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The World of Fatwas or the Shariah in Action
Study of Islamic canonical decisions (Fatwas) issued in India during the last hundred years.
768 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
63 people are currently reading
956 people want to read
About the author
Arun Shourie
38 books301 followersIndian economist, journalist, author and politician.
He has worked as an economist with the World Bank, a consultant to the Planning Commission of India, editor of the Indian Express and The Times of India and a Minister of Communications and Information Technology in the Vajpayee Ministry (1998–2004). He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982 and the Padma Bhushan in 1990.
Popularly perceived as one of the main Hindu nationalist intellectuals during the 90s and early 2000s.
He has worked as an economist with the World Bank, a consultant to the Planning Commission of India, editor of the Indian Express and The Times of India and a Minister of Communications and Information Technology in the Vajpayee Ministry (1998–2004). He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982 and the Padma Bhushan in 1990.
Popularly perceived as one of the main Hindu nationalist intellectuals during the 90s and early 2000s.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
June 5, 2018
This was really boring: an anti-Islamic tirade. I could not finish it. Usually, even when I disagree with Shourie, I used to appreciate his skill as a writer - something that is conspicuous by its absence from this book.
I would recommend this book to only Donald Trump.
I would recommend this book to only Donald Trump.
April 14, 2014
Wonderful. Rarely have I seen a book with such detail and boldness. You, Arun Shourie, are a legend, sir.
November 7, 2014
The author has done commendable research in the topic giving a clear insight into what Islam actually is. But, at times, he seems to be repetitive. But the latter is not an issue compared to the magnitude of facts he has put forth. I recommend this book to those who are into research on Semitic religions. This book is not for light reading but yes, it is a very good book indeed. A big thanks to Shourie sir for his work.
November 14, 2010
I was astonished to find out that every aspect of a Muslim's life is governed by Sharia. But i am still not able to understand why would a muslim accept some of these crazy fatwas? A must read for those who think on the lines of 'Sarva Dharma Sambhav' (Equal respect to all Religions).
February 15, 2016
4.5/5. Dry style. The book is exhaustive and hence can get repititive.
July 28, 2009
An eye opener , Arun does his homework very well that makes the novel more interesting ! Sorry not a novel but THE BOOK !
November 20, 2025
Arun Shourie’s The World of Fatwas or the Shariah in Action is one of those books that arrives with the calm of a dossier and the crackle of a live wire. You open it expecting a study; you emerge feeling as if you’ve been walked through a labyrinth of centuries—rooms filled with edicts, injunctions, punishments, permissions, silences, and a thousand anxious footnotes, all humming with the tension of belief and power.
And through this charged architecture, Shourie moves with the measured pace of someone who knows he’s carrying nitroglycerin but refuses to flinch. The book isn’t content with being a mere catalogue of fatwas; it is an autopsy of certainty, an excavation of intellectual habits, and ultimately an invitation to think about what happens when any tradition—religious, legal, or cultural—decides that its past is non-negotiable, immutable, and eternally binding.
Shourie begins with sources—those intimidating medieval tomes that, for most people, float vaguely in the background of religious discourse but rarely come out into the sunlight. He brings them out. He translates, he quotes, he comments, he cross-checks.
And in doing so, he exposes how fatwas—those supposedly neutral, clerical “opinions”—grow into a full-fledged system of social legislation. We see rulings on everything from ablutions to warfare, from relationships to political loyalty, from inheritance to dietary norms, all written with that iron-clad conviction that brooks no dissent.
This is Shourie’s method: he shines a forensic light on the logical chain linking medieval jurisprudence to modern lived realities. There is no anger in his tone; only a clinical steadiness that, ironically, makes the revelations more unsettling.
What unsettles is not the existence of fatwas—every tradition has its arbiters, its interpreters—but the worldview they encode. Shourie keeps returning, almost with a grim fascination, to the way these edicts tightly police everyday life, prescribing and proscribing with an intensity that feels less moral than managerial.
The human individual, with all their quirks, messiness, contradictions, and confusions, becomes a type, a unit to be regulated. There’s a fatwa for a wife’s behavior with her husband, a fatwa for what happens if a man accidentally utters the wrong word during divorce, a fatwa for business transactions, clothing, music, politics, reading, friendship—an entire world micromanaged through a legalistic lens.
Reading this, you feel the claustrophobia Shourie wants you to feel: a system that touches everything can liberate nothing.
At the heart of Shourie’s intellectual project is a simple question: what happens when a community is trained to derive its norms not from present circumstances but from a fossilized scriptural past? The answer he traces is multipronged. The past becomes not inspiration but template; interpretation becomes mimicry; authority becomes custodianship rather than moral responsibility.
Fatwas, in this sense, operate like cultural software updates that never update—they merely reinstall an old version with greater insistence. Shourie doesn’t dramatize this; he lets the cumulative weight of citations do the work.
By the twentieth page you aren’t shocked; you’re exhausted, which is exactly the point. The world of fatwas is not an occasional aberration; it is a system, a worldview, an ecosystem.
What gives the book its sharpest edge is Shourie’s unflinching focus on accountability:
1. Who issues these rulings?
2. Who enforces them?
3. Who benefits?
4. Who risks life and livelihood by questioning them?
He turns our gaze toward the institutional machinery: the clerics, the seminaries, the political actors who find fatwas useful tools for social organization. The book is not just about theology; it is about power.
A fatwa becomes a disciplinary mechanism. It becomes a way to police dissenters. It becomes a way to exert control over women, minorities, the heterodox. And in Shourie’s telling, the tragedy is not merely that such mechanisms exist, but that they masquerade as divine mandates. Structures of control are easier sold when wrapped in the language of the eternal.
The consequences spill over into social life in ways both subtle and spectacular. Shourie pulls together examples of how fatwas on education, technology, political participation, or even cooperation with non-Muslims create friction between communities. He tracks the ways in which rigid jurisprudence can become a barrier to integration, debate, reform, or even plain coexistence.
Yet he does not blame believers; he blames the machinery that trains them to obey rather than question. This is where the book gains its moral urgency: Shourie is not arguing against Islam; he is arguing against the ossification of any tradition. His target is not faith, but the refusal to let faith breathe.
One of the more compelling threads he weaves is the contrast between textual prescriptions and lived practice. Most Muslims do not live by the strictest interpretations he cites; many have developed their own rhythms of faith and cultural custom that coexist comfortably with plural societies. Shourie knows this.
But he also knows that institutions, not ordinary believers, shape discourse.
Fatwas, even if ignored by most, become weapons in the hands of a determined few. They become rallying cries for political mobilization. They become benchmarks for who is “authentic” or “impure”. They shape narratives of victimhood or superiority. And all of this has real-world fallout. Fatwas may not control the private lives of millions, but they can influence elections, policies, inter-community relations, and the ideological climate.
Shourie’s style is deliberately dry, almost bureaucratic, as if he wants the reader to confront the overwhelming volume of jurisprudence without getting distracted by rhetorical fireworks. It is an aesthetic choice that pays off. His voice becomes the still point in a chaotic whirl of citations. The reader becomes a witness, not to Shourie’s outrage but to a structure that reveals itself through its own logic.
The book is less a polemic and more an x-ray.
Yet there is unmistakable passion beneath the calm. Shourie is deeply invested in the idea that societies must evolve, that humans must be free to imagine alternatives, that no scripture—no matter how sacred—can be allowed to function as a fossilized constitution. He believes that moral agency is the birthright of individuals, not clerical bodies. And he believes that fear, once institutionalized, is the enemy of freedom.
These beliefs animate the book, lending it a quiet ferocity.
As the narrative expands, he explores historical contexts: how fatwas played roles in political upheavals, colonial resistance, intra-community conflicts. He shows that clerics have always contested each other; fatwas have always been tools in internal power struggles.
There is no single orthodoxy—only competing orthodoxies. This is what makes the landscape both dangerous and fascinating. A system built on absolute certainties produces endless rival certainties, each declaring itself the true voice of the divine.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of the book is its implicit argument about modernity. Shourie suggests that the rise of the modern nation-state requires an entirely different mode of ethical and political reasoning, one grounded not in inherited jurisprudence but in democratic negotiation. Fatwas, by their nature, resist negotiation. They derive authority from revelation, not argument. They seek obedience, not consensus. The resulting friction between pre-modern legalism and modern civic life becomes, in Shourie’s telling, one of the great unresolved tensions of our time.
He does not pretend that this problem is unique to Islam; he acknowledges that every religious tradition has faced the challenge of reconciling ancient norms with modern values. But he insists—using citations, incidents, and institutional histories—that Islamic jurisprudence has been particularly resistant to internal reform.
And this resistance, he argues, is enabled by structures that continue to treat medieval jurists as ultimate authorities. Shourie asks, with characteristic bluntness, how a community can thrive in the twenty-first century if its moral imagination remains tethered to the tenth.
What emerges, finally, is not a condemnation but a diagnosis. Shourie wants his readers—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—to understand the mechanisms through which religious authority reproduces itself.
He wants them to see how easily systems of control can present themselves as systems of piety. He wants them to recognize that genuine reform requires courage, clarity, and above all, transparency. Fatwas thrive in opacity; sunlight is their antidote.
The book ends, not with a call for hostility, but with a call for intellectual honesty. Shourie is blunt about the risks of ignoring the evidence he presents, but he is equally conscious that change cannot be imposed. It must emerge from within communities, through debate, dissent, reinterpretation, and the gradual loosening of the old scaffolding.
The world of fatwas may be vast, but it is not immutable. What Shourie demands is that we take it seriously enough to question it.
In the end, reading The World of Fatwas feels like watching an entire legal-religious universe being held up to the light—every nook, every shadow, every contradiction exposed, not with malice but with a relentless insistence on truth. It is a book that asks difficult questions, refuses easy answers, and challenges anyone—believer or skeptic—to confront the consequences of unquestioned authority.
Whether one agrees with Shourie or not, one cannot walk away untouched. The book unsettles because it compels us to ask the most radical question of all: what kind of world do we create when we allow ancient certainties to decide modern futures? And do we have the courage to imagine alternatives?
That courage—Shourie seems to argue—will define the century far more than any scripture ever could.
And through this charged architecture, Shourie moves with the measured pace of someone who knows he’s carrying nitroglycerin but refuses to flinch. The book isn’t content with being a mere catalogue of fatwas; it is an autopsy of certainty, an excavation of intellectual habits, and ultimately an invitation to think about what happens when any tradition—religious, legal, or cultural—decides that its past is non-negotiable, immutable, and eternally binding.
Shourie begins with sources—those intimidating medieval tomes that, for most people, float vaguely in the background of religious discourse but rarely come out into the sunlight. He brings them out. He translates, he quotes, he comments, he cross-checks.
And in doing so, he exposes how fatwas—those supposedly neutral, clerical “opinions”—grow into a full-fledged system of social legislation. We see rulings on everything from ablutions to warfare, from relationships to political loyalty, from inheritance to dietary norms, all written with that iron-clad conviction that brooks no dissent.
This is Shourie’s method: he shines a forensic light on the logical chain linking medieval jurisprudence to modern lived realities. There is no anger in his tone; only a clinical steadiness that, ironically, makes the revelations more unsettling.
What unsettles is not the existence of fatwas—every tradition has its arbiters, its interpreters—but the worldview they encode. Shourie keeps returning, almost with a grim fascination, to the way these edicts tightly police everyday life, prescribing and proscribing with an intensity that feels less moral than managerial.
The human individual, with all their quirks, messiness, contradictions, and confusions, becomes a type, a unit to be regulated. There’s a fatwa for a wife’s behavior with her husband, a fatwa for what happens if a man accidentally utters the wrong word during divorce, a fatwa for business transactions, clothing, music, politics, reading, friendship—an entire world micromanaged through a legalistic lens.
Reading this, you feel the claustrophobia Shourie wants you to feel: a system that touches everything can liberate nothing.
At the heart of Shourie’s intellectual project is a simple question: what happens when a community is trained to derive its norms not from present circumstances but from a fossilized scriptural past? The answer he traces is multipronged. The past becomes not inspiration but template; interpretation becomes mimicry; authority becomes custodianship rather than moral responsibility.
Fatwas, in this sense, operate like cultural software updates that never update—they merely reinstall an old version with greater insistence. Shourie doesn’t dramatize this; he lets the cumulative weight of citations do the work.
By the twentieth page you aren’t shocked; you’re exhausted, which is exactly the point. The world of fatwas is not an occasional aberration; it is a system, a worldview, an ecosystem.
What gives the book its sharpest edge is Shourie’s unflinching focus on accountability:
1. Who issues these rulings?
2. Who enforces them?
3. Who benefits?
4. Who risks life and livelihood by questioning them?
He turns our gaze toward the institutional machinery: the clerics, the seminaries, the political actors who find fatwas useful tools for social organization. The book is not just about theology; it is about power.
A fatwa becomes a disciplinary mechanism. It becomes a way to police dissenters. It becomes a way to exert control over women, minorities, the heterodox. And in Shourie’s telling, the tragedy is not merely that such mechanisms exist, but that they masquerade as divine mandates. Structures of control are easier sold when wrapped in the language of the eternal.
The consequences spill over into social life in ways both subtle and spectacular. Shourie pulls together examples of how fatwas on education, technology, political participation, or even cooperation with non-Muslims create friction between communities. He tracks the ways in which rigid jurisprudence can become a barrier to integration, debate, reform, or even plain coexistence.
Yet he does not blame believers; he blames the machinery that trains them to obey rather than question. This is where the book gains its moral urgency: Shourie is not arguing against Islam; he is arguing against the ossification of any tradition. His target is not faith, but the refusal to let faith breathe.
One of the more compelling threads he weaves is the contrast between textual prescriptions and lived practice. Most Muslims do not live by the strictest interpretations he cites; many have developed their own rhythms of faith and cultural custom that coexist comfortably with plural societies. Shourie knows this.
But he also knows that institutions, not ordinary believers, shape discourse.
Fatwas, even if ignored by most, become weapons in the hands of a determined few. They become rallying cries for political mobilization. They become benchmarks for who is “authentic” or “impure”. They shape narratives of victimhood or superiority. And all of this has real-world fallout. Fatwas may not control the private lives of millions, but they can influence elections, policies, inter-community relations, and the ideological climate.
Shourie’s style is deliberately dry, almost bureaucratic, as if he wants the reader to confront the overwhelming volume of jurisprudence without getting distracted by rhetorical fireworks. It is an aesthetic choice that pays off. His voice becomes the still point in a chaotic whirl of citations. The reader becomes a witness, not to Shourie’s outrage but to a structure that reveals itself through its own logic.
The book is less a polemic and more an x-ray.
Yet there is unmistakable passion beneath the calm. Shourie is deeply invested in the idea that societies must evolve, that humans must be free to imagine alternatives, that no scripture—no matter how sacred—can be allowed to function as a fossilized constitution. He believes that moral agency is the birthright of individuals, not clerical bodies. And he believes that fear, once institutionalized, is the enemy of freedom.
These beliefs animate the book, lending it a quiet ferocity.
As the narrative expands, he explores historical contexts: how fatwas played roles in political upheavals, colonial resistance, intra-community conflicts. He shows that clerics have always contested each other; fatwas have always been tools in internal power struggles.
There is no single orthodoxy—only competing orthodoxies. This is what makes the landscape both dangerous and fascinating. A system built on absolute certainties produces endless rival certainties, each declaring itself the true voice of the divine.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of the book is its implicit argument about modernity. Shourie suggests that the rise of the modern nation-state requires an entirely different mode of ethical and political reasoning, one grounded not in inherited jurisprudence but in democratic negotiation. Fatwas, by their nature, resist negotiation. They derive authority from revelation, not argument. They seek obedience, not consensus. The resulting friction between pre-modern legalism and modern civic life becomes, in Shourie’s telling, one of the great unresolved tensions of our time.
He does not pretend that this problem is unique to Islam; he acknowledges that every religious tradition has faced the challenge of reconciling ancient norms with modern values. But he insists—using citations, incidents, and institutional histories—that Islamic jurisprudence has been particularly resistant to internal reform.
And this resistance, he argues, is enabled by structures that continue to treat medieval jurists as ultimate authorities. Shourie asks, with characteristic bluntness, how a community can thrive in the twenty-first century if its moral imagination remains tethered to the tenth.
What emerges, finally, is not a condemnation but a diagnosis. Shourie wants his readers—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—to understand the mechanisms through which religious authority reproduces itself.
He wants them to see how easily systems of control can present themselves as systems of piety. He wants them to recognize that genuine reform requires courage, clarity, and above all, transparency. Fatwas thrive in opacity; sunlight is their antidote.
The book ends, not with a call for hostility, but with a call for intellectual honesty. Shourie is blunt about the risks of ignoring the evidence he presents, but he is equally conscious that change cannot be imposed. It must emerge from within communities, through debate, dissent, reinterpretation, and the gradual loosening of the old scaffolding.
The world of fatwas may be vast, but it is not immutable. What Shourie demands is that we take it seriously enough to question it.
In the end, reading The World of Fatwas feels like watching an entire legal-religious universe being held up to the light—every nook, every shadow, every contradiction exposed, not with malice but with a relentless insistence on truth. It is a book that asks difficult questions, refuses easy answers, and challenges anyone—believer or skeptic—to confront the consequences of unquestioned authority.
Whether one agrees with Shourie or not, one cannot walk away untouched. The book unsettles because it compels us to ask the most radical question of all: what kind of world do we create when we allow ancient certainties to decide modern futures? And do we have the courage to imagine alternatives?
That courage—Shourie seems to argue—will define the century far more than any scripture ever could.
December 31, 2014
This book is backed by the kind of meticulous research that could be the envy of any great scholar.
It helps understand the Muslim mindset, their worldview, issues important to them & their social & economic condition. Most of all it traces the thought process that led to the eventual creation of Pakistan & their outlook towards India. Ironically the ideology that led to partition still thrives well in this country.
Observing the contemporary events & media reporting, one could see that secularism is nothing but a tool to shield & protect the obscurantist agenda of the ulema.
In spite of all the clamoring by secularists that extremists like ISIS have nothing to do with religion, the book lays threadbare the theology that is at the heart of what motivates the faithful for Jihad.
On the flip side, the book could have been much better edited. There is humongous amount of references & much of that content has been reproduced even in the text. This gory detail from the fatwas often gruesome or pervert in nature consumes too much space & makes for very difficult reading.
A shorter summary for the book may be much more readable & enlightening to those brought up on the secular narrative that all religions are the same.
It helps understand the Muslim mindset, their worldview, issues important to them & their social & economic condition. Most of all it traces the thought process that led to the eventual creation of Pakistan & their outlook towards India. Ironically the ideology that led to partition still thrives well in this country.
Observing the contemporary events & media reporting, one could see that secularism is nothing but a tool to shield & protect the obscurantist agenda of the ulema.
In spite of all the clamoring by secularists that extremists like ISIS have nothing to do with religion, the book lays threadbare the theology that is at the heart of what motivates the faithful for Jihad.
On the flip side, the book could have been much better edited. There is humongous amount of references & much of that content has been reproduced even in the text. This gory detail from the fatwas often gruesome or pervert in nature consumes too much space & makes for very difficult reading.
A shorter summary for the book may be much more readable & enlightening to those brought up on the secular narrative that all religions are the same.
December 9, 2014
THE WORLD OF FATWAS: A brilliant dissertation!! Fool prof thesis, academically researched and brilliantly narrated!! Puts an informed perspective to a little known topic in the English language!! My only problem is with the attitude of the hypothesis- it is not ready for any softness on the matter, or rationalize the issue with an contextual understanding!
However, it leaves me with much to ponder!
However, it leaves me with much to ponder!
August 1, 2017
Informative. Well researched. Liked the comparision of Sharia with another tatalitarion ideology of communism (the author is well versed with that too). The author has countered the usual claims of secularists of "this verse is cited out of context" etc. well. Would recommend to people who are open minded and wish to understand Shariat (in action) i.e. the views and practices propagated by the learned *Ulema* of Muslim community.
April 6, 2018
it is a very good book to understand how the Islamic community per se operates in India. I was surprised at the way Ali brothers who had reverred Mahatma Gandhi so much during Non Cooperation Movement jettisoned him after the movement.
The author has made bold statements and backs it with research. He offers some solutions but they are really not solutions but hopes. He highlights certain portion of Quran where the literal meaning of verses promotes hatred and is used by the fundamentalist groups. he also touches upon other issues which have been creating hostilities in India like cow slaughter and the take of Fatwas on the same.
A must read for all
The author has made bold statements and backs it with research. He offers some solutions but they are really not solutions but hopes. He highlights certain portion of Quran where the literal meaning of verses promotes hatred and is used by the fundamentalist groups. he also touches upon other issues which have been creating hostilities in India like cow slaughter and the take of Fatwas on the same.
A must read for all
June 9, 2013
very good read! helps one clear his head on such topics of fatwa and sharia
June 7, 2016
A very insightful book. May b there is a counterpoint to it, but the author has presented his understanding quite forcefully.
October 4, 2019
Exhaustive!
Quite detaily.
Everyone should read it.
Quite detaily.
Everyone should read it.
May 17, 2020
Brilliant book for those who need to understand Shariah law or Fatwa. This book will give you more understanding of their religion and culture.
August 8, 2020
"The Religion of Peace"
March 17, 2022
This book is not a fun read and it’s not meant to be. It’s a research piece and is tedious at times. But so should it be, given the nature of the subject and the retaliation it must’ve received from the ‘community’.
But this is an excellent study of islam and how it functions. Shourie goes into depths previously unfathomed and presents a picture that the upper class Muslims had kept tightly secretive all this while. Covering multiple sects of islam and their various texts, this will give you an understanding and clarity like no other book. Even if you think you know a lot about Islam.
Also, every Muslim should read this book.
But this is an excellent study of islam and how it functions. Shourie goes into depths previously unfathomed and presents a picture that the upper class Muslims had kept tightly secretive all this while. Covering multiple sects of islam and their various texts, this will give you an understanding and clarity like no other book. Even if you think you know a lot about Islam.
Also, every Muslim should read this book.
June 11, 2021
A must-read book for all Indians, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.
December 21, 2019
A book especially for Muslims for introspection.
April 28, 2025
4/5
Yes, it's very repetitive... But there's a lot of research and information that did add to my knowledge... I enjoyed reading the book though...
Yes, it's very repetitive... But there's a lot of research and information that did add to my knowledge... I enjoyed reading the book though...
January 9, 2022
Arun Shourie gives a good introduction to the topic before delving into individual chapters, beginning with recent history in India and giving history - and more - of fatwas. But - and he's warned readers about it - revolting matters already come at beginning of the second chapter, making one wonder if one should read the rest at all. Presumably not every chapter would be such a put off, but still.
Wish there were "skip" buttons!
*****
Introduction
*****
"First, our scholars have not spared time for this vital material for the same reason on account of which they have not spared time for other things vital to our existence as a country. Most of the intellectual work in India consists in writing footnotes to work being done in the West—this has been so in the case of Marxist intellectuals even more than it is in the case of the others. And when our intellectuals are not engaged in writing these footnotes, they are busy following the fashion of the day in Western circles, busy ‘applying’, as the phrase goes, to Indian material the notion or ‘thesis’ which has become fashionable in the West. In a word, our scholarly work is derivative. So the first reason there has been no substantial study of the fatwas in India is that they have not yet caught the eye of the West.
"The second reason is that analysing the fatwas would expose that which neither the secularist nor the liberal Muslim wants exposed. The liberal Muslim has internalized the notion that to bring the truth about the shariah to light, to put in the open facts about those who are the public face of the community, is to ‘help the enemies of Islam’. The secularist is even more reluctant to have these facts put to public view. He has established his credentials of secularism by espousing the very positions which the ulema and fundamentalist Muslim politicians have advocated. Once the facts about the ulema, about the law they lay down, about the norms they prescribe become common knowledge the secularist would be out of the very thing he has made the proof of his secularism.
"The third reason is just plain funk. Bringing the truth about the ulema and their fatwas out into the open is certain to call upon one the wrath of the ulema. The secularist naturally does not want that to happen: quite the contrary, he is ever anxious to be in the good books of the ulema—their certificates are invaluable in establishing his credentials; being invited to their gatherings is what gives him an edge over other secularists. And the liberal Muslim doesn’t want to tangle with the ulema for the very reason that they have the power to issue fatwas."
" ... Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan. He was a prolific issuer of fatwas, a formidable polemicist, often an abusive one, an indefatigable campaigner, in a word a pugilist. Few dared to cross swords with him, indeed few dared to even stand in his way. He lived from 1856 to 1921, and came to exercise a mesmeric hold over vast numbers."
" ... he was most emphatic in denouncing anyone who joined hands with the kafirs even for attaining strictly Islamic objectives. Thus, for instance, he heaped abuse and scorn at those who had agreed to work under the leadership of Gandhiji even though it had been with the object of restoring the greatest of Islamic institutions, the Caliphate. You have agreed to work under a kafir, he railed. You have made Muslims the slaves of a kafir, he railed. I have used the twelve-volume set of his fatwas published in August 1994."
"The Dar al-Ulum is of course well known. Started in 1866, it is often referred to as the Al-Azhar of India. From its beginning it was profoundly anti-West, it was anti-modern. Accordingly, many persons associated with it exerted themselves to undermine the British. That opposition was an aspect of its commitment to orthodoxy. Lauding this commitment to orthodoxy as one of the hallmarks of the Dar al-Ulum, a Government of India publication, Centres of Islamic Learning in India, says,
"One of the main objects of the Darul Ulum was to provide the Indian Muslims with a direct access to the original sources of Islamic Learning, produce learned men with missionary zeal to work among the Muslim masses to create a truly religious awakening towards classical Islam, ridding the prevalent one in India of innovation and unorthodox practices, observances and beliefs that have crept into it and to impart instruction in classical religion."
"Even by itself this is a vast amount of primary material the forty volumes comprise over 18,000 pages. I could not have gone through the material but for the help of Mr Yashpal Bandhu, Mr Sita Ram Goel, and two friends who happen to be Muslim: at their request I have to withhold their names, such are the apprehensions under which even scholars like them have to live. ... "
"So as to show the continuity of the tradition I have in addition referred to the three most widely used texts on Sunni law—the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, the compilation which was put together at the instance of Emperor Aurangzeb; the Hidayah of Sheikh Burhanu’d-din Ali (d. AD 1198); and the Fatawa-i-Qazi Khan of Imam Fakhruddin Hasan bin Mansur al-Uzjandi al-Farghani (d. AD 1196). The way in which the tradition has remained locked in a straitjacket will become apparent in the chapter on women and talaq in which I have illustrated the point by using, not primarily the volumes of fatwas listed above but the twelfth-century Fatawa-i-Qazi Khan — an unconscionable and totally indefensible practice like ‘conditional divorce’ continues unchanged and unchallenged as one of Allah’s boons to men from the twelfth-century Fatawa-i-Qazi Khan, through the volumes of fatwas that we are primarily concerned with, to the rulings of our courts in present-day India."
"Conditional divorce"??????!!!!!!!
"There is one final extension. A vital part of my argument is that, while many of the things we read in the fatwas seem strange to us, they accurately reflect what has been set out in the Quran and the Hadis. This fact that what they are enforcing is what the Quran and the Prophet prescribed is also one of the sources of the strength of the ulema: in the end they can always cite the Quran and the Hadis, and no Muslim can find an answer around those ultimate authorities. ... "
"It is possible that the reader will feel embarrassed or angered by what is said in the fatwas, as well as in the primary sources. But he must remember that that is what the texts actually say, and that both the collections of fatwas which I have used and of course the Quran and the collections of Hadis are available in bookshops throughout our country. Indeed, they are the high literature of the community. They constitute the texts which students learn and memorize at the ‘centers of Islamic learning’ that we are forever being told are among the prides of India. ... "
"When the material is freely available, when it is in the widest possible circulation in the very language in which the more impressionable masses have ready access to it, when this is what they are being constantly urged to read and indeed to live by, when this is the material which is taught and internalized in the ‘centers of Islamic learning’, when it forms the staple of those who control the mind and reactions of the community, when in fact it constitutes the very device through which they control and direct the community, when it is the high literature of the community, when it is the material on which the learned of the community are weaned, when it constitutes the most authoritative out-turn of those who are the most highly respected and the most influential personages in the community, when these are the norms and decrees by ‘which the community is to regulate its life, why should the material not be available in English also, why should it not be scrutinized?"
January 09, 2022.
*****
Their Sway
*****
1. Their ways, their power
" ... Gandhiji had taken up the Khilafat question. By then the Khilafat was a bankrupt and discredited institution. But Gandhiji concluded that as Muslims in India felt so strongly about it, all Indians—in particular the Hindus, even more particularly he, personally— must make the issue their own. Nothing should be expected of the Muslims or Muslim leaders, he insisted, our support for the issue must be unilateral, it must be absolutely unconditional. Many felt that as a reciprocal gesture Muslim leaders should at least have Muslims give up slaughtering cows. Gandhiji was adamant: there must be no bargaining, he maintained; if as a result of our espousing the issue of Khilafat, Muslim hearts melt and they of their own decide to give up slaughtering cows, that would be a consummation, but we must not make support for Khilafat conditional upon anything. Others maintained that Muslim leaders must give up the demand the British had engineered them to make—that of separate electorates. Again Gandhiji was adamant: he saw of course the British design to divide the two communities; he saw too that this device—separate electorates—was the poisoned seed which would eventually tear them apart; but his answer to that was that everyone must take up an issue dear to the Muslims and thereby wean them from the designs of the British. Not just Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami Shraddhananda, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, but even the young Jawaharlal—the sentence occurs in the context of the Angora Deputation—felt that Mohammed Ali ‘wanted to use Hindus simply as pawns’.1 But Gandhiji was adamant: he would rather be deceived a thousand times, he maintained, than not trust."
"In 1923 Maulana Mohammed Ali was chosen the president of the Congress. ... "
He spoke.
" ... Be that as it may, it was just as peculiar to Mahatma Gandhi also; but it was reserved for a Christian Government to treat as a felon the most Christ-like man of our times (Shame, Shame) and to penalize as a disturber of the public peace the one man engaged in public affairs who comes nearest to the Prince of Peace."
"Soon enough the same Maulana Mohammed Ali who had been kissing Gandhiji’s feet, who had been falling at his feet, who had been shedding tears in such profusion, who had hailed him as ‘the most Christ-like man of our times’, declares at Aligarh and again at Ajmer:
"However pure Mr Gandhi’s character may be, he must appear to me from the point of view of religion inferior to any Mussalman though he be without character."
Ambedkar wrote about this about turn.
"When Mr Mohammed Ali was speaking at a meeting held at Aminabad Park in Lucknow he was asked whether the sentiments attributed to him were true. Mr Mohammed Ali without any hesitation or compunction replied:
‘Yes, according to my religion and creed, I do hold an adulterous and a fallen Mussalman to be better than Mr Gandhi.’8"
"As the controversy swelled, Maulana Mohammed Ali gave his version of the reason for his statement. In a letter to Swami Shraddhananda he wrote:
"The fact is as I had stated verbally to you. Even then some Mussalman friends have been constantly flinging at me the charge of being a worshipper of Hindus and a Gandhi-worshipper. The real object of these gentlemen was to alienate from me the Mussalman community, the Khilafat Committee and the Congress, by representing that I had become a follower of Mahatma Gandhi in my religious principles. I had, therefore, on several occasions plainly declared that in the matter of religion, I professed the same belief as any other true Mussalman, and as such I claimed to be a follower of the Prophet Mohammed (on him be peace) and not of Gandhiji. And further that since I hold Islam to be the highest gift of God, therefore, I was impelled by the love I bear towards Mahatmaji to pray to God that He might illumine his soul with the true light of Islam. I wish, however, to emphatically declare that I hold that today neither the representatives of Islam nor of the Hindu, Jewish, Nazarene or Parsi faith can present another instance of such high character and moral worth as Gandhiji and that is the reason why I hold him in such high reverence and affection. ... "
"But between belief and actual character there is a wide difference. As a follower of Islam I am bound to regard the creed of Islam as superior to that professed by the followers of any non-Islamic religion. And in this sense the creed of even a fallen and degraded Mussalman is entitled to a higher place than that of any other non-Muslim irrespective of his high character even though the person in question be Mahatma Gandhi himself.9"
"The Kohat matter also took an ugly turn. Muslims were the overwhelming proportion of the population. Hindus and Sikhs had been set upon and driven out. They had been thrashed, killed, forced to undergo conversions.
"But to the astonishment of all, in December 1924 at the session in Bombay of the Muslim League (of all things), the till-recently president of the Congress, Maulana Mohammed Ali, moved an embellishment to what, even to begin with, was a partisan resolution. The resolution maintained that ‘the sufferings of the Hindus of Kohat are not unprovoked, but that, on the contrary, the facts brought to light make it clear that gross provocation was offered to the religious sentiments of the Mussalmans, and the Hindus were the first to resort to violence; and further that, though their sufferings were very great, and they are deserving of the sympathy of all Mussalmans, it was not they alone that suffered...’13"
" ... Maulana Shaukat Ali accompanied Gandhiji to Rawalpindi to meet the refugees from Kohat. The two issued separate statements on what they had learnt about the riots.16 Worse emerged."
" ... Bapu then began to amend his own report. Shaukat Ali vehemently insisted that Bapu must drop the comparison with (Gen.) Dyer, the paragraph showing Bapu’s reasons for his blaming Muslims and the sentence that it was, by and large, not the Muslim community that had suffered but the Hindus. Bapu slashed all that. ... "
"When Shaukat Ali refused to sign the report which pinpointed the responsibility on Muslims of Kohat, was he being merely, and routinely partisan? Or was he obeying a higher religious command?"
"‘al-Salam Alikam, My Lord, I have received your letter just now. Allah be praised that all is well,’ wrote Iqbal to his friend, the historian Akbar Shah Najibabadi on 12 April 1925.
"You have rightly observed that the influence of professional theologians (maulwis) had declined steeply as a result of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s movement but that the Khilafat Committee has re-established their prestige among Indian Muslims due to the Committee’s need for political fatwas. This was a grave mistake which has perhaps not been realized by anyone till now.
"He continued,
"I have had an experience of this (mistake) recently. Some days ago I had written an essay in English on the subject of Ijtihad. It was read at a conference held here. Allah willing it will be published also. But some people have pronounced me a Kafir. In any case, I will talk to you about all this in detail when you come to Lahore. In India, these days in particular, we haye to move with care and due circumspection.18
"Ijtihad, as is well known, is the right to interpret the texts. It had been one of the devices by which Muslim society had tried to loosen the straitjacket. But barely 200 years after the Prophet’s death, the ulema decreed that ‘the doors of Ijtihad have been closed.’ This was being done, they said, because there were no pious Muslims left who could give reliable interpretations. Literal adherence shall be the rule henceforth, they decreed. As we know from his Lectures, which we shall take up in a moment, Iqbal believed that there was absolutely no basis for this embargo, and he held it to have been responsible for the subsequent stultification of Islamic society. But, as he wrote, he was dubbed a kafir for espousing that view. And he, with all the robustness he counselled to the world, chose to be careful and circumspect. The paper was not published."
Is Shourie missing the point? Iqbal said
" ... "You have rightly observed that the influence of professional theologians (maulwis) had declined steeply as a result of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s movement but that the Khilafat Committee has re-established their prestige among Indian Muslims due to the Committee’s need for political fatwas. ... "
In short, Gandhi brought on regression of the other community with his politics.
"Three years later the Muslim Association at Madras invited him to deliver lectures on modernizing Islamic thought. He organized the theme in six lectures which he delivered at Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad and Aligarh during 1929. He added a seventh lecture later. The collection was published by the Oxford University Press in 1934."
"He traced the ossification of Muslim society to the fact that, ever since the acutest minds gravitated to Sufism, ‘the Muslim State was... left in the hands of intellectual mediocrities, and the unthinking masses of Islam, having no personalities of a higher calibre to guide them, found their security only in blindly following the schools.’"
"‘No people can afford to reject their past entirely; for it is their past that has made their personal identity.’ In Islam, he said, the task of reforming institutions is even more delicate as it’s character is non-territorial, as ‘mutually repellent races’have adopted it. Hence, he declared in words which echo admonitions we shall soon encounter, ‘In the evolution of such a society even the immutability of socially harmless rules relating to eating and drinking, purity or impurity, has a life of its own, inasmuch as it tends to give such society a specific inwardness, and further secures that external and internal uniformity which counteracts the forces of heterogeneity always latent in a society of a composite character...’:"
"One telling clue is that the lectures were delivered in English—a language in which they were less liable to have an impact on the broad mass of Muslims or even the Muslim literati, but also the language in which they were less liable to provoke the ire of the ulema. The Urdu translation of the lectures was never published during Iqbal’s lifetime.
"The Lectures were eventually published in Urdu only in 1958—the poet having been safely dead for twenty years.
"And to this day the Ulema exclaim how much better it would have been had the Lectures never been published.20"
Next, Arun Shourie describes reaction to "The Arab Civilization", translation of Joseph Hell's original German book, translated into urfu and published by Jamia Milia.
....
Wish there were "skip" buttons!
*****
Introduction
*****
"First, our scholars have not spared time for this vital material for the same reason on account of which they have not spared time for other things vital to our existence as a country. Most of the intellectual work in India consists in writing footnotes to work being done in the West—this has been so in the case of Marxist intellectuals even more than it is in the case of the others. And when our intellectuals are not engaged in writing these footnotes, they are busy following the fashion of the day in Western circles, busy ‘applying’, as the phrase goes, to Indian material the notion or ‘thesis’ which has become fashionable in the West. In a word, our scholarly work is derivative. So the first reason there has been no substantial study of the fatwas in India is that they have not yet caught the eye of the West.
"The second reason is that analysing the fatwas would expose that which neither the secularist nor the liberal Muslim wants exposed. The liberal Muslim has internalized the notion that to bring the truth about the shariah to light, to put in the open facts about those who are the public face of the community, is to ‘help the enemies of Islam’. The secularist is even more reluctant to have these facts put to public view. He has established his credentials of secularism by espousing the very positions which the ulema and fundamentalist Muslim politicians have advocated. Once the facts about the ulema, about the law they lay down, about the norms they prescribe become common knowledge the secularist would be out of the very thing he has made the proof of his secularism.
"The third reason is just plain funk. Bringing the truth about the ulema and their fatwas out into the open is certain to call upon one the wrath of the ulema. The secularist naturally does not want that to happen: quite the contrary, he is ever anxious to be in the good books of the ulema—their certificates are invaluable in establishing his credentials; being invited to their gatherings is what gives him an edge over other secularists. And the liberal Muslim doesn’t want to tangle with the ulema for the very reason that they have the power to issue fatwas."
" ... Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan. He was a prolific issuer of fatwas, a formidable polemicist, often an abusive one, an indefatigable campaigner, in a word a pugilist. Few dared to cross swords with him, indeed few dared to even stand in his way. He lived from 1856 to 1921, and came to exercise a mesmeric hold over vast numbers."
" ... he was most emphatic in denouncing anyone who joined hands with the kafirs even for attaining strictly Islamic objectives. Thus, for instance, he heaped abuse and scorn at those who had agreed to work under the leadership of Gandhiji even though it had been with the object of restoring the greatest of Islamic institutions, the Caliphate. You have agreed to work under a kafir, he railed. You have made Muslims the slaves of a kafir, he railed. I have used the twelve-volume set of his fatwas published in August 1994."
"The Dar al-Ulum is of course well known. Started in 1866, it is often referred to as the Al-Azhar of India. From its beginning it was profoundly anti-West, it was anti-modern. Accordingly, many persons associated with it exerted themselves to undermine the British. That opposition was an aspect of its commitment to orthodoxy. Lauding this commitment to orthodoxy as one of the hallmarks of the Dar al-Ulum, a Government of India publication, Centres of Islamic Learning in India, says,
"One of the main objects of the Darul Ulum was to provide the Indian Muslims with a direct access to the original sources of Islamic Learning, produce learned men with missionary zeal to work among the Muslim masses to create a truly religious awakening towards classical Islam, ridding the prevalent one in India of innovation and unorthodox practices, observances and beliefs that have crept into it and to impart instruction in classical religion."
"Even by itself this is a vast amount of primary material the forty volumes comprise over 18,000 pages. I could not have gone through the material but for the help of Mr Yashpal Bandhu, Mr Sita Ram Goel, and two friends who happen to be Muslim: at their request I have to withhold their names, such are the apprehensions under which even scholars like them have to live. ... "
"So as to show the continuity of the tradition I have in addition referred to the three most widely used texts on Sunni law—the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, the compilation which was put together at the instance of Emperor Aurangzeb; the Hidayah of Sheikh Burhanu’d-din Ali (d. AD 1198); and the Fatawa-i-Qazi Khan of Imam Fakhruddin Hasan bin Mansur al-Uzjandi al-Farghani (d. AD 1196). The way in which the tradition has remained locked in a straitjacket will become apparent in the chapter on women and talaq in which I have illustrated the point by using, not primarily the volumes of fatwas listed above but the twelfth-century Fatawa-i-Qazi Khan — an unconscionable and totally indefensible practice like ‘conditional divorce’ continues unchanged and unchallenged as one of Allah’s boons to men from the twelfth-century Fatawa-i-Qazi Khan, through the volumes of fatwas that we are primarily concerned with, to the rulings of our courts in present-day India."
"Conditional divorce"??????!!!!!!!
"There is one final extension. A vital part of my argument is that, while many of the things we read in the fatwas seem strange to us, they accurately reflect what has been set out in the Quran and the Hadis. This fact that what they are enforcing is what the Quran and the Prophet prescribed is also one of the sources of the strength of the ulema: in the end they can always cite the Quran and the Hadis, and no Muslim can find an answer around those ultimate authorities. ... "
"It is possible that the reader will feel embarrassed or angered by what is said in the fatwas, as well as in the primary sources. But he must remember that that is what the texts actually say, and that both the collections of fatwas which I have used and of course the Quran and the collections of Hadis are available in bookshops throughout our country. Indeed, they are the high literature of the community. They constitute the texts which students learn and memorize at the ‘centers of Islamic learning’ that we are forever being told are among the prides of India. ... "
"When the material is freely available, when it is in the widest possible circulation in the very language in which the more impressionable masses have ready access to it, when this is what they are being constantly urged to read and indeed to live by, when this is the material which is taught and internalized in the ‘centers of Islamic learning’, when it forms the staple of those who control the mind and reactions of the community, when in fact it constitutes the very device through which they control and direct the community, when it is the high literature of the community, when it is the material on which the learned of the community are weaned, when it constitutes the most authoritative out-turn of those who are the most highly respected and the most influential personages in the community, when these are the norms and decrees by ‘which the community is to regulate its life, why should the material not be available in English also, why should it not be scrutinized?"
January 09, 2022.
*****
Their Sway
*****
1. Their ways, their power
" ... Gandhiji had taken up the Khilafat question. By then the Khilafat was a bankrupt and discredited institution. But Gandhiji concluded that as Muslims in India felt so strongly about it, all Indians—in particular the Hindus, even more particularly he, personally— must make the issue their own. Nothing should be expected of the Muslims or Muslim leaders, he insisted, our support for the issue must be unilateral, it must be absolutely unconditional. Many felt that as a reciprocal gesture Muslim leaders should at least have Muslims give up slaughtering cows. Gandhiji was adamant: there must be no bargaining, he maintained; if as a result of our espousing the issue of Khilafat, Muslim hearts melt and they of their own decide to give up slaughtering cows, that would be a consummation, but we must not make support for Khilafat conditional upon anything. Others maintained that Muslim leaders must give up the demand the British had engineered them to make—that of separate electorates. Again Gandhiji was adamant: he saw of course the British design to divide the two communities; he saw too that this device—separate electorates—was the poisoned seed which would eventually tear them apart; but his answer to that was that everyone must take up an issue dear to the Muslims and thereby wean them from the designs of the British. Not just Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami Shraddhananda, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, but even the young Jawaharlal—the sentence occurs in the context of the Angora Deputation—felt that Mohammed Ali ‘wanted to use Hindus simply as pawns’.1 But Gandhiji was adamant: he would rather be deceived a thousand times, he maintained, than not trust."
"In 1923 Maulana Mohammed Ali was chosen the president of the Congress. ... "
He spoke.
" ... Be that as it may, it was just as peculiar to Mahatma Gandhi also; but it was reserved for a Christian Government to treat as a felon the most Christ-like man of our times (Shame, Shame) and to penalize as a disturber of the public peace the one man engaged in public affairs who comes nearest to the Prince of Peace."
"Soon enough the same Maulana Mohammed Ali who had been kissing Gandhiji’s feet, who had been falling at his feet, who had been shedding tears in such profusion, who had hailed him as ‘the most Christ-like man of our times’, declares at Aligarh and again at Ajmer:
"However pure Mr Gandhi’s character may be, he must appear to me from the point of view of religion inferior to any Mussalman though he be without character."
Ambedkar wrote about this about turn.
"When Mr Mohammed Ali was speaking at a meeting held at Aminabad Park in Lucknow he was asked whether the sentiments attributed to him were true. Mr Mohammed Ali without any hesitation or compunction replied:
‘Yes, according to my religion and creed, I do hold an adulterous and a fallen Mussalman to be better than Mr Gandhi.’8"
"As the controversy swelled, Maulana Mohammed Ali gave his version of the reason for his statement. In a letter to Swami Shraddhananda he wrote:
"The fact is as I had stated verbally to you. Even then some Mussalman friends have been constantly flinging at me the charge of being a worshipper of Hindus and a Gandhi-worshipper. The real object of these gentlemen was to alienate from me the Mussalman community, the Khilafat Committee and the Congress, by representing that I had become a follower of Mahatma Gandhi in my religious principles. I had, therefore, on several occasions plainly declared that in the matter of religion, I professed the same belief as any other true Mussalman, and as such I claimed to be a follower of the Prophet Mohammed (on him be peace) and not of Gandhiji. And further that since I hold Islam to be the highest gift of God, therefore, I was impelled by the love I bear towards Mahatmaji to pray to God that He might illumine his soul with the true light of Islam. I wish, however, to emphatically declare that I hold that today neither the representatives of Islam nor of the Hindu, Jewish, Nazarene or Parsi faith can present another instance of such high character and moral worth as Gandhiji and that is the reason why I hold him in such high reverence and affection. ... "
"But between belief and actual character there is a wide difference. As a follower of Islam I am bound to regard the creed of Islam as superior to that professed by the followers of any non-Islamic religion. And in this sense the creed of even a fallen and degraded Mussalman is entitled to a higher place than that of any other non-Muslim irrespective of his high character even though the person in question be Mahatma Gandhi himself.9"
"The Kohat matter also took an ugly turn. Muslims were the overwhelming proportion of the population. Hindus and Sikhs had been set upon and driven out. They had been thrashed, killed, forced to undergo conversions.
"But to the astonishment of all, in December 1924 at the session in Bombay of the Muslim League (of all things), the till-recently president of the Congress, Maulana Mohammed Ali, moved an embellishment to what, even to begin with, was a partisan resolution. The resolution maintained that ‘the sufferings of the Hindus of Kohat are not unprovoked, but that, on the contrary, the facts brought to light make it clear that gross provocation was offered to the religious sentiments of the Mussalmans, and the Hindus were the first to resort to violence; and further that, though their sufferings were very great, and they are deserving of the sympathy of all Mussalmans, it was not they alone that suffered...’13"
" ... Maulana Shaukat Ali accompanied Gandhiji to Rawalpindi to meet the refugees from Kohat. The two issued separate statements on what they had learnt about the riots.16 Worse emerged."
" ... Bapu then began to amend his own report. Shaukat Ali vehemently insisted that Bapu must drop the comparison with (Gen.) Dyer, the paragraph showing Bapu’s reasons for his blaming Muslims and the sentence that it was, by and large, not the Muslim community that had suffered but the Hindus. Bapu slashed all that. ... "
"When Shaukat Ali refused to sign the report which pinpointed the responsibility on Muslims of Kohat, was he being merely, and routinely partisan? Or was he obeying a higher religious command?"
"‘al-Salam Alikam, My Lord, I have received your letter just now. Allah be praised that all is well,’ wrote Iqbal to his friend, the historian Akbar Shah Najibabadi on 12 April 1925.
"You have rightly observed that the influence of professional theologians (maulwis) had declined steeply as a result of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s movement but that the Khilafat Committee has re-established their prestige among Indian Muslims due to the Committee’s need for political fatwas. This was a grave mistake which has perhaps not been realized by anyone till now.
"He continued,
"I have had an experience of this (mistake) recently. Some days ago I had written an essay in English on the subject of Ijtihad. It was read at a conference held here. Allah willing it will be published also. But some people have pronounced me a Kafir. In any case, I will talk to you about all this in detail when you come to Lahore. In India, these days in particular, we haye to move with care and due circumspection.18
"Ijtihad, as is well known, is the right to interpret the texts. It had been one of the devices by which Muslim society had tried to loosen the straitjacket. But barely 200 years after the Prophet’s death, the ulema decreed that ‘the doors of Ijtihad have been closed.’ This was being done, they said, because there were no pious Muslims left who could give reliable interpretations. Literal adherence shall be the rule henceforth, they decreed. As we know from his Lectures, which we shall take up in a moment, Iqbal believed that there was absolutely no basis for this embargo, and he held it to have been responsible for the subsequent stultification of Islamic society. But, as he wrote, he was dubbed a kafir for espousing that view. And he, with all the robustness he counselled to the world, chose to be careful and circumspect. The paper was not published."
Is Shourie missing the point? Iqbal said
" ... "You have rightly observed that the influence of professional theologians (maulwis) had declined steeply as a result of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s movement but that the Khilafat Committee has re-established their prestige among Indian Muslims due to the Committee’s need for political fatwas. ... "
In short, Gandhi brought on regression of the other community with his politics.
"Three years later the Muslim Association at Madras invited him to deliver lectures on modernizing Islamic thought. He organized the theme in six lectures which he delivered at Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad and Aligarh during 1929. He added a seventh lecture later. The collection was published by the Oxford University Press in 1934."
"He traced the ossification of Muslim society to the fact that, ever since the acutest minds gravitated to Sufism, ‘the Muslim State was... left in the hands of intellectual mediocrities, and the unthinking masses of Islam, having no personalities of a higher calibre to guide them, found their security only in blindly following the schools.’"
"‘No people can afford to reject their past entirely; for it is their past that has made their personal identity.’ In Islam, he said, the task of reforming institutions is even more delicate as it’s character is non-territorial, as ‘mutually repellent races’have adopted it. Hence, he declared in words which echo admonitions we shall soon encounter, ‘In the evolution of such a society even the immutability of socially harmless rules relating to eating and drinking, purity or impurity, has a life of its own, inasmuch as it tends to give such society a specific inwardness, and further secures that external and internal uniformity which counteracts the forces of heterogeneity always latent in a society of a composite character...’:"
"One telling clue is that the lectures were delivered in English—a language in which they were less liable to have an impact on the broad mass of Muslims or even the Muslim literati, but also the language in which they were less liable to provoke the ire of the ulema. The Urdu translation of the lectures was never published during Iqbal’s lifetime.
"The Lectures were eventually published in Urdu only in 1958—the poet having been safely dead for twenty years.
"And to this day the Ulema exclaim how much better it would have been had the Lectures never been published.20"
Next, Arun Shourie describes reaction to "The Arab Civilization", translation of Joseph Hell's original German book, translated into urfu and published by Jamia Milia.
....
June 8, 2016
Fatwas attracted attention across world especially after 9/11. We come across fatwas on petty items like samosa and then one can not frequently find fatwas on burning issues like suicide bombing / sectarian killings. This all lead to conclusion that fatwas are mostly for ritualistic part of the religion like what void your fasting attract thousand queries and fatwas thereon.
The book was written in 1995, so it was not as harsh as it could have been, if written after 9/11.
The introduction of the book claimed that the book covers fatwas issued during 100 years and their impact on Muslim psyche (especially Muslims of Indo-Pak). But the writer kept on crying for Muslims not treating Hindus well by bringing acts of rulers and quoting fatwas out of context. The pet peeve of the book was why Muslims chose to slaughter cow in the presence of other animals in India and why Muslims got right to divorce. So the most of the part, the writer could not put himself in place of those who follow Islam and these fatwas. I don't blame writer as his Hindu background and religious philosophy is different from Islam. Many of Hindus even don't consider Hinduism a religion, whereas Islam is considered a complete code of life.
The only part I found interesting and informative was chapter dealing with fatwas on independence movement. Reading about tussle between Pro Gandhi / congress Molvi Kifayatullah and anti-Gandhi Imam Reza Barelvi was an interesting experience.
The book was written in 1995, so it was not as harsh as it could have been, if written after 9/11.
The introduction of the book claimed that the book covers fatwas issued during 100 years and their impact on Muslim psyche (especially Muslims of Indo-Pak). But the writer kept on crying for Muslims not treating Hindus well by bringing acts of rulers and quoting fatwas out of context. The pet peeve of the book was why Muslims chose to slaughter cow in the presence of other animals in India and why Muslims got right to divorce. So the most of the part, the writer could not put himself in place of those who follow Islam and these fatwas. I don't blame writer as his Hindu background and religious philosophy is different from Islam. Many of Hindus even don't consider Hinduism a religion, whereas Islam is considered a complete code of life.
The only part I found interesting and informative was chapter dealing with fatwas on independence movement. Reading about tussle between Pro Gandhi / congress Molvi Kifayatullah and anti-Gandhi Imam Reza Barelvi was an interesting experience.
April 15, 2019
Found it to be very repetitive. Knowing Arun Shourie, I know he is not an Islamophobe. But his description is so negative, that I am tempted to not accept it without doing any further study
March 19, 2023
Another brilliant book by Arun Shourie, where he has delved into the world of Fatwas issued by various imminent and well-known religious leaders in last couple of centuries.
This book shows us how to know about a society, we need to look into the various rules that society has formulated and internalized and the it gave us a transparent view of all those rules which currently is regulating a society of more than a billion people world over especially in the Indian subcontinent.
Highly recommended for people who are interested in understanding how a bunch of religious leaders can keep the whole society ossified through the power of fatwas and how they are formed, bypassed and modified at the will of these religious leaders in the name of a religion.
This book shows us how to know about a society, we need to look into the various rules that society has formulated and internalized and the it gave us a transparent view of all those rules which currently is regulating a society of more than a billion people world over especially in the Indian subcontinent.
Highly recommended for people who are interested in understanding how a bunch of religious leaders can keep the whole society ossified through the power of fatwas and how they are formed, bypassed and modified at the will of these religious leaders in the name of a religion.
February 2, 2023
शानदार किताब। लेखक ने स्वयं इस्लामी प्रकाशनों से फतवा एकत्र करने और उन्हें कुरान की सहायक आयतों के साथ प्रस्तुत करने के लिए काफी मेहनत की है। लेखक अपने सभी स्रोतों को उद्धृत करता है, जो इसे एक संदर्भ पुस्तक बनाता है। किताब बताती है कि फतवे किस तरह छोटी-छोटी बातों पर भी मुसलमानों की जिंदगी को प्रभावित करते हैं। मौलवियों द्वारा जारी किए गए फतवे ही उन्हें शक्तिशाली बनाते हैं और अपने अनुयायियों को मध्ययुगीन युग में वापस धकेलते हैं
May 23, 2022
Unreadable. After the 4th page listing the same question about how Muslim men should behave in the presence of a menstruating wife, I am quite done with the book. This entire book could have been 200 pages and made its point.
DNF.
DNF.
Read
May 21, 2014Goooood
November 22, 2023
Currently perusing the content
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