Average Muslims Take To A Dangerous Technique To Have interaction With Militant RSS

By James M Dorsey

Average Muslims and militant Hindu nationalists are unusual bedfellows at the very best of occasions, significantly after they come collectively to reshape Hindu-Muslim relations in troubled India.

But, that’s what Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama and India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) search to realize.

Nahdlatul Ulama, arguably the world’s most average Muslim civil society group on this planet’s largest Muslim-majority state and democracy, is every part the RSS, a infamous Hindu nationalist motion extensively considered because the catalyst of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination in India, will not be.

What makes the endeavour much more exceptional is that the 2 teams have strikingly totally different visions of what Hindu-Muslim reconciliation ought to entail.

For Nahdlatul Ulama, engagement with the RSS is a part of a daring and dangerous technique to influence religion teams, together with Muslims, to confront their troubled, typically violent, histories and problematic tenants of their religions that reject pluralism and advocate supremacy.

“Nahdlatul Ulama believes that the one approach to overcome entrenched historic grievances and promote peaceable co-existence is to have interaction all events and refuse to indulge within the sentiment of enmity and hatred primarily based upon a declare of distinctive communal victimhood,” the group stated in an announcement in September explaining its engagement with RSS.

For the RSS, engagement is about redressing historic grievances relationship to centuries of Muslim invasions and rule, defending Hindus in opposition to perceived modern Muslim threats, and guaranteeing that India is a Hindu fairly than a non-discriminatory multi-religious state.

A 2019 modification to India’s citizenship legislation advised how the RSS defines a Hindu state. The modification extends the precise to use for citizenship to members of spiritual minorities — Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians however not Muslims — fleeing persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.

However, Khwaja Iftikhar Ahmed, an Indian Muslim creator and mental who maintains shut ties with the RSS, insisted in an interview with the creator that RSS ideology views Indians, regardless of their faith, culturally as Hindus.

“They are saying that Hindu doesn’t have a non secular connotation, Hindu being all these folks dwelling on this a part of the world, they’re culturally…Hindus… The faith is Santana Dharma or Everlasting Religion (the Hindu reference to Hinduism). Hindu is the cultural id… That’s the center floor,” Iftikhar stated.

In 2021, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat launched a extensively acclaimed e-book authored by Iftikhar that argued in favour of Hindu-Muslim togetherness and concord.

Nahdlatul Ulama and the RSS’ totally different visions have penalties for technique. Though the RSS’ Indonesian engagement is with a motion led by clerics, in India, it tends to work together with secular Muslims who don’t have any authority to reform Islamic jurisprudence fairly than spiritual students.

Even so, Iftikhar stated quite a few Indian Muslim spiritual leaders of all stripes have been in contact with the RSS, though a lot of them did so privately. These embrace leaders of Deobandism, a revivalist ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim motion, which counts some 20 per cent of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims amongst its followers.

Deobandism emerged within the mid-Nineteenth century round Darul Uloom Madrassa, a non secular seminary in Deoband within the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, to protect Islamic teachings underneath British colonial rule.

In a separate interview on an Indian Muslim tv channel, Iftikhar argued that the Muslim group had failed to handle its variations with the RSS.

“The group has prevented any dialogue or debate on that. It has at all times taken refuge behind others, whereas the problem was ours. The response ought to have been from us, and we must always have tackled these points. The problems are challenges that India as a rustic and we as Indians…as one single nation, are dealing with. It’s not a Hindu problem; it isn’t a Muslim problem,” Iftikhar stated.

In a chapter that he contributed to an edited quantity on the politics of hate in South Asia, Indian Islam scholar A. Faizur Rehman appeared to spell out Iftikhar’s castigation of the Indian Muslim management and align himself with Nahdlatul Ulama’s name for reform of Islamic legislation.

Rehman took the Muslim group to job for not countering their very own ultra-conservatives and militants on a number of points, such because the defence of relations with non-Muslims, the rights of Muslim and non-Muslim minority communities in Muslim lands, and draconic blasphemy legal guidelines in nations like Pakistan.

“If the Muslim group fails to query and cease these fanatics, it will be unwittingly contributing to Islamophobia,” Rehman stated. He argued that Muslims wanted to make clear their beliefs by stating that India will not be a part of the Muslim notion of an abode of battle and, like Nahdlatul Ulama, declare that the idea of the kafir or infidel doesn’t apply to non-Muslims.

A gathering of 20,000 Nahdlatul Ulama clerics dominated in 2019 that the idea of the kafir was now not legally legitimate.

Rehman contended that Muslims ought to discard the idea of dawah or proselytisation “as a device of supremacism” and abolish apostasy and blasphemy as capital crimes underneath Islamic legislation.“Briefly, what is required…is a radical rethink of Muslim theology,” the scholar stated.

Three years into the dialogue, the jury remains to be out on Nahdaltul Ulama’s interplay with RSS, which began as a cautious dialogue and has expanded into a level of cooperation.

To this point, the endeavour, embraced by average Indian Muslims and reformers, seems to have labored extra within the RSS’ favour than that of Nahdlatul Ulama. Nahdlatul Ulama’s credentials supply the RSS Muslim legitimisation.

The RSS has used the Muslim group’s push for reform of spiritual jurisprudence, the idea of a pluralistic Humanitarian Islam, and unequivocal endorsement of the Common Declaration of Human Rights to inform India’s 200 million Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim minority, what their religion ought to appear to be. To be honest, there could also be no Hindu-Muslim reconciliation with out the RSS, a 5 million-member-strong motion whose disciples represent the core of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP and authorities. The RSS is the ideological cradle of Modi, who has been a member since childhood.

Rehman reductions Hindu fears of a demographic risk to their majority standing in India however acknowledges that deep-seated mistrust dates to the Twelfth-century Muslim conquests. Noting that Hindu mistrust is rooted within the insistence of Muslim conquerors that India was Islamic territory, Rehman conceded that Hindu fears are fuelled by “clerics and televangelists in India (who) proceed to show their supremacist vanity.” (IPA Service)

By association with the Arabian Submit

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