Reforming Muslim societies...

I am going to let you in on a little secret. For Muslims, at the present, there is no escape of Islam. Those who want to reform, modernise and even secularise Islam have to invoke the Islamic message. So what you call cynical use of Islam is actually any thing but.

The issue my friend is very simple. Albert Hourani has written about the Muslim World entering the modern age in 1930s where Muslim Nationalism (not just in South Asia) emerged on the planks of modernity, women’s rights and reform ... it had to as a matter of necessity appeal to the reformist activism of the Islamic message. It is not this nationalism that was the problem (for after all an identity is always imagined) but the movement within Islam that stood as a counter to it... the Islamic revivalist movements of Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen and Jamaat-e-Islami... not to mention Deoband’s own political Islam. The issue here is that... the Congress actively pursued the latter instead of the former in its quest to make a composite nationalist plank. That is my only point.

Now ... it is anyone’s guess where MMA stands on things.