as they prepared for their exams that summer; in August, many of her friends moved away; the school tuition bills had to be paid; she was scolded by a doctor in a refugee hospital for seeking a few moments of normalcy with her friends; she took clothing from her mother’s laundry to give to the refugees. This focus on the everyday helps us, as historians, to understand the experience of women and youth during partition.

Mrs. Haider’s memories come in snippets that take on comprehensive significance and are influenced by the national history of Pakistan. She speaks of conflicts with Hindus yet, it is the loss of her Hindu friends that she feels most sharply. And the innocence of her surprise at their departure is still evident in her voice. As her story concludes, she refers to a woman who died from her wounds after doctors’ heroic attempts to save her. When she died, her baby daughter became an orphan. Though the story is not included here, one of Mrs. Haider’s friends took that baby home and today, she is practically an older sister of Mrs. Haider’s daughter-in-law, Neely, the daughter of that friend who long ago carried a baby home from the refugee hospital.

Zahra Haider’s story gives a glimpse of Lahore, a primary site of partition’s violent upheavals. She shows us that partition’s disruptions were both massive and mundane. Stories like Mrs. Haider’s bring partition down to ground-level where we can see, hear and feel what partition was like for one young girl trying to make sense of the world around her.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT HERE

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