Inter-religious relations: conciliation and confrontation
As evident from the preceding discussions, relationships between religious
communities were often fragile in the mid- and late nineteenth century.
Without doubt, these relationships were at times confrontational. On the
Muslim side, for one, there were occasional outbreaks of hostility. In the
1850s, for example, in what were apparently the first Hindu–Muslim
skirmishes in Ayodhya ̄, the Sunnı ̄s (some one third of the city’s population
at the time) led battles against entrenched Hindu warring ascetics on the
grounds that a Muslim pilgrimage site had been taken over by Hindus. Some
militant Hindus, for their part, were known to “bait” Muslims: in 1893, a Cow
Protection Movement was launched (the first of several) trying to prevent
Muslims from slaughtering cows; and in the mid-1890s, the A ̄rya Sama ̄j
launched its attempt to reconvert Muslims. The situation was exacerbated
by certain British policies wherein caste and religious distinctions were
highlighted: identity cards were issued which indicated a person’s caste and
religion; a quota system was used to assign places in the civil service; and
certain communities were granted permission to follow their own laws, not
least important, Muslims who were permitted the right to follow the sharı ̄‘a.
This last policy led to protests by some Hindus in 1907 and thereafter. These
policies, in general, tended to lead to the creation of power blocs based on
caste or religion and to the phenomenon known in India as communalism^43
- the propensity to make the values of one’s “community” more important
than those of any other community, including those of the nation-state itself.
One response on the part of Muslim leaders was that of calling for a
separate electorate for Muslims. Even the moderate Ahmad Kha ̄n had
worried that because Muslims were only 20 percent of the subcontinent’s
population, they would be unable to find appropriate representation in the
face of the majority. In 1906, the Muslim League was founded to press for
demands that Muslims be elected from separate Muslim electorates and that
the percentage of these be higher than the percentage of the population.^44
In light of these developments, the contribution of Muhammed Alı ̄and
Muhammad Iqbalare apropos.
Muhammed Alı ̄ (1878–1931) was born of a conservative Muslim family,
studied at Alı ̄garh College and at Oxford. In England, he observed the results
of British hegemony over other Islamic areas and the decline of the Ottoman
empire. This increased his resistance to the British, especially during the
First World War for which he was incarcerated. Mahatma Gandhi sought his
release; subsequently, he became an admirer and ally of Gandhi, working
for a united and independent India. He believed cooperation between
Hindu and Muslim was essential and that non-violence was the way to self-
rule. Hindus, he argued, needed to understand that Muslims were trying to
Streams from the “West” and their Aftermath 183