19/10/2022
A serious debate over the word kafir started in India after Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat objected to its use against Hindus, during a recent meeting with five Muslim intellectuals. Such a demand for the term’s theological renunciation was made earlier too. In 2009, the Dharm Raksha Manch, affiliated to the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), wrote to 13 Muslim organisations asking them to issue a fatwa that Hindus are not kafirs and therefore ‘jihad’ against them is not justified by Islam. On the face of it, such demands are not unreasonable because Hindus (or non-Muslims in general) are not kafirs from an Islamic perspective. But asking Muslims to stop using this term, or seeking its ban, does not make sense because there is no evidence that even a small section of Indian Muslims contemptuously refer to Hindus as kafirs.
A tolerant policy
Historically, it was Muslim imperialists who, in collaboration with conniving theologians, wielded the tag kafir as a religio-legal weapon to politically subjugate both Muslims and non-Muslims. But in India the Muslim rule was pragmatic. It did not try to establish a theocratic state and was accommodative of Hindu communities despite the anti-Hindu polemics of influential religious zealots. For instance, Ziauddin Barani (1285–1358), in Fataawa-e-Jahandaari, which contains norms of Islamic governance addressed to the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, tells the sultans to uproot infidels, polytheists, and heretics (that is, Hindus) “if you want not to be ashamed before God and the Prophet.” During the Mughal period, Abdul Qadir Badauni (1540–1615) published Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh to counter Emperor Akbar’s inclusive programme of sulh-e-kul (universal peace), which considered all citizens as possible allies of the state irrespective of their caste or religion.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that both the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal empire mostly disregarded the anti-Hindu tirades. In The Muslim Question: Understanding Islam and Indian History, Raziuddin Aquil reveals that the preponderant Hanafi position of the ulama enabled medieval Muslim rulers to legally justify and put in practice a tolerant policy towards Hindus. This liberalism was also nourished by a genre of religious ethics called the akhlaaq literature authored by open-minded scholars such as Nasiruddin Tusi and Nuruddin Qazi. Qazi, like Tusi, believed that in matters of governance it is justice (adl), not infidelity (kufr) or religion (deen) that matters. For him, a just non-Muslim ruler would serve society better than an unjust Muslim king.
By the end of the Mughal period, kafir had acquired new aesthetic meanings in romantic Urdu poetry. Mirza Ghalib used it in the sense of “beloved” here: Mohabbat mein nahin hai farq jeene aur marne ka / Usi ko dekh kar jeete hain jis kafir pe dam nikle (In love there is no difference between living and dying/The very beloved I die for inspires me to live). In another poetic dyad, Dagh Dehlvi uses the term kafir jawaani to describe the “full-blown” and “captivating” juvenescence of his beloved.
The Quranic kafir
The word kafir has its terminological origin in the Quran. It is derived from kufr, which means to conceal, to reject, to be ungrateful, or to deny. An analysis of verses 3:70-71, 21:30 and 14:32-34 shows that the words used for “concealing the truth”, “refusal to see reason” and “ingratitude” — takfuroona, kafaru and kaffaar, respectively — draw critical attention to people’s dismissive attitude towards rationalism and universal values such as intellectual honesty and gratitude. This categorically rules out the possibility of rendering kufr as “disbelief in Islam”, and kafir as “non-Muslim”.
The Quran, through its suasive verses, demands nothing more than the voluntary recognition of its constructive message to humanity on the basis of the evidence it offers. The significance of this approach is that “Muslims” who agree with the Quran do not have the right to impose Islam on the “kafirs” who refuse to accept the Quranic argumentation. Even the Prophet was told that his mandate was limited to proclaiming the divine message (42:48). In fact, several hadiths attributed to the Prophet in Kitab al Adab of Bukhari warn Muslims against calling anyone a kafir.
Then who are the kafirs against whom war was permitted by the Quran during the Prophet’s lifetime? Assuredly they are not non-Muslims in general but the despotic oligarchs who drove the Prophet and his followers out of Mecca, broke off their treaties with Muslims, and attacked them first (22:39-40, 2:190 and 9:13).
It is unfortunate that post-Prophetic Muslim dynasties dogmatised a distorted definition of kufr after suppressing its original meaning, in the process helping it get endorsed in Islamic legal treatises to the detriment of good relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.
However, as pointed out above, there is no evidence to show that Indian Muslims use kafir as a pejorative term for Hindus. Even the aforementioned VHP letter did not make this accusation. It cited only emails released by the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ quoting Muslim legal texts to justify the terror attacks in Ahmedabad and Delhi.
The onus, nevertheless, is on Muslim theologians to delegitimise the historical misinterpretation of this word and restore its unmalicious Quranic meaning in the interest of interfaith harmony. And Hindutva organisations should ensure that terms such as “jihadis” and “Pakistanis” are not used to demean Indian Muslims.
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