If one is researching the emergence of critical thought and reasoning in Muslim culture in the subcontinent of India, one is bound to come across the work of Hamid Dalwai but only after meticulous digging and networking. It didn't surprise me that he was not well-known because anything that is critical of regressive practices in Islam is very hard to find or has been lost in obscurity.
Skeptics in Islam are not new but they are not exactly well-known too It is only now that due to the advent of technology, one is able to piece together the zanadiqa (heretic) traditions in Islam and discover strains of reasoning (Mutazalite) and 'ridda' (doubt). Though it is a matter of geopolitics that Western researchers and scholars are discovering them in multitudes, what is fascinating is that the Eastern writers compiling data on them are no less in number.
My journey into this quest for critical thought starts with Anouar Majid's A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America which brought me to Skeptics of Islam: Revisionist Religion, Agnosticism and Disbelief in the Modern Arab World edited by Ralph M. Coury. As I started marking the countries wherein the dissenters and heretics mentioned in both books originated from, I was astounded to learn Egypt leads the rest while Saudi Arabia made it to the list too with its one dissenter.
What disappointed me was the lone mention of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan from India as one of the pioneers of critical thought. My mind went, "No way!" and I was drawn to Hamid Dalwai's seminal work 'Muslim Politics in India' in which he has trashed Sir Syed as the man who actually broke up India and not Mohammed Ali Jinnah as is the popular conception. This is what Hamid Dalwai had to say about him in his chapter on the historical background of Muslim Politics in India:
"Muslims remained backwards because they were religion-bound revivalists who refused to modernize themselves. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in this light appears as a great visionary who heralded the Indian Muslim Renaissance. It was due to his great efforts that the rigidly religious mind of Indian Muslims began to show the first signs of a thaw. Educated Muslims began to redefine life in terms of the modern age. They gave up the grand dream of converting India to Islam. This was the beginning of a great upheaval among educated Indian Muslims. A process of transformation had begun. It was this process that should have brought Muslims close to Hindus and broadened their view of man and society. The trend of this process was toward a view according to which Hindus and Muslims would have been looked upon as equals.
This process was, however, ironically reversed because modern Indian Muslims proved unequal to the task. Their modernity proved limited and they lacked the broad vision that could have ensured the complete success of the Aligarh renaissance. Ironically, this very process separated the Muslims from the Hindus instead of bringing them closer together. The old Muslim habit of blaming the Hindus for their problems reappeared and was set more firmly than ever. Although Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was free from the vice of religious fanaticism, he lacked the virtue of being free from the atavistic vanity of the inheritor of the Moghul past. In this very period, when it was possible for a national consciousness to emerge, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan himself succumbed to the egoistic conception that Muslims were the conquerors of India. It was he who was the father of separatist Muslim nationalism, and not Jinnah as it is so erroneously supposed. Jinnah is only a later version of Sir Syed, revised and enlarged. Thus the aberrant modern Muslim himself was responsible first for a separatist Muslim nationalism and later for the creation of Pakistan. The foundation of Muslim nationalism is the postulate that Hindu and Muslim societies are autonomous and parallel social structures.
It is no fault of the Hindus that the Indian Muslims embraced this theory of a separate Muslim nationalism. Nor is it the fault of the Hindus that Indian Muslims regarded Hindus in Pakistan as hostages ensuring their own (Indian Muslims') security in India. It is only once in a while that an individual or society gets an opportunity to make or mar its own future. The Muslims lost their rare chance of embracing modernity simultaneously with the Hindus when they yielded to the pressure exerted on them by the ulema of Deoband and rejected English education. History gave them another chance a little later - the opportunity to strengthen Indian nationalism by joining forces with the Hindus but they let go even this opportunity by succumbing to the erroneous notion that Hindu and Muslim societies were autonomous and parallel social structures. They paid scant heed even to geographical realities and refused to consider where they lived and would live in the future. The problems faced by the Indian Muslims today can be traced back to these two lost opportunities. If a chance that comes only once in a century is wasted, it takes another century to make up for the loss."
It is evident from the above why Hamid Dalwai is not known beyond the members of the Indian Secular Society he co-founded with A B Shah and a few secular Maharashtrians (a state in India in the Konkan region where Hamid hailed from) committed to democracy, pluralism, liberalism, and critical reasoning. There seems to have been a deliberate suppressing of his view by the state and some establishments especially given India's Left-leaning tilt towards Postmodernism, the Palestinian Movement and the non-Aligned Movement throughout the Cold War all through the 50s, 60 and 70s.
In these politically correct times, it is no surprise that Hamid Dalwai is not known much in India especially his own home state. Born on September 29 in 1932 in Mirjoli village of Ratnagiri district in Konkan, Maharashtra, he is most famous for the March he organised without any political backing for the rights of Muslim women, in 1966 on April 18 against the triple talaq, (oral pronunciation of divorce in Muslim Personal Laws banned in most Muslim majority countries except India till a recent Supreme Court ruling).
He was only able to gather seven Muslim women including his wife Mehrunissa Dalwai, a revolutionary lady in her own way, for the March which is now an iconic photograph showing Hamid holding a placard. But he had pioneered the Muslim Reform Movement by criticising the regressive practices in Islam on the subcontinent and demanded the scrapping of triple talaq, polygamy and the regressive practice of halala. He was of the opinion marriage should be based on the laws of the Constitution and tirelessly campaigned for a common civil code. Decades later, the youth of India would rush to archives in their respective libraries to see what experts had to say about the Supreme Court hearings on triple talaq and out tumbled Hamid Dalwai's personality, his novel 'Indhan' (Fuel) and his views as told to his close friends especially Dilip Chitre who recorded them verbatim and published them in English, Marathi being the vernacular Hamid preferred.
'Angry Young Secularist' - Hamid earned the nickname twice over with his continuous clash with the Deoband brand of Islam taught by mullahs as well as the extremist and increasingly fascist far-right Hindutva groups of India. Fearless, rational, atheist, secular, patriotic and reasonably nationalistic, Hamid Dalwai is the kind of leader that the youth of India especially those of Muslim heritage are discovering. Influenced by Ram Manohar Lohia, Jai Prakash Narayan and Mahatma Gandhi (freedom fighters and builders of the Indian Republic), Hamid also established the Muslim Satyashodak (truth-seeking) Mandal.
Mehrunissa Dalwai and Hamid were physically attacked and socially ostracised and boycotted for organizing protests against polygamy and triple talaq, and were even dubbed "enemies of religion". Hamid never conformed or con promised and remained firmly committed to the Constitution of India and secularism.
A documentary based on his life by Jyoti Subhash starring Naseeruddin Shah, documents his struggle with what he called the denial of Muslims in India about their pre-Partition actions and post-Partition and the copycat actions of Hindutva far-right groups in establishing a Hindu Rashtra, along the lines of an Islamic Caliphate of their doppelgangers. As translations of his Marathi speeches and articles in the papers he used to contribute to are underway, his unsung story is going to be told in all corners of the country and hopefully globally.
Unfortunately, Hamid died too young at the age of 44 on 3 May 1977 of a kidney ailment. Though his legacy lives on gaining momentum, "Hamidness" is something every secularist and liberal have missed out on if he or she hasn't heard of him or read him once. Being Hamid means no quarters given to nonsense, superstition and dogma, something I personally have been instinctively aspiring to since I realised the hypocrisy of my community in the 1990s and beyond.
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