Q.1 Describe the historical background of khalifate Movement in India.

Answer:- Khilafat movement

Indian Muslim movement
Khilafat movement, pan-Islamic force in India that arose in 1919 in an effort to salvage
the Ottoman caliph as a symbol of unity among the Muslim community in India during
the British raj. The movement was initially bolstered by Gandhi’s noncooperation
movement but fell apart after the abolition of the caliphate in 1924.

Fears of Muslim disunity were aroused by the decline of the Ottoman Empire—the

preeminent Islamic power whose sultan, as caliph, was seen by pan-Islamists as the
leader of the worldwide Muslim community. The caliphate was endangered first by
Italian attacks (1911) and the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and later by the empire’s defeat
in World War I (1914–18). Fears of the loss of the caliphate were intensified by
the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920), which dismembered the empire, not only detaching
all non-Turkish regions from the empire but also giving parts of the Turkish homeland to
Greece and other non-Muslim powers.

A campaign in defense of the caliphate was launched, led in India by the brothers

Shaukat and Muḥammad ʿAlī and by Abul Kalam Azad. The leaders joined forces
with Mahatma Gandhi’s noncooperation movement for Indian freedom, promising
nonviolence in return for his support of the Khilafat movement. In 1920 the latter
movement was marred by the ḥijrat (Urdu: “exodus”; recalling
Muhammad’s Hijrah from Mecca) from India to Afghanistan of about 18,000 Muslim
peasants, who felt that India was an apostate land. It was also tarnished by the
Muslim Malabar rebellion in south India in 1921, the excesses of which deeply stirred
Hindu India. Gandhi’s suspension of his movement and his arrest in March 1922
weakened the Khilafat movement still further. It was further undermined when Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk drove the Greeks from western Asia Minor in 1922 and deposed the
Turkish sultan Mehmed VI in the same year. The movement finally collapsed when
Atatürk abolished the caliphate altogether in 1924.

Islam
Islam, major world religion promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th
century CE. The Arabic term islām, literally “surrender,” illuminates the fundamental
religious idea of Islam—that the believer (called a Muslim, from the active particle
of islām) accepts surrender to the will of Allah (in Arabic, Allāh: God). Allah is viewed as
the sole God—creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world. The will of Allah, to which
human beings must submit, is made known through the sacred scriptures,
the Qurʾān (often spelled Koran in English), which Allah revealed to his messenger,
Muhammad. In Islam Muhammad is considered the last of a series of prophets
(including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and Jesus), and his message
simultaneously consummates and completes the “revelations” attributed to earlier
prophets.

Retaining its emphasis on an uncompromising monotheism and a strict adherence to

certain essential religious practices, the religion taught by Muhammad to a small group
of followers spread rapidly through the Middle East to Africa, Europe, the Indian
subcontinent, the Malay Peninsula, and China. By the early 21st century there were
more than 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide. Although many sectarian movements have
arisen within Islam, all Muslims are bound by a common faith and a sense of belonging
to a single community.

This article deals with the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islam and with the
connection of religion and society in the Islamic world. The history of the various
peoples who embraced Islam is covered in the article Islamic world.
The foundations of Islam

The legacy of Muhammad

From the very beginning of Islam, Muhammad had inculcated a sense of brotherhood
and a bond of faith among his followers, both of which helped to develop among them a
feeling of close relationship that was accentuated by their experiences of persecution as
a nascent community in Mecca. The strong attachment to the tenets of the
Qurʾānic revelation and the conspicuous socioeconomic content of Islamic religious
practices cemented this bond of faith. In 622 CE, when the Prophet migrated to Medina,
his preaching was soon accepted, and the community-state of Islam emerged. During
this early period, Islam acquired its characteristic ethos as a religion uniting in itself both
the spiritual and temporal aspects of life and seeking to regulate not only the individual’s
relationship to God (through conscience) but human relationships in a social setting as
well. Thus, there is not only an Islamic religious institution but also an Islamic law, state,
and other institutions governing society. Not until the 20th century were the religious
(private) and the secular (public) distinguished by some Muslim thinkers and separated
formally in certain places such as Turkey.

This dual religious and social character of Islam, expressing itself in one way as a
religious community commissioned by God to bring its own value system to the world
through the jihād (“exertion,” commonly translated as “holy war” or “holy struggle”),
explains the astonishing success of the early generations of Muslims. Within a century
after the Prophet’s death in 632 CE, they had brought a large part of the globe—from
Spain across Central Asia to India—under a new Arab Muslim empire.

The period of Islamic conquests and empire building marks the first phase of the
expansion of Islam as a religion. Islam’s essential egalitarianism within the community
of the faithful and its official discrimination against the followers of other religions won
rapid converts. Jews and Christians were assigned a special status
as communities possessing scriptures and were called the “people of the Book” (ahl al-
kitāb) and, therefore, were allowed religious autonomy. They were, however, required to
pay a per capita tax called jizyah, as opposed to pagans, who were required to either
accept Islam or die. The same status of the “people of the Book” was later extended in
particular times and places to Zoroastrians and Hindus, but many “people of the Book”
joined Islam in order to escape the disability of the jizyah. A much more massive
expansion of Islam after the 12th century was inaugurated by the Sufis (Muslim
mystics), who were mainly responsible for the spread of Islam in India, Central Asia,
Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa (see below).

Beside the jihad and Sufi missionary activity, another factor in the spread of Islam was
the far-ranging influence of Muslim traders, who not only introduced Islam quite early to
the Indian east coast and South India but also proved to be the main catalytic agents
(beside the Sufis) in converting people to Islam in Indonesia, Malaya, and China. Islam
was introduced to Indonesia in the 14th century, hardly having time to consolidate itself
there politically before the region came under Dutch hegemony.

The vast variety of races and cultures embraced by Islam (an estimated total of more
than 1.5 billion persons worldwide in the early 21st century) has produced important
internal differences. All segments of Muslim society, however, are bound by a common
faith and a sense of belonging to a single community. With the loss of political power
during the period of Western colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of
the Islamic community (ummah), instead of weakening, became stronger. The faith of
Islam helped various Muslim peoples in their struggle to gain political freedom in the
mid-20th century, and the unity of Islam contributed to later political solidarity.
Sources of Islamic doctrinal and social views

The doctrine of ijmāʿ, or consensus, was introduced in the 2nd century AH (8th

century CE) in order to standardize legal theory and practice and to overcome individual
and regional differences of opinion. Though conceived as a “consensus of
scholars,” ijmāʿ was in actual practice a more fundamental operative factor. From the
3rd century AH ijmāʿ has amounted to a principle of stability in thinking; points on which
consensus was reached in practice were considered closed and further substantial
questioning of them prohibited. Accepted interpretations of the Qurʾān and the actual
content of the Sunnah (i.e., Hadith and theology) all rest finally on the ijmāʿ in the sense
of the acceptance of the authority of their community.

Ijtihād, meaning “to endeavour” or “to exert effort,” was required to find the legal or
doctrinal solution to a new problem. In the early period of Islam, because ijtihād took the
form of individual opinion (raʾy), there was a wealth of conflicting and chaotic opinions.
In the 2nd century AH ijtihād was replaced by qiyās (reasoning by strict analogy), a
formal procedure of deduction based on the texts of the Qurʾān and the Hadith. The
transformation of ijmāʿ into a conservative mechanism and the acceptance of a
definitive body of Hadith virtually closed the “gate of ijtihād” in Sunni Islam
while ijtihād continued in Shiʿism. Nevertheless, certain outstanding Muslim thinkers
(e.g., al-Ghazālī in the 11th–12th century) continued to claim the right of new ijtihād for
themselves, and reformers in the 18th–20th centuries, because of modern influences,
caused this principle once more to receive wider acceptance.

The Qurʾān and Hadith are discussed below. The significance of ijmāʿ and ijtihād are
discussed below in the contexts of Islamic theology, philosophy, and law.
Doctrines of the Qurʾān

God

The doctrine about God in the Qurʾān is rigorously monotheistic: God is one and
unique; he has no partner and no equal. Trinitarianism, the Christian belief that God is
three persons in one substance, is vigorously repudiated. Muslims believe that there are
no intermediaries between God and the creation that he brought into being by his sheer
command, “Be.” Although his presence is believed to be everywhere, he is not
incarnated in anything. He is the sole creator and sustainer of the universe, wherein
every creature bears witness to his unity and lordship. But he is also just and merciful:
his justice ensures order in his creation, in which nothing is believed to be out of place,
and his mercy is unbounded and encompasses everything. His creating and ordering
the universe is viewed as the act of prime mercy for which all things sing his glories.
The God of the Qurʾān, described as majestic and sovereign, is also a personal God; he
is viewed as being nearer to one than one’s own jugular vein, and, whenever a person
in need or distress calls him, he responds. Above all, he is the God of guidance and
shows everything, particularly humanity, the right way, “the straight path.”

This picture of God—wherein the attributes of power, justice, and mercy interpenetrate
—is related to the concept of God shared by Judaism and Christianity and also differs
radically from the concepts of pagan Arabia, to which it provided an effective answer.
The pagan Arabs believed in a blind and inexorable fate over which humans had no
control. For this powerful but insensible fate the Qurʾān substituted a powerful but
provident and merciful God. The Qurʾān carried through its
uncompromising monotheism by rejecting all forms of idolatry and eliminating all gods
and divinities that the Arabs worshipped in their sanctuaries (ḥarams), the most
prominent of which was the Kaʿbah sanctuary in Mecca itself.
The universe

In order to prove the unity of God, the Qurʾān lays frequent stress on the design and
order in the universe. There are no gaps or dislocations in nature. Order is explained by
the fact that every created thing is endowed with a definite and defined nature whereby
it falls into a pattern. This nature, though it allows every created thing to function in a
whole, sets limits, and this idea of the limitedness of everything is one of the most fixed
points in both the cosmology and theology of the Qurʾān. The universe is viewed,
therefore, as autonomous, in the sense that everything has its own inherent laws of
behavior, but not as autocratic, because the patterns of behavior have been endowed
by God and are strictly limited. “Everything has been created by us according to a
measure.” Though every creature is thus limited and “measured out” and hence
depends upon God, God alone, who reigns unchallenged in the heavens and the earth,
is unlimited, independent, and self-sufficient.
Humanity

According to the Qurʾān, God created two apparently parallel species of creatures,
human beings and jinn, the one from clay and the other from fire. About the jinn,
however, the Qurʾān says little, although it is implied that the jinn are endowed with
reason and responsibility but are more prone to evil than human beings are. It is with
humanity that the Qurʾān, which describes itself as a guide for the human race, is
centrally concerned. The story of the Fall of Adam (the first man) promoted in Judaism
and Christianity is accepted, but the Qurʾān states that God forgave Adam his act of
disobedience, which is not viewed in the Qurʾān as original sin in the Christian sense of
the term.

In the story of the creation of humanity, Iblīs, or Satan, who protested to God against
the creation of human beings, because they “would sow mischief on earth,” lost in the
competition of knowledge against Adam. The Qurʾān, therefore, declares humanity to
be the noblest of all creation, the created being who bore the trust (of responsibility) that
the rest of creation refused to accept. The Qurʾān thus reiterates that all nature has
been made subservient to humans, who are seen as God’s vice-regent on earth;
nothing in all creation has been made without a purpose, and humanity itself has not
been created “in sport” but rather has been created with the purpose of serving and
obeying God’s will.

Despite this lofty station, however, the Qurʾān describes human nature as frail and
faltering. Whereas everything in the universe has a limited nature and every creature
recognizes its limitation and insufficiency, human beings are viewed as having been
given freedom and therefore are prone to rebelliousness and pride, with the tendency to
arrogate to themselves the attributes of self-sufficiency. Pride, thus, is viewed as the
cardinal sin of human beings, because, by not recognizing in themselves their essential
creaturely limitations, they become guilty of ascribing to themselves partnership with
God (shirk: associating a creature with the Creator) and of violating the unity of God.
True faith (īmān), thus, consists of belief in the immaculate Divine Unity
and islām (surrender) in one’s submission to the Divine Will.
Satan, sin, and repentance

In order to communicate the truth of Divine Unity, God has sent messengers or
prophets to human beings, whose weakness of nature makes them ever prone to forget
or even willfully to reject Divine Unity under the promptings of Satan. According to the
Qurʾānic teaching, the being who became Satan (Shayṭān or Iblīs) had previously
occupied a high station but fell from divine grace by his act of disobedience in refusing
to honour Adam when he was ordered to do so. Since then his work has been
to beguile human beings into error and sin. Satan is, therefore, the contemporary of
humanity, and Satan’s own act of disobedience is construed by the Qurʾān as the sin of
pride. Satan’s machinations will cease only on the Last Day.

Judging from the accounts of the Qurʾān, the record of humanity’s acceptance of the
prophets’ messages has been far from perfect. The whole universe is replete with signs
of God. The human soul itself is viewed as a witness of the unity and grace of God. The
messengers of God have, throughout history, been calling humanity back to God. Yet
not all people have accepted the truth; many of them have rejected it and become
disbelievers (kāfir, plural kuffār; literally, “concealing”—i.e., the blessings of God), and,
when a person becomes so obdurate, his heart is sealed by God. Nevertheless, it is
always possible for a sinner to repent (tawbah) and redeem himself by a genuine
conversion to the truth. There is no point of no return, and God is forever merciful and
always willing and ready to pardon. Genuine repentance has the effect of removing all
sins and restoring a person to the state of sinlessness with which he started his life.
Prophecy

Prophets are men specially elected by God to be his messengers. Prophethood is

indivisible, and the Qurʾān requires recognition of all prophets as such
without discrimination. Yet they are not all equal, some of them being particularly
outstanding in qualities of steadfastness and patience under
trial. Abraham, Noah, Moses, and Jesus were such great prophets. As vindication of the
truth of their mission, God often vests them with miracles: Abraham was saved from fire,
Noah from the Deluge, and Moses from the pharaoh. Not only was Jesus born from
the Virgin Mary, but God also saved him from crucifixion at the hands of the Jews.
The conviction that God’s messengers are ultimately vindicated and saved is
an integral part of the Qurʾānic doctrine.

All prophets are human and never part of divinity: they are the most perfect of humans
who are recipients of revelation from God. When God wishes to speak to a human, he
sends an angel messenger to him or makes him hear a voice or inspires him.
Muhammad is accepted as the last prophet in this series and its greatest member, for in
him all the messages of earlier prophets were consummated. The
archangel Gabriel brought the Qurʾān down to the Prophet’s “heart.” Gabriel is
represented by the Qurʾān as a spirit whom the Prophet could sometimes see and hear.
According to early traditions, the Prophet’s revelations occurred in a state of trance
when his normal consciousness was transformed. This state was accompanied by
heavy sweating. The Qurʾān itself makes it clear that the revelations brought with them
a sense of extraordinary weight: “If we were to send this Qurʾān down on a mountain,
you would see it split asunder out of fear of God.”

This phenomenon at the same time was accompanied by an unshakable conviction that
the message was from God, and the Qurʾān describes itself as the transcript of a
heavenly “Mother Book” written on a “Preserved Tablet.” The conviction was of such an
intensity that the Qurʾān categorically denies that it is from any earthly source, for in that
case it would be liable to “manifold doubts and oscillations.”
Eschatology (doctrine of last things)

In Islamic doctrine, on the Last Day, when the world will come to an end, the dead will
be resurrected and a judgment will be pronounced on every person in accordance with
his deeds. Although the Qurʾān in the main speaks of a personal judgment, there are
several verses that speak of the resurrection of distinct communities that will be judged
according to “their own book.” In conformity with this, the Qurʾān also speaks in several
passages of the “death of communities,” each one of which has a definite term of life.
The actual evaluation, however, will be for every individual, whatever the terms of
reference of his performance. In order to prove that the resurrection will occur, the
Qurʾān uses a moral and a physical argument. Because not all requital is meted out in
this life, a final judgment is necessary to bring it to completion. Physically, God, who is
all-powerful, has the ability to destroy and bring back to life all creatures, who are limited
and are, therefore, subject to God’s limitless power.

Some Islamic schools deny the possibility of human intercession but most accept it, and
in any case God himself, in his mercy, may forgive certain sinners. Those condemned
will burn in hellfire, and those who are saved will enjoy the abiding joys
of paradise. Hell and heaven are both spiritual and corporeal. Beside suffering in
physical fire, the damned will also experience fire “in their hearts.” Similarly, the blessed
will experience, besides corporeal enjoyment, the greatest happiness of divine pleasure.
Social service

Because the purpose of human existence is submission to the Divine Will, as is the
purpose of every other creature, God’s role in relation to human beings is that of the
commander. Whereas the rest of nature obeys God automatically, humans are the only
creatures that possess the choice to obey or disobey. With the deep-seated belief in
Satan’s existence, humanity’s fundamental role becomes one of moral struggle,
which constitutes the essence of human endeavour. Recognition of the unity of God
does not simply rest in the intellect but entails consequences in terms of the moral
struggle, which consists primarily in freeing oneself of narrowness of mind and
smallness of heart. One must go out of oneself and expend one’s possessions for the
sake of others.

The doctrine of social service, in terms of alleviating suffering and helping the needy,
constitutes an integral part of Islamic teaching. Praying to God and other religious acts
are deemed to be incomplete in the absence of active service to the needy. In regard to
this matter, the Qurʾānic criticisms of human nature become very sharp: “Man is by
nature timid; when evil befalls him, he panics, but when good things come to him he
prevents them from reaching others.” It is Satan who whispers into a person’s ears that
by spending for others he will become poor. God, on the contrary, promises prosperity
in exchange for such expenditure, which constitutes a credit with God and grows much
more than the money people invest in usury. Hoarding of wealth without recognizing the
rights of the poor is threatened with the direst punishment in the hereafter and is
declared to be one of the main causes of the decay of societies in this world. The
practice of usury is forbidden.

With this socioeconomic doctrine cementing the bond of faith, there emerges the idea of
a closely knit community of the faithful who are declared to be “brothers unto each
other.” Muslims are described as “the middle community bearing witness on
humankind,” “the best community produced for humankind,” whose function it is “to
enjoin good and forbid evil” (Qurʾān). Cooperation and “good advice” within the
community are emphasized, and a person who deliberately tries to harm the interests of
the community is to be given exemplary punishment. Opponents from within the
community are to be fought and reduced with armed force, if issues cannot be settled
by persuasion and arbitration.

Because the mission of the community is to “enjoin good and forbid evil” so that “there
is no mischief and corruption” on earth, the doctrine of jihad is the logical outcome. For
the early community it was a basic religious concept. The lesser jihad, or holy striving,
means an active struggle using armed force whenever necessary. The object of such
striving is not the conversion of individuals to Islam but rather the gaining of political
control over the collective affairs of societies to run them in accordance with the
principles of Islam. Individual conversions occur as a by-product of this process when
the power structure passes into the hands of the Muslim community. In fact, according
to strict Muslim doctrine, conversions “by force” are forbidden, because after
the revelation of the Qurʾān “good and evil have become distinct,” so that one may
follow whichever one may prefer (Qurʾān), and it is also strictly prohibited to wage wars
for the sake of acquiring worldly glory, power, and rule. With the establishment of the
Muslim empire, however, the doctrine of the lesser jihad was modified by the leaders of
the community. Their main concern had become the consolidation of the empire and its
administration, and thus they interpreted the teaching in a defensive rather than in an
expansive sense. The Khārijite sect, which held that “decision belongs to God alone,”
insisted on continuous and relentless jihad, but its followers were virtually destroyed
during the internecine wars in the 8th century.

Beside a measure of economic justice and the creation of a strong idea of community,

the Prophet Muhammad effected a general reform of Arab society, in particular
protecting its weaker segments—the poor, the orphans, the women, and the
slaves. Slavery was not legally abolished, but emancipation of slaves was religiously
encouraged as an act of merit. Slaves were given legal rights, including the right of
acquiring their freedom in return for payment, in installments, of a sum agreed upon by
the slave and his master out of his earnings. A slave woman who bore a child by her
master became automatically free after her master’s death. The infanticide of girls that
was practiced among certain tribes in pre-Islamic Arabia—out of fear of poverty or a
sense of shame—was forbidden.

Distinction and privileges based on tribal rank or race were repudiated in the Qurʾān
and in the celebrated “Farewell Pilgrimage Address” of the Prophet shortly before his
death. All are therein declared to be “equal children of Adam,” and the only distinction
recognized in the sight of God is to be based on piety and good acts. The age-old Arab
institution of intertribal revenge (called thaʾr)—whereby it was not necessarily the killer
who was executed but a person equal in rank to the slain person—was abolished. The
pre-Islamic ethical ideal of manliness was modified and replaced by a more humane
ideal of moral virtue and piety.
Fundamental practices and institutions of Islam

The five pillars

During the earliest decades after the death of the Prophet, certain basic features of the
religio-social organization of Islam were singled out to serve as anchoring points of the
community’s life and formulated as the “Pillars of Islam.” To these five, the Khārijite sect
added a sixth pillar, the jihad, which, however, was not accepted by the general
community.
The shahādah, or profession of faith

The first pillar is the profession of faith: “There is no deity but God, and Muhammad is
the messenger of God,” upon which depends membership in the community. The
profession of faith must be recited at least once in one’s lifetime, aloud, correctly, and
purposively, with an understanding of its meaning and with an assent from the heart.
From this fundamental belief are derived beliefs in (1) angels (particularly Gabriel, the
Angel of Inspiration), (2) the revealed Book (the Qurʾān and the sacred books
of Judaism and Christianity), (3) a series of prophets (among whom figures of Jewish
and Christian tradition are particularly eminent, although it is believed that God has sent
messengers to every nation), and (4) the Last Day (Day of Judgment).
Prayer

The second pillar consists of five daily canonical prayers. These prayers may be offered
individually if one is unable to go to the mosque. The first prayer is performed before
sunrise, the second just after noon, the third in the late afternoon, the fourth immediately
after sunset, and the fifth before retiring to bed.

Before a prayer, ablutions are performed, including the washing of hands, face, and
feet. The muezzin (one who gives the call for prayer) chants aloud from a raised place
(such as a tower) in the mosque. When prayer starts, the imam, or leader (of the
prayer), stands in the front facing in the direction of Mecca, and the congregation stands
behind him in rows, following him in various postures. Each prayer consists of two to
four genuflection units (rakʿah); each unit consists of a standing posture (during which
verses from the Qurʾān are recited—in certain prayers aloud, in others silently), as well
as a genuflection and two prostrations. At every change in posture, “God is great” is
recited. Tradition has fixed the materials to be recited in each posture.

Special congregational prayers are offered on Friday instead of the prayer just after
noon. The Friday service consists of a sermon (khuṭbah), which partly consists of
preaching in the local language and partly of recitation of certain formulas in Arabic. In
the sermon, the preacher usually recites one or several verses of the Qurʾān and builds
his address on it, which can have a moral, social, or political content. Friday sermons
usually have considerable impact on public opinion regarding both moral and
sociopolitical questions.

Although not ordained as an obligatory duty, nocturnal prayers (called tahajjud) are

encouraged, particularly during the latter half of the night. During the month
of Ramadan, lengthy prayers called tarāwīḥ are offered congregationally before retiring.

In strict doctrine, the five daily prayers cannot be waived even for the sick, who may
pray in bed and, if necessary, lying down. When on a journey, the two afternoon prayers
may be followed one by the other; the sunset and late evening prayers may be
combined as well. In practice, however, much laxity has occurred, particularly among
the modernized classes, although Friday prayers are still very well attended.
The zakāt

The third pillar is the obligatory tax called zakāt (“purification,” indicating that such a
payment makes the rest of one’s wealth religiously and legally pure). This is the only
permanent tax levied by the Qurʾān and is payable annually on food grains, cattle, and
cash after one year’s possession. The amount varies for different categories. Thus, on
grains and fruits it is 10 percent if land is watered by rain, 5 percent if land is watered
artificially. On cash and precious metals it is 21/2 percent. Zakāt is collectable by the
state and is to be used primarily for the poor, but the Qurʾān mentions other purposes:
ransoming Muslim war captives, redeeming chronic debts, paying tax collectors’ fees,
jihad (and by extension, according to Qurʾān commentators, education and health), and
creating facilities for travelers.

After the breakup of Muslim religio-political power, payment of zakāt became a matter of

voluntary charity dependent on individual conscience. In the modern Muslim world it has
been left up to the individual, except in some countries (such as Saudi Arabia) where
the Sharīʿah (Islamic law) is strictly maintained.
Fasting

Fasting during the month of Ramadan (ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar), laid
down in the Qurʾān (2:183–185), is the fourth pillar of the faith. Fasting begins at
daybreak and ends at sunset, and during the day eating, drinking, and smoking are
forbidden. The Qurʾān (2:185) states that it was in the month of Ramadan that the
Qurʾān was revealed. Another verse of the Qurʾān (97:1) states that it was revealed “on
the Night of Power,” which Muslims generally observe on one of the last 10 nights of
Ramadan (usually the 27th night). For a person who is sick or on a journey, fasting may
be postponed until “another equal number of days.” The elderly and the incurably sick
are exempted through the daily feeding of one poor person if they have the means.
The hajj

The fifth pillar is the annual pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca prescribed for every Muslim once
in a lifetime—“provided one can afford it” and provided a person has enough provisions
to leave for his family in his absence. A special service is held in the sacred mosque on
the 7th of the month of Dhū al-Ḥijjah (last in the Muslim year). Pilgrimage activities
begin by the 8th and conclude on the 12th or 13th. All worshippers enter the state
of iḥrām; they wear two seamless garments and avoid sexual intercourse, the cutting of
hair and nails, and certain other activities. Pilgrims from outside Mecca assume iḥrām at
specified points en route to the city. The principal activities consist of walking seven
times around the Kaʿbah, a shrine within the mosque; the kissing and touching of
the Black Stone (Ḥajar al-Aswad); and the ascent of and running between Mount Ṣafā
and Mount Marwah (which are now, however, mere elevations) seven times. At the
second stage of the ritual, the pilgrim proceeds from Mecca to Minā, a few miles away;
from there he goes to ʿArafāt, where it is essential to hear a sermon and to spend one
afternoon. The last rites consist of spending the night at Muzdalifah (between ʿArafāt
and Minā) and offering sacrifice on the last day of iḥrām, which is the ʿīd (“festival”) of
sacrifice. See Eid al-Adha.

Many countries have imposed restrictions on the number of outgoing pilgrims because

of foreign-exchange difficulties. Because of the improvement of communications,
however, the total number of visitors has greatly increased in recent years. By the early
21st century the number of annual visitors was estimated to exceed two million,
approximately half of them from non-Arab countries. All Muslim countries send official
delegations on the occasion, which is being increasingly used for religio-political
congresses. At other times in the year, it is considered meritorious to perform the lesser
pilgrimage (ʿumrah), which is not, however, a substitute for the hajj pilgrimage.
Sacred places and days

The most sacred place for Muslims is the Kaʿbah sanctuary at Mecca, the object of the
annual pilgrimage. It is much more than a mosque; it is believed to be the place where
the heavenly bliss and power touches the earth directly. According to Muslim tradition,
the Kaʿbah was built by Abraham. The Prophet’s mosque in Medina is the next in
sanctity. Jerusalem follows in third place in sanctity as the first qiblah (i.e., direction in
which the Muslims offered prayers at first, before the qiblah was changed to the Kaʿbah)
and as the place from where Muhammad, according to tradition, made his ascent
(miʿrāj) to heaven. For the Shiʿah, Karbalāʾ in Iraq (the place of martyrdom of ʿAlī’s son
Ḥusayn) and Meshed in Iran (where Imām ʿAlī al-Riḍā is buried) constitute places of
special veneration where Shiʿis make pilgrimages.
Shrines of Sufi saints

For the Muslim masses in general, shrines of Sufi saints are particular objects of
reverence and even veneration. In Baghdad the tomb of the greatest saint of all, ʿAbd
al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, is visited every year by large numbers of pilgrims from all over the
Muslim world.
By the late 20th century the Sufi shrines, which were managed privately in earlier
periods, were almost entirely owned by governments and were managed by
departments of awqāf (plural of waqf, a religious endowment). The official appointed to
care for a shrine is usually called a mutawallī. In Turkey, where such endowments
formerly constituted a very considerable portion of the national wealth, all endowments
were confiscated by the regime of Atatürk (president 1928–38).

The mosque

The general religious life of Muslims is centred around the mosque. In the days of the
Prophet and early caliphs, the mosque was the centre of all community life, and it
remains so in many parts of the Islamic world to this day. Small mosques are usually
supervised by the imam (one who administers the prayer service) himself, although
sometimes also a muezzin is appointed. In larger mosques, where Friday prayers are
offered, a khaṭīb (one who gives the khuṭbah, or sermon) is appointed for Friday service.
Many large mosques also function as religious schools and colleges. In the early 21st
century, mosque officials were appointed by the government in most countries. In some
countries—e.g., Pakistan—most mosques are private and are run by the local
community, although increasingly some of the larger ones have been taken over by the
government departments of awqāf.
Holy days

Find out why Eid al-Fitr is also called the Festival of Breaking Fast
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The Muslim calendar (based on the lunar year) dates from the emigration (hijrah) of the
Prophet from Mecca to Medina in 622. The two festive days in the year are the Eids
(ʿīds), Eid al-Fitr, which celebrates the end of the month of Ramadan, and Eid al-
Adha (the feast of sacrifice), which marks the end of the hajj. Because of the crowds,
Eid prayers are offered either in very large mosques or on
specially consecrated grounds. Other sacred times include the “Night of Power” (Laylat
al-Qadr; believed to be the night in which God makes decisions about the destiny of
individuals and the world as a whole) and the night of the ascension of the Prophet to
heaven. The Shiʿis celebrate the 10th of Muḥarram (the first month of the Muslim year)
to mark the day of the martyrdom of Ḥusayn. The Muslim masses also celebrate the
death anniversaries of various saints in a ceremony called ʿurs (literally, “nuptial
ceremony”). The saints, far from dying, are believed to reach the zenith of their spiritual
life on this occasion.
Islamic thought

Islamic theology (kalām) and philosophy (falsafah) are two traditions of learning

developed by Muslim thinkers who were engaged, on the one hand, in the rational
clarification and defense of the principles of the Islamic religion (mutakallimūn) and, on
the other, in the pursuit of the ancient (Greek and Hellenistic, or Greco-Roman)
sciences (falāsifah). These thinkers took a position that was intermediate between the
traditionalists, who remained attached to the literal expressions of the primary sources
of Islamic doctrines (the Qurʾān, Islamic scripture; and the Hadith, sayings and
traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) and who abhorred reasoning, and those whose
reasoning led them to abandon the Islamic community (the ummah) altogether. The
status of the believer in Islam remained in practice a juridical question, not a matter for
theologians or philosophers to decide. Except in regard to the fundamental questions of
the existence of God, Islamic revelation, and future reward and punishment, the juridical
conditions for declaring someone an unbeliever or beyond the pale of Islam were so
demanding as to make it almost impossible to make a valid declaration of this sort about
a professing Muslim. In the course of events in Islamic history, representatives of
certain theological movements, who happened to be jurists and who succeeded in
converting rulers to their cause, made those rulers declare in favour of their movements
and even encouraged them to persecute their opponents. Thus there arose in some
localities and periods a semblance of an official, or orthodox, doctrine.
Origins, nature, and significance of Islamic theology

Early developments

The beginnings of theology in the Islamic tradition in the second half of the 7th century
are not easily distinguishable from the beginnings of a number of other disciplines—
Arabic philology, Qurʾānic interpretation, the collection of the sayings and deeds of
Muhammad (Hadith), jurisprudence (fiqh), and historiography. Together with these
other disciplines, Islamic theology is concerned with ascertaining the facts
and context of the Islamic revelation and with understanding its meaning
and implications as to what Muslims should believe and do after the revelation had
ceased and the Islamic community had to chart its own way. During the first half of the
8th century, a number of questions—which centred on God’s unity, justice, and other
attributes and which were relevant to human freedom, actions, and fate in the hereafter
—formed the core of a more-specialized discipline, which was called kalām (“speech”)
because of the rhetorical and dialectical “speech” used in formulating the principal
matters of Islamic belief, debating them, and defending them against Muslim and non-
Muslim opponents. Gradually, kalām came to include all matters directly or indirectly
relevant to the establishment and definition of religious beliefs, and it developed its own
necessary or useful systematic rational arguments about human knowledge and the
makeup of the world. Despite various efforts by later thinkers to fuse the problems
of kalām with those of philosophy (and mysticism), theology preserved its relative
independence from philosophy and other nonreligious sciences. It remained true to its
original traditional and religious point of view, confined itself within the limits of the
Islamic revelation, and assumed that these limits as it understood them were identical
with the limits of truth.
The Hellenistic legacy

The pre-Islamic and non-Islamic legacy with which early Islamic theology came into
contact included almost all the religious thought that had survived and was being
defended or disputed in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and India. It was transmitted by learned
representatives of various Christian, Jewish, Manichaean (members of a dualistic
religion founded by Mani, an Iranian prophet, in the 3rd century), Zoroastrian (members
of a monotheistic, but later dualistic, religion founded by Zoroaster, an Iranian prophet
who lived before the 6th century BCE), Indian (Hindu and Buddhist, primarily),
and Ṣābian (star worshippers of Harran often confused with the
Mandaeans) communities and by early converts to Islam conversant with the
teachings, sacred writings, and doctrinal history of the religions of these areas. At first,
access to this legacy was primarily through conversations and disputations with such
men, rather than through full and accurate translations of sacred texts or theological and
philosophic writings, although some translations from Pahlavi (a Middle Persian
dialect), Syriac, and Greek must also have been available.

The characteristic approach of early Islamic theology to non-Muslim literature was

through oral disputations, the starting points of which were the statements presented or
defended (orally) by the opponents. Oral disputation continued to be used in theology
for centuries, and most theological writings reproduce or imitate that form. From such
oral and written disputations, writers on religions and sects collected much of their
information about non-Muslim sects. Much of Hellenistic (post-3rd-century- BCE Greek
cultural), Iranian, and Indian religious thought was thus encountered in an informal and
indirect manner.

From the 9th century onward, theologians had access to an increasingly larger body of
translated texts, but by then they had taken most of their basic positions. They made a
selective use of the translation literature, ignoring most of what was not useful to them
until the mystical theologian al-Ghazālī (flourished 11th–12th centuries) showed them
the way to study it, distinguish between the harmless and harmful doctrines contained in
it, and refute the latter. By this time Islamic theology had coined a vast number of
technical terms, and theologians (e.g., al-Jāḥiẓ) had forged Arabic into a versatile
language of science; Arabic philology had matured; and the religious sciences
(jurisprudence, the study of the Qurʾān, Hadith, criticism, and history) had developed
complex techniques of textual study and interpretation. The 9th-century translators
availed themselves of these advances to meet the needs of patrons. Apart from
demands for medical and mathematical works, the translation of Greek learning was
fostered by the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs (8th–9th centuries) and their viziers as additional
weapons (the primary weapon was theology itself) against the threat
of Manichaeism and other subversive ideas that went under the
name zandaqah (“heresy” or “atheism”).
Theology and sectarianism

Despite the notion of a unified and consolidated community, as taught by the Prophet

Muhammad, serious differences arose within the Muslim community immediately after
his death. According to the Sunnis—the traditionalist faction whose followers
now constitute the majority branch of Islam—the Prophet had designated no successor.
Thus, the Muslims at Medina decided to elect a chief. Two of Muhammad’s fathers-in-
law, who were highly respected early converts as well as trusted lieutenants, prevailed
upon the Medinans to elect a leader who would be accepted by the Quraysh,
Muhammad’s tribe, and the choice fell upon Abū Bakr, father of the Prophet’s favoured
wife, ʿĀʾishah. All of this occurred before the Prophet’s burial (under the floor of
ʿĀʾishah’s hut, alongside the courtyard of the mosque).

According to the Shiʿah, however, the Prophet had designated as his successor his

son-in-law ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, husband of his daughter Fāṭimah and father of his only
surviving grandsons, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. His preference was general knowledge. Yet,
while ʿAlī and the Prophet’s closest kinsmen were preparing the body for burial, Abū
Bakr, ʿUmar, and Abū ʿUbaydah, from Muhammad’s companions in the Quraysh tribe,
met with the leaders of the Medinans and agreed to elect the aging Abū Bakr as the
successor (khalīfah, hence “caliph”) of the Prophet. ʿAlī and his kinsmen were dismayed
but agreed for the sake of unity to accept the fait accompli because ʿAlī was still young.
After the murder of ʿUthmān, the third caliph, ʿAlī was invited by the Muslims at Medina
to accept the caliphate. Thus, ʿAli became the fourth caliph (656–661), but the
disagreement over his right of succession brought about a major schism in Islam,
between the Shiʿah—those loyal to ʿAlī—and the Sunni “traditionalists.” Athough their
differences were in the first instance political, arising out of the question of leadership,
theological differences developed over time.
The Khārijites

During the reign of the third caliph, ʿUthmān, certain rebellious groups accused the
caliph of nepotism and misrule, and the resulting discontent led to his assassination.
The rebels then recognized the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, ʿAlī, as ruler but later
deserted him and fought against him, accusing him of having committed a grave sin in
submitting his claim to the caliphate to arbitration. The name Khārijite (khārijī) is derived
from the word khārajū, meaning “to withdraw,” because the Khārijites withdrew (by
active dissent or rebellion) from a state of affairs they considered to be gravely impious.

The basic doctrine of the Khārijites was that a person or a group who committed a grave
error or sin and did not sincerely repent ceased to be Muslim. Mere profession of
the faith—“there is no god but God; Muhammad is the prophet of God”—did not make a
person a Muslim unless this faith was accompanied by righteous deeds. In other words,
good works were an integral part of faith and not extraneous to it. The second principle
that flowed from their aggressive idealism was militancy, or jihad, which the Khārijites
considered to be among the cardinal principles, or pillars, of Islam. Contrary to
the orthodox view, they interpreted the Qurʾānic command about “enjoining good and
forbidding evil” to mean the vindication of truth through the sword. The placing of these
two principles together made the Khārijites highly inflammable fanatics, intolerant of
almost any established political authority. They incessantly resorted to rebellion and, as
a result, were virtually wiped out during the first two centuries of Islam.

Because the Khārijites believed that the basis of rule was righteous character and piety
alone, any Muslim, irrespective of race, colour, and sex, could, in their view, become
ruler—provided he or she satisfied the conditions of piety. This was in contrast to the
claims of the Shiʿah (the party of Muhammad’s son-in-law, ʿAlī) that the ruler must
belong to the family of the Prophet and in contrast to the doctrine of the Sunnis
(followers of the Prophet’s way) that the head of state must belong to the Prophet’s
tribe, the Quraysh.

A moderate group of the Khārijites, the Ibāḍīs, avoided extinction, and its members are
to be found today in North Africa and in Oman and in parts of East Africa, including the
island of Zanzibar. The Ibāḍīs do not believe in aggressive methods and,
throughout medieval Islam, remained dormant. Because of the interest of 20th-century
Western scholars in the sect, the Ibāḍīs became active and began to publish their
classical writings and their own journals.

Although Khārijism is now essentially a story of the past, the reaction against it left a
permanent influence on Islam. It forced the religious leadership of the community to
formulate a bulwark against religious intolerance and fanaticism. Positively, it has
influenced reform movements, which sprang up in Islam from time to time and treated
spiritual and moral placidity and status quo with a quasi-Khārijite zeal and militancy.
The Muʿtazilah

The question of whether good works are an integral part of faith or independent of it, as
raised by the Khārijites, led to another important theological question: Are human acts
the result of a free human choice, or are they predetermined by God? This question
brought with it a whole series of questions about the nature of God and of human
nature. Although the initial impetus to theological thought, in the case of the Khārijites,
had come from within Islam, full-scale religious speculation resulted from the contact
and confrontation of Muslims with other cultures and systems of thought.

As a consequence of translations of Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic

during the 8th and 9th centuries and the controversies of Muslims with dualists
(e.g., gnostics and Manichaeans), Buddhists, and Christians, a more powerful
movement of rational theology emerged. Its representatives are called
the Muʿtazilah (literally “those who stand apart,” a reference to the fact that they
dissociated themselves from extreme views of faith and infidelity). On the question of
the relationship of faith to works, the Muʿtazilah—who called themselves “champions of
God’s unity and justice”—taught, like the Khārijites, that works were an essential part of
faith but that a person guilty of a grave sin, unless he repented, was neither a Muslim
nor yet a non-Muslim but occupied a “middle ground.” They further defended the
position, as a central part of their doctrine, that human beings were free to choose and
act and were, therefore, responsible for their actions. Divine predestination of human
acts, they held, was incompatible with God’s justice and human responsibility. The
Muʿtazilah, therefore, recognized two powers, or actors, in the universe—God in the
realm of nature and humanity in the domain of moral human action.

The Muʿtazilah explained away the apparently predeterministic verses of the Qurʾān as

being metaphors and exhortations. They claimed that human reason, independent
of revelation, was capable of discovering what is good and what is evil, although
revelation corroborated the findings of reason. Human beings would, therefore, be
under moral obligation to do the right even if there were no prophets and
no divine revelation. Revelation has to be interpreted, therefore, in conformity with the
dictates of rational ethics. Yet revelation is neither redundant nor passive. Its function is
twofold. First, its aim is to aid humanity in choosing the right, because in the conflict
between good and evil human beings often falter and make the wrong choice against
their rational judgment. God, therefore, must send prophets, for he must do the best for
humanity; otherwise, the demands of divine grace and mercy cannot be fulfilled.
Secondly, revelation is also necessary to communicate the positive obligations of
religion—e.g., prayers and fasting—which cannot be known without revelation.

God is viewed by the Muʿtazilah as pure Essence, without eternal attributes, because
they hold that the assumption of eternal attributes in conjunction with Essence will result
in a belief in multiple coeternals and violate God’s pure, unadulterated unity. God
knows, wills, and acts by virtue of his Essence and not through attributes of knowledge,
will, and power. Nor does he have an eternal attribute of speech, of which the Qurʾān
and other earlier revelations were effects; the Qurʾān was, therefore, created in time
and was not eternal.
The promises of reward that God has made in the Qurʾān to righteous people and the
threats of punishment he has issued to evildoers must be carried out by him on the Day
of Judgment, for promises and threats are viewed as reports about the future; if not
fulfilled exactly, those reports will turn into lies, which are inconceivable of God. Also, if
God were to withhold punishment for evil and forgive it, this would be as unjust as
withholding reward for righteousness. There can be neither undeserved punishment nor
undeserved reward; otherwise, good may just as well turn into evil and evil into good.
From this position it follows that there can be no intercession on behalf of sinners.

When, in the early 9th century, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn raised Muʿtazilism to the
status of the state creed, the Muʿtazilah rationalists showed themselves to be illiberal
and persecuted their opponents. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (died 855), an eminent orthodox
figure and founder of one of the four orthodox schools of Islamic law, was subjected to
flogging and imprisonment for his refusal to subscribe to the doctrine that the Qurʾān,
the word of God, was created in time.
Sunnism

In the 10th century a reaction began against the Muʿtazilah that culminated in the

formulation and subsequent general acceptance of another set of theological
propositions, which became Sunni, or “orthodox,” theology. The issues raised by these
early schisms and the positions adopted by them enabled the Sunni orthodoxy to define
its own doctrinal positions in turn. Much of the content of Sunni theology was, therefore,
supplied by its reactions to those schisms. The term sunnah, which means a “well-
trodden path” and in the religious terminology of Islam normally signifies “the example
set by the Prophet,” in the present context simply means the traditional and well-defined
way. In this context, the term sunnah usually is accompanied by the appendage “the
consolidated majority” (al-jamāʿah). The term clearly indicates that the traditional way is
the way of the consolidated majority of the community as against peripheral or
“wayward” positions of sectarians, who by definition must be erroneous.
The way of the majority

With the rise of the orthodoxy, then, the foremost and elemental factor that came to be
emphasized was the notion of the majority of the community. The concept of the
community so vigorously pronounced by the earliest doctrine of the Qurʾān gained both
a new emphasis and a fresh context with the rise of Sunnism. Whereas the Qurʾān had
marked out the Muslim community from other communities, Sunnism now emphasized
the views and customs of the majority of the community in contradistinction to peripheral
groups. An abundance of tradition (Hadith) came to be attributed to the Prophet to the
effect that Muslims must follow the majority’s way, that minority groups are all doomed
to hell, and that God’s protective hand is always on (the majority of) the community,
which can never be in error. Under the impact of the new Hadith, the community, which
had been charged by the Qurʾān with a mission and commanded to accept a challenge,
now became transformed into a privileged one that was endowed with infallibility.
Tolerance of diversity

At the same time, while condemning schisms and branding dissent as heretical,
Sunnism developed the opposite trend of accommodation, catholicity, and synthesis.
A putative tradition of the Prophet that says “differences of opinion among my
community are a blessing” was given wide currency. This principle
of toleration ultimately made it possible for diverse sects and schools of thought—
notwithstanding a wide range of difference in belief and practice—to recognize and
coexist with each other. No group may be excluded from the community unless it itself
formally renounces Islam. As for individuals, tests of heresy may be applied to their
beliefs, but, unless a person is found to flagrantly violate or deny the unity of God or
expressly negate the prophethood of Muhammad, such tests usually have no serious
consequences. Catholicity was orthodoxy’s answer to the intolerance and secessionism
of the Khārijites and the severity of the Muʿtazilah. As a consequence, a formula was
adopted in which good works were recognized as enhancing the quality of faith but not
as entering into the definition and essential nature of faith. This broad formula saved
the integrity of the community at the expense of moral strictness and doctrinal
uniformity.

On the question of free will, Sunni orthodoxy attempted a synthesis between human
responsibility and divine omnipotence. The champions of orthodoxy accused the
Muʿtazilah of quasi-Magian dualism (Zoroastrianism) insofar as the Muʿtazilah admitted
two independent and original actors in the universe: God and human beings. To
the orthodox it seemed blasphemous to hold that humanity could act wholly outside the
sphere of divine omnipotence, which had been so vividly portrayed by the Qurʾān but
which the Muʿtazilah had endeavoured to explain away in order to make room for
humanity’s free and independent action.
Influence of al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī

The Sunni formulation, however, as presented by al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī, Sunni’s

two main representatives in the 10th century, shows palpable differences despite basic
uniformity. Al-Ashʿarī taught that human acts were created by God and acquired by
humans and that human responsibility depended on this acquisition. He denied,
however, that humanity could be described as an actor in a real sense. Al-Māturīdī, on
the other hand, held that although God is the sole Creator of everything, including
human acts, nevertheless, a human being is an actor in the real sense, for acting and
creating were two different types of activity involving different aspects of the same
human act.

In conformity with their positions, al-Ashʿarī believed that a person did not have the
power to act before he actually acted and that God created this power in him at the time
of action; and al-Māturīdī taught that, before an action is taken, a person has a certain
general power for action but that this power becomes specific to a particular action only
when the action is performed, because, after full and specific power comes into
existence, action cannot be delayed.

Al-Ashʿarī and his school also held that human reason was incapable of discovering
good and evil and that acts became endowed with good or evil qualities through God’s
declaring them to be such. Because humanity in its natural state regards its own self-
interest as good and that which thwarts this self-interest as bad, natural human reason
is unreliable. Independently of revelation, therefore, murder would not be bad nor the
saving of life good. Furthermore, because God’s Will makes acts good or bad, one
cannot ask for reasons behind the divine law, which must be simply accepted. Al-
Māturīdī takes an opposite position, not materially different from that of the Muʿtazilah:
human reason is capable of finding out good and evil, and revelation aids human
reason against the sway of human passions.

Despite these important initial differences between the two main Sunni schools of
thought, the doctrines of al-Māturīdī became submerged in course of time under the
expanding popularity of the Ashʿarite school, which gained wide currency particularly
after the 11th century because of the influential activity of the Sufi theologian al-
Ghazālī. Because these later theologians placed increasing emphasis on divine
omnipotence at the expense of the freedom and efficacy of the human will, a
deterministic outlook on life became characteristic of Sunni Islam—reinvigorated by the
worldview of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, which taught that nothing exists except God,
whose being is the only real being. This general deterministic outlook produced, in turn,
a severe reformist reaction in the teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah, a 14th-century theologian
who sought to rehabilitate human freedom and responsibility and whose influence has
been strongly felt through the reform movements in the Muslim world since the 18th
century.
Shiʿism

Shiʿism is the only important surviving non-Sunni sect in Islam in terms of numbers of
adherents. As noted above, it owes its origin to the hostility between ʿAlī (the
fourth caliph, son-in-law of the Prophet) and the Umayyad dynasty (661–750). After
ʿAlī’s death, the Shiʿah (“Party”; i.e., of ʿAlī) demanded the restoration of rule to ʿAlī’s
family, and from that demand developed the Shiʿi legitimism, or the divine right of the
holy family to rule. In the early stages, the Shiʿiah used this legitimism to cover the
protest against the Arab hegemony under the Umayyads and to agitate for social
reform.

Gradually, however, Shiʿism developed a theological content for its political stand.
Probably under gnostic (esoteric, dualistic, and speculative) and old Iranian (dualistic)
influences, the figure of the political ruler, the imam (exemplary “leader”), was
transformed into a metaphysical being, a manifestation of God and the primordial light
that sustains the universe and bestows true knowledge on humanity. Through the imam
alone the hidden and true meaning of the Qurʾānic revelation can be known, because
the imam alone is infallible. The Shiʿiah thus developed a doctrine
of esoteric knowledge that was adopted also, in a modified form, by the Sufis.
The Twelver Shiʿah recognize 12 such imams, the last (Muḥammad) having
disappeared in the 9th century. Since that time, the mujtahids (i.e., the Shiʿi jurists) have
been able to interpret law and doctrine under the putative guidance of the imam, who
will return toward the end of time to fill the world with truth and justice.

On the basis of their doctrine of imamology, the Shiʿiah emphasize their idealism and
transcendentalism in conscious contrast to Sunni pragmatism. Thus, whereas the
Sunnis believe in the ijmāʿ (“consensus”) of the community as the source of decision
making and workable knowledge, the Shiʿah believe that knowledge derived from
fallible sources is useless and that sure and true knowledge can come only through a
contact with the infallible imam. Again, in marked contrast to Sunnism, Shiʿism adopted
the Muʿtazilah doctrine of the freedom of the human will and the capacity of human
reason to know good and evil, although its position on the question of the relationship
of faith to works is the same as that of the Sunnis.
Parallel to the doctrine of an esoteric knowledge, Shiʿism, because of its early defeats
and persecutions, also adopted the principle of taqiyyah, or dissimulation of faith in a
hostile environment. Introduced first as a practical principle, taqiyyah, which is also
attributed to ʿAlī and other imams, became an important part of the Shiʿi religious
teaching and practice. In the sphere of law, Shiʿism differs from Sunni law mainly in
allowing a temporary marriage, called mutʿah, which can be legally contracted for a
fixed period of time on the stipulation of a fixed dower.

From a spiritual point of view, perhaps the greatest difference between Shiʿism and
Sunnism is the former’s introduction into Islam of the passion motive, which is
conspicuously absent from Sunni Islam. The violent death (in 680) of ʿAlī’s son, Ḥusayn,
at the hands of the Umayyad troops is celebrated with moving orations, passion plays,
and processions in which the participants, in a state of emotional frenzy, beat their
breasts with heavy chains and sharp instruments, inflicting wounds on their bodies. This
passion motive has also influenced the Sunni masses in Afghanistan and the Indian
subcontinent, who participate in passion plays called taʿziyahs. Such celebrations are,
however, absent from Egypt and North Africa.

Although the Shiʿah numbered approximately 130 million of some 1.5 billion Muslims
worldwide in the early 21st century, Shiʿism has exerted a great influence on Sunni
Islam in several ways. The veneration in which all Muslims hold ʿAlī and his family and
the respect shown to ʿAlī’s descendants (who are called sayyids and sharīfs) are
obvious evidence of this influence.
Ismāʿīlīs

Besides the main body of Twelver (Ithnā ʿAsharī) Shiʿah, Shiʿism has produced a
variety of more or less extremist sects, the most important of them being the Ismāʿīlī.
Instead of recognizing Mūsā as the seventh imam, as did the main body of the Shiʿah,
the Ismāʿīlīs upheld the claims of his elder brother Ismāʿīl. One group of Ismāʿīlīs,
called Seveners (Sabʿiyyah), considered Ismāʿīl the seventh and last of the imams. The
majority of Ismāʿīlīs, however, believed that the imamate continued in the line of
Ismāʿīl’s descendants. The Ismāʿīlī teaching spread during the 9th century from North
Africa to Sind, in India, and the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimid dynasty succeeded in establishing a
prosperous empire in Egypt. Ismāʿīlīs are subdivided into two groups—the Nizārīs,
headed by the Aga Khan, and the Mustaʿlīs in Mumbai, with their own spiritual head.
The Ismāʿīlīs are to be found mainly in East Africa, Pakistan, India, and Yemen.

In their theology the Ismāʿīlīs have absorbed relatively radical elements and heterodox

ideas compared with other Shiʿis. The universe is viewed as a cyclic process, and the
unfolding of each cycle is marked by the advent of seven “speakers”—messengers of
God with scriptures—each of whom is succeeded by seven “silents”—messengers
without revealed scriptures; the last speaker (the Prophet Muhammad) is followed by
seven imams who interpret the Will of God to humanity and are, in a sense, higher than
the Prophet because they draw their knowledge directly from God and not from the
Angel of Inspiration. During the 10th century, certain Ismāʿīlī intellectuals formed
a secret society called the Brethren of Purity, which issued a philosophical
encyclopaedia, The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, aiming at the liquidation of
positive religions in favour of a universalist spirituality.
Aga Khan III (1887–1957) took several measures to bring his followers closer to the
main body of the Muslims. The Ismāʿīlīs, however, still have not mosques but jamāʿat
khānahs (“gathering houses”), and their mode of worship bears little resemblance to
that of the Muslims generally.
Related sects

Several other sects arose out of the general Shiʿi movement—e.g., the Nuṣayrīs
(ʿAlawites), the Yazīdīs, and the Druze—which are sometimes considered as
independent from Islam. The Druze arose in the 11th century out of a cult of deification
of the Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim.

During a 19th-century anticlerical movement in Iran, a certain ʿAlī Moḥammad

of Shīrāz appeared, declaring himself to be the Bāb (“Gate”; i.e., to God). At that time
the climate in Iran was generally favourable to messianic ideas. He was, however,
bitterly opposed by the Shiʿi ʿulamāʾ (council of learned men) and was executed in
1850. After his death, his two disciples, Ṣobḥ-e Azal and Bahāʾullāh, broke and went in
different directions. Bahāʾullāh eventually declared his religion—stressing a
humanitarian pacificism and universalism—to be an independent religion outside Islam.
The Bahāʾī faith won a considerable number of converts in North America during the
early 20th century.
Other groups

Sufism

Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, emerged out of early ascetic reactions on the part of

certain religiously sensitive personalities against the general worldliness that had
overtaken the Muslim community and the purely “externalist” expressions of Islam in law
and theology. These persons stressed the Muslim qualities of moral motivation,
contrition against overworldliness, and “the state of the heart” as opposed to the legalist
formulations of Islam.
The Aḥmadiyyah

In the latter half of the 19th century in Punjab, India, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad claimed to
be an inspired prophet. At first a defender of Islam against Christian missionaries, he
then later adopted certain doctrines of the Indian Muslim modernist Sayyid Ahmad Khan
—namely, that Jesus died a natural death and was not assumed into heaven as the
Islamic orthodoxy believed and that jihad “by the sword” had been abrogated and
replaced with jihad “of the pen.” His aim appears to have been to synthesize all religions
under Islam, for he declared himself to be not only the manifestation of the Prophet
Muhammad but also the Second Advent of Jesus, as well as Krishna for the Hindus,
among other claims. He did not announce, however, any new revelation or new law.

In 1914 a schism over succession occurred among the Aḥmadiyyah. One group that
seceded from the main body, which was headed by a son of the founder, disowned
the prophetic claims of Ghulam Ahmad and established its centre in Lahore (now in
Pakistan). The main body of the Aḥmadiyyah (known as the Qadiani, after the village of
Qadian, birthplace of the founder and the group’s first centre) evolved a separatist
organization and, after the partition of India in 1947, moved their headquarters to
Rabwah in what was then West Pakistan.
Both groups are noted for their missionary work, particularly in the West and in Africa.
Within the Muslim countries, however, there is fierce opposition to the main group
because of its claim that Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet (most Muslim sects believe in
the finality of prophethood with Muhammad) and because of its separatist organization.
Restrictions were imposed on the Aḥmadiyyah in 1974 and again in 1984 by the
Pakistani government, which declared that the group was not Muslim and prohibited
them from engaging in various Islamic activities.
Fazlur RahmanThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Islamic philosophy

The origin and inspiration of philosophy in Islam are quite different from those of
Islamic theology. Philosophy developed out of and around the nonreligious practical and
theoretical sciences, it recognized no theoretical limits other than those of human
reason itself, and it assumed that the truth found by unaided reason does not disagree
with the truth of Islam when both are properly understood. Islamic philosophy was not a
handmaid of theology. The two disciplines were related, because both followed the path
of rational inquiry and distinguished themselves from traditional religious disciplines and
from mysticism, which sought knowledge through practical, spiritual purification. Islamic
theology was Islamic in the strict sense: it confined itself within the Islamic
religious community, and it remained separate from the Christian and Jewish theologies
that developed in the same cultural context and used Arabic as a linguistic medium. No
such separation is observable in the philosophy developed in the Islamic cultural
context and written in Arabic: Muslims, Christians, and Jews participated in it and
separated themselves according to the philosophic rather than the religious doctrines
they held.
The Eastern philosophers

Background and scope of philosophical interest in Islam

The background of philosophic interest in Islam is found in the earlier phases of

theology. But its origin is found in the translation of Greek philosophic works. By the
middle of the 9th century, there were enough translations of scientific and philosophic
works from Greek, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit to show those who read them with care that
scientific and philosophic inquiry was something more than a series of disputations
based on what the theologians had called sound reason. Moreover, it became evident
that there existed a tradition of observation, calculation, and theoretical reflection that
had been pursued systematically, refined, and modified for over a millennium.

The scope of this tradition was broad: it included the study of logic, the sciences of
nature (including psychology and biology), the mathematical sciences
(including music and astronomy), metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Each of these
disciplines had a body of literature in which its principles and problems had been
investigated by Classical authors, whose positions had been, in turn, stated, discussed,
criticized, or developed by various commentators. Islamic philosophy emerged from its
theological background when Muslim thinkers began to study this foreign tradition,
became competent students of the ancient philosophers and scientists, criticized and
developed their doctrines, clarified their relevance for the questions raised by the
theologians, and showed what light they threw on the fundamental issues
of revelation, prophecy, and the divine law.
Relation to the Muʿtazilah and interpretation of theological issues

The teachings of al-Kindī

Although the first Muslim philosopher, al-Kindī, who flourished in the first half of the 9th
century, lived during the triumph of the Muʿtazilah of Baghdad and was connected with
the ʿAbbāsid caliphs who championed the Muʿtazilah and patronized the Hellenistic
sciences, there is no clear evidence that he belonged to a theological school. His
writings show him to have been a diligent student of Greek and Hellenistic authors in
philosophy and point to his familiarity with Indian arithmetic. His conscious, open, and
unashamed acknowledgment of earlier contributions to scientific inquiry was foreign to
the spirit, method, and purpose of the theologians of the time. His acquaintance with the
writings of Plato and Aristotle was still incomplete and technically inadequate. He
improved the Arabic translation of the Theology of Aristotle but made only a selective
and circumspect use of it.

Devoting most of his writings to questions of natural philosophy and mathematics, al-
Kindī was particularly concerned with the relation between corporeal things, which are
changeable, in constant flux, infinite, and as such unknowable, on the one hand, and
the permanent world of forms (spiritual or secondary substances), which are not subject
to flux yet to which human beings have no access except through things of the senses.
He insisted that a purely human knowledge of all things is possible, through the use of
various scientific devices, learning such things as mathematics and logic,
and assimilating the contributions of earlier thinkers. The existence of a “supernatural”
way to this knowledge in which all these requirements can be dispensed with was
acknowledged by al-Kindī: God may choose to impart it to his prophets by cleansing
and illuminating their souls and by giving them his aid, right guidance, and inspiration;
and they, in turn, communicate it to ordinary human beings in an admirably clear,
concise, and comprehensible style. This is the prophets’ “divine” knowledge,
characterized by a special mode of access and style of exposition. In principle,
however, this very same knowledge is accessible to human beings without divine aid,
even though “human” knowledge may lack the completeness and consummate logic of
the prophets’ divine message.

Reflection on the two kinds of knowledge—the human knowledge bequeathed by the

ancients and the revealed knowledge expressed in the Qurʾān—led al-Kindī to pose a
number of themes that became central to Islamic philosophy: the rational–
metaphorical exegesis of the Qurʾān and the Hadith; the identification of God with the
first being and the first cause; creation as the giving of being and as a kind of causation
distinct from natural causation and Neoplatonic emanation; and the immortality of the
individual soul.
The teachings of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī

The philosopher whose principal concerns, method, and opposition to authority were
inspired by the extreme Muʿtazilah was the physician Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (flourished 9th–
10th centuries). He adopted the Muʿtazilah’s atomism and was intent on developing a
rationally defensible theory of creation that would not require any change in God
or attribute to him responsibility for the imperfection and evil prevalent in the created
world. To this end, he expounded the view that there are five eternal principles—God,
Soul, prime matter, infinite, or absolute, space, and unlimited, or absolute, time—and
explained creation as the result of the unexpected and sudden turn of events
(faltah). Faltah occurred when Soul, in her ignorance, desired matter and the good God
eased her misery by allowing her to satisfy her desire and to experience the suffering of
the material world, and then gave her reason to make her realize her mistake and
deliver her from her union with matter, the cause of her suffering and of all evil. Al-Rāzī
claimed that he was a Platonist, that he disagreed with Aristotle, and that his views were
those of the Ṣābians of Harran and the Brahmans (the Hindu priestly caste).

Ismāʿīlī theologians became aware of the kinship between certain elements of his
cosmology and their own. They disputed with him during his lifetime and continued
afterward to refute his doctrines in their writings. According to their account of his
doctrines, he was totally opposed to authority in matters of knowledge, believed in the
progress of the arts and sciences, and held that all reasonable human beings are
equally able to look after their own affairs, equally inspired and able to know the truth of
what earlier teachers had taught, and equally able to improve upon it. Ismāʿīlī
theologians were incensed, in particular, by his wholesale rejection of prophecy,
particular revelation, and divine laws. They were likewise opposed to
his criticisms of religion in general as a device employed by evildoers and a kind
of tyranny over human beings that exploits their innocence and credulity, perpetuates
ignorance, and leads to conflicts and wars.

Although the fragmentary character of al-Kindī’s and al-Rāzī’s surviving philosophic

writings does not permit passing firm and independent judgment on their
accomplishments, they tend to bear out the view of later Muslim students of philosophy
that both lacked competence in the logical foundation of philosophy, were
knowledgeable in some of the natural sciences but not in metaphysics, and were unable
to narrow the gap that separated philosophy from the new religion, Islam.
The teachings of al-Fārābī

Political philosophy and the study of religion

The first philosopher to meet this challenge was al-Fārābī (flourished 9th–10th

centuries). He saw that theology and the juridical study of the law were derivative
phenomena that function within a framework set by the prophet as lawgiver and founder
of a human community. In this community, revelation defines the opinions the members
of the community must hold and the actions they must perform if they are to attain the
earthly happiness of this world and the supreme happiness of the other world.
Philosophy could not understand this framework of religion as long as it concerned itself
almost exclusively with its truth content and confined the study of practical science to
individualistic ethics and personal salvation.

In contrast to al-Kindī and al-Rāzī, al-Fārābī recast philosophy in a new

framework analogous to that of the Islamic religion. The sciences were organized within
this philosophic framework so that logic, physics, mathematics,
and metaphysics culminated in a political science whose subject matter is the
investigation of happiness and how it can be realized in cities and nations. The central
theme of this political science is the founder of a virtuous or excellent community.
Included in this theme are views concerning the supreme rulers who follow the founder,
their qualifications, and how the community must be ordered so that its members attain
happiness as citizens rather than isolated human beings. Once this new philosophical
framework was established, it became possible to conduct a philosophical investigation
of all the elements that constituted the Islamic community: the prophet-lawgiver, the
aims of the divine laws, the legislation of beliefs as well as actions, the role of the
successors to the founding legislator, the grounds of the interpretation or reform of the
law, the classification of human communities according to their doctrines in addition to
their size, and the critique of “ignorant” (pagan), “transgressing,” “falsifying,” and “erring”
communities. Philosophical cosmology, psychology, and politics were blended by al-
Fārābī into a political theology whose aim was to clarify the foundations of the Islamic
community and defend its reform in a direction that would promote scientific inquiry and
encourage philosophers to play an active role in practical affairs.
Interpretation of Plato and Aristotle

Behind this public, or exoteric, aspect of al-Fārābī’s work stood a massive body of more
properly philosophic or scientific inquiries, which established his reputation among
Muslims as the greatest philosophical authority after Aristotle, a great interpreter of the
thought of Plato and Aristotle and their commentators, and a master to whom almost all
major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a
fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome, and intricate questions of
philosophy. Continuing the tradition of the Hellenistic masters of the Athenian and
Alexandrian philosophical schools, al-Fārābī broadened the range of philosophical
inquiry and fixed its form. He paid special attention to the study of language and its
relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s logical works, he
expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and nonscientific
forms of argument and established the place of logic as an indispensable prerequisite
for philosophic inquiry. His writings on natural science exposed the foundation and
assumptions of Aristotle’s physics and dealt with the arguments of Aristotle’s
opponents, both philosophers and scientists, pagan, Christian, and Muslim.
The analogy of religion and philosophy

Al-Fārābī’s theological and political writings showed later Muslim philosophers the way
to deal with the question of the relation between philosophy and religion and presented
them with a complex set of problems that they continued to elaborate, modify, and
develop in different directions. Starting with the view that religion is analogous or similar
to philosophy, al-Fārābī argued that the idea of the true prophet-lawgiver ought to be
the same as that of the true philosopher-king. Thus, he challenged both al-Kindī’s view
that prophets and philosophers have different and independent ways to the highest truth
available to human beings and al-Rāzī’s view that philosophy is the only way to that
knowledge. That a person could combine the functions of prophecy, lawgiving,
philosophy, and kingship did not necessarily mean that these functions were identical; it
did mean, however, that they all are legitimate subjects of philosophic inquiry.
Philosophy must account for the powers, knowledge, and activities of the prophet,
lawgiver, and king, which it must distinguish from and relate to those of the philosopher.
The public, or political, function of philosophy was emphasized. Unlike Neoplatonism,
which had for long limited itself to the Platonic teaching that the function of philosophy is
to liberate the soul from the shadowy existence of the cave—in which knowledge can
only be imperfectly comprehended as shadows reflecting the light of the truth beyond
the cave (the world of senses)—al-Fārābī insisted with Plato that the philosopher must
be forced to return to the cave, learn to talk to its inhabitants in a manner they can
comprehend, and engage in actions that may improve their lot.
Impact on Ismāʿīlī theology

Although it is not always easy to know the immediate practical intentions of a

philosopher, it must be remembered that in al-Fārābī’s lifetime the fate of the Islamic
world was in the balance. The Sunni caliphate’s power hardly extended
beyond Baghdad, and it appeared quite likely that the various Shiʿi sects, especially the
Ismāʿīlīs, would finally overpower it and establish a new political order. Of all the
movements in Islamic theology, Ismāʿīlī theology was the one that was most clearly and
massively penetrated by philosophy. Yet, its Neoplatonic cosmology, revolutionary
background, antinomianism (antilegalism), and general expectation that divine laws
were about to become superfluous with the appearance of the qāʾim (the imam of the
“resurrection”) all militated against the development of a coherent political theory to
meet the practical demands of political life and present a viable practical alternative to
the Sunni caliphate. Al-Fārābī’s theologico-political writings helped point out this basic
defect of Ismāʿīlī theology. Under the Fāṭimids in Egypt (969–1171), Ismāʿīlī theology
modified its cosmology in the direction suggested by al-Fārābī, returned to the view that
the community must continue to live under the divine law, and postponed the prospect
of the abolition of divine laws and the appearance of the qāʾim to an indefinite point in
the future.
The teachings of Avicenna

The “Oriental Philosophy”

Even more indicative of al-Fārābī’s success is the fact that his writings helped produce
a philosopher of the stature of Avicenna (flourished 10th–11th centuries), whose
versatility, imagination, inventiveness, and prudence shaped philosophy into a powerful
force that gradually penetrated Islamic theology and mysticism and Persian poetry in
Eastern Islam and gave them universality and theoretical depth. His own personal
philosophic views, he said, were those of the ancient sages of Greece (including the
genuine views of Plato and Aristotle), which he had set forth in the “Oriental
Philosophy,” a book that has not survived and probably was not written or meant to be
written. They were not identical with the common Peripatetic (Aristotelian) doctrines and
were to be distinguished from the learning of his contemporaries, the Christian
“Aristotelians” of Baghdad, which he attacked as vulgar, distorted, and falsified. His
most voluminous writing, Kitāb al-shifāʾ (“The Book of Healing”), was meant to
accommodate the doctrines of other philosophers as well as hint at his own personal
views, which are elaborated elsewhere in more imaginative and allegorical forms.
Distinction between essence and existence and the doctrine of
creation

Avicenna had learned from certain hints in al-Fārābī that the exoteric teachings of Plato
regarding the forms, creation, and the immortality of individual souls were closer to
revealed doctrines than the genuine views of Aristotle, that the doctrines of Plotinus and
later Neoplatonic commentators were useful in harmonizing Aristotle’s views with
revealed doctrines, and that philosophy must accommodate itself to the divine law on
the issue of creation and of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which presupposes
some form of individual immortality. Following al-Fārābī’s lead, Avicenna initiated a full-
fledged inquiry into the question of being, in which he distinguished
between essence and existence. He argued that the fact of existence cannot be inferred
from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by
themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the
progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be due to an
agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence. To do
so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect. The universe consists
of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and responsible for
the existence of the rest of the chain below. Because an actual infinite is deemed
impossible by Avicenna, this chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly
simple and one, whose essence is its very existence, and therefore is self-sufficient and
not in need of something else to give it existence. Because its existence is
not contingent on or necessitated by something else but is necessary and eternal in
itself, it satisfies the condition of being the necessitating cause of the entire chain
that constitutes the eternal world of contingent existing things.

All creation is necessarily and eternally dependent upon God. It consists of the
intelligences, souls, and bodies of the heavenly spheres, each of which is eternal, and
the sublunary sphere, which is also eternal, undergoing a perpetual process of
generation and corruption, of the succession of form over matter, very much in the
manner described by Aristotle.
The immortality of individual souls

There is, however, a significant exception to this general rule: the human rational soul.
One can affirm the existence of one’s soul from direct consciousness of one’s self (what
one means by “I”), and one can imagine this happening even in the absence of external
objects and bodily organs. This proves, according to Avicenna, that the soul is
indivisible, immaterial, and incorruptible substance, not imprinted in matter, but created
with the body, which it uses as an instrument. Unlike other immaterial substances (the
intelligences and souls of the spheres), it is not pre-eternal but is generated, or made to
exist, at the same time as the individual body, which can receive it, is formed.
The composition, shape, and disposition of its body and the soul’s success or failure in
managing and controlling it, the formation of moral habits, and the acquisition of
knowledge all contribute to its individuality and difference from other souls. Though the
body is not resurrected after its corruption, the soul survives and retains all the
individual characteristics, perfections or imperfections, that it achieved in its earthly
existence and in this sense is rewarded or punished for its past deeds. Avicenna’s claim
that he has presented a philosophic proof for the immortality of generated (“created”)
individual souls no doubt constitutes the high point of his effort to harmonize philosophy
and religious beliefs.
Philosophy, religion, and mysticism

Having accounted for the more difficult issues of creation and the immortality of
individual souls, Avicenna proceeded to explain the faculty of prophetic knowledge (the
“sacred” intellect), revelation (imaginative representation meant to convince the
multitude and improve their earthly life), miracles, and the legal and institutional
arrangements (acts of worship and the regulation of personal and public life) through
which the divine law achieves its end. Avicenna’s explanation of almost every aspect of
Islam is pursued on the basis of extensive exegesis of the Qurʾān and the Hadith. The
primary function of religion is to assure the happiness of the many. This practical aim of
religion (which Avicenna saw in the perspective of Aristotle’s practical science) enabled
him to appreciate the political and moral functions of divine revelation and account for
its form and content. Revealed religion, however, has a subsidiary function also—that of
indicating to the few the need to pursue the kind of life and knowledge appropriate to
rare individuals endowed with special gifts. These individuals must be dominated by the
love of God to facilitate the achievement of the highest knowledge. In many places
Avicenna appears to identify these individuals with the mystics. The identification of the
philosopher as a kind of mystic conveyed a new image of the philosopher as a member
of the religious community who is distinguished from his coreligionists by his
otherworldliness, dedicated to the inner truth of religion, and consumed by the love of
God.

Avicenna’s allegorical and mystical writings are usually called “esoteric” in the sense
that they contain his personal views cast in an imaginative, symbolic form. The esoteric
works must, then, be interpreted. Their interpretation must move away from the explicit
doctrines contained in “exoteric” works such as the Shifāʾ and recover “the unmixed and
uncorrupted truth” set forth in the “Oriental Philosophy”—the existence of which, as
noted above, is spurious. This dilemma has made interpretation both difficult and
rewarding for Muslim philosophers and modern scholars alike.
The Western philosophers

Background and characteristics of the Western Muslim philosophical

tradition

Andalusia (in Spain) and western North Africa contributed little of substance to

Islamic theology and philosophy until the 12th century. Legal strictures against the study
of philosophy were more effective there than in the East. Scientific interest was
channelled into medicine, pharmacology, mathematics, astronomy, and logic. More
general questions of physics and metaphysics were treated sparingly and in symbols,
hints, and allegories. By the 12th century, however, the writings of al-Fārābī, Avicenna,
and al-Ghazālī had found their way to the West. A philosophical tradition emerged,
based primarily on the study of al-Fārābī. It was critical of Avicenna’s
philosophic innovations and not convinced that al-Ghazālī’s critique of Avicenna
touched philosophy as such, and it refused to acknowledge the position assigned by
both to mysticism. The survival of philosophy in the West required
extreme prudence, emphasis on its scientific character, abstention from meddling in
political or religious matters, and abandonment of the hope of effecting extensive
doctrinal or institutional reform.
The teachings of Ibn Bājjah

Theoretical science and intuitive knowledge

Ibn Bājjah (died 1138) initiated this tradition with a radical interpretation of al-Fārābī’s
political philosophy that emphasized the virtues of the perfect but nonexistent city and
the vices prevalent in all existing cities. He concluded that the philosopher must order
his own life as a solitary individual, shun the company of nonphilosophers, reject their
opinions and ways of life, and concentrate on reaching his own final goal by pursuing
the theoretical sciences and achieving intuitive knowledge through contact with the
Active Intelligence. The multitude live in a dark cave and see only dim shadows. Their
ways of life and their imaginings and beliefs consist of layers of darkness that cannot be
known through reason alone. Therefore, the divine law has been revealed to enable
human beings to know this dark region. The philosopher’s duty is to seek the light of the
sun (the intellect). To do so, he must leave the cave, see all colours as they truly are
and see light itself, and finally become transformed into that light. The end, then, is
contact with Intelligence, not with something that transcends Intelligence, as taught by
Plotinus, Ismāʿīlism, and mysticism. Ibn Bājjah criticized the latter as the way of
imagination, motivated by desire, and aiming at pleasure. Philosophy, he claimed, is the
only way to the truly blessed state, which can be achieved only by going through
theoretical science, even though it is higher than theoretical science.
Unconcern of philosophy with reform

Ibn Bājjah’s cryptic style and the unfinished form in which he left most of his writings
tend to highlight his departures from al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Unlike al-Fārābī, he is
silent about the philosopher’s duty to return to the cave and partake of the life of the
city. He appears to argue that the aim of philosophy is attainable independently from the
philosopher’s concern with the best city and is to be achieved in solitude or, at most, in
comradeship with philosophic souls. Unlike Avicenna, who prepared the way for him by
clearly distinguishing between theoretical and practical science, Ibn Bājjah is concerned
with practical science only insofar as it is relevant to the life of the philosopher. He
is contemptuous of allegories and imaginative representations of philosophic
knowledge, silent about theology, and shows no concern with improving the multitude’s
opinions and way of life.
The teachings of Ibn Ṭufayl

The philosopher as a solitary individual

In his philosophic story Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, Son of Wakeful”), the philosopher Ibn

Ṭufayl (died 1185) fills gaps in the work of his predecessor Ibn Bājjah. The story
communicates the secrets of Avicenna’s “Oriental Philosophy” as experienced by a
solitary hero who grows up on a deserted island, learns about the things around him,
acquires knowledge of the natural universe (including the heavenly bodies), and
achieves the state of “annihilation” (fanāʾ) of the self in the divine reality. This is the
apparent and traditional secret of the “Oriental Philosophy.” But the hero’s wisdom is
still incomplete, for he knows nothing about other human beings, their way of life, or
their laws. When he chances to meet one of them—a member of a
religious community inhabiting a neighbouring island, who is inclined to reflect on the
divine law and seek its inner, spiritual meanings and who has abandoned the society of
his fellow human beings to devote himself to solitary meditation and worship—he does
not at first recognize that he is a human being like himself, cannot communicate with
him, and frightens him by his wild aspect. After learning about the doctrines and acts
of worship of the religious community, he understands them as alluding to and agreeing
with the truth that he had learned by his own unaided effort, and he goes as far as
admitting the validity of the religion and the truthfulness of the prophet who gave it. He
cannot understand, however, why the Prophet Muhammad communicated the truth by
way of allusions, examples, and corporeal representations or why religion permits
human beings to devote much time and effort to practical, worldly things.
Concern for reform
His ignorance of the nature of most people and his compassion for them make the
solitary hero insist on becoming their saviour. He persuades his companion to take him
to his coreligionists and help him convert them to the naked truth by propagating among
them “the secrets of wisdom.” His education is completed when he fails in his
endeavour. He learns the limits beyond which the multitude cannot ascend without
becoming confused and unhappy. He also learns the wisdom of the divine lawgiver in
addressing them in the way they can understand, enabling them to achieve limited ends
through doctrines and actions suited to their abilities. The story ends with the hero
taking leave of these people after apologizing to them for what he did and confessing
that he is now fully convinced that they should not change their ways but remain
attached to the literal sense of the divine law and obey its demands. He returns to his
own island to continue his former solitary existence.
The hidden secret of Avicenna’s “Oriental Philosophy”

The hidden secret of Avicenna’s “Oriental Philosophy” appears, then, to be that the
philosopher must return to the cave, educate himself in the ways of nonphilosophers,
and understand the incompatibility between philosophical life and the life of the
multitude, which must be governed by religion and divine laws. Otherwise, his ignorance
will lead him to actions dangerous to the well-being of both the community and
philosophy. Because Ibn Ṭufayl’s hero had grown up as a solitary human being, he
lacks the kind of wisdom that could have enabled him to pursue philosophy in a
religious community and be useful to such a community. Neither the conversion of the
community to philosophy nor the philosopher’s solitary life is a viable alternative.

Q.2 What are the circumstances which led to the introduction of Martial Law in Punjab in
1919? Discuss in detail.

Answer:- Martial Law and Massacre:

Violence and the Limit In Amritsar, 13 April 1919 was a day marked by the heat and dust
characteristic of the Punjab at that time of the year. General Dyer, who had been in the
city since 11 April, spent the morning marching round the city, reading a proclamation
forbidding the residents from leaving the city or gathering in processions or assemblies.
By 1:00 P.M., however, finding the weather too hot, he returned to his headquarters.
Soon after, he received reports that an alternative procession during the morning was
announcing a gathering at Jallianwala Bagh at 4:30 P.M. The city was observing the
fourth consecutive day of Hartal or general strike, and there were funerals being held for
people shot by the military on 10 April. Adding to this tension was the fact that many
people had come into the city from out of town, as it was the day of the Baisakhi festival
—the Hindu New Year. It is estimated that by the afternoon some twenty thousand
people had assembled in the bagh, some in open defiance of General Dyer’s
proclamation, but others merely in the spirit of the festival, as the bagh was adjacent to
the holy Golden Temple. By 4:00 P.M. General Dyer received information that the
meeting was being held and immediately set out with his troops and armored vehicles.1
Jallianwala Bagh was actually not a park or garden at all, but an unused ground in the
shape of an irregular rectangle about 250 yards long and 200 yards wide. Houses built
with their back walls to the area had effectively enclosed it on three sides. The fourth
side had a boundary wall of around 5 feet, with a few narrow lanes serving as exits.2
Unable to get his armored cars through these lanes, General Dyer approached the
ground on foot and stationed his troops, twenty-five on either side of him. Then without
any warning he opened fire. In the 99 panic that followed, some people lay on the
ground to avoid the bullets but were trampled as others rushed toward the exits. As the
crowd thickened around such points, General Dyer directed the fire at them. The firing
lasted for ten to fifteen minutes, and a total of 1,650 rounds of ammunition were used.
Only after nearly running out of ammunition did General Dyer cease firing and withdraw,
without determining the casualties or providing for any medical assistance. The official
estimate later on was that 379 people had been killed, with thousands more seriously
injured.3 This was the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre, an incident that was
neither the beginning nor the end of martial law, but that came to dominate the debate
around the “disturbances in the Punjab.”4 “Amritsar” became a signal event with the
years, and one that was seen as contributing to the end of British rule in India, or worse,
as Alfred Draper’s book Amritsar: The Massacre That Ended the Raj suggests. 5 The
official view was to stress the exceptionality of the event, to concentrate on Dyer’s “bad
judgement” as his alone. Winston Churchill during the Commons debate on Dyer’s
actions somewhat unbelievably declared it to be “without precedent or parallel in the
modern history of the British Empire . . . an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an
event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.”6 The official view, which stressed
the singularity of the event, insisted that what made it without parallel was not only the
large number of people killed—and in this they were right—but also the flawed logic with
which Dyer explained his actions. At the center of this charge was a much quoted
statement from the report General Dyer made to his division command on 25 August
1919. I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed, and I consider this is the
least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect
it was my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand,
the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of
merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a
military point of view not only on those present, but more especially throughout the
Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity.7 100 The Jurisprudence of
Emergency It is a remarkable and revealing statement that we shall explicate at some
length later on. To the Majority of the Hunter Committee, however, such an explanation
represented a “mistaken conception of duty.” It may have been necessary, they argued,
to fire upon the crowd to get it to disperse, “but continued firing upon that crowd cannot
be justified because of the effect such firing may have upon people in other places.”8 In
short, much of the immediate reaction to Dyer’s violent response was to insist that it had
gone beyond the province and purpose of martial law. To follow such an insistence,
however, is only to push the issue back one stage, where one encounters the question,
What, after all, is martial law? In this chapter, I shall attempt to answer this question in
various ways. In the first part, I examine the issue from a more historicist perspective,
tracking the origins and change in the meaning of this legal category, from riots in
eighteenth-century Britain to nineteenth-century invocations of martial law in the
colonies. Later, however, I try to extrapolate the deeper relation between law and
violence that martial law demonstrates by returning to the exemplary instance of the
Amritsar massacre through a reading of Walter Benjamin. The purpose of such a broad
approach, particularly the comparison of colonial martial law to responses to domestic
disturbances in Britain, is twofold. First, it allows us to consider the contradictions in a
colonial martial law as examples of the problematic relation between law and violence in
Western legal theory. The problem of placing martial law into a contained definition—
and I hope to show that this is truly a problem—does not exist outside the problematic
of the moment of exception within a liberal-constitutional system. Second, such a
comparative approach allows us to specify the effects of racial difference on legal
constructs. Thus, as treated here, emergency covers the general situation of
jurisprudential doubt that exists on a continuum from military aid to civil power to the
more intensified manifestation of martial law. This is not to suggest that a martial law
response to emergency is identical to a response to a riot—indeed, many commentators
on incidents of colonial martial law charged that the situation was misunderstood
because it was compared to a “mere” riot—but it is to argue that the connections must
be substantiated in order that the differences and their ideological consequences can be
specified with some accuracy. Martial Law and Massacre 101 Thus, for example, the
significance of twentieth-century justifications for colonial martial law that emphasize
local statutes can only be realized if they are read as a movement away from earlier
justifications by unwritten prerogative. From Domestic Riots to Colonial Rebellions As
we approach the definition of martial law, it may be noted at the outset that the category
of martial law occupies a profoundly ambiguous place in jurisprudential writing. It is
considered to be both a properly legal question and a marker of the law’s absence. On
the one hand, there is recognition of the inevitability of martial law in certain situations.
Here it represents the force of the state at its purest, the necessary condition if both law
and state are to survive. On the other hand, we find an insistence on rules that
determine the moment of emergency—an insistence that the law shall appear at its own
vanishing point to determine the rules of its own failure. Martial law, like other responses
to emergency, simply rested not on the authorization of ordinary law but on the legal
maxim Salus populi suprema est lex (safety of the people is the supreme law). Notice
how in such a formulation martial law is the manifestation of both the highest law and of
no law at all. But while martial law is based on necessity, there are rules that can govern
the perception of what constitutes necessity, and these rules are historically variable. It
becomes possible, thus, to approach martial law as a changing cognitive question. This
is why the legal history of martial law matters. Within English legal history, it is even
more difficult to fix the role of martial law. Although the issue of military intervention in
civil politics—specifically the aid of the army to civil power in riots and rebellions—
repeatedly arose from the late eighteenth century onward, the category of martial law
was not applied to Great Britain. This should not lead one to conclude, as Leon
Radzinowicz does, “that the expression martial law is not known to English law.”9
Rather, both military and martial law as names and jurisdictions derived from the old
institution of the Court of Constable and Marshall, itself an archaism by the late
eighteenth century. Indeed, for Holdsworth, this common genealogy helped explain the
persistent confusions over what differentiated martial law from the rules of the army.10
Within English jurisprudence, martial law could refer both to the Crown’s right to ordain
articles of 102 The Jurisprudence of Emergency war for army discipline (a prerogative
wholly absorbed later by statutory Mutiny Acts) and to the suspension of ordinary law by
a military commander in moments of necessity. Indeed, the notion of necessity provides
the main anchor in this entire juristic questioning. The maxim of Salus populi suprema
est lex is the one “unbroken sequence of authority from the earliest Year Books.”11
Vigorously debated under the Stuarts and limited to wartime emergencies by the
Petition of Right,12 martial law as the concession of civil power to military authorities
over civilians, however, fell into domestic disuse from the Restoration onward. Yet the
questions that arose upon its return in the colonies in the mid–nineteenth century were
largely familiar, similar as they were to the earlier debates over the proper relation of
military to civil power in moments of unrest. Despite the place of martial law in English
history, and the legal affinity between martial law and responses to domestic riots, there
was a persistent tendency in English jurisprudence to banish martial law from the
confines of law proper. Thus we have the Duke of Wellington’s famous definition of
martial law as “neither more nor less than the will of the general who commands the
army. In fact, martial law means no law at all.”13 If throughout the nineteenth century
the maxim of Salus populi suprema est lex provided a rationale for acts of necessity and
emergency, then another maxim, inter arma silent leges, explained the lack of a judicial
or constitutional authority for those acts— explained, in other words, why in war the law
was simply silent. Acts of emergency may happen, but there could be no room for a
prior legal authority to military adjudication in an ideology of a rule of law. As I
mentioned in the introduction, no one is more emphatic about this than Dicey, who
insisted that the British Constitution was distinguished by the fact that it did not cover
any sense of a state of siege.14 Dicey distinguishes between two senses in which
martial law is used in English jurisprudence: as what is “employed as a name for the
common law right of the Crown and its servants to repel force by force in the case of an
invasion, insurrection, riot or generally of any violent resistance to the law”15 and as
what is used to label the condition where military tribunals supersede the civil
judicature.16 It is only the first definition, Dicey insists, that is acceptable to English law.
The military may be responsible for a whole area under martial law but still does not
possess the right to capital punishment. Citing Wolf Tone’s case (1798), Martial Law and
Massacre 103 Dicey points out that the power of execution can only rest in the civil
courts.17 Even, however, as he effectively banishes a form of martial law that had been
used in the colonies in his own lifetime, Dicey provides us with a valuable clue: in order
to understand the ideological and jurisprudential significance of martial law, we must
read it within the general prerogative of the Crown to resort to violence to check a
challenge to its authority—read it, in other words, in connection with the form of
response to domestic riots and rebellions. With regard to the response to domestic riots,
in addition to the accepted prerogative of the Crown to repel force by force, there
existed the common law responsibility of all to protect and prevent the property of His
Majesty’s subjects from destruction. This responsibility traced back to the institution of
the posse comitatus. Indeed, for Blackstone, the institution of the posse revealed that
“our antient law, previous to the modern riot act, seems pretty well to have guarded
against any violent breach of the public peace.”18 Failure to join the posse comitatus
when required was itself an offense against the king’s prerogative. While the posse
comitatus was invoked into the nineteenth century,19 increasingly the need for
disciplined force and the blatant lack of neutrality of those who came out against the
rioters (in the agricultural uprisings, for example, it was most often landlords) led to a
more exclusive utilization of the army as an aid to civil power.20 The specific legal
questions that arose out of such interventions are remarkably similar to those later on
concerning the conduct of authorities under martial law: essentially such questions
came down to the correct amount of force that could and should be employed in
moments of unrest. In England, trying to determine this quantum produced some signal
instances in which magistrates and military were blamed for doing too little or too much.
The Act of 1 Geo. I, c. 5, commonly known as the Riot Act, was the official and statutory
response to unlawful assemblies.21 But as Brackley Kennet, the Lord Mayor of London
during the Gordon riots of 1781, discovered, its particular provisions and requirements
were far from clear. In Rex v. Kennet, Lord Mansfield stated that a failure such as
Kennet’s to read the Riot Act and to call out the military, no matter how pure the
intention to shield innocent people from accidental death, was prima facie a criminal
neglect of duty. Moreover, the hour window provided for in the act did not prevent the
instant use of force if so 104 The Jurisprudence of Emergency required.22 How much
force would be appropriate, however, was left an open and vexing question. Half a
century later, the courts attempted to formulate an answer in the case against another
magistrate, Charles Pinney, the mayor of Bristol during the riots of 1831. In Rex v.
Pinney, Justice Littledale set down a chilling exactitude as the correct response: Now a
person, whether a magistrate, or peace officer, who has the duty of suppressing a riot,
is placed in a very difficult situation, for if, by his acts, he causes death, he is liable to be
indicted for murder or manslaughter, and if he does not act, he is liable to an indictment
on an information for neglect; he is, therefore, bound to hit the precise line of his duty.23
This call for a precision of force was to be repeated and used as a standard not only in
the instances of other riots but also as the extant law in the infamous case of Governor
Eyre and martial law in Jamaica.24 The military, in fact, fared no better than the
magistrates, caught between protecting the state’s interest through the use of violence,
on the one hand, and protecting the state’s legitimacy and legality by not using too
much force, on the other. In 1812, Lord Mansfield ruled that the soldier during a moment
of unrest was legally no different than an ordinary citizen, subject to no special
exemption.25 The soldier was, however, subject to court-martial for disobeying orders.
Nonetheless, it remained a tacit assumption in English law that an order if illegal was no
defense later on. No one objected to this situation more vehemently than Sir Charles
Napier, who insisted that it in effect left the soldier thinking “shall I be shot for
forbearance by a Court-Martial, or hanged for over-zeal by a jury.”26 For Napier, part of
the problem lay in the ease with which magistrates called out the army and then refused
to let them take action. Somewhat excitedly, he suggested that the army only be called
out when firing had become inevitable and not for a relatively minor unrest. “I would
rather,” he declared in an interesting moment the significance of which will emerge later,
“see a few mischevious men make a slight breach in the law . . . than myself break the
law to pieces by firing on the people.”27 He charged the ministers with leaving things
undefined so as to have an officer to “sacrifice” should circumstances require it.28 It had
been hoped that Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 bill to establish a metMartial Law and Massacre
105 ropolitan police would eventually relieve the army from intervening in civil disorders.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, the army was called in to aid the
civil authorities in Yorkshire in 1893, where riots in the coalfields “revealed that
substantial disorders could still exhaust the resources of the police with alarming speed
[and] that the dependence of the authorities on the army had diminished but had not
disappeared.”29 Constitutional theory as a discourse was much slower to respond to
these instances than the army, which speedily answered further “invitations” from the
civil authorities in Belfast in 1907 and Dublin in 1914. Throughout these instances, the
notion that the military had to “hit the precise line” between too little and too much force
proved to be less than handy in the exigencies of the moment. A Parliamentary Select
Committee was constituted after Belfast in 1908 in order to create some ground rules
for future situations. Only then was it fully realized that in terms of legal theory,
tabulating the conditions of emergency intervention was an even more anxious task. In
an answer particularly telling for later discussions of martial law, Richard Haldane, the
Liberal secretary of state for war, insisted that “the judges have laid down, over and over
again, that a man is on the verge of two precipices, and has to get along, and he does
get along.” When asked if it was possible to draw up specific regulations that would
prevent the soldier from falling, Haldane replied, “If you do you will make the law go
over the precipices.”30 It is this anxiety, this notion that a state of emergency not only
requires a special law but threatens something fundamental about law in general that
we must try to explicate. Even though there is a difference between a colonial martial
law and responses to domestic unrest, as the former suspends the entire operation of
ordinary law in a given territory while the latter still works within ordinary law (although it
must be noted that even this difference was not agreed upon), the legal mode is quite
similar.31 In both cases a state of necessity is the initial justification, a post facto
indemnification is often the result, and an impossible demand for a precision of force
regulates the authority. This is, of course, why judges attempting to determine an abuse
of authority under a colonial martial law could turn to domestic cases following riots as a
legal guide. But beyond these specific connections, the responses to domestic unrest
and martial law show a commonality in their discursive revelation of the law’s
ambivalent relation to vio106 The Jurisprudence of Emergency lence—both the specific
act of violence and the general effect produced by it. Because a given act of violence
contains no integral difference whether executed by those under legal authority or by
those set against it, the law in resorting to violence, a material act of killing, produces an
intensified need for the external signature of legality in order to distinguish the two.
Indeed, it is this identity between the force within law and that without that produces a
situation whereby the greater the need for an immediate use of force outside the
ordinary protocols of legal procedure, the greater the need for that very regulative
procedure. The effect of a generalized situation of violence thus becomes a threat not to
this or that property or individual right but to the law itself. As Walter Benjamin once
noted, the law’s fear of such violence is different from its fear of crime. Crime is a
transgression against the law that may be checked by it. A more general unrest
threatens not so much to transgress the law as to set up an alternative logic and
authority to it.32 I will later return to this issue of generalized violence and emergency,
but here should point out that such a perception is not limited to a more abstract level of
theorizing. Here is Lord C. J. Tindal during the Bristol charge: Each individual breach of
the law, tends to counteract and destroy this its primary use and object, yet do general
risings and tumultuous meetings of the people in a more especial manner produce this
effect, not only removing all security, both from the persons and property of men, but for
the time putting down the law itself, and daring to usurp its place.33 Thus, in the British
case martial law must not be seen as an issue only in colonial territories, nor as one that
did not disturb the liberal arrangements of the metropole. While it is true that martial law
was proclaimed only in colonial areas, its source remained the common law of England.
And it is not entirely axiomatic that the jurisprudential reticence surrounding emergency
had to do with the English social and political animus toward state power. In any case,
recent scholarship has shown that that animus may have been seriously misunderstood
by historians.34 While Charles Townshend, whose comprehensive work on civil
emergency provides much of the historiography on the subject, Martial Law and
Massacre 107 is correct in noticing that “in Britain . . . unlike the German Notrecht, the
claim of necessity has always had to struggle to be accepted,” he may be too hasty in
ascribing the motive for that to resistance toward a large state.35 As John Brewer has
argued, the hesitation over wide executive powers produced an ideology of legitimacy
that in fact produced a “military-fiscal juggernaut” of a state. Additionally, the claim of
necessity and the legal condition of emergency itself prove historically variable, and it is
an attention to this variability that may loosen the unchanging postures of state. In the
colonies martial law was frequently resorted to throughout the nineteenth century:
Barbados in 1805 and 1816; Demerera in 1823; Jamaica in 1831–32 and 1865; Canada
in 1837–38; Ceylon in 1817 and 1848; Cephalonia in 1848; Cape of Good Hope in 1834
and 1849–51; and the Island of St. Vincent in 1863.36 All of these instances, particularly
those of Demerera in 1823, Ceylon in 1848, and Jamaica in 1865, produced debate,
controversy, and an effort at justification. Thus we find no shortage of documentary
material with which to answer our question of what is martial law. The approach by
which such an answer may be achieved, however, is more problematic. As we have
already noted with regard to domestic unrest, the logic of necessity is deeply embedded
in the rhetorical structure of a liberal-constitutional system’s response to emergency.
This axiomatic condition is so massive that to question martial law frontally, to ask
directly why it is needed, is to produce tautologies. Martial law, after all, is the last resort
when all order has broken down. Under the imminent threat of collapse and chaos, the
normative structure of the constitution is obviously suspended. Indeed, this rhetorical
armor is what has precisely precluded a proper critique of martial law, for its origins are
always already as contingent as they are axiomatic. The English constitutional authority
before Dicey, Henry Hallam, conceded as much and was quoted by Eyre’s supporters in
the Jamaica case: “there may indeed be times of pressing danger, when the
conservation of all demands the sacrifice of the legal rights of a few.”37 To discover the
full significance of martial law, then, we have to follow through on the question asked of
it in English constitutional theory itself: When is the moment of necessity? More useful
for disclosing the ambivalent connections between law, violence, and the state, in short,
for disclosing the constitutive conditions of legality itself, is to ask, 108 The
Jurisprudence of Emergency Where does martial law come from? When does it become
necessary, and what does it hope to achieve? We can clarify this question further by
noting two separate but related issues that will map our inquiry. First, the legal issue
relates to the introduction of martial law and involves the changing rules for defining
“necessity,” the move between justifications by prerogative or statute, the relation
between colonial legislatures and the imperial Parliament, and so on. Second, there is
what may be called the cognitive-political issue, which involves general questions of the
law’s relation to violence, and the object of martial law and its use of force. Indeed, the
rhetorical structure of martial law begins to crumble the moment one asks for some
exactness to the description of “pressing danger.” The category “necessity” is itself a
temporal condition. That is, it must be represented as an interruption in the otherwise
smooth functioning of lawful politics. Only its minute by minute narrative, its always so
closely anticipated ending, can make legitimate the exercise of violence. Thus Lord
Brougham during the Demerera debate in 1823 severely qualified the explanation of
necessity: “It would be the worst of all conceivable grievances—it would be a calamity
unspeakable—if the whole law and constitution of England were suspended one hour
longer than the most imperious necessity demanded.”38 And Sir James Mackintosh, in
that same debate, somewhat unwittingly revealed the ideological stakes involved in
such a calamity: “if it survives the necessity on which alone it rests for a single minute, it
becomes a mere exercise of lawless violence.”39 What keeps the line between very
similar acts of violence intact here is a correct cognition of necessity. And it is the
particular burden placed on this category of necessity that allows us to make a specific
distinction between the domestic situation and the colonies. In those colonies where a
social situation of racial difference existed, the legal definition of necessity would prove
more varied and vexing. Here the ideological stakes in emergency would be more
explicit. This was the singular lesson of the controversy over Governor Eyre and the
events in Morant Bay, Jamaica, in 1865. The narrative of those events and their
aftereffects in England is by now familiar and somewhat settled.40 We may briefly
reconstruct the story, highlighting the legal issues. Prior to October 1865, the situation in
Jamaica had been tense, with increasing disputes between blacks and whites over rent.
The situation Martial Law and Massacre 109 was at least partly exacerbated by the
revolutionary promptings of Paul Bogle, a black landowner in St. Thomas in the east,
and George William Gordon, a prominent mulatto, and a member of the Jamaica House
of Assembly. On 12 October a protest outside the courthouse in Morant Bay turned
violent, and a number of people were killed. Governor Eyre, himself suspicious of black
intentions, and responding to white fears of a black conspiracy to expel all whites from
the island, summoned the Council of War to declare martial law.41 By the provisions of
a recent local act (9 Vict., c. 35), martial law could only be declared “by the opinion and
advice of a Council of War, as aforesaid; and at the end of thirty days from the time of
such Martial Law being declared, it shall ipso facto determine.”42 The governor together
with the Council of War proclaimed martial law on 13 October for all of the county of
Surrey except Kingston. Martial law remained in force for its full statutory limit, and the
reprisals against the resisters seem to have been extremely violent: even by the official
account of the Royal Commission appointed to investigate in January 1866, 439 people
were put to death, either by being shot on the spot or hanged after court-martial, 600
men and women were publicly flogged, and over 1,000 cottages were burned down.43
As news of these punishments started reaching London, an immense controversy
erupted. In December 1865, the Jamaica Committee was formed by a number of
prominent public figures, including John Stuart Mill, Charles Buxton, John Bright,
Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley, in order to pressure the government to inquire into
the reports. Ultimately, however, the committee focused its efforts not on the general
incidents of troop atrocities, but on the specific issue of the execution of Gordon. In a
meeting of the committee in July 1866, John Stuart Mill declared that “the objects of this
committee are simply to ascertain whether there exists in this country any means for
making a British functionary responsible for blood unlawfully shed, and whether that be
murder or not.”44 In response, by August 1866 an Eyre Defense Committee was
formed, with Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, and Tennyson among others as members. The
legality of the proceedings against Gordon, even by the looser standards of emergency
rule, certainly seems to have been suspect. While Gordon had been responsible for a
number of inflammatory statements prior to the outbreak, he was not in Morant Bay
when the 110 The Jurisprudence of Emergency violence started but was staying in
Kingston, a town exempted from the jurisdiction of martial law. Eyre, however, arrested
Gordon on 17 October and brought him over to Morant Bay for a trial under a military
tribunal. Accordingly, on 21 October, Brigadier Nelson put together a tribunal of some
very junior officers with Lieutenant Brand as its president, and the tribunal found Gordon
guilty and sentenced him to death.45 The proceeding, however, violated a number of
basic judicial rules. Nelson had put together two charges against Gordon on the basis of
some documents and affidavits: high treason and complicity with certain rebels. Capital
punishment for an action in which there was no direct involvement, and based on
circumstantial evidence at best, may have been excessive. Even more problematic was
the fact that Gordon was forcibly brought into the jurisdiction of martial law. On the
morning of 23 October, however, Gordon was executed. Such an outcome was a
substantial circumvention of a procedural legality. More important, it could not even be
squared with an English doctrine of necessity. Gordon was not an insurgent, imminently
involved in violence against the state at the moment of his execution. The justification
for martial law that rested on the assertion that rebels essentially became soldiers and
thus forfeited the claim to a civil legal response thus could not immediately be applied in
this case. Even Geoffrey Dutton, in his pro-Eyre account, is forced to concede that
Gordon was “morally guilty and legally innocent.”46 What would then be needed, as I
indicated earlier, was an altogether different conceptualization of necessity, one that
highlighted the social situation of a colony with a racially distinct conquering class. Such
a conceptualization, however, was not without ideological consequences. Specifically, it
would create a split between the legal identity of the metropole and the colony. As we
have already seen, English colonialism had long recognized that it could not bring
English law wholesale to the colonies, that it would have to recognize cultural and social
differences. It had, however, hoped to resolve these differences by positing an essential
legal identity between metropole and colony at the constitutional level, particularly
through the assertion of a single form of procedure and guarantee. Emergency,
however, made sociological differences intervene in this legal-constitutional identity. We
can explicate this argument by reading the trials in England that followed the incident of
martial law in Jamaica. Two separate efforts Martial Law and Massacre 111 were made
to indict those involved in the Gordon case in front of a grand jury, both of which were
unsuccessful: the first against Brigadier Nelson and the president of the court-martial
that tried Gordon, Lieutenant Brand, in 1867; and the second against Eyre himself in
1868. In both cases the judges—Lord C. J. Cockburn in the case against Nelson and
Brand, and Justice Blackburn in the Eyre case—had to determine the law as it applied
to the issue of martial law in order to give instructions to the jury, which led to a rare and
public disagreement between two of England’s most prominent jurists. Regina vs.
Nelson and Brand came up before Sir Alexander Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice, at the
Old Bailey in 1867.47 Cockburn, who took more than six hours to persuade the jury to
find a bill against the two, rejected the argument that martial law meant no more than
the will of its administrators responding to necessity. No such force, he argued, resided
in any servant of the Crown since the Petition of Right, and such force was deeply
inimical to all declared law. Cockburn began his charge by reiterating the circumstances
of the outbreak of violence. These, he suggested, warranted emergency action. What
was unwarranted, according to him, was the prolonged continuation of martial law, when
in fact the rebellion had immediately collapsed upon the arrival of troops. Since Jamaica
was a settled and not a conquered colony, which meant that English common law had
been brought to it by the settlers, the standard of emergency would have to be that of
English common law: the only authorized force, thus, would be against insurgents in the
act of imminent violence. The continuation of martial law and the execution of Gordon
after such violence had been suppressed would, according to Cockburn, presumably be
illegal. For Finlason, a contemporary jurist, absolutely prolific in his coverage of the
Jamaica case and in his support for Eyre,48 the charge of the Lord Chief Justice
entirely missed the crucial racial dimension of the situation. The fact that the ratio of the
black population to the whites was 450,000 to 13,000, and that the whites feared a
planned conspiracy to expel or kill them, meant for Finlason that the response to the
rebellion had to look beyond the imminent violence.49 The Lord Chief Justice had,
according to Finlason, made the mistake “that he looked only to the outbreak, and forgot
the rebellion of which it was the outbreak. In other words, he was thinking of a riot or a
casual revolt.”50 This is an interesting twist on the connection we have already noted
between the 112 The Jurisprudence of Emergency legal understanding of responses to
domestic riots and colonial martial law. Finlason’s argument consists of denying that
connection, of insisting that a common law understanding of necessity could not be
stretched to cover the actual necessity of a colonial emergency. And at each step of his
argument, it is race that undermines the legal identity between metropole and colony.
The English common law as it existed in Jamaica, according to Finlason, was meant for
English-born subjects and their descendents and not for Africans. Sir Alexander
Cockburn had thus “fallen into” the fallacy of the counsel for the prosecution, in
presuming “that because the common law was carried to Jamaica by the English
settlers as their birthright, therefore it precluded martial law against the Africans, except
when allowed by the common law here.”51 For Finlason, what had resulted in Jamaica
was not the common law version of emergency at all, but a true martial law responding
to a different standard of necessity.52 To object to a deterrent measure, such as the
summary execution of Gordon, beyond the incidence of immediate violence, was to
presume “not only legal, but actual and social identity between this country and the
colony.”53 Finlason’s criticism of the chief justice’s charge ends then with an
explanation of dizzying circularity: He utterly failed to realise the danger of the rebellion,
and therefore he of course failed to recognise the necessity for deterrent measures, of
which the necessity could only be recognised by realising the danger, and without
realising which severities would easily appear to have been cruelties.54 Martial law
appears here as a deeply cognitive problem. We can now recognize the anxiety over
the slippage between the same act of violence as it can appear within the authority of
the law and opposed to it, so that an excessive cruelty can easily be mistaken for a
warranted severity. Necessity is the legal category of a correct cognition—nothing new
there—but what Finlason discloses with a startling simplicity is that, unlike some other
legal rules, necessity cannot avoid the explicit recognition of the sociological, and in this
case of the racial. What Finlason discloses, in other words, is the fact that the authority
for martial law would have to be found not in the self-regulating discourses of legality
but in the unspoken and violent origin of the state. Martial Law and Massacre 113 For
colonial ideology, however, to concede to Finlason’s assertion would be to posit a
separate legal standard for segments of the population that were, after all, “Her
Majesty’s Subjects.” To insist, as Finlason had done, that the English common law
standard of necessity was only applicable to English subjects and their descendents,
but not to Africans, was to raise the logical extension of that assertion: that martial law
of the Jamaican variety could be applied to Ireland. This connection was not lost on Irish
liberals in Parliament, whose objection to it even Finlason had to notice: As an Irishman,
he [Major O’Reilly] said the subject had a vital and thrilling interest. It touched him and
his countrymen more than it touched England and Englishmen. To them it was a vague
tradition of the past; but to Irishmen, almost within the memory of living men, it had been
a bloody and cruel reality, and even within his lifetime it had been clamoured for by
those who ought to have known better.55 Like the earlier questions of an absolute
sovereignty for the colonies, martial law could not be exclusively situated in the colonial
realm; its ideological consequences would inevitably return to Britain itself. The juries
refused to find a “true bill” in both proceedings. For John Stuart Mill, “it was clear that to
bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed
against Negroes and mulattoes was not a popular proceeding with the English middle
classes.”56 In other words, to the philosopher of liberalism, the racialism that a colonial
emergency made explicit equally barred an effective check on the authority of the state.
Carlyle’s critique, on the other hand, focused on the necessarily violent underpinnings of
even a liberal state. In Regina v. Nelson and Brand, Sir Alexander Cockburn had taken
six hours to read his charge to the jury. When the grand jury, however, refused to indict,
Carlyle took it upon himself to explain why: Nobody answers this remarkable Lord Chief
Justice, “Lordship, if you were to speak for six hundred years, instead of six hours, you
would only prove the more to us that, unwritten if you will, but real and fundamental,
anterior to all laws and first making written laws possible, there must have been, and is,
and will be, coeval with 114 The Jurisprudence of Emergency Human Society, from its
beginnings to its ultimate end, an actual Martial Law, of more validity than any other law
whatsoever. Lordship, if there is no written law that three and three shall be six, do you
wonder at the Statute Book for that omission.”57 Even as he dismisses them under the
inexorable logic of an original sovereign might, Carlyle neatly catches the enduring
concerns of jurisprudence: the origin of legal authority and lawfulness, and the related
question of the cognitive conditions for distinguishing lawful violence, distinguishing,
following Kelsen, “between the state and a gang of racketeers.”58 It is this concern that
animates both modern jurisprudential analysis and the more important constitutional
cases in the former British Empire. For Carlyle, the justification for martial law must be
sought in the unspoken and violent origin of the state. In the case of the colonies,
however, where this origin is both more sudden and more specific, the ideological
disclosures forced by martial law are more dramatic. The Eyre case then is a crucial
moment in the story of how the category of martial law changes through its experiences
in the colonies—as a moment in the gradual enlargement of the temporal structure of
martial law, of what is permissible and for how long. It was more or less settled after the
events in Jamaica that the fear of conspiracies against the state was more real in the
colonies than at home, and martial law as such could be kept in force beyond the
immediate acts of violence that provoked it in the first place. This, however, still did not
mean that the authority for martial law could be legislated in advance. Despite Justice
Blackburn’s legal opinion emphasizing the right of a colonial legislature to statutorily
permit martial law, the entire tenor of both English law and political policy continued to
be one of discouraging the stipulation of an emergency condition in advance, of insisting
on a case-bycase basis. This was the declared policy of the Colonial Office in a circular
sent to all colonial governors soon after the Eyre case. An enactment which purports to
invest the Executive Government with a permanent power of suspending the ordinary
law of the colony, of removing the known safeguards of life and property, and of
legalizing in advance such measures as may be deemed conMartial Law and Massacre
115 ducive to the establishment of order by the military officer charged with the
suppression of disturbances, is, I need hardly say, entirely at variance with the spirit of
English law.59 Notice how in such a formulation the colonial enactment is in conflict not
with the substance of English law, which may or may not apply to the colony, but with an
English constitutional understanding of legality, which is always to be applicable to the
colony. Such a “spirit” of the law would, of course, mean that the Jamaica statute
recognized by Justice Blackburn would have to be ultra vires. The circular posits the
legitimacy of the empire in terms of a legality, and it posits that legality in terms of the
legal identity between metropole and colony. It instructs all colonies to submit to their
local legislatures “an Act repealing so much of the law as authorizes the proclamation of
martial law.”60 This is not to be construed, the circular goes on to explain, as a
prohibition against martial law, but only as a directive that the governor cannot “be
relieved from the obligation of deciding for himself.”61 If that decision involved
continuing martial law beyond the incidence of an imminent violence, a post facto act of
indemnity, taking into account the exigencies of a colonial situation, could be
successfully resorted to. Thus the Jamaica case emphasized the need for tying a
decision of emergency to the necessity of the moment, even as it gave greater latitude
to the definition of that emergency. Within English constitutional debates, however, the
initial condition that could justify martial law was also historically variable. For a long
time, it was taken as settled doctrine that the operative rule was whether the civil courts
could actually, physically sit and convene. Only their inability to do so was to be taken
as a condition of war.62 In 1902, during the Boer War, however, the Judicial Committee
of the Privy Council considered the question in Marais v. General Officer Commanding;
Ex Parte D.F. Marais and found that because the theater of war had so extended itself
and the conditions of emergency had become so diverse, this rule could no longer be
upheld.63 The Lord Chancellor stated the court’s position: “The fact that for some
purposes some tribunals had been permitted to pursue their ordinary course is not
conclusive that war was not raging.”64 Once martial law had been declared, the court
stated, military decisions were not justiciable by the ordinary courts. In addition, here we
once again find an effort to disso116 The Jurisprudence of Emergency ciate the
emergency conditions in the colonies from instances of domestic unrest. Thus, the court
found that it might be the case with a “mere riot” that the decision of military intervention
was unduly severe and questionable on those grounds. This, however, did not preclude
the permissibility of martial law “once let the fact of actual war be established.”65 But by
removing the inability of ordinary courts to function as a necessary precondition, the
Privy Council gave more latitude to the establishment of the “fact” of war. The case of
Marais, then, continues a tendency in English law from the mid–nineteenth century
onward to widen the scope of the condition of necessity. The Marais decision generated
some criticism and led to a series of articles in the Law Quarterly Review. In placing the
decision within a more general and historical context, the various authors were able to
isolate some of the persistent themes constitutive of martial law. For Frederick Pollock,
martial law could not be dissociated from the constitutional rules of the English common
law, and he doubted whether there was “any jurisdiction under the British flag where
these rules are not assumed to have become part of the local law.”66 This meant that
the final authority to decide whether there had been an excess of duty during martial law
would have to reside in the civil courts, once they were able to function again. For Earle
Richards, however, although such a proposition may be the desired form of legal
functioning, the logic of the Marais ruling seemed to suggest the opposite: that once
martial law had been declared, the power of the civil courts to intervene was entirely
superseded. Indeed, if it once be admitted that the courts have no power to interfere at
the time, it seems to us to follow that the right is gone altogether. To suspend the law in
such circumstances is in general to annul it altogether. To refuse to interfere at any rate
in the case of a prisoner condemned to death is not suspension of law but abrogation; it
is not a postponement of justice but a denial of the only remedy.67 The Marais ruling
thus significantly increased the scope of power available to martial law. It also, in a
move that Earle Richards approved of, dispensed with the “artificial rule” that functioning
courts precluded a conclusion that war existed. For Earle Richards, “war is self-evident,
and the fact that the courts may continue to sit cannot prevent the exisMartial Law and
Massacre 117 tence of war.”68 Reading the case, however, it would seem that war is
anything but self-evident. From the Petition of Right onward, the purpose of this so-
called artificial rule was to prohibit an “expectancy of danger” as a condition of
emergency itself. The Marais ruling increased the latitude for deciding on a condition of
emergency, by allowing such an expectancy of danger as a condition of emergency
itself. It is reasonably safe to conclude then that the English law of emergency as it met
the condition of the colonies became less rather than more narrow. This movement was
to create one of the conditions for the possibility of a disaster such as the Amritsar
massacre in 1919. One of the more exemplary cases of colonial martial law, it is to that
situation in the Punjab, India, in 1919, that we now turn. In doing so, we move
chronologically forward from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. But we
must also now move analytically forward, from examining the source of martial law and
the moment of its introduction to the question of the proper object of martial law. What is
it exactly, we must ask, that martial law hopes to accomplish? On the face of it, the
answer to such a question seems obvious: martial law is the ultimate force needed to
restore a situation of law and order. However, just as the condition of necessity that
justifies the introduction of martial law turns out to be anything but straightforward, so
the object of martial law turns out to be a problematic question, and one that reveals the
contradictions inherent in ordinary law and state power itself. Emergency and Law’s
Violence: The Amritsar Massacre So far, I have argued in terms of a corrective logic.
That is, I have tried to argue against the self-evident and unchanging postures of
emergency by showing the historical malleability of martial law, its temporal expansions,
its changing cognitive conditions, in order that we may be in a better position to evaluate
the rules that apply in emergency. But now, I would like to shift the register of analysis
and turn from a corrective answer to what I consider a foundational question. So I shall
try once more to answer the question of what martial law is by focusing on what it does.
Let me say outright that the questions of punishment and order, while they may form a
part, are not the whole of the answer here. We must not too readily presume the
effectiveness of martial law as remedy to an ordinary lawlessness. Reading the
documentation of 118 The Jurisprudence of Emergency martial law, it is striking that
martial law in its operations as the replacement of civil authority is not as efficient as
one would presume. Power may transfer from the lengthy procedures of civil
adjudication to military tribunals, but repeatedly we encounter the picture Charles
Townshend has drawn of officers struggling with Banning’s Military Law Made Easy.
What martial law does, and does terribly well, becomes clear only if we nuance the
catchall phrase “law and order,” distinguishing issues of force and order from issues of
authority. It is the reconstitution of the general authority of the state that martial law
performs, and while this involves the exercise of violence, it is a specific form of
violence. If we are to explicate the function of violence in martial law, to explicate its
extreme condition, we shall have to reemphasize the limit condition to which it responds
—the inscription of racial difference. The presence of race must here be more than an
acknowledgment of a racial animus that would putatively explain the vigor and venom of
much of the rhetoric. Rather, we must once again view race as the limit condition within
the articulation of both the liberal conditions of rule and of positivist legality. There is
perhaps no other text in the liberal canon where the racial differentiation of subjects and
the criteria of forms of rule are woven together more tightly and with more clarity than
John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government.69 The embryonic
ideas of this text, as Homi Bhabha reminds us, were first formulated in precisely the
context of debate on morality and education: in response to Lord Macaulay’s infamous
1835 Minute on Indian Education, with its clarion call for the creation of “a class of
persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in
intellect.”70 Faced with the task of convincing the reader of the ideality of the specific
form of representative government, distinguished in degree and kind from despotism on
the one hand and direct democracy on the other, Mill must specify the optimum
conditions in which such a form may successfully operate. It is clearly not suitable to all:
“a rude people, though in some degree alive to the benefit of civilized society, may be
unable to practice the forbearances which it demands . . . in such a case, a civilized
government, to be really advantageous to them, will require to be in a considerable
degree despotic.”71 The virtues of order and obedience are what colonial government
has to offer to the natives, but Mill Martial Law and Massacre 119 insists that “there are
different degrees of obedience,” and the most desirable form is obedience of a general
order, of “mandates issued in the deliberate form of laws.”72 After all, Mill asks us, what
is it that distinguishes a slave from a savage, making the former preferable in the
evolutionary scheme of ordered government? The answer is a developmental scale of
modes of obedience: the slave is in advance of a savage, for “he has learnt to obey. But
what he obeys is only a direct command. It is characteristic of born slaves to be
incapable of conforming their conduct to a rule or law.”73 This story of the stages of
civilization and of the corresponding, progressive scale of juridical subjects is
reasonably well known, and we need not dwell on it much longer. But what is more
important to those interested in reading the reflections and refractions of modern law
through the prism of colonial discourse is the way in which the distinction that organizes
Mill’s scale—the distinction between types of force, and the distinction between
command and rules—is also the initial and animating condition of much positivist
jurisprudence. We shall now turn to that theory and to the work of H. L. A. Hart in
particular before returning to India. Hart’s theory is cast in the form of a historical
Bildung: a primitive society may have law to the extent that it contains primary rules of
obligation, but it cannot be considered a mature legal system until it has a secondary
set of rules—rules directed not to the general populace but to officials who determine,
declare, and enforce the law. Indeed, as Hart tells it, the mode of obedience (whether
subjects obey the law out of a sense of fear or social conformity or moral bearing)
becomes less important than the development of an official legal establishment: “The
history of law does, however, suggest that the lack of official agencies to determine
authoritatively the fact of violation of rules is a much more serious defect.”74 In fact, by
the end of Hart’s story, the definition of law does entail more than notions of command
and obedience, if only because it has jettisoned the concern over why people obey the
law, content with the fact that they just do, and has more vested in how officials
determine with certainty the validity of a rule and its potential violation. I am, however,
going to dwell on the original problem that Hart began with: the distinction between rules
and commands, and the relation between obedience and authority. Certainly, Hart is
successful in 120 The Jurisprudence of Emergency trying to diffuse the force of law, to
insist that the effect of rules upon the naked power of the gunman is not so much a
masking as it is mediation. Indeed, in its attempt to decenter the simple act of force
associated with the gunman, by introducing secondary rules that stipulate who gets to
make the law in the first place—“persons qualified in certain ways to legislate by
complying with a certain procedure”75— Hart’s text is saturated with tropes of
immediacy versus mediate force, face-to-face commands versus general declarations.
The maturation of a legal system, in Hart’s Bildung, builds in distance between the
source and object of violence. It is precisely such distance that Stanley Fish calls our
attention to in his reading of The Concept of Law. “Notice how much distance there is,”
Fish points out, “between the source of power and the object of its exercise. In the
gunman scenario the coercion is direct and discrete; in the world of rule the coercing
agent stands at the end of a long and articulated chain, beginning with the rule itself,
which mandates not an act but a procedure.”76 Legal control, Hart argues, could not be
implemented through a system dependent on face-to-face commands, if only for
logistical reasons: “no society,” Hart correctly points out, “could support the number of
officials necessary to secure that every member of the society was officially and
separately informed of every act which he was required to do.” But what follows such a
declaration is a curious sentence, seemingly commonsensical and cursory, but one that
requires some further elaboration. “Instead such particularized forms of control,” Hart
continues, “are either exceptional or are ancillary accompaniments or reinforcements of
general forms of directions.”77 Now what remains somewhat obscure is both the
substantive content of these particularized moments and their relation, whether directly
causal or otherwise, to the smooth functioning of a generalized legality. We could accept
that such particular moments refer to the face-to-face orders of a policeman, addressed
to motorist or vagrant (examples that Hart himself offers), or even the performative
speech of a judge faced with a defendant. It would, however, be curious to identify
Hart’s particularized forms with these mundane encounters, if only because such
examples do not so much represent a “reinforcement” of the law as they do its
enforcement in the first instance. All law, after all, has to be enforced on bodies—
protocols of interpretation, procedures of institutions, require the body, require its
constraint and movement, signature and utterance. Martial Law and Massacre 121
Certainly, given the tenor of some analysis of legal interpretation, it is necessary to be
reminded of law’s essential dealing with force—with its ability and desire to enforce—
and it is precisely such a necessity and such a reminder that give the opening sentence
of Robert Cover’s now famous essay “Violence and the Word” its puncturing effect:
“Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.”78 But surely for Hart’s
purposes, and indeed ours, a reminder that violence is imbricated in law at every level
cannot be sufficient. After all, might there not be another mode of violence, one that not
only enforces a prior sanction but also, and this is Hart’s vocabulary, relates
particularized instances to generalized forms? What would such an establishing
violence look like? Readers familiar with Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence”
will have already noticed in my vocabulary of enforcing and establishing violence an
echo of the crucial distinction between “law-preserving” and “law-founding” violence that
structures Benjamin’s essay.79 “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”—the original title is important
here, as it points to the evaluative and demarcational project of Kritik, and to the double
meaning of sanctioned force and violence that make up the German Gewalt—was first
published in 1921. One of Benjamin’s more dense and difficult essays, “The Critique of
Violence” combines Benjamin’s terse, aphoristic style with his Marxism and messianic
sensibility. The essay begins with a series of rigorous distinctions between positive and
natural law, means and ends, only to abruptly catapult us into the apocalyptic arrival of a
final and divine violence that will expiate the “rotten” and “bloody” violence of
lawmaking. This final condition, by which, as Peter Demetz points out, “the essay
subverts its own fundaments in order to enact something of the ontological ‘break’ in
which the old world is suddenly transformed into a new,” adds to the difficulty of
assimilating Benjamin’s insights.80 Indeed, “The Critique of Violence” offers us no
totalizing theory of violence, but at the level of aphoristic suggestion it is invaluable.
Earlier I emphasized the tropes of distance and proximity, means and mediation, which
occupy Hart’s text, and it is now significant to note that a topology of means and ends
also animates and frustrates Benjamin’s effort. Indeed, Benjamin’s essay begins with an
awareness of the fact that the circular justifications of ends and means in natural and
positive law threaten to eclipse the object of critique: “natural law 122 The
Jurisprudence of Emergency attempts, by the justness of the ends, to ‘justify’ the
means, positive law to ‘guarantee’ the justness of the ends through the justification of
means.”81 The escape from such casuistry comes with Benjamin’s decision to focus on
positive law because its effort to render violence legitimate is also to render it historical.
That is to say, positive law focuses primarily on the quality of means, on their origin and
authority, precisely by drawing a distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned force
(authorization), which for Benjamin is done by asking of all violence the “proof of its
historical origin.” “The Critique of Violence” employs the German mittel which can be
translated variously as means, mediate, and mediation. Benjamin plays with the word
and its derivatives, such as unmittelbare (unmediated but also immediate), reine
unmittelbare (purely unmediated), and eine nicht mittelbare (non mediate), in order to
designate the modalities of violence within positive law.82 The modes of violence are
represented in the essay as a dyad: violence, Benjamin insists, is either “law-
preserving” or “law-founding.” Violence that preserves that law is a mediated mode, in
that its immanent application is mediated through and by a prior rule that dictates the
form and content of the instance and that crucially makes such a violence “subject to
the restriction that it may not set itself new ends.”83 This is distinct for Benjamin from
that other form of violence, which seems to dispense with the question of ends as a
prior stipulation altogether. Thus the archetype of law-founding violence is “mythical
violence”—the representation of the anger of the gods in mythology—and its exemplary
story, for Benjamin, is the legend of Niobe. Apollo and Artemis’s reaction to Niobe’s
arrogance, sparing the life of the mother but in a whimsy of fate subjecting her children
to a cruel death, could perhaps be read on some level as a punishment, but if so it is a
strange punishment, neither particularly rehabilatory nor retributive in its effect. Rather,
Benjamin notes, “mythical violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the
gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but first of all a
manifestation of their existence.”84 It is these moments of law-founding violence that
Benjamin locates in the modalities of positive law. Foundational is perhaps a misleading
description, to the extent that it suggests the singular instance of an origin. Benjamin
certainly wants to retain some sense of the ideological labor performed by the notions of
origin and foundation, but also Martial Law and Massacre 123 wants to locate such
moments in their episodic (perhaps even atavistic) repetition. Thus when he turns to the
agency of enforcement—the modern police—the rigor of the distinction gives way, not
so much to a blurring as to a “spectral mixture.” The police in their discretion necessarily
mix the right of disposition (to enforce a prior sanction) with right of decree (to insist on
the instance of a need for a sanction). Thus Derrida notes that “what threatens the rigor
of the distinction between the two types of violence is at bottom the paradox of
iterability. Iterability requires the origin to repeat itself originarily.”85 It is, however, this
very paradox—this understanding of a certain kind of legal violence as the episodic
repetition of the origin, or analogous to Hart’s vocabulary, as the particular and episodic
reinforcement of the general form, which constitutes one of Benjamin’s essay’s more
profound insights. We may return then, with Benjamin’s insights, to the question of
emergency and martial law in general, and the situation in Amritsar in particular. Here,
two related questions highlight the disjunction between rules and violence. First, what is
it that the law permits emergency measures to accomplish—what were the rules that
governed its special use of force? Second, what was perceived as the need for martial
law in the spring of 1919 in the Punjab? Let us recall and consider with a seriousness, a
deadly earnest if you will, Carlyle’s insistence on the priority of martial law—“real and
fundamental, anterior to all laws and first making written laws possible”—and we must
not miss the double sense of priority here, in terms of an importance and a temporal
originality. Martial law seeks to effect not just the restoration of order but the restoration
of the general authority of the state. In doing so, it takes advantage of the absence of
normative constraints on power not just to punish more—which it may or may not do—
but to punish out of a different logic. This punishment, if we can even call it that, is not
caused by questions of innocence or guilt or a specific transgression of the law, nor is it
particularly rehabilitory or retributive in its effect. Rather, it is a purely nonmediate form,
purely performative, the purpose of which is the sheer manifestation of power itself. It is
the form of violence that Walter Benjamin called “mythical violence.”86 It is in this
sense, perhaps, that martial law “saves” the state, by re-creating the conditions for the
possibility of its existence. Specifically how it does so will become clearer as we return
to the example of martial law in colonial India. 124 The Jurisprudence of Emergency
The Indian Minority Report had strongly disagreed with Dyer’s remarks. To them such
an explanation echoed “Prussian tactics,” not unlike those used by German military
commanders in Belgium and France.87 They saw General Dyer’s “moral effect” as
“terror” and explained its source thus. People like General Dyer have the fixed idea that
the effective way of governing India is force. It is the same idea that General
DrakeBrockman of Delhi gave expression to in his written statement at Delhi: “Force is
the only thing an Asiatic has any respect for.”88 On the other hand, General Dyer was to
protest against these charges by pointing out that force was, in fact, required, and that
the Majority Committee was placing soldiers in an impossible situation: “if they consider
only the immediate needs of the moment, they are liable to be condemned for not
looking further ahead . . . if they consider the situation as a whole . . . they are liable to
be told that they must not look beyond the dispersal of the crowd.”89 Indeed, the British
government and the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, while agreeing with the
committee that Dyer had a mistaken conception of duty, did recognize the problem for
the military to which Dyer referred. Accordingly, it ordered the Indian government to
prepare a martial law manual for future use.90 I list these responses here in order to
emphasize how little has changed from the earlier instances of military intervention. For
an event that was supposedly singular, the Amritsar massacre prompted rhetorical
responses that were considerably timeworn. General Dyer’s protest against the difficult
position the military were placed in during moments of civil unrest may as well have
been taken from Sir Charles Napier and the debate following the Bristol riots and Rex v.
Pinney.91 On the other side, the Minority Report’s statement that General Dyer’s
mentality was of the sort that believed that a rule of force was appropriate to India only
meant that he belonged in a long tradition of British ideology that advocated a
paternalist despotism as the best mode of British governance of India. The Amritsar
massacre and, indeed, martial law in the Punjab are best understood, then, as the
culmination of several intensely ambiguous discourses, some specific to an English
political imagination’s Martial Law and Massacre 125 negotiation between the military,
state power, and a rule of law, others the result of that negotiation in a regime of
conquest. It is thus not surprising that the official British response to the massacre
focuses not on the number of people who were killed or their particular guilt or
innocence, but the reasons for their death. That is, it focuses not so much on the
substance of Dyer’s actions, but the logic with which they are explained. Everywhere in
these official documents one finds confused answers to a question, sometimes tacit,
sometimes explicitly asked: What is the proper object of martial law? It is answered by
placing the massacre and martial law in the Punjab itself in its wider political context.
Discussions over the object of martial law are linked to questions of the causes for the
unrest, that is, to the reasons why martial law may have been needed in the first place.
Although social and economic conditions in the Punjab, following World War I,
contributed to the “disturbances” there—notably the influenza epidemic of 1918–19,
high inflation of basic goods prices, and aggressive troop conscription in the
countryside92—the immediate catalyst for the agitation and subsequent declaration of
martial law was, ironically enough, an emergency law. On 18 March 1919, the imperial
council placed on the statute book the Emergency Powers Bill, or the so-called Rowlatt
Act, after Justice Sydney A. T. Rowlatt, the main author of the Report of the Committee
appointed to investigate Revolutionary Conspiracies in India.93 The committee had
painted a picture of elaborate conspiracies in India and had recommended the
continuation of some wartime measures, including the suspension of certain civil
liberties. The Rowlatt Act was passed against the express urging of nationalist leaders,
who saw it as a betrayal of promises made by the British during the war to extend Indian
political participation. To that extent, it was seen as mitigating the effect of the already
meager political changes of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms.94 Gandhi denounced
the act and called for a civil disobedience movement to protest it on 7 April 1919. Two
days later Gandhi was forbidden to enter the Punjab and was arrested attempting to do
so. By 10 April, the arrests of Drs. Satyapal and Kitchlew in Amritsar had provoked
further unrest. The agitation against the Rowlatt Act, particularly Gandhi’s Satyagraha, is
given a causal force in the Hunter Committee’s inquiry after the fact. On the one hand,
“rumors” are blamed for producing a general 126 The Jurisprudence of Emergency
misunderstanding of the scope of the act, portraying it as increasing executive
interference in daily life.95 On the other hand, the civil disobedience movement is
expressly criticized, not for its opposition to the act, but for asking people to disobey the
laws of the act. In India’s particular state of political development, we are told, to permit
disobedience to one law is to invite a more general and complete disobedience to all
law.96 This was equally Lord Chelmsford’s explanation for the situation in 1919. In a
letter from the government of India to the secretary of state in London, he hoped that
politicians would from now on refrain from “invoking forces which they can neither direct
nor control.” He went on to explain why: when this movement (Civil Disobedience) was
initiated, it was apparently not obvious to its promoters, as it was to all thoughtful
persons, that in India in its present state of development (whatever may be the case in
other countries) the unsettling effect of the advice to the public in general to break
selected laws was likely to lead to a situation which might involve the overthrow of all
law and order.97 Lord Chelmsford’s understanding of the effects of civil disobedience in
India is curious but significant. A developmental scale of judicial subjects is set up here,
whereby more developed (read civilized) subjects are able to distinguish between
specific laws, which may appear to them to be wrong for some reason, and the general
authority of the state that subtends those laws. Thus, they are able to selectively
“disobey” a specific law without threatening the overall authority of the state. In India,
however, where the subjects are presumably unable to appreciate what John Malcolm
nearly a century before had called “the more artificial systems of jurisprudence,”98 no
such cognitive distinction is possible. Here, Lord Chelmsford suggests, echoing once
again a thematic of despotism, every law is a personal and direct manifestation of the
sovereign. To call for even the nonviolent disobedience of the Rowlatt Act is to unleash
a more general “disturbance” that threatens the authority of the state. Thus, the real
need for martial law is not merely to put down this or that outbreak of violence but to
restore this authority. Although Lord Chelmsford is at pains to confine such a dynamic to
countries lower on his developmental scale, it is not that different from Martial Law and
Massacre 127 the understanding we encountered earlier of the effects of violent riots in
England. There, we may recall, the fear was that such violence did more than disobey a
single law, that it set up a logic parallel to the law itself, daring, as C. J. Tindal put it, “to
usurp its place.”99 The understanding of the conditions that require martial law in the
Punjab, then, is an intensification of such a dynamic. What is required of martial law is a
corrective to this “unsettling effect,” as Lord Chelmsford calls it— perhaps in the form of
the “moral effect” that General Dyer stated to be his proper object and aim. Once one
explicates the state’s understanding of this “real” need for martial law, the logic of its
violent actions becomes clearer: not the punishment of the guilty, not the end to specific
transgressions, but the restoration of a general condition. Moreover, it is crucial to once
again remind ourselves that this general condition cannot be reduced to notions of
public peace and order. In fact, in each explanation for an action by an officer, there is a
will to generality—an order whose obedience will itself teach the subject about general
rules. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, both General Dyer’s explanation for
his actions and the official response to his explanation are saturated with this
ambivalence about specific tasks and general ends. In General Dyer’s statement we get
an uncanny reflection of the relation between performative violence and a return to
legality, and the distinction between such violence and mere mechanical notions of
force and the preservation of order. The schism between the immediacy of violence and
the putative object of its accomplishment saturates the dialogue of criticism and defense
of Dyer’s actions, making it into an uncanny reflection of the relation between a
performative violence and a return to what Hart would call “legal control”—a reflection of
the gap between the mechanics of force and the preservation of order. As I mentioned
at the start of this chapter, the Parliamentary Inquiry into Dyer’s actions would concede
that the firing was crucial to the “stability” of the entire Punjab region, but could not allow
itself to concede that such “excessive force” was “justified because of the effect such
firing may have upon people in other places.” General Dyer’s statement in his own
defense, in fact, rather astutely picks up on this aphasic moment. Dyer insists that for
the firing to be considered excessive, one would first have to agree on its putative
object, in order to determine what it is in excess of—“if I 128 The Jurisprudence of
Emergency was not confined to the bare mechanical operation of getting the crowd ‘to
move on’ then no evidence or ground is anywhere suggested to show that the force I
used was in the least degree excessive.” Dyer’s argument is that his actions can only be
understood as excessive if they are contained within a closed economy of transgression
and punishment, disturbance and the restoration of order. But Dyer insists that his
object was not specific—rather it was a specific action taken to establish rather than
merely enforce a general rule. This is then General Dyer’s “moral effect throughout the
Punjab,” but it is a mode not confined to him alone. Throughout the inquiry report one
finds instances of official actions that seem to move away from specific objects to the
more general object of revealing the power of the state. The actions of Lieutenant
Colonel Johnson in Lahore demonstrate this desire to reveal the power of the state.
After government proclamations posted on the walls of the Santan Dharm College were
found defaced, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson made the students and professors march in
the hot sun through the city and then interned them for more than three hours in the
Red Fort. When pressed by the Minority Committee’s investigation, Johnson admitted
that there was no evidence to suggest that any of these people had been directly
responsible for the defacement of the posters. In fact, detection and punishment of the
guilty was not the object. Rather, Johnson admitted that he was “longing for an
opportunity to show them the power of martial law.”100 Indeed, this remark is an
uncannily accurate example of Benjamin’s notion of mythical violence—of a violence
that is not so much about means and ends as it is about the manifestation of power.
What the power of martial law is used for becomes apparent from some of the other
incidents that the committee investigates. In Kasur, the committee found that Captain
Doveton had resorted to “fancy punishments,” designed in order to counter the effect of
people chanting “Hukum kya chiz hai, hum koi hukum nahin jante—what is an order; we
know of no such thing as an order.”101 The punishments then were only meant to
reinforce the general notion of the command itself. Indeed, this logic can become
increasingly general, as is evidenced by the committee’s findings in Gujranwala. There
the local commander issued the infamous “salaaming [greeting] order,” which required
Indians when they encountered European officers to leave their conveyances and
salaam. When pressed by the committee to explain the purpose of such Martial Law
and Massacre 129 an order, the commander insisted that it was not meant to humiliate
Indians, but only to reinforce a general sense of respect for authority. This sense had
been breaking down, according to the commander, at all levels of Indian society: “The
tendency of the present day is to abolish respectfulness. The Indian father will tell you
that sons are not respectful even to their parents.”102 Obviously, these instances are
different from the Amritsar massacre, as they contain a more psychic rather than
physical violence. What is not very different, however, is the mode of explanation. For
these army commanders, as much as for General Dyer, the object of martial law is the
restoration of what legal theorists like to call the “habit of obedience.” It is difficult to
miss the performative and very general nature of these instances. We are now far from
the “precise line” standard set down in Rex v. Pinney, if only because it is difficult to
make a judgment of precision on an act that seems to have no precise and immediate
object: remember, for Dyer the aim was more than dispersing the crowd but something
else; for Colonel Johnson it was more than punishment for defacing the posters but
something else. In fact, we are probably closer to the Duke of Wellington’s
understanding of martial law as not a legal but a sovereign act, not only because it was
brought forth under the Crown’s prerogative but also because, as we may recall, for
Wellington martial law was the expression of a pure will. It is the expression of this will,
this sovereignty, that is required as the prior condition before law and state resume their
normal course. And the necessity of this condition is more than just a pragmatic one.
That is, it is not just a question of martial law applying to a situation where you must
expend more force than you would normally, in some total quantum of ergs. Rather, it
seems a deeper, almost conceptual necessity. And what happens when the law returns,
so to speak; when the parliamentary committee considers these instances in the form of
their normative and normalizing narrative? The Majority of the Hunter Committee find
themselves unable to object too much to these odd displays of power. After all, the
question is not one of words but substance. The power of ordinary law to preserve order
lies, not in its ability to enforce itself on every subject, but in the fact that with all
subjects save a few, no need of enforcement will arise. It depends upon the law-abiding
130 The Jurisprudence of Emergency instincts of the great majority and upon the
authority of the government being a received fact. In India at present ordinary methods
of government depend for their possibility—not merely their efficiency—on the existence
of this relation between people who are Indian and a Raj which is British.103 As this
report suggests, something other than authority is seen as needed to counter a
breakdown in authority. What follows at this point in the report is the by now inevitable
comparison between the situation in the colony and domestic riots. The Majority
Committee commends the Punjab government for not viewing each outbreak of unrest
as an isolated riot and responding accordingly. That mode, we are told, would only
suffice “upon the condition that the authority of Government in the main be
respected.”104 Thus, at each point we get a sense that martial law in the colony is a
return to a prior condition, before law and before state legitimacy. It is what is needed to
construct the state all over again. To the official mindset, however, the troubling aspect
of such a formulation was that it placed this coercive force at the heart of law and made
such force a condition for the very possibility of law’s existence. Thus, we get the not
surprising result of the Hunter Committee condemning each of these punishments, even
as it concedes their efficacy, indeed, their indispensability. The committee compulsively
returns to an ambivalence, unable either to condemn or condone these actions. Critical
of the form of these actions, the committee nonetheless concedes their indispensability.
And we are left with this object of performative violence as it floats in and through the
text, foundational to the language and action of legal positivism that the committee
employs and yet everywhere disavowed.

Q.3 State Allama Iqbal’s view with regard to Muslim nation of India with reference to his famous
Allahabad address in 1930.

Answer:- Allahabad Address

The Allahabad Address (Urdu: ‫ )خطبہ الہ آباد‬was a speech by scholar, Sir Muhammad
Iqbal, one of the best-known in Pakistani history. It was delivered by Iqbal during the
21st annual session of the All-India Muslim League, on the afternoon of Monday, 29
December 1930, at Allahabad, British India. In this address Iqbal outlined a vision of an
independent state for the great Muslim-majority provinces in northwestern India, thus
becoming the first politician to articulate what would become known as the Two-nation
theory—that Muslims are a distinct nation and thus deserve political independence from
other regions and communities of India. [1]
Allama Iqbal defined the Muslims of India as a nation and suggested that there could be
no possibility of peace in the country unless and until they were recognized as a nation
and under a federal system, the Muslim majority units were given the same privileges
which were to be given to the Hindu majority units. It was the only way in which both the
Muslims and the Hindus could prosper in accordance with their respective cultural
values. In his speech, he emphasized that unlike Christianity, Islam came with "legal
concepts" with "civic significance," with its "religious ideals" considered as inseparable
from social order: "therefore, the construction of a policy on national lines, if it means a
displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim." [2]
Iqbal thus stressed not only the need for the political unity of Muslim communities but
the undesirability of blending the Muslim population into a wider society not based on
Islamic principles. However, he would not elucidate or specify if his ideal Islamic state
would construe a theocracy, even as he rejected secularism and nationalism. The latter
part of Iqbal's life was concentrated on political activity. He would travel across Europe
and West Asia to garner political and financial support for the League, and he reiterated
his ideas in his 1932 address, and during the Third Round-Table Conference, he
opposed the Congress and proposals for transfer of power without considerable
autonomy or independence for Muslim provinces.[1]

History
The Hindu-Muslim question had great importance and stood crucial to British Indian
history after 1857, especially in the 20th century. But the key issue for Muslims
remained "separate identity." On several occasions and addresses, the issue gets
highlighted that the Muslims are a separate nation with different culture and civilization,
interests and rights. The Two-Nation Theory was not accepted by the Muslims, Hindus
and the British peoples because they believed in "territorial nationalism". The Congress'
perspective of Hindu Muslim relationship was that any perceived rift between the Hindus
and Muslims was the product of the British divide and rule policy. According to the
Congress, the British had consciously created splits and divisions, therefore it was an
artificial issue which should not be emphasized. For Muslims it was the core issue, "I"
was the central issue, it related to their culture, civilization, heritage and the type of
arrangement that were to be done in the future political and constitutional arrangements
of India.

The Idea of separate Homeland based on many issues, the first was the decline and
degeneration of the Muslims. Most of the Muslim states became the colonies of the
European states. Then the industrial; revolution, development of science and
technology became a preserve of the European nations. So, the question for Muslims
was why the decline and degeneration have set in among the Muslims. The second
issue was how to work for revival and regeneration of Muslims in general and how
Muslims could overcome the decline and again assume their rightful place in the
international system. The third issue was specific to the Muslims of South Asia who
shared the problems of the Muslims as a whole, problem of decline and degeneration
but in addition to this certain specific problems which pertain to British India and one
important problem which Muslim faced was that that of minority, the majority were not
Muslims and this makes the situation in British India different from the situation in the
Middle Eastern Countries where Muslims were in majority. In British India the problem
was that they could be overwhelmed by the other community, therefore they were
emphasizing on their identity, value, culture and also heritage and civilization which they
thought and emphasize time and again that it gave them a different, distinct and an
exclusive identity. They were not simply a minority but a community and a nation. The
reason was that they did not want to be absorbed into the majority community.
Phases of development
By 1930, this sentiment had developed very clearly which was very much demonstrated
in the development of History of India or the question of the relationship between the
Muslims and the other communities. It was in this context that Allama Iqbal delivered his
presidential address. Iqbal, political thoughts developed in three phases. [3]
The first phase pertains to the pre-1905 period, before delivering the address Iqbal
addresses the factors for the decline of the Muslims and he tries to focus on Indian
nationality, nationhood or Indian unity. Iqbal explained about resolving differences in his
book Bang-i-Dara and writes Tarānah-i-Hindī and Naya shawala to reunite Muslims with
Hindus.[4]
The second phase pertains the period from 1905 to 1908, Iqbal spent these years in
Europe, during his higher education and in Germany at Munich University [5] for PhD. His
stay in England helps to crystallize his ideas. Iqbal appreciated certain things in the
West, for example, the quest for knowledge, their efforts for innovation and change.
Iqbal was critical of materialism, capitalism and competition an unrestricted and
unlimited competition that was undermining the society and it is during this period that
he began to think philosophically and scientifically about the Muslims and he
emphasized on the importance of spiritualism in one's life. [3]
The third phase occurs when Iqbal comes back to India after his education. Here his
exclusive attention and focus were on the Muslim. He talked about the centrality of
Islam, the question of submission to God, Oneness of God, He emphasized in his
writings pros as well as poetry and he talked about Muhammad (SA) as the ideal leader
as the leader that the Muslims should try to follow. However, his focus was on primarily
Muslims of this region when he dealt with the political or the constitutional issues of
India. Iqbal got the title of SIR in 1922 in recognition of his intellectual work. In 1927
Iqbal was elected to the Punjab Legislative Council, so far next little over two years he
served in the Punjab legislative council that is from 1927 to 1930, little over two years. [3]
Revival of Islamic polity
Iqbal's six English lectures were published first from Lahore in 1930 and then by Oxford
University press in 1934 in a book titled The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in
Islam. Which were read at Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh.[6] These lectures dwell on
the role of Islam as a religion as well as a political and legal philosophy in the modern
age.[6] In these lectures Iqbal firmly rejects the political attitudes and conduct of Muslim
politicians, whom he saw as morally misguided, attached to power and without any
standing with Muslim masses.
Iqbal expressed fears that not only would secularism weaken the spiritual foundations of
Islam and Muslim society, but that India's Hindu-majority population would crowd out
Muslim heritage, culture and political influence. In his travels to Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran
and Turkey, he promoted ideas of greater Islamic political co-operation and unity, calling
for the shedding of nationalist differences.[7] He also speculated on different political
arrangements to guarantee Muslim political power; in a dialogue with Dr. B. R.
Ambedkar, Iqbal expressed his desire to see Indian provinces as autonomous units
under the direct control of the British government and with no central Indian
government. He envisaged autonomous Muslim provinces in India. Under one Indian
union, he feared for Muslims, who would suffer in many respects especially with regard
to their existentially separate entity as Muslims.[6] The Muslims of subcontinent were
degraded both by British people and Hindus. After the advent of 1857, British people
turn against Muslims thinking that they are only culprits and similarly Hindus want
complete control over Muslims and they want to change constitution where Muslims
should be suppressed and by not giving Muslims any importance. It was the cause due
to which Iqbal presents his idea of uniting Muslims and Muslim majority areas such as
Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and NWFP.

Address 1930Iqbal was elected president of the Muslim League in 1930 at its
session in Allahabad, in the United Provinces as well as for the session in Lahore in
1932. In his presidential address on 30 December 1930, Iqbal outlined a vision of an
independent state for Muslim-majority provinces in northwestern India.
The Address basis
In 1930 Iqbal delivered the Presidential Address the Allahabad Address, before address
Iqbal also delivered landmark lectures on Islam in 1928 and 1929
in Aligarh, Hyderabad and Madras. Because Iqbal's address eye-plot was based on
Islam. Iqbal's views on Islam and introversion with the modern conditions and modern
situation helps him to generate the Allahabad Address. In 1932, Iqbal also presided
over All India Conference that was held at Lahore and during that conference, he
repeated some of the ideas and some of the thoughts which he had presented in his
Address at 1930.
The Address outline
In his address, Iqbal called for the creation of "a Muslim India within India", especially in
North-western India. Iqbal demanded the right of self-government for the Muslims. As
he said:
India is a continent of human groups belonging to different races, speaking different
languages, and professing different religions [...] Personally, I would like to see
the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into
a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire,
the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the
final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.
Within his address, Iqbal also touched on his fear that Islam may have a similar fate as
Christianity. "To Islam, matter is spirit realising itself in space and time" whereas Europe
had "accepted the separation of Church and State and disliked the fact that their leaders
were "indirectly forcing the world to accept it as unquestionable dogma [...] I do not
know what will be the final fate of the national idea in the world of Islam. Whether Islam
will assimilate and transform it as it has before assimilated and transformed many ideas
expressive of a different spirit, or allow a radical transformation of its own structure by
the force of this idea, is hard to predict. Professor Wensinck of Leiden (Holland) wrote to
me the other day: "It seems to me that Islam is entering upon a crisis through which
Christianity has been passing for more than a century. The great difficulty is how to
save the foundations of religion when many antiquated notions have to be given up." [8]
Iqbal spoke of:
The unity of an Indian nation, therefore, must be sought not in the negation, but in the
mutual harmony and cooperation, of the many. True statesmanship cannot ignore facts,
however unpleasant they may be [...] And it is on the discovery of Indian unity in this
direction that the fate of India as well as of Asia really depends [...] If an effective
principle of cooperation is discovered in India it will bring peace and mutual goodwill to
this ancient land which has suffered so long [...] And it will at the same time solve the
entire political problem of Asia.
In regards to the army, Iqbal stated:
Punjab with 56 percent Muslim population supplies 54 percent of the total combatant
troops to the Indian Army, and if the 19,000 Gurkhas recruited from the independent
State of Nepal are excluded, the Punjab contingent amounts to 62 percent of the whole
Indian Army. This percentage does not take into account nearly 6,000 combatants
supplied to the Indian Army by the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. From
this, you can easily calculate the possibilities of North-West Indian Muslims in regards to
the defence of India against foreign aggression. Thus processing full opportunity of
development within the body politic of India, the North-West Indian Muslims will prove
the best defenders of India against a foreign invasion.
Iqbal also addresses how it was "painful to observe" the failed attempts to "discover
such a principle of internal harmony". However, he still felt "hopeful". He expressed
great concerns that the British politicians were "cleverly exploiting Hindu-Muslim
differences regarding the ultimate form of Central Government" through Princes of the
Princely States. He was also critical of the Simon Report that it did great "injustice to
Muslims" to not be given a statutory majority for Punjab and Bengal. Furthermore, he
demanded Sindh to be united with Baluchistan and turned into a separate province as it
did not have anything in common with Bombay Presidency.
Comparing the European democracy to Indian democracy, he justified the Muslim
demand for a "Muslim India within India", saying.
The principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognizing the
fact of communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within
India is, therefore, perfectly justified. The resolution of the All-Parties Muslim
Conference at Delhi is, to my mind, wholly inspired by this noble ideal of a harmonious
whole which, instead of stifling the respective individualities of its component wholes,
affords them chances of fully working out the possibilities that may be latent in them.
And I have no doubt that this House will emphatically endorse the Muslim demands
embodied in this resolution.
Commenting on the Hindu fears of religious rule in the Muslim autonomous states, Iqbal
said:
Muslim demand is not actuated by the kind of motive he imputes to us; it is actuated by
a genuine desire for free development which is practically impossible under the type of
unitary government contemplated by the nationalist Hindu politicians with a view to
secure permanent command dominance in the whole of India. Nor should
the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim states will mean the
introduction of a kind of religious rule in such states. I have already indicated to you the
meaning of the word religion, as applied to Islam. The truth is that Islam is not a Church
[...] I, therefore, demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim State in the best
interests of India and Islam. For India, it means security and peace resulting from an
internal balance of power; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp
that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilize its law, its education, its
culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the
spirit of modern times.
In his concluding remarks, Iqbal said:
India demands complete organization and unity of will and purpose in the Muslim
community, both in your own interest as a community and in the interest of India as a
whole [...] We have a duty toward India where we are destined to live and die. We have
a duty towards Asia, especially Muslim Asia. And since 70 millions of Muslims in single
country constitute a far more valuable asset to Islam than all the countries of Muslim
Asia put together, we must look at the Indian problem not only from the Muslim point of
view but also from the standpoint of the Indian Muslim as such.

Importance
Iqbal's address was known to have a forceful and logical presentation of the Muslim
case in India. His address arises the awareness why should Muslims be treated as a
political entity rather than a minority. His address highlights the following views that
would prove highly beneficial in future.

 Territorial adjustments will enable the Muslims to develop themselves in

accordance with their ideas and serve the cause of Ummah.
 Redistribution of territory developed later on the concept of a Muslim homeland.
 He further expressed these ideas in letters to Jinnah from May 1936 to
November 1937. He talked of a separate federation of Muslim provinces. The
North Western India and Bengal can be considered as entitled to self-
determination like other nations in India and outside. Shariah's development is
impossible without a free Muslim state or states. He advised the Muslims to be
above self-interest and devote themselves to Islam.
 In difficult times, Islam has saved the Muslims.
 Faith, culture and historical traditions are more important than patriotism.

Q.4 What do you know about Gandhi Irwin Pact? Explain in detail.

Answer:- Gandhi-Irwin Pact

Gandhi-Irwin Pact, agreement signed on March 5, 1931, between Mohandas K.
Gandhi, leader of the Indian nationalist movement, and Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax),
British viceroy (1926–31) of India. It marked the end of a period of civil disobedience
(satyagraha) in India against British rule that Gandhi and his followers had initiated with
the Salt March (March–April 1930). Gandhi’s arrest and imprisonment at the end of the
march, for illegally making salt, sparked one of his more effective civil disobedience
movements. By the end of 1930, tens of thousands of Indians were in jail (including
future Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru), the movement had
generated worldwide publicity, and Irwin was looking for a way to end it. Gandhi was
released from custody in January 1931, and the two men began negotiating the terms of
the pact. In the end, Gandhi pledged to give up the satyagraha campaign, and Irwin
agreed to release those who had been imprisoned during it and to allow Indians to
make salt for domestic use. Later that year Gandhi attended the second session
(September–December) of the Round Table Conference in London.

George Montagu Dunk, 2nd earl of Halifax

George Montagu Dunk, 2nd earl of Halifax, (born Oct. 5/6, 1716—died June 8, 1771),
English statesman, after whom the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, is named.

He was the son of George Montagu, 1st earl of Montagu, to whose title he succeeded in
1739. He assumed the name of his wealthy wife, Anne Dunk, whom he married in 1741.

He became president of the Board of Trade in 1748 and took an active interest in
colonial development, helping to found Halifax, N.S., and in several ways rendering
good service to trade, especially with North America. He was lord lieutenant of Ireland
from March 1761 to March 1763 and for a time concurrently first lord of the Admiralty,
from June to October 1762, in Lord Bute’s administration; he then became secretary of
state for the northern department, transferring to the southern department in 1763.
Halifax was lord privy seal during 1770 in the ministry of his nephew, Lord North, and
was again secretary of state for the northern department during 1771 from January until
his death in June.

Salt March
Salt March, also called Dandi March or Salt Satyagraha, major nonviolent protest
action in India led by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in March–April 1930. The march
was the first act in an even-larger campaign of civil
disobedience (satyagraha) Gandhi waged against British rule in India that extended into
early 1931 and garnered Gandhi widespread support among the Indian populace and
considerable worldwide attention.

Salt production and distribution in India had long been a lucrative monopoly of the
British. Through a series of laws, the Indian populace was prohibited from producing or
selling salt independently, and instead Indians were required to buy expensive, heavily
taxed salt that often was imported. This affected the great majority of Indians, who were
poor and could not afford to buy it. Indian protests against the salt tax began in the 19th
century and remained a major contentious issue throughout the period of British rule of
the subcontinent.

In early 1930 Gandhi decided to mount a highly visible demonstration against the
increasingly repressive salt tax by marching through what is now the western Indian
state of Gujarat from his ashram (religious retreat) at Sabermati (near Ahmadabad) to
the town of Dandi (near Surat) on the Arabian Sea coast. He set out on foot on March
12, accompanied by several dozen followers. After each day’s march the group stopped
in a different village along the route, where increasingly larger crowds would gather to
hear Gandhi rail against the unfairness of the tax on poor people. Hundreds more would
join the core group of followers as they made their way to the sea until on April 5
the entourage reached Dandi after a journey of some 240 miles (385 km). On the
morning of April 6, Gandhi and his followers picked up handfuls of salt along the shore,
thus technically “producing” salt and breaking the law.

Salt March sculpture

No arrests were made that day, and Gandhi continued his satyagraha against the salt
tax for the next two months, exhorting other Indians to break the salt laws by committing
acts of civil disobedience. Thousands were arrested and imprisoned,
including Jawaharlal Nehru in April and Gandhi himself in early May after he
informed Lord Irwin (the viceroy of India) of his intention to march on the nearby
Dharasana saltworks. News of Gandhi’s detention spurred tens of thousands more to
join the satyagraha. The march on the saltworks went ahead as planned on May 21, led
by the poet Sarojini Naidu, and many of the some 2,500 peaceful marchers were
attacked and beaten by police. By the end of the year, some 60,000 people were in jail.

Gandhi was released from custody in January 1931 and began negotiations with Lord
Irwin aimed at ending the satyagraha campaign. A truce subsequently was declared,
which was formalized in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact that was signed on March 5. The calming
of tensions paved the way for Gandhi, representing the Indian National Congress,
to attend the second session (September–December 1931) of the Round Table
Conference in London.

satyagraha
satyagraha, (Sanskrit and Hindi: “holding onto truth”) concept introduced in the early
20th century by Mahatma Gandhi to designate a determined but nonviolent resistance
to evil. Gandhi’s satyagraha became a major tool in the Indian struggle against British
imperialism and has since been adopted by protest groups in other countries.

According to this philosophy, satyagrahis—practitioners of satyagraha—achieve correct

insight into the real nature of an evil situation by observing a nonviolence of the mind,
by seeking truth in a spirit of peace and love, and by undergoing a rigorous process of
self-scrutiny. In so doing, the satyagrahi encounters truth in the absolute. By refusing to
submit to the wrong or to cooperate with it in any way, the satyagrahi asserts that truth.
Throughout the confrontation with evil, the satyagrahi must adhere to nonviolence, for to
employ violence would be to lose correct insight. Satyagrahis always warn their
opponents of their intentions; satyagraha forbids any tactic suggesting the use of
secrecy to one’s advantage. Satyagraha includes more than civil disobedience. Its full
range of application extends from the details of correct daily living to the construction
of alternative political and economic institutions. Satyagraha seeks to conquer through
conversion: in the end, there is neither defeat nor victory but rather a new harmony.

Satyagraha draws from the ancient Indian ideal of ahimsa (“noninjury”), which is

pursued with particular rigour by Jains, many of whom live in Gujurat, where Gandhi
grew up. In developing ahimsa into a modern concept with broad political
consequences, as satyagraha, Gandhi also drew from the writings of Leo
Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, from the Bible, and from the Bhagavadgita, on which
he wrote a commentary. Gandhi first conceived satyagraha in 1906 in response to a law
discriminating against Asians that was passed by the British colonial government of the
Transvaal in South Africa. In 1917 the first satyagraha campaign in India was mounted
in the indigo-growing district of Champaran. During the following years, fasting and
economic boycotts were employed as methods of satyagraha in India, until the British
left the country in 1947.

Critics of satyagraha, both in Gandhi’s time and subsequently, have argued that it is
unrealistic and incapable of universal success, since it relies upon a high standard
of ethical conduct in the opponent, the representative of evil, and demands an
unrealistically strong level of commitment from those struggling for social amelioration.
Nonetheless, satyagraha played a significant role in the civil rights movement led
by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States and has spawned a
continuing legacy in South Asia itself.

international agreement
international relations
international agreement, instrument by which states and other subjects of international
law, such as certain international organizations, regulate matters of concern to them.
The agreements assume a variety of form and style, but they are all governed by the
law of treaties, which is part of customary international law.

A treaty, the typical instrument of international relations, is defined by the 1969 Vienna

Convention on the Law of Treaties as an “agreement concluded between States in
written form and governed by international law, whether embodied in a single instrument
or in two or more related instruments and whatever its particular designation.
Contractual treaties are treaties by which the parties agree to exchange pieces of
territory or settle a dispute or claims—that is, by which they deal with a particular kind of
business. Lawmaking treaties, which have grown tremendously in number and
significance since World War II, are instruments in which the parties formulate principles
or detailed rules for their future conduct.”

Some multilateral agreements set up an international organization for a specific purpose

or a variety of purposes. They may therefore be referred to as constituent agreements.
The United Nations Charter (1945) is both a multilateral treaty and the constituent
instrument of the United Nations. An example of a regional agreement that operates as
a constituent agreement is the charter of the Organization of American States (Charter
of Bogotá), which established the organization in 1948. The constitution of an
international organization may be part of a wider multilateral treaty. The Treaty of
Versailles (1919), for example, contained in Part I the Covenant of the League of
Nations and in Part XIII the constitution of the International Labour Organisation.

The term supranational is of recent origin and is used to describe the type of treaty
structure developed originally by six western European states: France, Germany, Italy,
the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The first treaty was that of Paris, signed in
1951, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC); the second,
the Rome treaty, signed in 1957, establishing the European Economic
Community (EEC); the third, the Rome treaty of the same date establishing
the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). A clause in the ECSC treaty
provides for the complete independence of the members of the executive organ from
the governments that appoint them.

Treaties, however, are not the only instruments by which international agreements are
concluded. There are single instruments that lack the formality of a treaty called agreed
minute, memorandum of agreement, or modus vivendi; there are formal single
instruments called convention, agreement, protocol, declaration, charter, covenant,
pact, statute, final act, general act, and concordat (the usual designation for accords
with the Holy See); finally there are less formal agreements consisting of two or more
instruments, such as “exchange of notes” or “exchange of letters.”

In the absence of an international legislature, the multilateral treaty is the chosen

instrument for adapting international law to changing circumstances brought about by
rapid technological developments and the ever-growing interdependence of nations.

Despite the extreme diversity of international agreements, it is possible to classify them

according to the functions that they serve in international society. Three such broad
functions may be discerned; namely, the development and codification of
international law, the establishment of new levels of cooperation
and integration between states, and the resolution of actual and potential international
conflict.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties contains a compromissory clause

(whereby participants agree to submit disputes to arbitration or the International Court of
Justice) for certain types of disputes and a procedure of conciliation for others. The
resistance of states to compulsory arbitration or adjudication is indicative of their limited
commitment to universal integration through the rule of law. In this respect the
European Economic Community is an exception, providing as it does for the compulsory
settlement of disputes arising under the three constituent treaties by the Court
of Justice, which is open even to individuals. It may be noted that western Europe was
the cradle of nationalism and the doctrine of the sovereignty of states. Now it may have
become the cradle of supranational integration.

Tendulkar on Gandhi
Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar first published his eight-volume biography of Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, Mahatma, in 1951–54. He published a revised and expanded
edition in 1960–63. The biography that he wrote for the Encyclopædia Britannica first
appeared in the 1964 printing of the 14th edition, and it was used until 1973, when the
version below appeared. In his biography for Britannica, Tendulkar used the same
approach he used in Mahatma: drawing heavily on archival research, he quoted
extensively from Gandhi himself, giving this biography a vivid injection of Gandhi’s own
voice.
GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND (1869–1948)

GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND (1869–1948), architect of India’s freedom

through a nonviolent revolution, was born at Porbandar, Kathiawar, on Oct. 2, 1869. His
father and grandfather, of the Vaishya (trading) caste, were both chief ministers in
Kathiawar princely states. His mother, Putlibai, was deeply religious and possessed a
strong personality. Her influence, more than any other, formed his character.
His life

When 12 years old, Gandhi was married to Kasturbai who was of the same age and by
whom he had four children. He attended Alfred high school at Rajkot and matriculated
at 18. After three years’ stay in London he was called to the bar (Inner Temple). For two
years he practised in Bombay and Rajkot with little success, but an unexpected offer to
proceed to South Africa opened a new vista before him. A week after his arrival in
Durban in May 1893 he visited the court only to be asked by the magistrate to take off
his turban. His second shock came at Pietermaritzburg when, holding a first-class
railway ticket, he was pushed out of the compartment by a white guard and left
shivering in a dark waiting room. This was a critical experience: “There was a white man
in the room; I was afraid of him. What was my duty, I asked myself. Should I go back to
India or should I go forward, with God as my helper, and face whatever was in store for
me? I decided to stay and suffer. My active non-violence began from that date.”

He founded the Natal Indian Congress party in 1894. He came to the aid of the British
empire in the South African War and in the Zulu rebellion by organizing an ambulance
corps. Meanwhile his reputation as a lawyer was rising; he varied his work with visits to
India, where G.K. Gokhale became his friend and guide. In 1904 he took over a weekly
publication, Indian Opinion, to fight the Indian settlers’ cause. As the struggle advanced
Gandhi found the term “passive resistance” inadequate. He changed it to satyagraha,
“force which is born of truth and love or non-violence.” Satyagraha in South Africa lasted
eight years, beginning in 1906, when the Transvaal government passed a bill which
required every Indian to register his fingerprints. Under Gandhi’s leadership the Indians
refused to obey this humiliating law; 2,000 men and women courted imprisonment by
marching in protest and ultimately the Indians won their case.

Gandhi’s outlook was changing rapidly. He studied the Upanishads, the Koran and the
Bible. He memorized the Bhagavad Gita as a dictionary of daily reference.
Ruskin’s Unto This Last affected him profoundly with its message that the good of the
individual is the good of all, that the life of the labourer is the life worth living. In his
Phoenix settlement (1904) and Tolstoi farm (1910) Gandhi worked as scavenger,
cobbler, farmer and printer, a practical idealist bending mind and body in unison. He
abandoned his law practice and embraced voluntary poverty.

In 1909 Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, which is the quintessence of
his ideas. The goal set forth in the book is “an exploitation-free society in which the
ordinary individual can claim and defend his rights.” His ideas were almost anarchical
and as a condemnation of modern machine civilization the book remains a classic.
Correspondence followed with Leo Tolstoi, who liked the book and
considered satyagraha an idea of world-wide importance.

Gandhi returned to India in Jan. 1915 and Rabindranath Tagore hailed him

as Mahatma (“great soul”). In May 1915 Gandhi founded a satyagraha ashram at
Ahmedabad with 25 inmates, who took vows to observe truth, nonviolence, celibacy and
fearlessness; to practise self-control; to work for the removal of untouchability and for
education through the mother tongue; and to wear only khadi (hand-spun and hand-
woven cloth). They were to practise swadeshi (the use of products made in the home
country), accepting only what was offered by their immediate neighbourhood.
For two years Gandhi traveled extensively. In April 1917 a peasant from Champaran in
Bihar took him to study the plight of ryots who were compelled by law to plant indigo on
their land for sale to European planters. Gandhi began his inquiry assisted by Rajendra
Prasad, and was ordered to leave the district. He disobeyed the order and was
summoned to court and tried. He simply pleaded guilty. The governor intervened and
appointed an inquiry committee with Gandhi as a member. The committee’s
recommendations, favourable to the ryots, were translated into the Champaran Agrarian
act. This was the first case of satyagraha in India.

In April 1918 Lord Chelmsford, the viceroy, invited Gandhi to a war conference. Gandhi
told the viceroy: “In Champaran by resisting an agelong tyranny I have shown the
ultimate sovereignty of British justice…. If I could popularize the use of soul force, I
know that I could present you with an India that could defy the whole world.”

He plunged himself into recruiting, but the response was meagre. The war soon ended
and in March 1919 the government, aware of widespread discontent, enacted the
Rowlatt bills which empowered the authorities to imprison without trial those suspected
of sedition. In protest Gandhi called upon the people to observe a hartal (“suspension of
business”) on Sunday, April 6, preceded by a fast and prayer. On the way to Delhi he
was arrested, which led to mob violence. He owned to a “Himalayan” miscalculation and
suspended civil disobedience. In the same month 10,000 people who had assembled at
Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar were machine-gunned. Martial law was declared in the
Punjab. In Oct. 1919 Gandhi started two weeklies, Young India in English
and Navajivan in Gujarati, to teach nonviolence and fearlessness.

In 1920 Gandhi took up the Khilafat (Caliphate) question over which the minds of

Muslims were agitated. They strongly resented the terms to be imposed on Turkey by
the treaty of Sèvres (1920). Gandhi proposed that a non-co-operation movement should
start on Aug. 1 with the surrender of all titles and honours and with a boycott of schools,
colleges, law courts and councils. He himself returned his Kaisar-i-Hind medal (awarded
for distinguished humanitarian work) and the decorations he had received in South
Africa.

There then began for India, with Gandhi as leader, a period of struggle and
transformation. In his speeches and writings, Gandhi was unsparing in his denunciation
of British imperialism as “a satanic system.” “Non-co-operation,” he declared, “though a
religious and strictly moral movement, aims at the overthrow of the government.” Critics
meanwhile made fun of his insistence on hand-spinning. Gandhi knew that the spinning
wheel was an uneconomic machine, but it was cheap, needed little skill and brought in a
supplementary income to families which were unemployed or underemployed for
several months in the year. Further, he saw in the spinning wheel the means of freeing
India from its dependence on Lancashire. India, in his view, could dispense with most of
its imports but cloth it must have. That is why the charkha (spinning wheel) became for
Gandhi the symbol of swaraj. He intensified the campaign by taking to the loincloth in
Sept. 1921. “Millions are too poor to buy enough khadi to replace their discarded cloth.
Let them be satisfied with a mere loin cloth.”

In Feb. 1922 Gandhi decided to lead a mass campaign of civil disobedience in the
Bardoli district (Gujarat). The payment of taxes to the government would be
discontinued. On the eve of the campaign, however, the people of Chauri Chaura (in
Uttar Pradesh) were provoked into attacking the police. Gandhi then decided to
suspend his mass campaign and imposed on himself a five days’ penitential fast. He
was arrested at his ashram at Ahmedabad on March 13, 1922, and was tried by C.N.
Broomfield, sessions judge at Ahmedabad, on a charge of sedition, based upon his
writings in Young India. He pleaded guilty. “I am here to invite and submit to the highest
penalty that can be inflicted upon me, for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what
appears to me to be the highest duty.” He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.
Two years after his confinement in Yeravda jail in Poona Gandhi had to undergo an
operation for appendicitis; he was released in Feb. 1924.

The Indian political landscape was then rapidly changing, the most decisive event being
the collapse of the Khilafat movement. C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru founded an
independent Swaraj party to oppose the government in the legislatures and did well in
the general elections. Since Gandhi realized that the majority of congressmen favoured
entry to the councils, he kept aloof from politics. He presided over the Congress at
Belgaum in 1924 and spoke only about spinning and the boycott of foreign cloth. As a
result the All-India Spinners’ association was founded for the development
of khadi under Gandhi’s guidance, and for the next four years his work was to be
preaching and organizing khadi centres in the villages.

In Nov. 1927 Lord Irwin, the viceroy, summoned Gandhi to apprise him of the
appointment of a statutory commission on constitutional reform under the chairmanship
of Sir John Simon. Even the moderates were shocked because not a single Indian was
appointed to the commission. Congress boycotted it effectively. In Oct. 1929 a
statement by Lord Irwin foreshadowed a Round Table conference between British and
Indian representatives. Gandhi asked the viceroy whether the Round Table conference
would establish full dominion status for India. The viceroy could give no such
assurance. Congress then had no choice. Under Jawaharlal Nehru’s presidency it
declared that its goal was complete independence and called on the people to be
prepared for the struggle.

On March 12, 1930, Gandhi started another campaign of civil disobedience, this time
against the tax on salt, which affected the poorest section of the community. He set out
with 78 followers to cover the distance of 240 mi. that lay between Ahmedabad and the
seashore at Dandi. On April 6 he bathed in the sea at Dandi and picked up a lump of
natural salt thereby symbolically defying the law under which salt collection was a
government monopoly. Everywhere people followed his example and mass arrests
followed. On May 4 Gandhi was arrested and interned, but he was released on Jan. 26,
1931. The Irwin-Gandhi agreement by which civil disobedience was discontinued was
signed on March 5. The making of salt for personal use was permitted and about
100,000 nonviolent prisoners were released.

On Sept. 12, 1931, Gandhi reached London to represent the Congress at the second
Round Table conference. Through his personal contacts, he brought India nearer to the
British intelligentsia and the commoner. At the conference he sensed that attention was
concentrated on the problem of minorities and that this took precedence over the central
issue, the transfer of power. Then, as always, he was convinced that it was British rule
which had driven a wedge between India’s creeds and classes; once this foreign
influence was removed, Indians would solve their communal differences. He spent a
week in a vain endeavour to reach an agreement with Muslims and other minorities.
Confronted with the imposing numbers against him, he had to remind the conference
that Congress represented 85% of the Indian population. He argued that the proposed
scheme for minorities would vivisect the nation.

On his return to India at the end of 1931, he had to face a grim situation. Jawaharlal
Nehru and Ghaffar Khan, the Congress leader in the North-West Frontier province,
were imprisoned and special ordinances had been issued. Gandhi requested Lord
Willingdon, the viceroy, to see him “as a friend,” but he wound up by enclosing a copy of
the resolution just passed by the Congress Working committee “tentatively sketching a
plan of civil disobedience,” which would be suspended “pending our discussion.”

On Jan. 4, 1932, Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel were arrested and again interned in

Yeravda jail. In March the struggle against the government entered a new phase. A
communal (electoral) award was imminent. Gandhi sent from prison to the secretary of
state for India a reminder of his own objection to the segregation of untouchables in a
separate electorate, and warned him that he would resist this by a fast unto death.
When, in August, an award was published that ignored his objections Gandhi
announced that he would start a fast on Sept. 20. The first day of the ordeal was
celebrated all over India as a day of prayer and fasting. Many temples were thrown
open to the untouchables. B.R. Ambedkar, a leader of the depressed classes, was
induced to join a representative conference and by the fifth day of the fast a solution
had been found. Gandhi then broke his fast.

Gandhi then identified himself with the untouchables, whom he called Harijans
(“children of God”) for “the most despised people are the most favoured of God.” In Feb.
1933 he started Harijan, a weekly which was his mouthpiece for the rest of his life; by
1942 it was published in ten Indian languages.

After his many fasts Gandhi withdrew to recover his strength in an ashram at Wardha
(in central India). Then he toured extensively for ten months on behalf of the Harijans.
He collected Rs. 800,000 for their cause, much of it in copper coins, some of it in
women’s jewelry.

Gandhi resigned not merely his leadership but even his membership of Congress in
1934. He had gained the impression that congressmen had adopted nonviolence, for
him a fundamental creed, only as a political expedient.

His work now lay in the villages and with the newly founded All-India Village Industries
association. He settled at Sevagram, a village near Wardha. By 1934 the making and
marketing of khadi had been organized in 5,000 villages. “The movement of the
spinning wheel is an organized effort to displace machinery from the state of
exclusiveness and exploitation and to place it in its proper state,” said Gandhi. “Under
my scheme, therefore, men in charge of machinery will not think of themselves or even
of the nation to which they belong, but of the whole human race.”

Congress swept the polls in 1937 because of Gandhi’s constructive program. “India,”
Gandhi wrote, “is still a prison, but the superintendent allows the prisoners to elect the
officials who run the jail.” So he advised Congressmen to enter the councils. Presently
he was drafting a program for the ministries which Congress formed in 9 of the 11
provinces. He stressed prohibition, basic education and the relief of indebted peasants;
broadly he hoped that the interests of the villages would be a first consideration.

At the outbreak of war in Sept. 1939, Gandhi found himself alone at a Congress
Working committee meeting in seeking that whatever support was to be given to the
British should be given unconditionally; nevertheless, recognition of India as a free and
independent nation seemed to be “the natural corollary of the British profession as to
democracy.” When the viceroy took India into the war without consulting the leaders or
legislatures the Congress ministries resigned.

In Jan. 1940 there was an exchange of letters between Gandhi and M.A. Jinnah, the
leader of the Muslim league and later founder of Pakistan. “You start with the theory of
the Indian nation that does not exist,” wrote Jinnah. “Your reply dashes to the ground all
hope of unity,” replied Gandhi.

The events in Europe of May 1940 had their repercussions in India. The Congress
Working committee found itself unable to accept in its entirety Gandhi’s attitude to the
war and, in particular, his view that India should not maintain its own armed forces to
defend its freedom against external aggression and internal disorder. In fact, he was
against all war. The Working committee absolved him from further responsibility for
Congress activities. In July the Working committee offered its co-operation in the war
effort and in return called for an acknowledgment by Britain of the complete
independence of India and a declaration that, as an immediate step in giving effect to it,
a provisional national government at the centre would be formed. When the viceroy
rejected the offer Congress sought Gandhi’s lead.

In Oct. 1940 Gandhi launched individual civil disobedience to win freedom of speech
against war. Vinoba Bhave was the first of hundreds of satyagrahis to court jail. In Dec.
1941 the government released the satyagrahis and, as the Japanese swept across the
Pacific and through Burma and Malaya, the urgency of some settlement in India
became clear. In March 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps, a British cabinet minister, came to
India with an offer, which Gandhi found worthless. The conception of the slogan “quit
India” now began to take shape in his mind and was developed in a succession of
articles in Harijan. On Aug. 8 the All-India Congress committee presided over by
Maulana Azad, adopted the “quit India” resolution. On Aug. 9 the government arrested
Gandhi and other Congress leaders. A mass rising immediately broke out. Repression
was intense. During Gandhi’s detention at Poona, his devoted secretary, Mahadev
Desai, and wife Kasturbai, who stood by him for 63 years, died in the camp.

In Jan. 1943, Gandhi wrote a letter to the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, blaming the
government for their “leonine violence” and announced a fast of 21 days, which began
on Feb. 10. He was released on May 6, 1944, on grounds of health.

In March 1946, after the end of the war and the advent of a Labour government in
Britain, a British cabinet mission consisting of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford
Cripps and A.V. Alexander arrived in Delhi. Gandhi declared himself completely
opposed to the two-nation theory on which Jinnah’s claim for Pakistan was founded.
The cabinet mission would have to decide this main issue.
On May 16 the cabinet mission issued a statement proposing the complete withdrawal
of the British authority from India. They recommended a united India, with one federal
government to deal with foreign affairs, defense and communications.

The Muslim league then decided to withdraw its previous acceptance of the mission’s
proposals and to prepare a program of direct action. Fresh efforts were made by the
viceroy, Lord Wavell, to form an interim government but Jinnah declined. A new
government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru took office on Sept. 2, 1946. For Gandhi it
was a day of deep significance. He wrote a note for Nehru and his colleagues: “Abolish
the salt tax; remember the Dandi march; unite Hindus and Muslims; remove
untouchability; take to khadi.”

Meanwhile communal differences were taking an ugly form. In Calcutta, riots broke out
on Aug. 16, the Muslim league’s Direct Action day, and massacres followed. They
spread to other parts of Bengal and to Bihar. During the cold weather of 1946–47,
Gandhi went to live in East Bengal. He walked barefoot from village to village in the
devastated areas of Noakhali and Tippera and mingled freely with Muslims and Hindus
and expounded his gospel of nonviolence to them equally. In March 1947 he moved to
Bihar to instill courage in the Muslim minority and to help them in their distress.

On June 3, 1947, Clement Attlee, the British prime minister, announced the plan for
partition; it was accepted by Congress and the Muslim league. Gandhi considered
partition “a spiritual tragedy”: “I do not agree with what my closest friends have done or
are doing; 32 years of work have come to an inglorious end.” On Aug. 15, 1947,
Independence day, he was fighting riots in Calcutta. He fasted all day and prayed. He
issued no message to the nation. At the end of August fresh riots broke out in Calcutta.
Gandhi embarked on a fast unto death to be broken only if the communal killing
stopped. This had an immediate effect. On Sept. 9 Gandhi reached Delhi. At his first
prayer meeting he expressed his regret over the terrible atrocities which were being
committed all round. A few days later he spoke about the wholesale migrations which
were taking place both ways across the frontier between India and Pakistan. It was the
duty of both governments, he said, to protect their minorities. He advised the Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs that they should all be prepared to die to a man rather than leave
their homes.

He could bear it no longer. On Jan. 12, 1948, he announced that he would undertake
yet one more fast. “I have no answer,” he said, “to the Muslim friends who see me from
day to day as to what they should do. My impotence has been gnawing at me of late. It
will go immediately the fast is undertaken.” The fast began the following day and went
on until Jan. 18 when the news reached him that a peace committee representative of
all communities in Delhi had signed a pact pledging brotherly amity and the protection of
the life, property and faith of the Muslim minority.

On Jan. 20, during a prayer meeting outside Gandhi’s residence in Delhi, a bomb was
thrown by a youth. It exploded harmlessly. Referring to the incident next day, Gandhi
said that no one should look down upon the youth, who probably regarded him as an
enemy of Hinduism.

On Friday, Jan. 30, 1948, shortly after 5 P.M., Gandhi was on his way to attend his
usual prayer meeting. As he was going up the steps to the prayer platform, a Hindu
fanatic suddenly broke through the congregation and fired three shots. Gandhi uttered
“He Rama” (O God), and died. The house and ground where he was killed were
dedicated to the nation on Oct. 2, 1971, in observance of the 102nd anniversary of his
birth.
His teaching

Gandhi was one of the very few who have set the stamp of an idea on an epoch. That
idea is nonviolence. His emphasis on truth and purity of means from which he evolved
his creed of nonviolence was but another aspect of his deep humanity, for it insisted
that men in their fight for their rights, whether as individuals or as groups, should never
violate their basic obligation to respect life. “As man has not been given power to create,
he has not the slightest right to destroy the smallest creature that lives.” Gandhi, like all
dynamic personalities, needed a vast medium for the expression of his creative will.
This medium he developed for himself when he assumed the responsibility of leading a
vast country into freedom, crossing countless social, economic and political hurdles.

Great as he was as a leader of men and as a political and social rebel, he was far
greater as a man who put no limit to his humanity. “My life is an indivisible whole,” he
said, “and all my activities run into one another; they all have their rise in my insatiable
love of mankind…. I do not know any religion apart from human activity. It provides a
moral basis to all other activities…. We needlessly divide life into watertight
compartments, religion and other; whereas if a man has true religion in him, it must
show itself in the smallest details of life. The slightest irregularity in sanitary, social and
political life is a sign of spiritual poverty."

Gandhi was a Hindu influenced by the Vaishnava and Jain traditions. In his student
days in London he was in the main stream of the thought
of Marx, Darwin, Morris, Kropotkin and the Fabians. He came under the influence
of Thoreau, Ruskin and Tolstoi. At 75 he read Das Kapital. He was an extraordinary
blend of the east and the west, of the ancient and the modern. His own writings, mainly
published by the Navajivan trust, Ahmedabad, were numerous and include An
Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments With Truth, originally written in Gujarati,
Gandhi’s mother tongue (Eng. trans. by Mahadev Desai, 1940). The publications
division of the government of India published eight volumes of his collected writings
during 1954–63.

Q.5 Give a detailed account of 2nd Round Table Conference and the Communal Award that
followed it.

Answer:- Second Round Table Conference, 1931

 

 The second Round Table Conference was held in London from 7

September 1931 to 1 December 1931 with the participation of Gandhi and
the Indian National Congress
  Two weeks before the Conference convened, the Labour government had
been replaced by the Conservatives
 As a part of Gandhi-Irwin pact, Gandhi agrees to suspend the Civil
Disobedience movement and participate in next Round Table
Conference(RTC)

 
Participants in Second RTC

Representatives Members
Maharaja of Alwar, Maharaja of Baroda, Maharaja Of Darbhanga ,
Nawab of Bhopal, Maharaja of Bikaner, Maharao of Kutch, Rana of
Dholpur, Maharaja of Indore, Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Maharaja
of Kapurthala, Maharaja of Nawanagar, Maharaja of Patiala, Maharaja of
Indian States Rewa, Chief Sahib of Sangli, Raja of Korea, Raja of Sarila, Sir
Prabhashankar Pattani (Bhavnagar), Manubhai Mehta (Baroda), Sardar
Sahibzada Sultan Ahmed Khan (Gwalior), Sir Muhammad Akbar Hydari
(Hyderabad), Mirza Ismail (Mysore), Col. K.N. Haksar (Jammu and
Kashmir), T. Raghavaiah (Travancore), Liaqat Hayat Khan (Patiala)
Government of India  C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, Narendra Nath Law, M. Ramachandra Rao
Indian National Congress  Mahatma Gandhi (He was the sole representative of the Congress).
 Aga Khan III, Maulana Shaukat Ali, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, A. K. Fazlul
Huq, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Shafi, Muhammad Zafarullah
Khan, Sir Syed Ali Imam, Maulvi Muhammad Shafi Daudi, Raja Sher
Muslims Muhammad Khan of Domeli, A. H. Ghuznavi, Hafiz Hidayat Hussain,
Sayed Muhammad Padshah Saheb Bahadur, Dr. Shafa’at Ahmad Khan,
Jamal Muhammad Rowther, Khwaja Mian Rowther, Nawab Sahibzada
Sayed Muhammad Mehr Shah
Hindus  M. R. Jayakar, B. S. Moonje, Diwan Bahadur Raja Narendra Nath
Depressed Classes  B. R. Ambedkar, Rettamalai Srinivasan
Indian Christians Surendra Kumar Datta, A. T. Pannirselvam
Women Sarojini Naidu, Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz, Radhabai Subbarayan
 
Proceedings

 There were three major differences between the first and second Round
Table Conferences
o Congress Representation
 The Gandhi–Irwin Pact opened the way for Congress
participation in this conference.
 Gandhi was invited from India and attended as the sole official
Congress representative accompanied by Sarojini Naidu and
also Madan Mohan Malaviya, Ghanshyam Das Birla,
 Muhammad Iqbal, Sir Mirza Ismail (Diwan of Mysore), S.K.
Dutta and Sir Syed Ali Imam.
 Gandhi claimed that the Congress alone represented political
India; that the Untouchables were Hindus and should not be
treated as a “minority”; and that there should be no separate
electorates or special safeguards for Muslims or other
minorities. These claims were rejected by the other Indian
participants.
 According to this pact, Gandhi was asked to call off the Civil
Disobedience Movement (CDM) and if he did so the prisoners
of the British government would be freed except the criminal
prisoners, i.e. those who had killed British officials. He
returned to India, disappointed with the results and empty-
handed
o National Government
 Two weeks earlier the Labour government in London had
fallen.
 Ramsay MacDonald now headed a National Government
dominated by the Conservative Party
o Financial Crisis
 During the conference, Britain went off the Gold Standard,
further distracting the National Government
o At the end of the conference Ramsay MacDonald undertook to
produce a Communal Award for minority representation
o Other important discussions were the responsibility of the executive
to the legislature and a separate electorate for the Untouchables as
demanded by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.
o Gandhi announced that henceforth he would work only on behalf of
the Harijans: he reached a compromise with the leader of depressed
classes, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, over this issue; the two eventually
resolved the situation with the Poona Pact of 1932

 Lord Irwin had been replaced by Lord Willingdon as viceroy in India. Just

before the conference began, the Labour government in England had been
replaced by a National Government

 The British were also angered by the increased revolutionary

activities which had claimed many European lives in India.
  The Right Wing or Conservatives in Britain led by Churchill strongly
objected to the British government negotiating with the Congress on an
equal basis. They, instead, demanded a strong government in India
 At the conference, Gandhi (and therefore the Congress) claimed to
represent all people of India against imperialism.
o The other delegates, however, did not share this view.
o Historians point out that many of the delegates were conservative,
government loyalists, and communalists, and these groups were
used by the colonial government to neutralise the efforts of Gandhi

Outcome of Second RTC

 The lack of agreement among the many delegate groups meant that no
substantial results regarding India’s constitutional future would come out of
the conference
 The session ended with MacDonald’s announcement of:
o two Muslim majority provinces—North-West Frontier Province
(NWFP) and Sindh;
o the setting up of an Indian Consultative Committee;
o setting up of three expert committees—finance, franchise and states;
and
o the prospect of a unilateral British Communal Award if Indians failed
to agree
 Further, the government refused to concede the basic Indian demand of
freedom

 The Communal Award

1905 - 1940, 1920 - 1932 EVENTS, EVENTS

When the Indian leadership failed to come up with a constitutional solution of the
communal issue, the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald announced his own
formula for solving the problem. He said that he was not only a Prime Minister of Britain
but was also a friend of the Indians and thus wanted to solve the problems of his
friends.

After the failure of the Second Round Table conference, Mr. MacDonald announced the
‘Communal Award’ on August 16, 1932. According to the Award, the right of separate
electorate was not only given to the Muslims of India but also to all the minority
communities in the country. The Award also declared untouchables as a minority and
thus the Hindu depressed classes were given a number of special seats, to be filled
from special depressed class electorates in the area where their voters were
concentrated. Under the Communal Award, the principle of weightage was also
maintained with some modifications in the Muslim minority provinces. Principle of
weightage was also applied for Europeans in Bengal and Assam, Sikhs in the Punjab
and North West Frontier Province, and Hindus in Sindh and North West Frontier
Province.

Though the Muslims constituted almost 56 percent of the total population of Punjab,
they were given only 86 out of 175 seats in the Punjab Assembly. The Muslim majority
of 54.8 percent in Punjab was thus reduced to a minority. The formula favored the Sikhs
of Punjab, and the Europeans of Bengal the most.

The Award was not popular with any Indian party. Muslims were not happy with the
Communal Award, as it has reduced their majority in Punjab and Bengal to a minority.
Yet they were prepared to accept it. In its annual session held in November 1933, the
All India Muslim League passed a resolution that reads; “Though the decision falls far
short of the Muslim demands, the Muslims have accepted it in the best interest of the
country, reserving to themselves the right to press for the acceptance of all their
demands.”

On the other hand, the Hindus refused to accept the awards and decided to launch a
campaign against it. For them it was not possible to accept the Untouchables as a
minority. They organized the Allahabad Unity Conference in which they demanded for
the replacement of separate electorates by joint electorates. Many nationalist Muslims
and Sikhs also participated in the conference. The Congress also rejected the Award in
Toto. Gandhi protested against the declaration of Untouchables as a minority and
undertook a fast unto death. He also held meetings with the Untouchable leadership for
the first time and try to convince them that they were very much part of the mainstream
Hindu society. He managed to sign the Poona Pact with Dr. B. R. Ambedker, the leader
of Untouchables in which the Congress met many of the Untouchables’ demands.