Commemorating Imtiaz Ahmad,Intellectually

It is indeed a strange, and in a way, unfortunate coincidence!

Professor Imtiaz Ahmad, who passed away in Delhi on 19 June 2023, reviewed my first Hindi book Allah Naam ki Siyasat for this issue of Social Change. To the best of my knowledge, this was perhaps his last intellectual contribution. I was really happy when I came to know that he had agreed to review my Hindi work. After all, he was my MPhil examiner in the mid-1990 and that was the only formal connection I had with him. And, ironically, I have been now asked to write his obituary for the same issue of the same journal!

This is an inexplicable feeling—it makes me sad and melancholic; while at the same time, it encourages me to engage with Imtiaz Ahmad’s academic life intellectually, critically and of course professionally. The most appropriate mode to commemorate the legacy of Imtiaz Ahmad, I feel, is to celebrate his role in shaping the contours of serious research on political sociology and social stratification in the specific context of Indian Islam.

Imtiaz Ahmad is often described as a ‘political sociologist’. This description is factually correct. He was professionally associated with the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where he taught courses on political sociology for many years. It also goes well with his academic background. He received his training at Lucknow University and Delhi School of Economics before going to the University of Chicago as a Fulbright scholar. Yet, Imtiaz Ahmad’s works cannot be confined to the given disciplinary boundaries of sociology, anthropology, political studies and even for that matter ‘political sociology’. He opened up the possibilities of empirically informed and conceptually sophisticated academic exploration.

Imtiaz Ahmad started his intellectual journey in the late 1960s. He was interested in exploring the nature of caste-based social stratification among Muslims in India. However, he was deeply unhappy about the state of sociological studies at that time. We find a serious unease in Ahmad’s early writings. In an essay written in 1972, he argued that the sociological studies on India did not give importance to the social structures of non-Hindu communities. He also identified a strange tendency to generalise the sociology of the Hindus as the sociology of India.

This search for a multifaceted ‘Indian sociology’ became the foundation of four major books, which Ahmad edited in the 1970s and 1980s. These volumes were based on a set of deeply engaging essays written by various authors on a variety of socio-cultural aspects concerning Muslims of South Asia. These studies produced a persuasive argument that a synthesis has been worked out in South Asia between the high Islamic ideals and custom-centric traditions. Precisely for these reasons, there is a need to recognise various expressions of lived Islam(s) for making sense of the actualities of Muslimness.

It is important to clarify here Ahmad did not produce these volumes simply to establish his supremacy as a revisionist scholar of Indian Islam. Instead, he encouraged disagreements, ideological plurality and creative frankness. His carefully written Introductions do not make any attempt to divert the basic thrust of different essays. As a result, these pathbreaking volumes were able to introduce the grassroots-based sociology of Muslims in India to the wider intellectual public. At the same time, Ahmad’s adherence to argumentative openness helped in producing vigorous intellectual discussions on various facets of Indian Muslim identity.

In my view, there are two important aspects of Ahmad’s intellectual contribution, which are relevant for us. First, Ahmad seems to make a conscious distinction between the past and history. His writings encourage us to acknowledge the significance of the past in the everyday life situation of Muslims. However, he does not want us to overemphasise the historical facts/categories to understand contemporary Muslim societies. He was very critical of this peculiar adherence to Islam’s history, which created an impression that Indian Muslim societies could only be understood as a historical residue of their Islamic past. Ahmad wanted to get rid of this historical stiffness in order to understand the flourishing and ever-changing realities of Muslims in India.

Second, Ahmad was also critical of the macro generalisations. He argues that we should not look for any fixed, permanent and universally applicable model for explaining Muslim sociological diversity. Instead, the localised expressions of caste, language, gender and class must be taken into consideration to evolve empirically rich and analytically sophisticated explanations. In other words, one must study the complex sociological ‘merger’ between the ever-evolving local cultures (which should not be entirely understood as ‘Hindu’ culture) and the local religious communities to produce what he calls a sociology of India.

Let me elaborate on this point. Imtiaz Ahmad’s intellectual position on Muslim communities, no doubt, introduces us to their socio-cultural everydayness. His adherence to the sociological diversity of Muslim community in India offers us immense possibilities to have a nuanced understanding of Muslim presence in India. Ahmad, it seems, evokes the Muslim sociological diversity as a finding to reject the political discourse of Muslim homogeneity.

For instance, in the Introduction of his book Ritual and Religion among Muslims in India (1981) Ahmad writes:

Muslim fundamentalists may assert and maintain that there is one, only one version of what is orthodox from the Islamic point of view and whatever does not conform to it is to be dismissed as heterodox…. Clearly it seems to me that Islamists’ vision has tended to obscure the inherent and underlying pluralism within Indian Islam as a practised religion. (Ahmad, 1981, p. 18)

Does this Islamic plurality as a ‘finding’ help us in understanding the different forms of politics of religion in India? Obviously, a simple reading of the broad argument presented in these four volumes edited by Imtiaz Ahmad (and even his later writings) can be employed to refute the agenda of those Islamists who persistently project Indian Muslims as a single and politically identifiable social group. However, for a profound understanding of the implication of this argument, we have to examine the manner in which the sociological plurality of Indian Islam is ignored, used, rearticulated and even evoked in the domain of actual politics. In other words, what is the relationship between the highly diversified everyday life of Muslim communities and the political discourses that identify them either as a constitutionally recognised religious minority or as an inseparable constituent of the global Islamic umma?

I have been engaging with this question for a long time. The crucial difference between substantive Muslimness and discourse Muslimness must be recognised as a point of departure in this regard. Substantive Muslimness refers to the multiple ways in which Muslim identity is formed in a variety of regional and local contexts. Issues such as caste, language, class and region play a significant role in determining the self-perception of a Muslim individual in real-life situations.

Various survey-based studies conducted by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)-Lokniti clearly show that Muslim perceptions, views, opinions and attitudes do not follow any set pattern. We do not find any homogeneous response even to the questions related to basic religious practices such as offering Namaz and observing fasts (Roza) in the month of Ramzan. This Muslim diversity underlines the fact that Indian Islam as a lived religion is practised by Muslims in a variety of ways. This is what I call substantive Muslimness.

The discourse of Muslimness, however, underlines a different aspect of Indian Muslim identity. Classification of Muslims as a religious minority in purely statistical terms, the description of medieval Indian history as Islamic rule and the media debates revolving around Islamic Jihad and terrorism produce a simple and undifferentiated image of a homogeneous Muslim community. Every aspect of Muslim life is seen through the prism of this discourse either to criticise Muslims for being barbaric or to celebrate Muslim culture as a symbol of the royal Islamic past.

The interplay between the substantive Muslimness and the discourse of Muslimness determines the actual manifestations of modern Indian Muslim identity in our public life. The substantive Muslimness gives it concrete real-life meanings, while the discourse of Muslimness converts the Muslim identity into a national/global question.

This formulation obviously underlines one of the limitations of Imtiaz Ahmad’s main thesis. Yet, it stems from his basic theoretical premise but moves in a direction, which does not necessarily confirm the arguments he makes and the positions he adheres to. Perhaps this is what Imtiaz Ahmad wanted us to do!