[sacw] SACW Dispatch | 26 Sept. 00

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
26 September 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

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#1. USA: Peace Conference on South Asia
#2. India: Origins & Development of Deendar Anjuman (1924-2000)Part II
#3. Pakistan: History crumbles as officials fumble

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#1.

Peace Conference on South Asia
October 7, 2000
Marriott Rocky Hill
100 Capitol Boulevard, Rocky Hill, CT 06067 U.S.A.
Telephone: 860-257-6000

MORNING SESSION

8:00 - Registration Begins
9:00 - Welcome & Introductory Remarks
- U.S. Senator Mary Ann Handley

Interfaith Spiritual Message of Peace
- Prof. Qamar-ul Huda

9:15 - Morning Speeches
Moderator: Prof. Roger Buckley

Keynote Address
- Pakistan's Ambassador to the United States Dr. Maleeha Lodhi

- Prof. Marcia Hermansen
* Playing the Religion Card: Religious Identity as a Volatile
Element in Pakistani Society

- Prof. Qamar-ul Huda
* Peace Through Educational Reforms

- Prof. Vijay Prashad
* Indo-Pak Matters: Why the United States Cannot be Trusted as
an "Honest" Broker

- Dr. Nasim Ashraf
* Conflict Resolution in South Asia: Models and Lessons from
Other Parts of the World

10:45 - Break
11:00 - Panel Discussion
12:30 - Luncheon (Complimentary)

AFTERNOON SESSION

2:00 - Afternoon Speeches
Moderator: Prof. Adil Najam

- Mr. Kenneth Cooper, Reporter, The Washington Post
* Stumbling Blocks to Sustained Peace in South Asia: Policy
Directions for the United States

- Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Executive Director, Kashmiri American
Council
* Achieving Peace in Kashmir: The Key to Peace in South Asia

- U.S. Congressman Sam Gejdenson, Ranking Member, House
International Relations Committee of the U.S. Congress
* Prospects for Peace & Democracy in South Asia

3:15 - Break
3:30 - Panel Discussion
4:45 - Closing

7:00 - Banquet

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#2.

[The below article continues from SACW dispatch of 25 September 2000]

India: The Origins & Development of Deendar Anjuman (1924-2000)

By Yoginder Sikand

Siddiq Hussain: The Founder of the Deendar Anjuman

Sayyed Siddiq Hussain, the founder of the Deendar Anjuman, was born to
Sayyed Amir Hussain and his wife Sayyeda Amina, in 1886 at Balampet in the
Gurmatkal taluqa of the Gulbarga district, then part of the Nizam’s
Dominions and now in the Karnataka state in south India. His family traced
their descent to the Prophet Muhammad, and were known for having produced
numerous leading Sufis belonging to the Qadri order. Siddiq Hussain
received his primary education first at Gulbarga and then at Hyderabad,
where he learnt Arabic from one Maulana ‘Abdul Nabi. Later, he enrolled at
the Muhammadan Arts College, Madras, and from there he went on to the
Bursen College, Lahore, for his higher education. In the course of his
studies he is said to have mastered eleven languages and developed an
expertise in medicine and the martial arts.
As a young man, the hagiographic accounts tell us, Siddiq Hussain
developed a great interest in various religions, and came into contact with
several noted Sufis and Islamic scholars of his time. These included Shibli
Numani, the noted ‘alim, Baba Tajuddin of Nagpur, Maulana ‘Abdullah of
Tamapur, Hazrat Miskin Shah Baba, and Zohra Bi and Maulana Mir Muhammad
Sa‘id of Hyderabad. From the last mentioned he took the bai‘at or oath of
initiation in the Qadri Sufi order. In 1914, in his ‘passion’, as he puts
it, ‘to study the Qur’an’, he joined the Qadiani branch of the heterodox
Ahmadiyya community, considered outside the pale of Islam for its belief
that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a prophet sent by God, and, in
doing so, denying the Islamic belief in the finality of the prophethood of
Muhammad. He took the oath of allegiance at the hands of the then head of
the Qadiani jama‘at, Miyan Bashiruddin Mahmud Ahmad, son of Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad, but fourteen days later he renounced his membership, accusing the
Qadianis of being kafirs for considering the Mirza as a prophet. It is
likely that at this time he moved closer to the rival Lahori branch of the
Ahmadis, who split off from the main Ahmadi jama‘at in 1914 on the question
of the status of the Mirza. Unlike the Qadianis, the Lahoris, led by the
well-known Islamic scholar Maulana Muhammad ‘Ali, insisted that the Mirza
was not a prophet but simply a mujaddid (‘renewer of the faith’). He quoted
the well-known tradition attributed to Muhammad that at the end of every
Islamic century God would send a mujaddid to the world to revive the faith,
and claimed that the Mirza was the mujaddid of the fourteenth century of
the Islamic calendar. It is possible that Siddiq Hussain might actually
have formally joined the Lahori jama‘at, for in his tract A‘ada-i-Islam
(‘Enemies of Islam’), dating to the mid-1920s, he wrote that he and members
of his Anjuman believed that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had been sent by God as the
mujaddid of the fourteenth century, indicating the regard he continued to
hold the Mirza in great esteem, despite having parted ways with the
Qadianis. In one of his early writings, dated to the late 1920s, he wrote
that after he left the Qadiani jama‘at, he spent some time in the company
of Maulana Muhammad ‘Ali and Maulvi Khwaja Kamaluddin, the leading lights
of the Lahori branch of the Ahmadis.

The Launching of the Mission

In the early hagiographic accounts of Siddiq Hussain written by his
followers and even in his own writings, we hear little of his activities
till 1924, when he publicly declared what he claimed was his divine
mission, and established the Deendar Anjuman (‘The Religious Association’).
The 1920s were a crucial period for Hindu-Muslim relations in India,
witnessing a marked rise of Hindu-Muslim conflict after a brief spell of
inter-communal harmony in the course of the short-lived Khilafat and
Non-Cooperation movements. In early 1923, the Arya Samaj, a militant and
openly anti-Muslim Hindu chauvinist group, launched a massive drive to
bring into the Hindu fold hundreds of thousands of Rajput Muslims in the
north-western districts of the United Provinces. Soon, the campaign, which
the Aryas referred to as the Shuddhi Andolan (‘The Purification Movement’)
and the Muslims as the Tehrik-i-Irtidad (‘The Apostasy Movement’), spread
to other areas of India, and Arya leaders began issuing calls for
converting all the Indian Muslims. Muslim leaders responded with alarm,
launching efforts at countering the Aryas through various Islamic
missionary (tabligh) groups. Siddiq Hussain is said to have actively worked
with one of the leading Tablighi activists of this time, the Amristar-based
lawyer, Ghulam Bhik Nairang, and his Anjuman Tabligh-ul Islam, in
attempting to prevent the Aryas from making further inroads among the
Muslims and also in spreading Islam among non-Muslim groups, particularly
the ‘lower’ castes. This is the first evidence that we have of the
beginning of what was to become his life-long involvement in missionary
work and in combating the Arya Samaj.
After spending some time in the north with the Lahori Ahmadis, with
members of the Ahl-i-Qur’an and with Nairang and his Tablighi group, Siddiq
Hussain returned to Hyderabad and established a medical practice there. By
this time, aggressive communal politics, which had become such a
characteristic feature of north Indian life, had made its way into the
state. Ruled by a Muslim Nizam and a small, feudal class, largely Muslim,
Hyderabad was a Hindu-majority state, with a Muslim population of hardly
one in ten. By the 1920s, resentment against the predominance of Muslims in
the upper echelons of government service increasingly led a rising
generation of newly-educated Hindus to the path of confrontation, which
soon assumed the form, as elsewhere in India, of Hindu-Muslim antagonism.
In response to this growing Hindu aggressiveness, the Majlis-i-Ittihad
ul-Muslimin (‘The Committee for the Unity of Muslims’) was set up in 1927,
with its headquarters at Hyderabad, whose avowed purpose was to protect
Muslim interests, reflecting, as ‘Alam says, ‘a concern with the growing
dissatisfaction of the Hindus with the government’. In 1933, the Arya
Samaj, which, till then, had been limited by its predominantly north Indian
base, turned its attention to Hyderabad, where it had already established a
small presence in the late nineteenth century. Beginning in 1931, a series
of clashes took place between the Aryas, who saw themselves as defenders of
the Hindus, and the Nizam’s forces. Several branches of the Samaj were now
set up in the Nizam’s Dominions. In 1938, the Aryas launched a mass
struggle against the Nizam which carried on for several months, in the
course of which some 8000 Aryas and other Hindus were arrested. The Arya
agitators, according to one report, are said to have exhorted the local
Hindus to ‘rise and fight the Muslims, kill them and overthrow them, as the
country belonged to the Hindus and not the Muslims’, in addition to
appealing to them not to pay their taxes to the Nizam. A fierce communal
riot broke out that year, in which scores of Muslims living in Hindu
localities were killed. In the aftermath of the 1938 riots, the Majlis,
alarmed at the rising tide of Hindu aggressiveness, took on a more militant
posture. It now modified its Constitution to declare that ‘The ruler and
the throne are the symbols of the political and cultural rights of the
Muslim community in the state’, and that, therefore, ‘this status of the
Muslims must continue forever’. As ‘Alam puts it, beginning in the late
1920s ‘a warlike atmosphere’ between Hindus and Muslims seems to have taken
hold of Hyderabad. 
Deeply involved as he was, by this time, with various Islamic movements,
having spent many years in the company of Sufis and leading ‘ulama, the
Qadianis and then the Lahoris, followed by his association with Nairang’s
Anjuman Tabligh ul-Islam, Siddiq Hussain seems to have been greatly
affected by what he saw as the grave threats to Islam and Muslim interests
at the hands of aggressive Hindu groups at this time. Launching a
large-scale missionary campaign, aimed at nothing less than the conversion
of all the Hindus of India to Islam, suggested itself to him as the need of
the hour. This was to go on to become his life’s major vocation, in
response, he asserted, to a divine command which he claimed to have received. 
Siddiq Hussain’s missionary career may be divided into three phases, each
related to the changing nature of Hindu-Muslim relations and the general
socio-political context of the times. To begin with, roughly from 1924 to
1930 is what could be called the phase of ‘peaceful persuasion’, in which
preaching, persuasion and distribution of literature were adopted as means
to spread his message among, first, the Lingayats, and then the Hindus in
general. This phase corresponded with the emergence of rumblings of
discontent among the Hindus of Hyderabad, but which had yet to take on
violent, aggressive forms. The period from 1930 till 1948 could be termed
as the phase of ‘violent aggression’, in which, among other means, Siddiq
Hussain advocated the declaration of actual war, styled as a jihad, in
addition to being involved in several court cases with his detractors. This
corresponds to the period when the Arya Samaj had grown into a powerful
oppositional force in Hyderabad, challenging, like the emerging Communist
and the Congress parties sought to do, the power of the Nizam and the
largely Muslim feudal elite. After his release from prison two months
before his death in 1952, Siddiq Hussain once again seems to have gone back
to his earlier mode of preaching, and this short phase can be termed as one
of ‘pragmatic accommodation’.

Missionary Work Among the Lingayats

Siddiq Hussain began his missionary career among the Lingayats, a group of
Shiva-worshippers living mainly in the Kannada-speaking districts of the
Nizam’s Dominions and in neighbouring Mysore. According to Anjuman sources,
once, while on a trip to the shrine of Kodekkal Basappa, a Sufi highly
venerated by the local Lingayats, he reportedly heard that the Sufi had
predicted the arrival of a saviour of the Lingayats, in the form of
‘Deendar Channabasaveswara’, who would be born in a Muslim family and would
‘make the Hindus and Muslims one’. This, he was to later claim, was a
prophecy heralding his own arrival. By this time, as he writes, he had
already dedicated his life to the cause of the spread of Islam, and, noting
the ‘special features’ (khususiyat) of the Lingayats, decided to work among
them. In order to communicate with them, he married a Kannada-speaking
Muslim woman from Talikotta who taught him their language. After his
marriage, he visited several Lingayat temples and monasteries, spending
much time with the priests, learning Sanskrit and their scriptures from
them. Then, it is said, he received divine inspiration in the form of a
dream informing him that he had been appointed by God as an avatar of the
Lingayat saint Channabasaveswara, in the form of Deendar Channabasaveswara,
to bring all the Hindus of India to Islam. Accordingly, he travelled to
Gadag, a small town near Hubli, and on 7 February, 1924, publicly announced
that he was much-awaited messiah of the Lingayats, the Deendar
Chanabasaveswara and the saviour of the Hindus. ‘Oh Hindus!’, he declared,
‘I am the guru who has been predicted in your scriptures’. Besides
claiming to be the Deendar Channabasaveswara, he also, at this time,
declared himself to be the kalki avatar, the tenth and last incarnation of
the Hindu deity Vishnu, who, the Hindus believe, would arrive to extirpate
misery from the world, put an end to the ‘evil age’ of kali yug and herald
the arrival of the ‘age of truth’(sat yug). This, he said, had been
revealed to him by God Himself, who had told him that he would establish
the sat yug in 1943. As he put it, ‘ Shri Bhagwan has informed me that I
will appear as the kalki avatar. The kali yug is soon to be abolished and
the sat yug inaugurated’. Shortly after that, he said, in the second half
of the fourteenth (Islamic) century, the Day of Judgement (qayamat) shall
come.
In his A‘ada-i-Islam, a tract penned to convince Muslims of his claims,
Siddiq Hussain wrote that it was as a response to the successes of the Arya
Samaj in bringing to the Hindu fold several thousand Muslims in northern
India that he received a divine inspiration, informing him that ‘God had
willed that the greatest incarnation (avatar) of the Hindus should emerge
to declare to the Hindus that their only hope for salvation lay in
converting to Islam’. Elsewhere, he wrote that in the wake of the shuddhi
movement of the Aryas, India had witnessed ‘heinous assaults’ on Islam and
the person of Muhammad. ‘God’, he said, ‘was watching this, and had decided
to take revenge by making all India Muslim’. He now assumed the name of
Siddiq Deendar Channabasaveswara, and in doing so, he claimed that he was
simply fulfilling the prophecies contained in the holy books of the
Lingayats and the Hindus, which, he claimed, had predicted his arrival and
had also indicated the truth of Islam. In his words:
Allah has appointed their biggest avatar in order to make them Muslim by
pointing out the directions contained in the books of the enemies of the
Muslims (dushmanan-i-islam), and he [this avatar] has announced: ‘Oh
Hindus! If you seek salvation then become Muslim because you can see that
till your avatars recited the creed of confession (kalima) of our Master,
Muhammad, peace and Allah’s blessings be upon him, they did not gain
salvation, so how can you be saved if you do not do so?’.

Siddiq Hussain’s choice of the Lingayats as the first group to direct his
missionary concerns to was probably motivated by the fact that the Lingayat
tradition, being, in its original form, sternly monotheistic and having
emerged from a powerful protest movement against idolatry and caste dating
back to the twelfth century, shared much in common with Islam. Aware of
the powerful anti-Brahminical traditions of the Lingayats, Siddiq Hussain
probably believed that his claims would fall on receptive ears and that the
Lingayats would respond warmly to his appeals. Many Lingayats of what is
today northern Karnataka are also followers of the cults of the Sufis,
whose shrines are found scattered all over the countryside. Some of these
are revered as local deities by the Lingayats, such as the Bahmani ruler
Ahmad Shah Wali, worshipped as an incarnation of the Lingayat deity Shah
Allama Prabhu, or the Sufi Shah Muinuddin of Thinthini, known to the
Lingayats as Munishwar. Given this syncretistic tradition among the
Lingayats, Siddiq Hussain probably felt that his appeals to them to convert
to Islam, claiming himself to be the incarnation of Channabasaveswara,
son-in-law of the founder of the Lingayat sect, Basava, and the one
responsible for consolidating and leading the community texts after
Basava’s death, might evoke a positive response. 

In a pamphlet written in the mid-1920s addressed specifically to the
Lingayats, Siddiq Hussain declared that the time had come for the entire
world to be united as one on the basis of Islam. He claimed that if the
Muslims were only to fulfil their religious duties, ‘all the people of the
world are ready to fall into their lap’. In particular, he said, the
Lingayats, whom he estimated numbered some 50,00,000, were ripe for
conversion to Islam, because, in his words, they were ‘pitiable, powerless,
bereft of friends’ and ‘their source of support has always been the Muslim
community’. He described the Lingayats as an oppressed group, awaiting a
messiah who would deliver them from the persecution of the Brahmins, and
saw himself as having been appointed by God for that purpose. As he put it:

This community is crying out, saying: ‘Oh Mercy of the Worlds (rahmat al
lil ‘alamin)! You are most merciful. Take pity on us. We are without any
support and helpers. Save us from the clutches of our oppressors and take
us into your refuge. For thousands of years the worshippers of Vishnu (hari
wale) have oppressed us and our neighbours, the Dravidian communities, and
have reduced us to the status of Shudras. They snatched away our political
power and forced us to flee to the forests, where, for thousands of years,
we roamed the jungles like barbarians’.

Employing the logic so central to the discourse of the emerging Dravidian
and Dalit movements of his times that saw Brahmin/Aryan hegemony as the
source of the plight of the ‘lower’ castes, Siddiq Hussain then went on to
suggest that it was Islam that has historically played a crusading role in
liberating the downtrodden castes from the shackles of caste oppression, a
role that it can once again play in mobilising the Lingayats and other
Shiva-worshipping ‘lower’ caste groups against the control of the Brahmins,
the worshippers of Vishnu [hari wale]. Thus, he added:

The Lingayats now tell us : ‘Some eight hundred years ago, when the Muslims
arrived in the Deccan and established their political power, they helped us
to rise again and, with their help and in the face of the opposition of the
worshippers of Vishnu, we set up large thrones (singhasana) in many towns,
but, now, unfortunately, our helpers (Muslims) have been ousted from power’.

The message then is clear: the Lingayats must join hands with the Muslims
and work to re-establish Muslim political power if they are to be able to
effectively counter the forces of Brahminical revival which is set to
reduce them, once more, to the status of slaves. Siddiq Hussain claimed
that the Dravidians were being rapidly absorbed into the fold of
Vaishnavism as part of a conspiracy on the part of Vishnu-worshipping
‘high’ caste Hindus to enslave them. On the other hand, the Dravidians wer,
he said, also being targeted for conversion by the Christian missionaries
and the Arya Samajists. The time was not far off, he predicted , when the
entire Dravidian race might finally be extinct. If this happened, the
Lingayats would be ‘forced into free labour ( begar)’ by the Brahmins, a
form of social slavery that had been imposed on the Dravidians for
centuries. In this context, Siddiq Hussain saw a glimmer of hope for the
Lingayats, and wrote:

[The Lingayats say]: ‘Our only source of hope is the prediction in our
sacred scriptures that one day a saviour will appear who will deliver us
from all our woes and will take us to the pinnacle of glory and will make
us triumph over all our enemies. He will come in the form of Deendar
Channabasaveswara, who, in accordance with the predictions of Mauneswara,
will make the Hindus and the Turukus (Muslims) one’.

[The remaining & complete text of the above article will posted on the SACW
website on 28 September 2000]

______

#3.

South China Morning Post
Monday, September 25, 2000

SOUTH ASIA TODAY

History crumbles as officials fumble

PAKISTAN by RORY MCCARTHY in Islamabad 
----------
It was once the heart of the Gandhara civilisation, but Pakistani
bureaucrats have seen fit to build a football stadium on the ruins at
Taxila, threatening one of the subcontinent's most important archaeological
sites. 

Taxila's plight exemplifies the dismal condition of Pakistan's historical
legacy, worn down by years of bureaucracy, mismanagement and wasted
financial donations. 

"Money is being squandered by unqualified people," said Shaukat Mahmood, an
architectural academic who has been campaigning to improve Pakistan's
heritage for 20 years. "They just don't know what they're doing. It's a
tragedy." 

Unesco, the UN heritage organisation, is so exasperated with Pakistan's
lack of concern that later this year it is likely to embarrass the military
regime by placing Taxila and one other site on a "world heritage in danger"
blacklist. If restoration work does not improve, the monuments will be
dropped altogether as listed sites. 

"The Government recognises that cultural heritage is important, but it
doesn't translate into action," said Prem Kasaju, director of Unesco's
Islamabad office. 

Unesco is also concerned about Lahore's Shalamar Gardens. A unique set of
water towers, more than 360 years old, has been partly demolished to widen
the six-lane Grand Trunk Road. The gardens, once the finest in the Mughal
world, were constructed at the same time as the nearby Lahore Fort by the
extravagant Emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal. 

As for the Shish Mahal, the ornate hall in Lahore Fort, a rare tile and
glass ceiling is sagging and in danger of collapse. 

And questions are being asked about the management of Moenjodaro, the ruins
of a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian city in Sind province for which US$23.5
million (HK$182 million) has been raised by Unesco through international
donations over the past 20 years. 

Although money has been spent on lavish scientific laboratories at the
site, water is still seeping into the foundations and salt deposits are
weakening the structures. Administrators at the site have been accused of
misusing their positions to appoint relatives rather than technical experts
to maintain the ruins. 

Often, competition between national and provincial bureaucrats is blamed
for holding back preservation efforts. "It's a total bureaucracy. Things
move very slowly," Mr Kasaju said. 

Saeed-ul Rehman, who leads the government archaeology department, said he
was aware of Unesco's concerns and was trying to correct them. "It's a
question of not having enough money or experts," he said. "Conservation is
a time-consuming job. We're trying our best." 

_____________________________________________
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