OPINION:
Knowing how radicalized India’s Muslim minority is and who is radicalizing it has global implications.
India, a secular democracy, is home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations.
In a 2020 Pew survey, 91% of Indian Muslims said religion is very important in their lives; 70% said they attended mosque weekly; 74% said they prefer Shariah family courts over secular ones and 63% percent said there is only one interpretation of Islam’s teachings.
This suggests that imams, through their mosques, play an influential role in driving community attitudes.
But high Shariah public support levels are reflective of a high degree of radicalization.
The institutional driver is the seminary system anchored by Darul Uloom Deoband, situated near New Delhi. Deoband’s curriculum, standardized some three centuries ago, has barely changed. Through the imams they train, such seminaries transmit their teachings throughout India and even into America.
Pressed by New Delhi after jihadist attacks in 2006 and 2007, in February 2008 some 10,000 clerics convened at Deoband and condemned terrorism. It sounded promising. But the conference accused India of targeting innocent Muslims, blamed Israel and the West for terrorism against Muslims, ignored Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism in India and urged the faithful to live strictly by Shariah.
Deoband’s deputy rector, Syed Mohammed Usman, later clarified that terrorism is “destructive,” but jihad is “constructive.” He is not alone in this belief.
According to Muhammad Taqi Usmani, an internationally recognized Deobandi scholar and retired justice of the Shariah appellate bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Muslims should live peacefully in non-Muslim countries until they are strong enough to wage armed jihad to establish the “grandeur of the religion of Allah.”
Islamists in India’s Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley showed what that grandeur looked like when, in 1990, over 300,000 Hindus were driven away amid calls made from mosques. Kashmir now is embroiled in an Islamist insurgency. In Usmani’s Pakistan, non-Muslims, who were roughly 23% of the population during the 1947 British-India partition, today constitute about 3%.
In this context, the Modi government’s policy decision to expand scholarships for Muslims and recruit them into security services is fraught with danger. It this has been undertaken without confronting the community’s significant radicalization and the seminary network sustaining it.
These policies are enabling the rise of Islamists within influential sectors of Indian society and the state.
MOORTHY MUTHUSWAMY
Leesburg, Virginia
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