The 'Dalit Muslims': Who Are They?
Most Indian Muslims are descendants of ' untouchable and 'low' caste converts, with only a small minority tracing their origins to Arab, Iranian and Central Asian settlers and invaders. Although the Qur’an is fiercely egalitarian in its social ethics, Indian Muslim society is characterised by numerous caste-like features, consisting of several caste-like groups (jatis). Muslims who claim foreign descent claim a superior status for themselves as ashraf or 'noble'. Descendants of indigenous converts are, on the other hand, commonly referred to contemptuously as ajlaf or 'base' or 'lowly'. As among the Hindus, the various jatis among the ajlaf Muslims maintain a strong sense of jati identity. The emergence of democratic politics is, however, bringing about a radical change in the manner in which this sense of identity is articulated. Aware of the importance of numbers in order to acquire political power and the economic benefits that accrue from it, the Dalit movement has sought to establish a wider sense of Dalit identity that transcends inter-caste and inter-religious divisions and differences among the ‘lower’ caste majority. This wider Dalit identity does not seek to deny individual jati identities. Rather, it takes them into account but seeks to subsume them within the wider collective Dalit identity, based on a common history of suffering as well as common racial origins as indigenous people. This seems to have been a crucial factor in the emergence of a specific 'Dalit Muslim' identity that the AIBMM seeks to articulate. 'Lower' caste Muslim ideologues and activists in the AIBMM are now in the process of fashioning a new 'Dalit Muslim' identity, seeking to bring all the 'lower' caste Muslims under one umbrella, defined by their common identity as Muslim as well as Dalit.
The All-India Backward Muslim Morcha
The AIBMM was set up in 1994 by Ejaz Ali, a young Muslim medical doctor from Patna, capital of the eastern state of Bihar, belonging to the Kunjera caste of Muslim vegetable-sellers. Bihar, India's poorest state, is notorious for its acute caste problem and for its frequent anti-Dalit pogroms. Consequently, the Dalits in Bihar have been among the first to take to militant forms of struggle. The Muslims of Bihar, who form over fifteen per cent of the state's population, are also characterised by sharp caste divisions. The plight of Bihar's Dalit Muslims, whom the AIBMM estimates at forming almost ninety per cent of the state's Muslim population and consisting of twenty-nine different caste groups, is particularly pathetic. 1 Most Bihari Dalit Muslims work as daily wage labourers, manual workers, artisans and petty peasants, barely managing to eke out an existence.
According to Ali, the plight of the overwhelming majority of the Muslims of Bihar, as well as an acute awareness of the limitations of the traditional Muslim leadership, suggested to him the need for the establishment of the AIBMM to struggle for the rights of the Dalit Muslims. He regards the destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 as a landmark event in this regard, seeing the traditional, and largely 'upper' caste, Muslim leadership as having only further complicated matters by playing into the hands of Hindu militants and as 'misleading' the Muslim masses for their own petty gains.
In less than a decade of its founding, by early 2001 the AIBMM had emerged as an umbrella group of over forty organisations claiming to represent various different Dalit Muslim castes. It now has branches in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Delhi, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, in addition to Bihar, where it has its headquarters.
Aims and Objectives of the AIBMM:
The foremost priority for the AIBMM is to get recognition from the Indian state for the over 100 million 'Dalit Muslims' as Scheduled Castes so that they can avail of the same benefits that the Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist Scheduled castes enjoy, including reserved government jobs, reserved seats in state legislatures and in the Indian Parliament, special courts to try cases of atrocities against them as well as social and economic development programmes meant specially for them. According to Indian law as it stands at present, only those Dalits who claim to be Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists can be considered to be members of the Scheduled Castes and thereby eligible for the special benefits that the state has made available to these castes. The AIBMM sees this as violating the basic secular character of the Indian Constitution. It insists that its demand for Scheduled Caste status for 'Dalit Muslims' is fully in consonance with the spirit of the Indian Constitution. Recognising the fact that demands for special legal status for Muslims have been viewed in the past as 'separatist' and 'anti-national' and even ‘pro-Pakistan’, the AIBMM is careful to project its demands as aimed at integrating the 'Dalit Muslim' into the 'national mainstream' by enabling them to progress economically and socially, along with other deprived sections of the Indian population. Besides being considered 'anti-secular', the law as it stands today is also condemned by the AIBMM as a gross violation of human rights. Furthermore,it is seen as a ploy to keep the more than one hundred million Dalit Muslims in perpetual thraldom, a conspiracy in which both the Hindu as well as Muslim 'upper' caste elite are seen as being involved. Because they have been denied Scheduled Caste status and the benefits that accrue from such status, the Dalit Muslims are said to lag far behind the Hindu Dalits, who have been able to make considerable progress in all fields because of the special facilities that the state has provided for them.
A New Indian Muslim Leadership and Changing Discourse of Community Identity:
The AIBMM prides itself in having coined the term 'Dalit Muslims', and in this it seeks to radically refashion notions of Muslim community identity. Deconstructing the notion of Muslims as a homogenous bloc, it brings to the fore the existence of caste distinctions among the Indian Muslims, which it sees as one of the primary and defining features of Indian Muslim society.
In articulating a separate Dalit Muslim identity it finds itself at odds with the traditional, largely 'high' caste Muslim leadership, which, in seeking to speak for all Muslims, sees the question of caste that the AIBMM so stridently stresses as divisive. Leading Muslim spokesmen have, not surprisingly, accused the AIBMM of seeking to create divisions within the Muslim community and of spreading 'casteism', and thus playing into the hands of militant Hindus.Ali sees as Islam as having historically played a key role in the emancipation of the Dalits, a role which, he says, was gradually watered down over time. Islam spread in India principally through the agency of the Sufis, he says, whose teachings of love and social equality attracted many Dalits to the new faith, shackled as they were by the chains of the caste system and the Brahminical religion. 7 It was not by the sword but through the love and compassion that the Sufis exhibited in their behaviour towards the poor, principally the Dalits, that large numbers of Hindus converted to Islam. With the establishment of Muslim political power in various parts of India, however, he says, this radical egalitarianism of the early Sufis gave way to more institutionalised forms of religious expression. 'High' caste Hindus, in order to save their properties or to secure high positions in Muslim-ruled territories, converted to Islam, bringing with them notions of caste superiority that are foreign to pristine Islam. Doctrines were developed that sought to legitimise caste inequalities by suitably misinterpreting the Qur'an. Gradually, he says, the 'spirit of Islam' was replaced by the 'rituals of Islam'.
...I'll cull some equivilant info from Chritian and Buddhist converts when I have time (I have another post to put up on this subject first)