The khilafat movement
Download as PPTX, PDF13 likes15,068 views
The Khilafat Movement was a pan-Islamic political protest campaign launched by Muslims in British India between 1919-1924 to influence the British government and protect the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The movement gained strength after the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 that partitioned the Ottoman Empire. Although mainly a religious movement, it became part of the wider Indian independence movement. The movement introduced religious rhetoric into Indian Muslim politics and gave Muslim clergy a central role in politics through organizations like the Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Hind. It had a regressive ideological influence on modern Indian Muslim thinking.
The khilafat movement
- 1. THE KHILAFAT MOVEMENT By P Gourisankaran
- 2. The Khilafat Movement • The Khilafat movement (1919-1924) was a pan-Islamic, political protest campaign launched by Muslims in British India to influence the British government and to protect the Ottoman Empire during the aftermath of World War I. The position of Caliph after the Armistice of Mudros of October 1918 with the military occupation of Istanbul and Treaty of Versailles (1919) fell into a disambiguation along with the Ottoman Empire's existence. The movement gained force after the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) which imposed the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and gave Greece a powerful position in Anatolia, to the distress of the Turks. They called for help and the movement was the result. The movement collapsed by late 1922 when Turkey gained a more favorable diplomatic position; by 1924 it simply abolished the roles of sultan and Calif. In India, although mainly a Muslim religious movement, the movement became a part of the wider Indian independence movement. The movement was a topic in Conference of London (February 1920).
- 4. • The ‘Khilafat’ Movement of 1919-24, is probably quite unique inasmuch as it has been glorified with one voice by Islamic ideologists, Indian nationalists and com-mu-n-ists alike and along with them by Western scholars, as an anti-colonial movement of Muslims of India, premised on the hostility of the British to the Turkish Sultan, their venerated Caliph. Little attempt has been made to examine the premises on which the movement was founded, the rhetoric of its leaders being taken at face value. On closer examination we find extra-ordinary paradoxes and contradictions behind that rhetoric. • As for the ‘achievements’ of that Movement, its lasting legacy is the legitimised place that it gave the Muslim clergy at the centre of the modern political arena, armed with a political orga-n-isation in the form of the Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Hind (and its successors after the Partition) which the clergy have used to intervene actively in both the political as well as the ideological sphere. Never before in Indian Muslim history was the clergy ever accorded such a place in political life.
- 5. • The Khilafat Movement also introduced the religious idiom in the politics of Indian Muslims. Contrary to some misconceptions (and misrepresentations) it was not the Muslim League, the bearer of Muslim Nationalism in India, that introduced religious ideology in the politics of Indian Muslims. Muslim Nationalism was a movement of Muslims and not a movement of Islam. It was an ethnic move-----ment of disaffected Muslim profess-ionals and the government-job-seeking educated Indian Muslim middle class, mainly those of UP and Bihar and urban Punjab. Their objectives were modest, for they demanded not much more than fair quotas in jobs for Muslims and certain safe-guards for their interests. Muslim Nation-alism in India was a secular rather than a religious movement. Nor was it, in its origins, a Hindu hating movement as is some-times made out. To the contrary, by virtue of the Lucknow Pact of 1916 it had already moved decisively towards a common platform with the broader Indian National Movement and unity with the Congress Party. The Khilafat Move-ment intervened in that context in a way that decisively killed the politics of the Lucknow Pact. The intervention of the Khilafat Movement in Indian Muslim politics has had a considerable retro-gressive ideological influence on the modern Indian Muslim mind that reverberates still in Muslim thinking and their politics in present day India and Pakistan. For that alone, it deserves to be reviewed and re-evaluated.
- 6. THE END