Minority Muslims

In Between Nation and « Community »a work based on her thesis, Laurence Gautier analyzes two Muslim universities located in India and founded during British colonization. The historian questions the role of these establishments in the process of Indian national construction in 1947, and the creation of India and Pakistan at the end of the 1990s. The institutions studied by the author have in common that they were created by Muslim elites, were located in northern India and were Muslim universities, that is to say whose staff and students are predominantly of the Muslim faith. However, they should not be confused with madrassasbecause they are public establishments, not providing religious education, open to all.

The first is the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental Collegefounded in Aligarh in 1875, in the context of the mobilizations of 1857 against British colonization ; he will become the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 1920. The second is the Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), created in 1920 by students of theAMU mobilized for the preservation of the Ottoman Caliphate and opposed to British policy. There AMU and the JMI thus actively participate in the fight against the Empire, but their commitment differs: the JMI supports the project carried by the Congress for a secularist India, while the AMU committed alongside the Muslim League for the creation of Pakistan. At the end of the Partition, the AMU presents itself as an institution representative of Indians of Muslim faith, which embodies their “ culture » and defends its interests ; in contrast, the JMIsecularist, does not see himself as a spokesperson for Muslims and rejects communitarianism.

Although the colonial period is not included stricto sensu in the analytical framework of the work, this general context influences these establishments. During the last decades of colonization, two antagonistic political projects developed with a view to independence. On the one hand, Jawaharlal Nehru, leading figure of the Congress party and future Prime Minister of independent India, defends the implementation of a secularist state, that is to say non-denominational and within which all religions enjoy equal constitutional recognition. ; on the other, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, initially committed to the defense of Muslims within the future India, gradually developed the idea of ​​a separate country on an ethno-religious basis: Pakistan – the result of political developments in the 1930s and 1940s. This political competition is reflected in society by clashes between Hindus and Muslims, and results in the Partition of the subcontinent. In total, 12 to 20 million people were displaced during this period, and one to two million lost their lives. These events have influenced the perception of Muslims remaining in India by non-Muslims: they are viewed with suspicion, because they are suspected of a hidden allegiance to Pakistan.

“ Produce » the Indian citizen

In this context, L. Gautier wonders how minoritized citizens, here Indians of Muslim faith, negotiate their place in a secularist national state as citizens and, simultaneously, members of a minority religious group – they were less than 10% during the first census of 1951 (they are estimated at 14% today). To answer this, she proposes a longitudinal study of two Muslim universities based on a very rich corpus, combining a wide diversity of primary sources and numerous references in Urdu. This material makes it possible to restore with finesse, complexity and nuances the trajectories of the establishments that she analyzes without essentializing them, in their sole relationship to Islam as is sometimes the case.

Laurence Gautier places his demonstration in the critical perspective developed in particular by the American anthropologist of Pakistani origin, Talal Asad, on the subject of the modern nation-state whose secularist institutions have a universal vocation: on the one hand, the relationship with the Nation is not established directly between individuals and the State, but is intermediated by authorities – for example here, universities. On the other hand, in practice, secularism strays far from what it is formally supposed to be. Far from establishing a neutral separation between the state and religious groups, it actually produces a normative majority narrative, within which minorities are more tolerated than accepted, since their integration is evaluated in terms of their differences with the majority. It thus induces distrust towards minority groups suspected of favoring their ethno-religious allegiances at the expense of their membership in the national political group.

In this context, the originality of the author’s approach is twofold. First of all, L. Gautier deploys a bottom-up perspective by approaching Indian national construction from the angle of minorities, in this case the Indians.·born of Muslim faith. Moreover, she chooses to study universities, strategic places in the processes of national construction, rather than a Muslim party or an Islamic organization. The choice of this third voice, between electoral logic and religious logic, sheds new light on the participation of Muslims in national construction and the training of the Indian citizen. The critical perspective of Indian secularism that L. Gautier adopts therefore allows us to distance ourselves from the normative analyzes on the one hand and from the sometimes hagiographic stories which are produced on this period and on the personality of J. Nehru on the other hand.

The author brings three conclusions: first, universities are not neutral educational places, but instances of political production. Therefore, secondly, these institutions constitute intermediaries between the central State and Muslims in national dynamics. From the state’s point of view, AMU And JMI are privileged interlocutors to address Muslims and gain their support. But for their part, universities are not simple translators of the implemented policy “ from above “. On the contrary, they produce from below » alternative narratives to the dominant vision by proposing a conception of the Nation in which Muslims are full citizens, by articulating, each in their own way, a simultaneous reflection on the Indian Nation and on “ community » (“ qaum ») Muslim. This is why the (re)positioning of the State and universities is in constant interaction. Moreover, thirdly, the restitution of the differentiated trajectories of theAMU and the JMI illustrates the non-homogeneous and non-monolithic character of the “ be Muslim ”, because the two institutions offer two different ways of “ to be a minority » which also allows, ultimatelyto deconstruct communitarianism and the idea of ​​mechanical solidarity between Muslims simply because of their religious confession.

Citizens, although Muslims ?

The fundamental lesson of this work is the historical disjunction between secularism as put into practice by the Indian state and as it is developed by the universities studied. From the creation of the new State, J. Nehru applied a misguided secularism which maintained a form of minoritization of the Muslim Indian: the latter could be a citizen despite of his religious obedience. We could describe this secularism as “ majoritarian » in the sense that, indirectly, it favors the Hindu majority. Secularists differ from Hinduists in that they do not consider that being Muslim excludes them from full citizenship, and in this sense depart from a xenophobic and communitarian reading of society. However, in their own way, they maintain suspicion towards Muslims since the latter are seen as a group distinct from the Hindu majority group seen as a referent. They also extend the colonial perspective which essentializes Hindus and Muslims and rigidifies the oppositions between the two groups.

J. Nehru’s ambivalence was evident in 1947 when he chose to favor AMU as interlocutor, and not the JMI. In doing so, he contradicts his own ideological positioning since the second shared the struggles of the Congress unlike the first. But this choice can be explained, precisely, by the pre-1947 orientations of the AMU which, paradoxically, first appears in the eyes of those in power as a better incarnation of “ Muslim identity » and therefore a privileged medium for “ talk to muslims “.

This majoritarian secularism is in conflict with the secularism put into practice by universities. Thus L. Gautier shows that contrary to the representation that power has of them, the AMU and the JMI did not mobilize on strictly identity-based causes, but also on socio-political struggles in order to improve the situation of Muslims. More generally, the two universities did not view membership in a secularist Republic as antagonistic to being Muslim. On the contrary, they have developed a conception of the Nation in which Muslims are full citizens whose community membership, far from being disqualifying, actually nourishes the national project. However, these establishments also face their own limitations and are criticized by low-caste Muslims who accuse them of being elitist and distant from their concerns.

Debunking Nehru, understanding Modi

Laurence Gautier’s work is of major importance for understanding the India of 2025, even if the study ends in the 1990s, when the country is not yet governed, and shaped, by supporters of a hard line of political Hinduism as has been the case since 2014 and the election of Narendra Modi, for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It allows us to understand how, in ten years, India has been able to evolve to this extent towards an identity-based practice of power in which the discrimination of Muslims (and Christians) is central.

This work shows that the secularism which irrigated the Indian State when the Congress was in power has always understood the Muslim subject as the “ other » from within, by distinction, even opposition, with the majority Hindu national body. In essence, L. Gautier shows us the ideological ferments on which the BJP was able to propose a maximalist version of this majoritarian secularism. Thus, it is today in the name of secularism that the Modi government is adopting ever more restrictive laws against Muslims who would have been “ favored » by decades of congressional government. The physical attacks they suffer, the destruction of their neighborhoods, the suppression of their rights: all this is justified in the name of risk. jihadist » or the fight against infiltrators « Pakistani ” Or “ Bangladeshi » and therefore, by the imperative need to protect the Indian Nation.

Therefore, if the transformation of India could be so rapid, it is because the majority of Indian society was ready for this deviation from formal secularism. The critical history offered by L. Gautier shows us that in reality, it had been socialized there since 1947. In fact, N. Modi was elected for the first time in 2014 when he was implicated in anti-Muslim pogroms. Since then, despite street lynchings and anti-Muslim attacks in New Delhi in 2019, he has been re-elected twice. And if his popularity is now diminished, it is because of his poor economic results, not his identity politics.