Religion: Too Important To Be Left To Clerics

Sameer Arshad Khatlani
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Indian Islamic scholar Maulana Hussain Madani, who headed the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary for three decades from 1927 to 1957, challenged poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal when the latter began pushing his idea of territorial nationalism in the 1930s. Madani held his own against Iqbal, a Cambridge University alumnus and arguably Urdu’s greatest poet, in an informed debate on nationhood. Madani cited Islamic sources to argue for composite nationalism and united India while rejecting Iqbal’s idea. Muhammad Ali Jinnah fleshed out the idea in the shape of Pakistan that was created by partitioning the Indian subcontinent in 1947. He overshadowed people such as Madani as he made Pakistan a reality. The division did not just trigger mass killings and migrations but also led to the Muslim brain drain to Pakistan. The drain accelerated the margination of the Muslims left behind. A decline in clerical quality that scholars such as Madani and Abul Kalam Azad once represented is among the consequences of this marginalisation.

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The decline has in recent decades been reflected in the ill-advised fatwas churned out periodically from seminaries. The fatwas have often played into the hands of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which has whipped up anti-Muslim hysteria in the country since it returned to power with an absolute majority in 2014. The internalisation of Muslims as the other plays a part in getting disproportionate media attention to fatwas, which are just individual opinions. The attention follows a pattern of Muslim demonisation in the media. The media deliberately ignores how fatwas end with ‘Allah knows best’ which underlines limitations of human interpretations of the scriptures and that different people can interpret them differently.

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But the larger issue remains clerical decline reflected in the insularity of fatwas. This blinkeredness comes because the clerical knowledge has increasingly been limited to the scriptures, which cannot be interpreted in the light of modern times without the basic knowledge of politics, history, economy, etc. There is little hope of any improvement because of the limited talent pool available for clergy. The seminal Sachar Committee report, which in 2006 highlighted social, economic, and educational exclusion of India's Muslims, found only four per cent of Muslim children studied at seminaries such as Deoband to become clerics. The students at the seminaries mostly come from the poorest families. They are often enrolled there as madrassas take care of their free food, lodging, and clothing. With the increasing Muslim exclusion, encouraging children to become clerics is neither a financially viable job option nor does it ensure the same prestige payer leaders once enjoyed. In places such as Kashmir, socially-dominant Syeds/Pirs once had a total monopoly over the clergy. Now there is rarely a prayer leader from this group as the preferred choices are secular and high-paying jobs.

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The insularity could be addressed with reforms perhaps on the lines of Egypt’s al-Azhar University founded in 970 AD. The basic teachings at the university revolve around Islamic law, theology, and Arabic. But the university has tried to keep pace with the times. Some modern subjects were made obligatory as early as in the 19th century. Al-Azhar underwent considerable reforms with the introduction of medicine and engineering in the 1960s when women were admitted to the university first. It now has women teachers too. A lot of this has been achieved as a result of the government support that appears impossible in India under the present dispensation. Even if the current rulers encourage reform, it would be futile because of the trust deficit as a result of their inherent hostility toward Muslims.

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Even secular politicians have lost touch with Muslim masses as a result of their otherisation and ghettoisation for security reasons. This is another reason for the problem as it has made clerics in many cases vote contractors for parties such as Congress. It gives clerics a position where they can easily resist calls for reform. The BJP government has sought to patronise some custodians of Sufi shrines willing to do its bidding. The custodians have perfected the art of making the right noises. But they mirror the traditional ulema in their lack of scholarship. Most of them are associated with shrines, awash with easy money, because of their heredity invariably without any training in secular subjects or theology. Their lifestyles are a far cry from the traditional Sufis, who kept rulers at arm’s length and emerged as spiritual inheritors of the prophet in response to the seventh century Umayyad dynasty’s materialism. With an invariably obsessive focus on official patronage, they remain aloof from the real Muslim issues. As such seeing them as a silver lining, both in terms of the enlightened scholarship or hold over masses, is a fallacy. 

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War is too important, as French prime minister Georges Clemenceau once famously remarked, to be left to the generals. Similarly, religion is as important to be left to the clerics. More so when they are increasingly drawn from the classes of people, who primarily enroll their children in seminaries to ensure they get proper meals. Society at large needs to focus on enlightened religious scholarship along with quality secular education as it finds itself pushed to the wall.       

This is a slightly updated version of a piece first published in The Times of India, the author's former employer, in 2016

Sameer Arshad Khatlani is an author-journalist based in New Delhi. He has been a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, India’s second-biggest English newspaper. Khatlani worked in a similar capacity with The Indian Express, India's most influential newspaper known for its investigative journalism, until June 2018. Born and raised in Kashmir, he began his career with the now-defunct Bangalore-based Vijay Times in 2005 as its national affairs correspondent. He joined Times of India, one of the world's largest selling broadsheets, in 2007. Over the next nine years, he was a part of the paper's national and international newsgathering team as an Assistant Editor. 

Khatlani has reported from Iraq and Pakistan and covered elections and national disasters. He received a master’s degree in History from the prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Khatlani is a fellow with Hawaii-based American East-West Center established by the US Congress in 1960 to promote better relations and understanding with Asian, and Pacific countries through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. 

Penguin published Khatlani’s first book The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan in February 2020. Eminent academic and King’s college professor, Christophe Jaffrelot, has called the book ‘an erudite historical account... [that] offers a comprehensive portrait of Pakistan, including the role of the army and religion—not only Islam’.