Why the Caliphate? Gandhi’s ideas about Islam and Hindu-Muslim unity

1. Why the Caliphate? • Gandhi’s ideas about Islam and Hindu-Muslim unity • The south african experience: a successful experiment of Indian unity • The utopia of creating the same kind of unity in India • The fragmented character of Islam in India and the failure of Ganhdi’s attempts

2. Gandhi’s ideas about Islam were perhaps too idealistic: they were rooted in his own spiritual understanding of religion, he gave much emphasis to sufism • In fact Gandhi underestimated the deep division inside Indian Islam, and the way in which it had become competitive vis-à-vis the hindu community

3. There were the fears of the Muslims: since the 19° century the British had created a system of administration that excluded the Muslim families traditional connection with government and administration • In the public examination system created by the British, “traditional” Muslim culture was irrelevant

4. Moreover, since the 1880s, at municipal level, the British has started creating a political system where Indian voice was given more space • At first, at the lower levels of administration, then by inserting selected Indians in the consultative body that assisted the Governors of the Provinces, and then also in the legislative council that assisted the Viceroy at the centre • This was not an elective system rather was based on co-optation

5. Later on, from the early 20° century, the British started creating an electoral system, by introducing a partial suffrage system of election to the legislative councils in the provinces and at the centre • This idea became law with the Morley-Minto reform of 1909 • All this reinforced the Muslims fears • In fact they demanded and obtained the system of separate electorates

6. The growth of religious reform: since the 19° century, the Muslim community had reacted to the loss of Muslim power by giving birth to a series of reform movements among the ulama • These currents gave emphasis to the need of reconstructing Muslim religious life with a strict adherence to a “high” religious standard, based on the Quran and the Sunna of the Prohet • The most important current of Muslim reform was the one based in the town of Deoband, in North India

7. This school emphasised individual responsibility for the creation of a Muslim society, and created a form of Islam where the power was irrelevant to the lives of the Muslims • At the same time they invited the Muslims to reform the lives in order to refuse all aspects of devotion that were not based on Quran and Sunna

8. The Deoband school became very popular in North India in the late 19th and 20th century • This trend contributed to create a distance between Muslims and Hindus by reinforcing the Muslim religious identity as a separate entity

9. However the movement of religious reform is a phenomenon that interested all religious communities in India