·         Muslim thinkers have often interpreted the West through Islamic ideals and secondary sources instead of studying Western civilization on its own terms.

·         The ideas of Shariati, Mawdudi, Qutb, and Nadwi provide important critiques of Western materialism, imperialism, and secularism, but remain largely reactive in their approach.

·         A balanced comparison must distinguish between Western ideals and practices, as well as Islamic ideals and the actual practices of Muslim societies.

·         Madrasas and Islamic universities should introduce specialized Western studies based on primary sources, including Western history, philosophy, political theory, and social institutions.

·         Genuine understanding of the West is essential for addressing modernity, migration, Islamophobia, democracy, liberty, feminism, and global political and economic challenges

Muslims have long struggled to understand the West, often relying on secondary sources and comparing Western practices with Islamic ideals rather than engaging with Western realities on their own terms. This fundamental methodological error has produced a distorted picture of Western civilization, fostering false notions of Islamic superiority while leaving Muslim societies ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of modernity, migration, Islamophobia, and ideological contestation. The path forward requires a radical reorientation: understanding the West from its own sources, recognizing its internal contradictions and achievements, and building specialized knowledge institutions, particularly in madrasas and Islamic universities, that can produce genuine comprehension rather than reactive polemic.

Westoxification and the Legacy of Shariati

The Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati coined the term “Westoxification” (Gharbzadegi) to describe a civilizational malaise afflicting Muslim societies, an intoxication with Western materialism, technology, and values that erodes Islamic identity and revolutionary potential. Shariati argued that Western-dominated modernization serves the market interests of European industrialists, converting non-Europeans into consumers of surplus production while blunting their resistance to imperialist domination. For Shariati, this was not merely cultural imitation but a deeper spiritual and political poisoning, the westernized Iranian generation abandoned religion as useless for resolving contemporary problems, accepting West-constructed values that declared Islam irrelevant to modern challenges.

Shariati’s critique extended beyond governments to Western intellectuals themselves, positioning Westoxification as a degenerative but ultimately rational disease with identifiable causes, symptoms, and potential cures. He distinguished between “Red Shi’ism” (revolutionary, populist, aligned with the oppressed) and “Black Shi’ism” (clericalized, state-sanctioned distortion), attempting to reformulate Islam as an ideology of liberation for the mustadh’afin (the dispossessed). Yet even Shariati’s sophisticated analysis remained partly reactive, framing Islam primarily in opposition to Western capitalism and imperialism rather than developing an independent epistemology for understanding Western civilization from within.

Mawdudi, Qutb, and Nadwi: Three Visions of the West

The twentieth-century Islamic thinkers Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, and Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, each developed distinct approaches to understanding the West, yet all shared a tendency to interpret Western civilization through Islamic categories rather than engaging Western sources directly. Mawdudi’s political thought derived from Qur’anic interpretation provided an alternative to Western ideologies, but his framework treated Western concepts as responses to be countered rather than systems to be comprehended on their own terms. Qutb radicalized this approach, presenting the confrontation with Islam as motivated by an overriding objective to destroy Islamic doctrine.

Nadwi offered a more nuanced position, criticizing blind imitation and servility to Western civilization while advocating critical appraisal rather than complete severance from Western achievements. He identified the West’s nineteenth-century dominance as stemming from superior knowledge and education, not inherent civilizational superiority, and emphasized spirituality and morality in Islam as contrasts to Western materialism. Nadwi drew fault lines in Western philosophy by highlighting its dependence on the material while pushing spiritual and moral development behind, characterizing the modern world by imperialism, capitalism, and communism exported to the Third World. Yet even Nadwi, who cannot be accused of Westophobia and stood for proper understanding and appreciation of the West, ultimately framed his analysis within Islamic categories of knowledge rather than developing a methodology for reading Western thought from primary sources.

The Methodological Error: Comparing Practices with Ideals

The fundamental error in Muslim reformist and revivalist thought lies in comparing Western peoples’ practices with Islamic ideals, creating an illusion of Islamic superiority while obscuring the gap between Islamic ideals and Muslim masses’ actual practices. This methodological flaw produced what scholars have called a “wrong superiority” belief: reformists measured Western reality against Islamic perfection while measuring Islamic reality against Western imperfection, generating a distorted comparative framework. A proper approach would compare Western practices with Muslim practices of the masses, and Western ideals with Islamic ideals, revealing both civilizations’ gaps between aspiration and reality.

This error had profound consequences. By not understanding the West from its own sources, Muslim thinkers failed to grasp the internal dynamics of Western thought, the historical development of concepts like democracy and liberty, and the genuine achievements of Western science and philosophy. Instead, they produced reactive critiques that, while often insightful about Western materialism and imperialism, remained trapped within an Islamic epistemological framework that could not genuinely comprehend Occidental civilization. The result was a body of thought that could diagnose Westoxification but could not produce the specialized knowledge needed to navigate Western modernity strategically.

The West as Enigma: Why Understanding Matters

The West remains an enigma to many Muslims precisely because it has been understood through secondary sources, polemical frameworks, and reactive critiques rather than direct engagement with Western texts, institutions, and intellectual traditions. This ignorance has practical consequences: Muslim societies cannot effectively respond to Western foreign policy, cannot navigate migration and integration challenges, cannot counter Islamophobia with sophisticated arguments, and cannot build institutions that produce genuine knowledge about Occidental civilization. The West is not merely an enemy or a source of toxins; it is a complex civilization with internal contradictions, genuine achievements, and historical developments that must be understood on their own terms.

Understanding the West matters for strategic reasons. Muslim societies face Western military power, economic dominance, and cultural influence, without comprehension of Western motivations, decision-making processes, and ideological foundations, Muslim responses remain reactive and often counterproductive. Migration has brought millions of Muslims to Western countries, creating diaspora communities that must navigate Western legal systems, political institutions, and social norms, ignorance of these systems produces marginalization and vulnerability to Islamophobia. Furthermore, Western concepts like democracy, feminism, and liberty have global influence, Muslims must understand these ideologies in their historical context to engage them critically rather than simply rejecting or uncritically adopting them.

Oriental and Occidental: Different Trajectories of Religion and Science

A crucial dimension of understanding the West involves recognizing the different historical trajectories of religion in Oriental (Islamic) and Occidental (Western) civilizations, particularly regarding the relationship between religion and science. In the West, religion experienced retrogradation, decline and marginalization, partly because it was perceived as hampering scientific progress, leading to the Enlightenment’s secularization of knowledge and the separation of religious ethics from secular power. This historical development produced a Western civilization where religion has been pushed to the periphery, resulting in what Nadwi called moral degeneration and spiritual malaise, but also enabling scientific and technological advances that gave the West global dominance.

In the Muslim world, by contrast, religion maintained a more central role in intellectual and social life, with madrasas and Islamic universities preserving religious knowledge while often failing to develop specialized knowledge about Western civilization. This difference has profound implications: Western secularization enabled certain forms of scientific progress but produced spiritual crisis, while Islamic retention of religious centrality preserved spiritual continuity but often at the cost of scientific and institutional development needed to compete with Western power. Understanding this divergence is essential for Muslims seeking to navigate modernity: neither simple Westernization nor reactive Islamization offers a viable path; instead, Muslims must develop institutions that can produce both religious knowledge and sophisticated understanding of Western civilization.

Madrasas and the Missing Specialization

Madrasas, the traditional Islamic educational institutions, have failed to teach specialized knowledge about the West, focusing instead on Islamic sciences while leaving students ignorant of Western thought, history, and institutions. This gap is particularly striking given that madrasas could have developed specialized departments for Western studies, producing scholars who understand the Occident from primary sources rather than through reactive polemics. Instead, madrasa curricula often reproduce the methodological error of comparing Western practices with Islamic ideals, generating graduates who can critique the West from an Islamic standpoint but cannot genuinely comprehend it on its own terms.

The consequences of this educational gap are severe. Muslim societies lack the specialized knowledge needed to navigate Western diplomatic institutions, understand Western legal systems, engage Western media, or counter Islamophobia with sophisticated arguments based on genuine comprehension rather than reactive defensiveness. Furthermore, madrasas have not produced the intellectual infrastructure needed to understand Western ideologies like feminism, democracy, and liberty in their historical context, leaving Muslim societies vulnerable to both uncritical adoption and blanket rejection of these concepts. Reforming madrasa education to include specialized Western studies, taught from primary sources, with methodological rigor, and without reactive polemic, would be a crucial step toward producing a generation capable of genuine understanding rather than Westoxified imitation or Westophobic rejection.

Understanding Western Freedoms and Ideologies in Context

Western concepts like feminism, democracy, freedom, and liberty must be understood in their historical and philosophical context, recognizing both their achievements and their limitations. These ideologies emerged from specific historical circumstances: the Enlightenment’s reaction against religious authority, the French Revolution’s overthrow of monarchy, the industrial revolution’s transformation of social relations, and the Cold War’s ideological contestation with communism. Understanding this context reveals that Western freedoms are not universal truths but historically contingent developments with both emancipatory and oppressive dimensions.

The Muslim world lacks the ecosystem that produced these ideologies: no Enlightenment, no industrial revolution, no bourgeois revolution, no Cold War ideological contestation. This absence means that importing Western concepts without understanding their historical genesis produces distorted outcomes: democracy becomes majoritarian tyranny without liberal protections, feminism becomes Western cultural imperialism without genuine gender justice, and liberty becomes license without moral responsibility. Muslims must understand these ideologies in their Western context to engage them critically: recognizing their genuine achievements (individual rights, rule of law, scientific progress) while identifying their limitations (materialism, spiritual crisis, imperialist deployment).

This understanding requires reading Western sources directly: Enlightenment philosophers, liberal political theorists, feminist thinkers, and democratic theorists must be studied in their own words, not through Islamic critiques or secondary summaries. Only through such direct engagement can Muslims develop the intellectual resources to engage Western ideologies strategically: adopting what serves Islamic values, rejecting what contradicts them, and transforming what can be Islamized. Without this comprehension, Muslim societies remain trapped between Westoxified imitation and Westophobic rejection, unable to navigate the complexities of modernity with intellectual independence.

Migration and Islamophobia: The Urgency of Understanding

Migration has brought millions of Muslims to Western countries, creating diaspora communities that must navigate Western legal systems, political institutions, and social norms while facing rising Islamophobia. This Islamophobia is not merely prejudice but a structured phenomenon with historical roots in Western Orientalism, colonial representations of Islam, and contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Understanding Islamophobia requires comprehending Western historical constructions of Islam, the role of media in reproducing stereotypes, and the political economy of xenophobia in post-industrial Western societies.

Muslim communities in the West face practical challenges that require sophisticated understanding of Western institutions: legal systems that protect religious freedom but also enforce secular norms, political institutions that offer representation but also reproduce structural discrimination, and social norms that value individual liberty but also produce isolation and anomie. Without comprehension of these dynamics, Muslim responses remain reactive: defensive assertions of Islamic identity that reinforce stereotypes, or assimilationist strategies that erase religious distinctiveness. A more strategic approach requires understanding Western institutions from within, identifying points of leverage for Muslim political participation, and developing arguments against Islamophobia based on genuine comprehension of Western values rather than reactive polemic.

Furthermore, Islamophobia is not merely a Western phenomenon but has global dimensions, affecting Muslim minorities worldwide and shaping Western foreign policy toward Muslim-majority countries. Understanding this global phenomenon requires comprehending Western strategic interests, the role of media in constructing Muslim threats, and the historical development of Orientalist representations that continue to shape Western perceptions of Islam. Without this understanding, Muslim responses remain trapped in reactive cycles that reinforce rather than challenge Islamophobic structures.

The West as Enemy, Criminal, and Crony Capitalist: Beyond Reactive Critique

Characterizing the West as enemy, criminal, or crony capitalist captures certain realities—Western imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and geopolitical aggression, while obscuring the complexity of Western civilization. The West has indeed exported imperialism, capitalism, and communism to the Third World, producing what Nadwi called aggressive nationalism destructive to the Muslim ummah. Western-dominated modernization serves market interests of European industrialists, converting non-Europeans into consumers while blunting resistance to domination. These critiques are valid and necessary.

Yet reducing the West to enemy or criminal obscures genuine achievements: scientific advances, legal innovations, philosophical developments, and institutional forms that have improved human welfare. Furthermore, this reactive framing traps Muslim thought in opposition rather than comprehension: the West becomes a caricature to be rejected rather than a civilization to be understood. A more sophisticated approach recognizes Western contradictions: genuine emancipation alongside imperialist domination, scientific progress alongside spiritual crisis, individual liberty alongside structural inequality.

This recognition enables strategic engagement rather than reactive rejection. Muslims can adopt Western scientific methods while rejecting materialist metaphysics, embrace rule of law while critiquing imperialist deployment, and value individual rights while insisting on moral responsibility. Such engagement requires understanding the West from its own sources, not through reactive polemics that capture partial truths while obscuring complexity. Only through such comprehension can Muslims navigate Western power strategically, adopting what serves Islamic values while rejecting what contradicts them.

Toward a New Epistemology: Understanding the West from Its Own Sources

The path forward requires a new epistemology for understanding the West: one that engages Western sources directly, recognizes Western complexity, and produces specialized knowledge institutions capable of genuine comprehension. This epistemology must overcome the methodological error of comparing Western practices with Islamic ideals, instead comparing Western practices with Muslim practices and Western ideals with Islamic ideals. It must read Western texts in their original languages, engage Western institutions through direct observation, and produce scholarship that comprehends rather than merely critiques.

Madrasas and Islamic universities must develop specialized departments for Western studies, producing scholars who understand the Occident from primary sources. These institutions should teach Western philosophy, political theory, history, and social science alongside Islamic sciences, enabling students to engage Western thought with intellectual rigor rather than reactive polemic. Furthermore, Muslim intellectuals must read Western sources directly: Enlightenment philosophers, liberal theorists, feminist thinkers, and democratic theorists must be studied in their own words, not through Islamic critiques.

This new epistemology must also recognize the different historical trajectories of Oriental and Occidental civilizations, particularly regarding religion and science. Understanding why religion experienced retrogradation in the West while maintaining centrality in the Muslim world enables Muslims to navigate modernity strategically: preserving spiritual continuity while developing the scientific and institutional capacities needed to compete with Western power. Such understanding requires comprehending Western freedoms and ideologies in their historical context, recognizing both their achievements and limitations, and engaging them critically rather than through uncritical adoption or blanket rejection.

Conclusion: The Imperative of Comprehension

Muslims must understand the West not as enemy or toxin but as enigma: a complex civilization with internal contradictions, genuine achievements, and historical developments that must be comprehended on their own terms. This understanding requires overcoming the methodological errors of past reformists, developing specialized knowledge institutions, and engaging Western sources directly rather than through reactive polemics. Without such comprehension, Muslim societies remain trapped between Westoxified imitation and Westophobic rejection, unable to navigate the complexities of modernity, migration, and Islamophobia with intellectual independence.

The stakes are high: Muslim communities face Western power, global Islamophobia, and ideological contestation that require sophisticated understanding rather than reactive critique. Only through genuine comprehension can Muslims develop the intellectual resources to engage Western civilization strategically: adopting what serves Islamic values, rejecting what contradicts them, and transforming what can be Islamized. This is not Westoxification but wisdom: understanding the Occident to navigate it, comprehend it, and ultimately transcend the false choice between imitation and rejection.

M. H. A. Sikander is Writer-Activist based in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Courtesy: New Age Islam

The post The West as Enigma: Why Muslims Must Understand the Occident on Its Own Terms appeared first on SabrangIndia.

·         Indian Muslims need not look to Pakistan-centric preachers or scholars for intellectual and religious direction—particularly when some of them have yet to fully internalise and articulate the demands of pluralism within their own national context.

·         Javed Ahmad Ghamidi’s intellectual trajectory itself reflects an important Indian influence: his thought was significantly shaped by the rationalist and reformist legacy of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. What Indian Muslims need today is not a wholesale importation of religious discourse from across the border, but a creative regeneration of the reformist, rational and pluralist intellectual tradition that emerged on Indian soil.

·         We need to take that legacy forward—critically, creatively and in response to India’s own civilisational, constitutional and pluralistic realities. The real task before us is to recover, renew and radically regenerate the Indian tradition of Islamic thought—not merely repeat imported formulations. We need scholars who can engage Islam through the lived realities of India: its constitutional framework, civilisational diversity, interfaith encounters, Sufi heritage and deeply plural social fabric.

·         There is an irony here that deserves to be confronted. Javed Ahmad Ghamidi’s intellectual formation was significantly influenced by the rationalist and reformist thought of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan—an Indian Islamic thinker who spent decades arguing for peace, dialogue, intellectual renewal and a non-confrontational engagement with modernity. If that intellectual inheritance could travel from India to Pakistan, why should Indian Muslims now imagine that their intellectual regeneration must necessarily come from Pakistan?

·         Indian Muslims do not need borrowed certainties. They need an indigenous intellectual renaissance. The time has come to stop importing answers and start producing them. We must learn to think beyond perpetual reaction, beyond every immediate political provocation, and beyond the anxieties of the next news cycle. A community that may define its intellectual agenda primarily! An intellectual renewal must mean more than changing rhetoric. It must produce new institutions, new scholarship and new answers to contemporary questions.

If Maulana Abul A’la Maududi’s political project emerged from the specific crises of colonial India and was subsequently articulated within the political realities of Pakistan, can his political theology provide an adequate framework for Indian Muslims in the twenty-first century?

For me, the answer is increasingly clear: Indian Muslims need not make Maududi’s political Islam the organising framework of their contemporary intellectual life. But that immediately raises a more difficult and important question:

What about Javed Ahmad Ghamidi?

Here the answer cannot be as simple. Ghamidi represents a substantially different intellectual trajectory. His work has challenged a number of inherited assumptions about Islamic law, politics, religious authority and the relationship between revelation and historical circumstance. His approach gives considerable importance to the Qur’an as the primary source of religious understanding, distinguishes enduring religious principles from historically conditioned arrangements, and subjects inherited interpretations to renewed scrutiny.

For Indian Muslims searching for an intellectually serious alternative to political Islam, these features make Ghamidi’s thought worth studying.

But worth studying is not the same as suitable for wholesale adoption. That distinction is crucial.

Ghamidi’s Real Significance

Ghamidi’s importance lies less in providing a ready-made political programme for India than in demonstrating that Islamic thought can be reconstructed through disciplined interpretation rather than ideological repetition.

This is an important departure from the tendency to treat every inherited formulation as equally immutable.

His engagement with questions of governance, jihad, citizenship, religious authority and Islamic law opens space for a different kind of Muslim intellectual conversation—one in which historical context, textual interpretation and reasoned argument matter.

In this respect, Ghamidi offers something that Indian Muslims urgently need: an example of intellectual disentanglement from the idea that every political claim made in the name of Islam is necessarily a religious obligation.

Yet there is a second side to the assessment.

Ghamidi’s intellectual framework was developed within the Pakistani context and within a particular South Asian scholarly genealogy. His formative relationship with Maududi and Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi is significant, even where his later conclusions differ from theirs. The reformist thought of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan also provides an important Indian parallel, particularly in the movement away from confrontationist political readings of Islam towards peace, dialogue and intellectual engagement.

Therefore, it would be historically simplistic to present Ghamidi as an entirely independent intellectual phenomenon—or as a straightforward continuation of Wahiduddin Khan.

His significance is better understood as part of a larger South Asian argument over what Islam means in the modern age.

And that argument has not ended.

Where Ghamidi Helps—and Where Indian Ulema Must Go Further

For Indian Ulema, Ghamidi’s approach can be useful precisely where it encourages critical examination of inherited political theology.

But India presents questions that require more than a Pakistani reformist framework.

The Indian Muslim intellectual condition is shaped by a constitutional order, a multi-religious society, India’s own civilisational history, regional cultures and languages, and the lived experience of Muslims as a large religious minority. Therefore, the Indian question cannot simply be: What does Ghamidi say about the Islamic state?

It must be: What does Islam mean for Muslims living as equal citizens in India’s constitutional and plural social order?

That leads to an entirely different intellectual agenda. Can Islamic ethics provide a theological vocabulary for equal citizenship?

How should concepts such as adl (justice), ihsan (moral excellence), rahmah (mercy) and shura (consultation) be interpreted within democratic public life?

How should Muslim jurisprudence address freedom of conscience, interfaith relations, gender justice, economic participation and constitutional rights?

What can India’s Sufi, Rishi and Bhakti traditions contribute to an Islamic theology of coexistence?

And how should Muslim scholars respond to artificial intelligence, biotechnology, environmental crisis, economic inequality and technological transformation?

These questions require Indian Muslim thinkers thinking from India—not merely Indian Muslims reading thinkers from elsewhere.

The Missing Indian Dimension

India has never been intellectually barren in matters of Islam.

The subcontinent produced powerful traditions of Qur’anic scholarship, Islamic philosophy, Sufism, Persian literature and Urdu thought. The Sufi centres of Delhi, Ajmer and the Deccan, the Rishi–Sufi traditions of Kashmir, the encounters between Sufis and Bhakti saints, and the reformist and intellectual contributions of figures such as Shah Waliullah and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan all demonstrate that Indian Muslim thought has historically interacted creatively with its surrounding civilisation.

This inheritance needs to be recovered—not as nostalgia, but as raw material for a new intellectual synthesis.

Ghamidi can therefore be read alongside this Indian inheritance rather than above it.

His work may help Indian Muslims reconsider inherited assumptions. Wahiduddin Khan may offer another model of religious engagement. Maududi may remain important as an object of historical and intellectual study. Iqbal may reopen questions of selfhood and creativity. Indian Sufi and Bhakti traditions may provide resources for interreligious ethics.

But none should become the final template.

From Following Thinkers to Producing Thought

This is ultimately the central issue. Indian Muslims have spent too much intellectual energy asking which scholar to follow and too little asking which institutions, methods and questions will produce the next generation of scholarship.

The answer cannot be another personality-centred movement.

India needs research institutions devoted to Qur’anic studies, Islamic philosophy and theology; centres for Islam and constitutional citizenship; serious academic study of Indian Sufism and Rishi traditions; madrasa–university intellectual programmes; Muslim public-policy and data research; translation and publishing initiatives; and fellowships for young scholars.

The purpose should be to create an intellectual culture in which disagreement is possible, inherited positions can be examined, and new interpretations can emerge without fear. That is where the Ghamidi question becomes genuinely useful.

Ghamidi need not be the answer to India’s intellectual crisis. His example can instead become part of the reason Indian Muslims begin asking better questions.

Maududi’s political theology belongs to an important chapter of South Asian Islamic intellectual history, but its political premises cannot simply be transplanted into twenty-first-century India. Ghamidi represents a more reformist and interpretive trajectory, and therefore deserves serious engagement. Yet his framework too emerged from a particular historical and national context.

The Indian Muslim intellectual project must ultimately move beyond both. Not by rejecting the wider Muslim intellectual world, but by entering it as a producer rather than merely a consumer.

India should not merely import Islamic thought. It should generate Islamic thought rooted in India’s constitutional reality, civilisational plurality and lived Muslim experience.

The decisive question is: Can India produce a new generation of Muslim thinkers who are deeply rooted in Islam, intellectually independent of imported ideological templates, conscious of India’s civilisational inheritance, and capable of addressing the realities of the twenty-first century?

That is the intellectual renaissance Indian Muslims should now begin building.

Today, Indian Muslims have no shortage of pan-Islamic intellectuals, transnational preachers or scholars speaking in the name of a global Ummah. What we lack is not voices—but an intellectual vision and renewal adequate to modern India’s reality.

What would that renewal actually look like?

It would mean developing an Indian Islamic theology of constitutional citizenship—one that explains, in substantive theological terms, why equality before law, freedom of conscience, democratic participation and fraternity are not merely political compromises but can be understood through the ethical resources of Islam.

It would mean producing a serious Islamic intellectual response to science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate change and the digital revolution, rather than allowing Muslim discourse to remain trapped in questions inherited from nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideological battles.

It would mean rethinking madrasa education so that classical disciplines—Qur’an, Hadith, Fiqh, Arabic and Islamic theology—are placed in meaningful conversation with constitutional law, philosophy, economics, history, sociology, comparative religion, technology and the natural sciences.

It would mean recovering India’s own Sufi, Rishi and Bhakti traditions of ethical coexistence, not as romantic folklore but as serious intellectual resources for understanding India’s religious pluralism, shared sacred spaces and the ethics of disagreement.

It would mean developing a contemporary fiqh of citizenship and minority participation appropriate to a constitutional democracy—moving beyond the old binaries of dār al-Islām and dār al-ḥarb and asking what Islamic ethics requires of citizens living together under a common constitutional order.

It would mean making women’s education, intellectual leadership and economic participation central to Muslim social reform, rather than treating them as peripheral questions.

It would mean creating research institutions that produce data-driven scholarship on Muslim education, employment, poverty, entrepreneurship and social mobility, replacing anecdote and political rhetoric with evidence.

It would mean cultivating a new generation of Muslim scholars capable of speaking to Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian and Jewish intellectual traditions without either polemical hostility or superficial interfaith symbolism.

And it would mean developing a distinctly Indian Muslim intellectual vocabulary around peace, pluralism, environmental responsibility, ethical economics, social justice and human dignity—drawing from the Qur’an and Islamic intellectual history while engaging seriously with the realities of contemporary India.

Contributing author at New Age Islam, Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi is an Indo-Islamic scholar, writer and researcher on Indian Sufism, interfaith ethics, and the spiritual history of Islam in South Asia. His latest book is “Ishq Sufiyana: Untold Stories of Divine Love”.

Courtesy: New Age Islam

The post Maududi Is Not Relevant for Indian Muslims — Nor Is Ghamidi appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The statement has been Initiated jointly by Javed Anand and Feroze Mithiborwala (Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy-IMSD), Zakia Soman and Noorjahan Safia Niaz (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan-BMMA), Shamsuddin Tamboli (Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal) and Bader Saeed (Roshni).

The signatories to the statement include Naseeruddin Shah, Zeenat Shaukat Ali, Sultan Shaheen, Teesta Setalvad, Ram Puniyani, Tushar Gandhi, Amol Palekar, Mallika Sarabhai, Ratna Pathak.

Read the full statement below: 

Progressive Muslim activists, intellectuals and women’s rights advocates strongly oppose the ill-conceived nationwide ‘Save India, Save Shariat’ campaign launched by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB).

• A Political Gift to Polarisation: 

Following the 2024 Lok Sabha elections where civil society and opposition parties rallied under ‘Save the Constitution’, the AIMPLB’s campaign inadvertently gives the BJP and the sangh parivar a platform to posture as defenders of constitutional norms. Ahead of crucial state assembly elections, this campaign reinforces false narratives and fuels propaganda that Indian Muslims reject the law of the land.

• Defending Patriarchy in the Name of Faith: 

The so-called “God-given Shariat Law’ in India is nothing but man-made personal laws, male interpreted patriarchal interpretations defended by the AIMPLB. In its September 2016 Supreme Court affidavit in the Triple Talaq case (Sayara Bano v. Union of India), the AIMPLB through its affidavit claimed divorce rights belong primarily to husbands because men allegedly possess “greater power of decision-making” and “control emotions.” It even argued that without quick separation option, a husband “may resort to illegal, criminal ways of murdering or burning her alive”—a disturbing rationalization of domestic violence. While claiming these laws are divine, the Board admitted in Paragraph 46 that “India is a patriarchal society, and therefore personal laws of all communities are aligned with the patriarchal notion…”

• Selective Use of the Constitution:

The AIMPLB selectively invokes Articles 25–30 (Religious Freedom), ignoring that these rights are explicitly subject to public order, morality, and health. They conveniently bypass Articles 14 and 15, which guarantee equality before the law and prohibit sex or religion-based discrimination.

• Global Precedents of Reform:

Muslim-majority nations worldwide—including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tunisia, and Morocco—have codified and reformed personal laws to protect women’s rights. Millions of Muslims live in secular democratic nations with uniform family codes without putting “Islam in danger.” The Muslim community’s current legal predicament in India is the direct result of the AIMPLB and conservative leaders failing to proactively reform and codify Muslim Personal Law.

• Exposing Political Exploitation:

While mainstream parties often ignore Muslim women’s civil rights, the Hindu Right exploits the UCC debate for political polarization. Genuine family law reform must guarantee Muslim women equal rights regarding minimum marriage age, abolition of polygamy, mutual divorce, equal inheritance, child custody, adoption, and a ban on female genital mutilation and halala.

• BJP, Sangh Parivar’s Hate Campaign:

While secular parties rarely support the rights of Muslim women, the BJP and the Hindu Right do so with an obvious motive: communal polarization. The sangh parivar sheds crocodile tears for Muslim women while ignoring relentless hate speech (love jihad, land jihad…) and hate crimes—mob lynching, bulldozing homes, demolishing masjids, and economic boycotts, with chants of Jai Shri Ram to strike fear and intimidation. This accompanies state actions targeting Muslims: Waqf Amendment Act, draconian anti-conversion laws, and a weaponised SIR (Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls) to disenfranchise vast sections of the electorate.

• Ignoring Everyday Survival Concerns:

While ‘Saving Shariah’ tops the AIMPLB’s agenda, real life everyday challenges facing Indian Muslims—socio-economic marginalization, security, education, and employment—are ignored. The ulema must address survival issues rather than furthering retrogressive norms.

• Our Call:

We call upon all progressive forces, civil society organizations, and secular political parties to intervene actively to ensure that the demand for a gender-just, religion-neutral Uniform Civil Code is rooted in equality and human rights, rather than weaponized for communal division.

Signatories:

1. Javed Anand, Convenor, Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD), Mumbai
2. Zakia Soman, Co-convenor, Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), Ahmedabad
3. Noorjehan Safia Niaz, Co-convenor, BMMA, Mumbai
4. Feroze Mithiborwala, Co-Convenor, IMSD, Mumbai
5. Shamsuddin Tamboli, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
6. Bader Sayeed, Former MLA, lawyer, President, Roshni, Chennai
7. A. J. Jawad, Lawyer, Arbitrator, IMSD, Chennai
8. Afroz Javed Inamdar, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal Bengaluru
9. Ajij Sayyed Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal Pune
10. Akbar Shaikh, Social Activist, IMSD, Farmer, Solapur
11. Altaphusen Ramjan Nabab, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
12. Amar Tamboli, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal Satara
13. Amol Palekar – Actor, director, film producer – Pune
14. Anand Patwardhan, Documentary Filmmaker, Mumbai
15. Ani Zonneveld, President, Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), USA, and Founder Member, Alliance of Inclusive Muslims (International)
16. Anita Cheria, Indian Christian Women’s Movement, Bangalore
17. Anjum Rajabali, Film Script writer, IMSD, Mumbai
18. Anwar Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
19. Arshad Alam, Columnist, editor, IMSD, Delhi
20. Ashok Dhiware IPS, Rtd. Additional DIG of Maharashtra State, Pune
21. (Dr) Ashwini KP, UN independent Expert, Bangalore
22. Asim Sayyed, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
23. Askari Zaidi, Veteran journalist, IMSD, Delhi
24. (Prof) Azharuddin Patel, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
25. Azim Pathan, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
26. Benazeer Tamboli, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
27. Benazir Kazi, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Solapur
28. Bismilla Sayyed, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Jalana
29. Dilawar Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
30. Gulab Attar, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Kolhapur
31. Hasan Ibrahim Pasha, Writer, IMSD, Allahabad
32. Hasina Khan, Bebaak Collective, Mumbai
33. Hilal Ahmed, Scholar and Author, Asst Professor, CSDS, Delhi
34. Iqbal Ahmad, BBC, Delhi
35. Irshad Wadgavkar, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Kolhapur
36. Jamir Momin, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
37. Jamir Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
38. Jeibunnisa R, BMMA, Tamil Nadu
39. Jyothi Yedulla, Vice-President, Casteless Society of India, Hyderabad
40. Khadijah Faruqui, Feminist and human rights consultant, Delhi
41. Dr. Lata Pratibha Madhukar, Bahujan Feminist Writer and Critique, Founder of Manomitr
42. Madan Lal Hind, Samajwadi Jan Parishad, Delhi
43. Madhu Bhaduri, Retd. Ambassador, Indian Foreign Service, Delhi
44. Madhu Bhushan, feminist, social activist, Bangalore
45. Mallika Sarabhai, Classical dancer, activist and actress, Ahmedabad
46. Mariya Salim, feminist development professional, Delhi
47. Mohammad Waheed, President, Casteless Society of India, Hyderabad
48. (Dr) Mohd Farooque Khan, Associate Professor, Marathwada University, Sambhajinagar
49. Mufid Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak, Mandal, Pune
50. Munir  Shikalgar Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Sangli
51. Muniza Khan, IMSD, CJP, Varanasi
52. (Adv) Nazrana Ahemad, Social activist, academician, Dibrugarh (Assam)
53. Naseeruddin Shah, Actor, Mumbai
54. Nasreen Contractor, Co-convenor, IMSD, Mumbai
55. Nasreen M, BMMA, Karnataka
56. Naureen Sophie Musvee. EC member, Roshni, Chennai
57. Parvin Altaphusen Nabab, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Satara
58. Peehu Pardeshi, PEHEL Foundation, Mumbai
59. Preeti Oza, Development Professional, Gandhinagar
60. Qaisar Pasha, Homemaker, Allahabad
61. (Prof.) Radha Kumar, renowned academic, former GOI Interlocutor for J&K, Kodaikanal
62. Rajesh Singhi, Social Sector Consultant, Alwar, Rajasthan
63. (Prof) Ram Puniyani, Author, Activist, President, CSSS, Mumbai
64. Ratna Pathak, Actor, Director, Mumbai
65. SR Darapuri, IPS(Retd), National President, All India Peoples Front, Lucknow
66. Sabah Khan, Parcham, Mumbai/Mumbra
67. Sachendra Pratap Yadav, Activist, Lucknow
68. Salim Momin Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Sangli
69. Samina Pathan Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
70. Samreen Khan, Socio-political Blogger, Kolkata
71. Sandeep Pandey, General Secretary, Socialist Party of India, Lucknow
72. Sandhya Gokhale – Author and activist, Pune
73. Sayara Mulani Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Kolhapur
74. Shabana Dean, IMSD, Pune
75. Shagufta Musvee, President Soroptimist International, EC member, Roshni
76. Shahed Shaikh, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
77. Shaikh Yusuf Baba, Convenor, Duniyadari Social Reform Movement, Hyderabad
78. Shahjahan Patel, Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Mumbai
79. Shakun Mohini, feminist, social activist, Bangalore
80. Shama Zaidi, filmmaker, script writer, Mumbai
81. (Dr) Shaniya Zarina Khan, Dentist, Delhi
82. Shriya Maini, Advocate, Supreme Court, Delhi
83. (Dr) Shujaat Ali Quadri, Convener, Muslim Youth organization of India
84. Sultan Shahin, Editor-in-chief, New Age Islam (online portal), Delhi
85. (Dr) Suresh Khairnar, Social Activist, Nagpur
86. Suresh Nautiyal, India   Green Party (IGP), Garhwal, Uttarakhand
87. Teesta Setalvad, Journalist, activist, educationist, Secretary Citizens for Justice & Peace, IMSD, Mumbai
88. Tushar Gandhi, President, Hum Bharat ke Log, Mumbai
89. Ummid Shaikh Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Pune
90. Yash Paranjpe, Writer, Navi Mumbai
91. (Dr) Zaheer A Sayeed, Neurologist, Chennai
92. Zeenat Shaukat Ali, Islamic Scholar, Director-General, Wisdom Foundation, Mumbai

The post Shariat Campaign: Ulema’s Boon to Hindutva appeared first on SabrangIndia.

And where is the CCTV footage that could help establish what happened inside the station? Two journalists allege they were assaulted at Delhi’s Saket Police Station.

They allege the assault intensified after police learnt they were Muslim. Teesta Setalvad speaks with Shaheen Khan and Nafeesa Khan about journalism, their experience as Muslim women, their rights as citizens, and the unanswered questions around CCTV footage and police accountability.

The post They Asked Questions. Then Came the Assault: Shaheen & Nafeesa Khan | Teesta Setalvad appeared first on SabrangIndia.

I argue however that, when this 2026 defence of ancient Hindu jurisprudence is placed alongside Mahmood’s long-standing jurisprudential positions—most notably his January 11-24, 1986 Frontline interview during the Shah Bano controversy—a consistent ideological trajectory emerges.

Far from a progressive effort to humanise legal history, Mahmood’s intellectual framework represents a sophisticated defence of systemic patriarchy. Across four decades, his legal logic systematically rebrands female subordination as benevolent care, denies women’s non-monetary economic contributions, and reduces women to perpetual financial and social liabilities who require lifelong male custodianship.

A foundational pillar of Mahmood’s legal philosophy is the absolute rejection of women’s independent economic agency within the marital unit. In his January 11-24 1986 Frontline interview (“Secularism on the Bend”), Mahmood forcefully criticised the Supreme Court’s ruling (April 23, 1985) in Mohammed Ahmad Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum, which had granted a meagre maintenance allowance to a 73-year-old divorced woman under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Mahmood argued that Shah Bano (1916-1992) was not entitled to maintenance from her former husband because she was an affluent woman with three adult, solvent sons—one of whom was a practicing lawyer. Under his interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence, the primary financial liability to support an elderly mother falls squarely upon her male offspring rather than her former spouse, regardless of the duration of the marriage.

When directly (and publicly) challenged on whether a wife’s decades of domestic labour, childcare, and household management constitute an economic contribution to the marriage that justifies post-divorce support or a share in marital property, Mahmood’s response was unambiguous. He rejected the “Western concept of matrimonial property”, asserting that in India, an uneducated or homemaker wife does not make an economic contribution. Instead, he explicitly declared her to be a financial burden: “How is that an economic contribution? On the contrary, she is a liability. She needs to be maintained in any case”. He went so far as to claim that a wife could only legally demand financial compensation for her domestic services if she formally declared herself an “employee” or an “agent of the husband” rather than a mother.

This worldview is far from an isolated legal quirk; it aligns directly with a broader, long-standing tradition of South Asian patriarchal instructional literature designed to socialise women into absolute domestic servitude. A prime historical example is Ashraf Ali Thanwi’s reformist handbook Bihishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments, 1905). Written at the turn of the twentieth century as an instructional guide for Muslim women, Thanwi’s text systematically constructs a piety centered on female self-effacement, unquestioning submission, and absolute obedience to the husband. In Bihishti Zewar, a wife is instructed that her religious duty and spiritual salvation depend on serving her husband as her earthly lord—enduring his tempers without complaint, prioritizing his comfort over her basic needs, and viewing her presence in the household as an act of perpetual devotion.

What Thanwi codified as religious virtue in 1905, Mahmood “secularised” and operationalised as legal jurisprudence in 1986 and 2026. In both frameworks, the woman’s internal value is tied entirely to her domestic utility, while her structural status is reduced to an uncompensated, obedient dependent. Thanwi’s theological insistence that a woman must endure systemic domestic inequity in exchange for heavenly reward seamlessly mirrors Mahmood’s legal assertion that an uneducated homemaker generates no economic value and remains merely a financial liability.

Decades later, in his September 2026 analysis of the Manusmriti, Mahmood deploys this exact same paternalistic logic. By equating the verse’s prescription of lifelong male guardianship with modern maintenance obligations, Mahmood once again reduces female existence to an inherent financial dependency. In all these contexts—whether examining Thanwi’s reformist didactic manuals, classical Sanskrit codes, or medieval Islamic jurisprudence—there is a shared refusal to recognise women as equal economic or legal partners in a household. A woman’s labour inside the home is dismissed as non-existent or dutifully owed, her status is framed as an inherent liability, and her entitlement to survival is made contingent upon the paternalistic charity of male guardians.

This institutionalised denial of agency seamlessly informs Mahmood’s defence of structural male dominance and the restriction of female self-determination. In his discussion of divorce law, Mahmood attempted to construct a facade of gender parity by claiming that Islamic law grants equal rights of unilateral dissolution to both men and women. He argued that a woman can unilaterally discard her husband through khula just as a man can through talaq, and that seeking a judicial decree is merely a confirmatory remedy against male chauvinism rather than a structural requirement.

Yet, this assertion conveniently glossed over the severe, asymmetrical financial penalties embedded in the process. While a man pronouncing talaq retains his assets and merely pays the agreed mehr (dower), a woman initiating khula is legally required to forfeit or return her mehr. When pressed on how an economically dependent, illiterate woman could realistically exercise this right without facing total destitution, Mahmood shifted the entire burden back onto women and their families, insisting that financial terms should have been negotiated in the nikahnama (marriage contract) prior to the wedding. When reminded that young girls and illiterate women rarely possess the agency or leverage to negotiate such contracts, Mahmood dismissed the widespread grievances of Muslim women’s rights groups who characterized personal laws as instruments of oppression, attributing their critique to sheer “ignorance of law”.

This pattern of dismissing female agency culminates in Mahmood’s semantic reinterpretation of classical patriarchal texts. In his 2026 Indian Express column, Mahmood attempts to sanitize the phrase na stri swatantrayamarhati—traditionally translated by both classical commentators and colonial scholars as “a woman does not deserve independence”—by translating it as “never left unprotected”. In doing so, he deliberately conflates the denial of autonomy with an act of paternalistic devotion. By framing the institutionalized denial of female freedom as a sacred male duty of safety, Tahir Mahmood constructs an apologetic framework that shields historic patriarchy from legitimate critique.

As the historian, Mubarak Ali observes in his critical study “Behishti Zewar Aur Aurat” (in his Urdu language book, Tareekh Aur Aurat, 1993), textually mandated codes of female conduct invariably function to “confine the woman within the domestic sphere while sanctifying her subjugation as moral virtue”, and that such normative texts manipulate legal and religious rhetoric to stripping women of independent agency under the guise of protecting tradition.

When read together, Mahmood’s writings across forty years (1986 and 2026) reveal a cohesive, conservative worldview that normalises gender hierarchy under the guise of legal protectionism. Whether relying on didactic texts like Bihishti Zewar, or opposing the Supreme Court’s secular intervention (1985) in Shah Bano, or reinterpreting the Manusmriti for a modern readership, the core thesis remains unchanged: women do not require constitutional equality, independent legal agency, or economic recognition; they merely require male oversight. By recasting the denial of independence as an act of care and framing female domestic existence as a financial liability, Mahmood, relying upon the same rhetorical sleight of hand, provides an intellectual defence of systemic misogyny that ensures women remain perpetual wards of male authority. In both instances (Indian Express, Sept 1, 2026, and Frontline, January 11-24, 1986), systemic misogyny and the denial of gender justice are sanitized as reverence for scriptural tradition and personal law, reducing female autonomy to a negotiable casualty of cultural preservation.

(The author teaches Modern and Contemporary Indian History at the Aligarh Muslim University. His X handle is: @sajjadhist)

Related:

Muslim women will define their own lives & choices: Bebaak Collective responds to Kerala cleric

“Balancing Principles”: Are Hindutva far-right supporters and Muslim illiberalism often cosy bedfellows?

The post Four decade-long misogyny of a law academic? Tahir Mahmood’s defence of Manusmriti echoes in his criticism of the 1985 Shah Bano verdict appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The question has acquired renewed urgency following recent remarks by Kerala-based Sunni cleric Sheikh Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar, popularly known as Sheikh Abubakr Ahmad and widely referred to as the “Grand Mufti of India”.

Speaking at a Hubbul Rasool conference in Kochi, the cleric reportedly said that women should remain confined to their homes and should not enter the public sphere. He defended purdah as a means of protecting women’s dignity and compared women to gold ornaments that, in his analogy, must be kept safely inside a box. He further argued that bringing women into the public sphere could lead to “great destruction” and attributed this position to the Qur’an.

Such remarks deserve serious theological scrutiny—not merely because they concern women’s rights, but because they raise a larger question about how scripture is interpreted and transmitted in contemporary Muslim society.

The issue is not whether Islam prescribes modesty. It unquestionably does. The Qur’an calls upon both believing men and believing women to observe modesty, chastity and moral restraint. The issue is whether modesty necessarily means confinement, whether purdah necessarily means social invisibility, and whether the Qur’an actually establishes a universal prohibition against women participating in public life. It does not.

The Qur’an is not a charter for female confinement!

The verse most commonly invoked to justify the confinement of women is Qur’an 33:33:

“And remain in your homes and do not display yourselves as was the display of the former days of ignorance.”

The verse occurs in a specific passage addressing the wives of the holy Prophet (pbuh). Its immediate context concerns the conduct, dignity and special responsibilities of the Prophet’s household. To extract one phrase from this context and transform it into an absolute command that every Muslim woman, in every society and historical circumstance, must remain inside her home is an interpretive decision—not an uncontested Qur’anic fact.

This distinction is fundamental!

The Qur’an repeatedly recognises women as autonomous moral subjects. It addresses believing women directly, assigns them religious responsibilities, grants them rights of inheritance and property, and describes believing men and women as mutual allies in establishing what is right and resisting what is wrong.

Most significantly, the Qur’an says:

“The believing men and believing women are allies of one another. They enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong.” (9:71)

How can women be described as moral partners in the collective ethical life of the ummah if they are simultaneously understood to be categorically barred from public life?

The answer cannot be obtained by isolating one phrase and ignoring the Qur’an’s wider moral vocabulary.

From modesty to misogyny: where interpretation goes wrong

The second important word in Qur’an 33:33 is tabarruj. It is often translated as displaying oneself or one’s adornments in an ostentatious manner.

Classical exegetes associated tabarruj with conspicuous self-display, affected mannerisms and the public exhibition of beauty or adornment intended to attract sensual attention. In other words, the Qur’anic concern is with ostentatious and sexually provocative display, not with the mere physical presence of women outside their homes.

This distinction is essential!

A woman who goes to a university, teaches in a school, works in a hospital, runs a business, attends a conference, visits a market or participates in civic life does not thereby commit tabarruj.

To equate a woman’s physical presence in public with tabarruj is to expand the Qur’anic concept beyond its moral meaning.

Purdah, likewise, cannot simply be transformed from an ethic of modesty into an architecture of female imprisonment.

What happened to Bibi Khadija (RA)?

There is also a profound historical problem with treating women’s public presence as inherently destructive.

Khadija al-Kubra, the first wife of the Prophet (pbuh) was a successful businesswoman before her marriage to him. Her commercial activity was not presented in Islamic tradition as a moral failure. She was not described as having compromised her dignity merely because she participated in economic life.

The Prophet’s own community included women who transmitted knowledge, engaged in commerce, sought medical treatment, participated in communal affairs and contributed to the social and intellectual life of the Muslim community.

Women were not invisible in Medina!

Nor was the mosque exclusively a male social institution. Women attended the Prophet’s mosque. They listened to his sermons, asked questions, transmitted hadith and participated in the religious life of the community.

The historical record therefore does not support the simplistic proposition that Islam’s ideal woman is one who never enters public space.

The “gold in a box” analogy is particularly revealing!

The analogy comparing women with gold ornaments deserves special attention. A woman is not jewellery.

She is not an object whose value increases because she is locked away from society. She is a human being endowed by God with intellect, conscience, moral responsibility and spiritual agency.

The Qur’an does not describe women as commodities whose social value depends upon physical concealment. Indeed, the Qur’anic account of human dignity begins at a level far deeper than gender:

“Indeed, We have honoured the children of Adam.” (17:70)

The Qur’an speaks of Bani Adam—the children of Adam—not merely men. Human dignity precedes gender.

The “gold in a box” analogy may have been intended to express protection and honour. But theological language must also be judged by the social meaning it produces. When women are repeatedly described as precious objects who must be hidden, protected and controlled, the distinction between protection and possession becomes dangerously blurred.

A woman does not need to be locked away to possess dignity. She needs education, security, freedom from violence, economic rights, social respect and the ability to exercise her God-given moral agency.

Protection cannot become prohibition!

There is a legitimate Islamic concern for women’s safety. Muslim societies, like all societies, must protect women from harassment, exploitation and violence.

If a public space is unsafe because men harass women, the Islamic response cannot reasonably be to imprison women at home. The ethical response should be to discipline those who harass, educate society, strengthen public safety and uphold the dignity of every human being. Otherwise, the victim is effectively punished for the misconduct of the perpetrator.

The Indian Muslim tradition is more complex!

The proposition that Muslim women belong exclusively to the domestic sphere also sits uneasily with India’s own Muslim social history.

Indian Islam has never been a monolithic civilisation of female seclusion. From the courts of Muslim rulers to the intellectual circles of scholars, from women poets and mystics to educators and reformers, Muslim women have participated in India’s cultural and intellectual history in diverse ways.

The subcontinent’s Sufi traditions, in particular, cannot be reduced to a theology of female invisibility. The spiritual vocabulary of Islam speaks of taqwa, ilm, ihsan, adl and karamah—God-consciousness, knowledge, excellence, justice and human dignity. None of these virtues is exclusively male.

The Qur’an itself declares:

“Surely the Muslim men and Muslim women, the believing men and believing women, the devout men and devout women, the truthful men and truthful women…” (33:35)

The verse then proceeds to promise forgiveness and an immense reward to both.

The spiritual subject of Islam is therefore neither exclusively male nor domestically confined.

A dangerous hermeneutical shortcut!

The deeper problem exposed by Sheikh Abubakr Ahmad’s statement is not simply one controversial sermon. It is a recurring hermeneutical tendency within certain strands of Muslim clerical discourse: a social custom is elevated into an immutable divine command, and a particular historical interpretation is presented as though it were the only possible meaning of revelation.

This is precisely where Muslim scholarship needs intellectual courage. The Qur’an must be read holistically.

A verse cannot be separated from its linguistic context, historical context, rhetorical context and the broader ethical trajectory of the Qur’an. Nor should the opinions of medieval or modern exegetes—however respected—be treated as revelation itself.

The Qur’an is divine. Our interpretations of the Qur’an are human. That distinction is indispensable. The Qur’an asks women and men alike to become people of faith, knowledge and righteousness. It does not ask half of humanity to disappear from society.

When clerics tell women that their presence in public spaces will lead to “great destruction”, they are ultimately constructing a theology of fear around the female body. But Islam did not come to make women afraid of their own existence.

The Qur’an came to liberate human beings especially the womenfolk from forms of domination—spiritual, social and moral. The Prophet (pbuh) did not establish a community in which women ceased to exist beyond the threshold of their homes. He established a community in which women were recognised as believers, mothers, daughters, wives, teachers, narrators, benefactors and moral agents.

That historical reality should make contemporary Muslims cautious about transforming one interpretation of one verse into an absolute social doctrine.

The future of Indian Islam does not depend upon keeping Muslim women inside four walls. It depends upon creating a society in which women can walk outside those walls with dignity, modesty, security and equal moral agency.

A regular contributor to New Age Islam, the author is an Indo-Islamic scholar, researcher on Indian Sufism, an author of “Ishq Sufiyana: Untold Stories of Divine Love”

Courtesy: The New Age Islam

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“Muslim women are not objects to be locked away in rooms or told where they can and cannot go. We have agency, autonomy, and every right to participate fully in public life,” said the statement by Bebaak released on social media. “What is especially concerning is that such views are being expressed from a position of religious scholarship. When influential religious figures promote restrictions on women, it can reinforce regressive ideas within the community. But let us be clear: Maulanas and Muftis do not represent all Muslims, nor do they speak for Islam in its entirety.

The Bebaak statement also states, “More importantly, we must recognise how statements like these are used to play dirty politics in the name of Muslim women. When religious figures make regressive statements about Muslim women, our identities and our names are turned into political tools. And as a consequence, we are forced to face discrimination and hostility from other quarters as well.

“Stop doing religious politics in our name. Muslim women are not political pawns. Our lives, our choices, and our identities do not belong to politicians, religious leaders, or anyone else to weaponise.

“Islamic history itself tells a different story. Muslim women have been scholars, teachers, entrepreneurs, traders, and active participants in public life. If women could occupy these spaces centuries ago, why are they being pushed back into the home today?

“Muslim women will not be confined by outdated interpretations of our place in society. We will define our own lives, our own choices, and our own futures.”

It had been widely reported in the media, and also in The Hindu, that Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliar, known for many as the Grand Mufti of India, recently issued a “joint-circular” to mahallus in his capacity as general secretary of the Samstha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama, asking them “not to exhibit women in front of other men on the streets or stages” during Islamic celebrations. Aboobacker Musliar, known for his proximity to various political formations, has been a leading figure in Kerala’s traditional Sunni Muslim community for more than five decades. The widely publicised diktat was reportedly issued in the context of the Milad festivities. Specifically, the circular courted controversy, following which Kanthapuram said bringing women to public forums would cause serious “chaos” and that Islam prescribed purdah for women to prevent this. These comments had been criticised both by the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF)’s leading party, the Indian National Congress (INC) with Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan and the CPI(M), also a long-term ally of the Mufti. Interestingly, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a component of the ruling UDF has been silent.

Background

The ‘Grand Mufti’ who is at the centre of this controversy that significant influence extending across India and to Muslim communities abroad. Kanthapuram, Ustad in Kerala, is known as Sheikh Abubakr Ahmad in the wider Muslim world. He is the founder of Jamia Markaz at Karanthur near Kozhikode, around which he has built a large religious, educational and social network. At 89, he continues to teach the Hadith collection regarded by Muslims as the most authentic collection of reports on Prophet Muhammad’s teachings and practices.

Kanthapuram’s rise began within the Samastha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama, the traditional body of Islamic scholars in Kerala. He was one of its prominent secretaries under Shamsul Ulama E.K. Aboobacker Musliar. In 1989, differences over the influence of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) led to a split. Kanthapuram and his followers walked out and formed a separate organisation. The division continues, leaving Keralam’s traditional Sunni community broadly divided between the E.K. and A.P. factions. He built his organisation around Markazu Saquafathi Sunniyya, founded at Karanthur in 1978.

His reach extends well beyond politics. He was also been associated with the Amman Message and A Common Word, international initiatives promoting Islamic unity and Muslim-Christian understanding. His organisation has also reportedly used these networks for humanitarian causes. In 2025, he intervened in the case of Kerala nurse Nimisha Priya, who was facing execution in Yemen, and saved her from the gallows through contacts with influential Yemeni religious figures.

Few religious leaders in the southern state of Kerala have remained so influential for decades. From a scholar in Kozhikode to the chief of an international network, Kanthapuram’s influence extends far beyond Karanthur. To his followers, he is a scholar, teacher and institution-builder; to his critics, a conservative cleric with deep influence over public and political life.

The statement by Bebaak collective may be read here.

Related:

Equal Inheritance Rights for Muslim Women: Upholding Constitutional Justice and Gender Equality

Wars Fought in The Name of Women’s Rights

Muslim women need not move court to register divorce by talaq: Kerala High Court

The post Muslim women will define their own lives & choices: Bebaak Collective responds to Kerala cleric appeared first on SabrangIndia.

That is also the nature of Shaheen’s wider ground reporting. Her videos show her going into neighbourhoods and public spaces, documenting local conditions, speaking to people and questioning authorities. Her reporting has focused on issues that are experienced directly by ordinary people rather than remaining within the confines of official briefings.

Her videos on the fire that broke out in Malviya Nagar, Delhi may be viewed below:

According to Shaheen’s written statement, police personnel objected to the recording and attempted to take their phones. Women police personnel were called and the sisters were eventually put into a police vehicle. Shaheen says they were told they would be dropped home but were instead taken to Saket police station.

Detailed report may be read here.

A detailed complaint against named personnel

Shaheen’s written statement is specific about the alleged events at Saket police station. She names SHO Dinesh Kumar and women police personnel including Sonam Solanki and Renuka Chaudhary. She says the sisters were threatened with being put in the lock-up and that the SHO threatened to file multiple FIRs against them. She alleges that when she asked what offence they had committed and said they would cooperate, the threats continued.

She then alleges that Solanki demanded her phone. When Shaheen questioned the basis for taking it, she says the officer snatched it and slapped her. Nafisa was allegedly assaulted as well. The sisters say they were subsequently dragged through the station and taken upstairs. Shaheen alleges that they were pulled by their hair and clothes, slapped, kicked and beaten with a baton. She says she tried to seek help from the SHO before being taken upstairs.

In her interview with Alt News, published on September 7, Shaheen gave substantially the same account, saying that she and Nafisa were dragged upstairs and assaulted for an extended period. She described being slapped, kicked, having her hair pulled and being struck with a baton. Alt News also published photographs showing bruising on Nafisa’s leg and Shaheen’s upper arm.

The allegation of communal abuse

According to her written statement, an incoming call on her forcefully seized phone displayed the name “Mohd. Khan”. Shaheen alleges that the officer saw the caller ID, realised she was Muslim and then made a remark about giving her additional slaps and baton blows. Speaking to Alt News, Shaheen repeated the allegation, saying the officer’s behaviour changed after seeing the name and identifying her as Muslim. She said the assault then intensified and that other women constables were also instructed to beat the sisters.

Sabrangindia has spoken to both sisters and accessed a copy of the criminal complaint.

The sisters described the same sequence in their September 6 interview with Nous Network, titled “Is Being Muslim Our Biggest Crime?” They alleged that they were beaten for roughly 30–40 minutes, including through slaps, kicks, hair-pulling and baton blows, and said the treatment became more severe after the officer allegedly realised that they were Muslim. Nafisa also questioned the relevance of their religion during the alleged assault.

The CCTV evidence

The sisters have repeatedly pointed to CCTV footage as potentially decisive evidence. Shaheen’s written statement identifies the areas through which she says they were dragged and assaulted. In her interview with Alt News, she said CCTV cameras covered parts of the station, including the reception and corridor, and that this footage could establish what happened. She said the room where she alleges the later assault occurred did not have a camera, but the route leading to it did. Article 14 reported that Shaheen and Nafisa were demanding the preservation and release of CCTV footage from Saket police station. The report noted that the women believe the footage could help test their allegations against the police account.

What happened after the alleged assault?

According to Shaheen’s statement, the sisters eventually made their way back to the reception area, where Nafisa collapsed. Shaheen says the police did not arrange for them to contact their family or obtain immediate medical assistance. They eventually contacted relatives and called the police control room. The women were taken to hospital and underwent medical examination before returning to the police station to pursue their complaint.

The medical evidence is now an important part of the case. Videos circulated after the incident showed injuries on the women, while Alt News reported photographs of bruising on Nafisa’s leg and Shaheen’s arm. The Indian Express also reported that a video released by 4PM showed bruises and welts that the women attributed to the alleged assault.

Alt News also spoke to their colleague Neetu, who alleged that the women were not immediately assisted in obtaining an MLC and that police instead sought a compromise. She alleged that the women themselves called the police and went for the medical examination, returning to the station later that night. She further alleged that they remained there for hours without an FIR and were asked to remove two names from their complaint.

Newslaundry reported that Shaheen remained at the police station for hours demanding that an FIR be registered. The report said police accepted the complaint but did not register an FIR. At the time of the publishing of this report, there was still no FIR against the police personnel named by the sisters.

Related:

Two women journalists allege police assault after questioning Delhi CM, say attack intensified after police heard they were Muslim

Midnight Arrest, Daylight Questions: Why was Santosh Pandit taken into custody?

Days of Demands, Hours of Protest: Swatantra Bhardwaj finally detained in assault case

Pune’s DJ Controversy, Ganeshotsav and Assault: The politics of who gets to make noise

The post Six Days On, Still No FIR: What happened to Shaheen and Nafisa Khan at Saket Police Station? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The journalists, Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan, said they had gone to cover the inauguration of Max Smart Super Speciality Hospital when police personnel stopped them. Shaheen alleged that she attempted to ask Gupta a question but was prevented from doing so and was taken to Saket police station along with her colleague.

Two women freelance journalists have alleged that Delhi police slapped and beat them up because they wanted to ask questions at an event featuring Union home minister Amit Shah and Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta and that the assault was exacerbated because they are both Muslim pic.twitter.com/zWJ8RTC1eh

— The Telegraph (@ttindia) September 4, 2026

What followed, according to the journalists, was not merely detention but physical assault. In a video released by 4PM News Network, Shaheen alleged that she and Nafisa were beaten and subjected to mental harassment at the police station. She displayed injury marks on Nafisa’s body and alleged that the assault became more severe after police personnel asked their names and learnt that they were Muslims.

“Delhi Police Assaulted Us, But the Assault Intensified After They Asked Our Religion and Learned Our Muslim Names,” Says 4PM Journalist Nafisa Khan. pic.twitter.com/AETfmoWVXA

— FOEJ Media (@FoejMedia) September 3, 2026

Newslaundry also reported the journalists’ allegation that Shaheen was caught by police while attempting to question the Chief Minister and taken to the police station. The most serious allegation made by Shaheen is that the assault intensified after police personnel heard the surname “Khan”. That claim cannot simply be treated as an extension of the dispute over the parked scooter.

Shaheen Khan alleges that Nafisa’s health deteriorated following the alleged police brutality. She claims she heard police personnel say, “If she’s dying, let her die,” while Nafisa was in distress, and alleges that police personnel did not come forward to provide her medical… pic.twitter.com/WLo2g6CQqu

— FOEJ Media (@FoejMedia) September 3, 2026

Journalists’ organisations demand action

At the time of the publication, no case had reportedly been registered in connection with the allegations. Police said senior officers were in touch with the two journalists. The absence of an FIR is significant given the nature of the allegations being made: two Muslim women say they were physically assaulted after being taken to a police station, and one of them has alleged that religious identity influenced the severity of the assault.

#delhipolice पर महिला पत्रकारों को बुरी तरह पीटने का आरोप है. आरोप महिला पुलिसकर्मी पर है.

पुलिस प्रशासन चुप क्यों है? प्रशासन को बताना चाहिए कि कल दोपहर 11 बजे साकेत थाने में क्या हुआ? अगर कुछ नहीं हुआ तो कह दें पुलिस ने कमरा बंद कर महिला पत्रकारों को नहीं पीटा. लेकिन सब चुप… pic.twitter.com/BA3L4RZXrj

— Rajat Pandey (@RajatpandeyJF) September 4, 2026

The allegations have drawn a strong response from the press community. The Press Club of India, Indian Women’s Press Corps, Delhi Union of Journalists, Press Association and Kerala Union of Working Journalists issued a joint statement condemning what they described as the “brutal assault” of the two journalists. They demanded punitive action against the police officials allegedly responsible and called upon Delhi Police Commissioner Anurag Kumar to ensure a free and fair investigation.

The Press Club of India, Indian Women’s Press Corps, Delhi Union of Journalists, Press Association and Kerala Union of Working Journalists have condemned the alleged assault of freelance journalists Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan by Delhi Police personnel posted at Saket Police… pic.twitter.com/CnPFjM9V3A

— United News of India (@uniindianews) September 3, 2026

Political leaders have also criticised the alleged assault. AAP Delhi chief Saurabh Bharadwaj condemned the incident, while Congress leader Pawan Khera described the alleged assault as “utterly reprehensible” and questioned whether Delhi was becoming a “police state”. Both highlighted the allegation that the treatment of the journalists intensified after their Muslim identity became known.

What are these horrifying visuals coming out of a Delhi police station?

Women journalists being beaten and thrashed for asking questions about the Delhi CM.

And when the police allegedly discovered that one of these journalists was Muslim, the assault intensified.

Is this a… https://t.co/jHH7E6metC

— Pawan Khera ಪವನ್ ಖೇರಾ (@Pawankhera) September 3, 2026

The way two women reporters of @4pmnews_network were beaten by police is very shameful.

I feel all other news reporters & journalists should takeup the matter.

BJP Govt always tests things in Delhi’s Laboratory and then it’s scaled up in every state.

— Saurabh Bharadwaj (@Saurabh_MLAgk) September 4, 2026

AAP leader Somnath Bharti separately urged Lieutenant Governor Taranjit Singh Sandhu to intervene and ensure action against officials found responsible.

This is not done, Shaheen, in addition of being a journalist, is a resident of my assembly constituency and I am aghast at this development. I request Honble @LtGovDelhi to intervene and fix accountability of the involved officers. A FIR must be lodged and responsible officers be… https://t.co/UBIze5FdrK

— Somnath Bharti सोमनाथ भारती (@attorneybharti) September 3, 2026

The FIR had to be fought for at the police station

The response to the alleged assault did not end with the journalists leaving the Saket Police Station. Instead, the early hours of September 4 saw activists and political workers remain outside the same police station demanding that Delhi Police formally register Shaheen and Nafisa’s complaint against the officers they accused of assaulting them.

All India Students’ Association (AISA) president Neha Bora was among those who joined a sit-in at the Saket Police Station at around 1 am. According to Siasat, activists alleged that the police were initially refusing even to receive the women’s complaint. Bora publicly demanded that an FIR be registered against the police personnel involved.

With Shaheen and Nafisa who faced brutal assault at the hands of Delhi Police today.. we will ensure the FIR is filed against the communal and violent police personnel involved.

This is nothing but a communal targeting of two Muslim Women Journalists simply for reporting the… pic.twitter.com/xCpBqGCwzY

— Neha (@neha_aisa) September 3, 2026

The pressure intensified when Congress workers from the party’s Minority Department reached the police station in large numbers and raised slogans against the Delhi Police. The complaint was eventually registered around 3 am, according to 4PM News Network, after Shaheen insisted that an FIR be filed against the accused officers and that they be immediately suspended.

Saket Police Station: FIR Delay Sparks Protest by Journalists & Lawyers#SaketPoliceStation #DelhiPolice #FIRDelay #JournalistsProtest #LawyersProtest #ViralVideo pic.twitter.com/ADpKnKYnpt

— Savera Times Haryana (@Savera_Haryana) September 4, 2026

Delhi: Female Journalist Confronts Police Over FIR Registration at Saket Station#delhi #saketpolicestation #delhipolice #femalejournalist #firregistration #viralvideo pic.twitter.com/XbEgHFVJUD

— The Savera Times (@thesavera_timep) September 4, 2026

VVIP security cannot become a shield against accountability

Delhi Police has denied the allegations in their entirety. DCP (South) Anant Mittal described the journalists’ claims as “factually incorrect and misleading”. According to the police, the two women had parked their scooter near the hospital in a way that obstructed the designated VVIP movement route during the visit of the Home Minister and Chief Minister.

The police said the journalists were repeatedly instructed to remove the vehicle and clear the route but allegedly refused to comply. They were subsequently taken to the local police station “for further enquiry”. The police specifically denied that the women were assaulted for asking questions to the Chief Minister, calling that allegation “false, misleading and baseless”. That explanation, however, does not by itself dispose of the allegations of physical assault.

Related:

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3,404 SIR Forms Found at Kharghar Xerox Shop: CJP, VFD and BCS demands answers from Maharashtra SEC

Allahabad HC quashes NSA detention of Aakriti Chaudhary, questions ‘concocted’ State narrative in Noida workers’ protest case

Six-year-old detained during Patna teacher aspirants’ protest, parents allege police assault

Water Cannons Instead of Answers: Bihar’s recruitment crisis and the state’s crackdown on protest

The post Two women journalists allege police assault after questioning Delhi CM, say attack intensified after police heard they were Muslim appeared first on SabrangIndia.

–Editors

Professor Faizan Mustafa

Vice-Chancellor, Chanakya National Law University, Patna

(Former Vice-Chancellor, NALSAR & NLUO; Former Registrar, Aligarh Muslim University)

Date September 2, 2026

Subject: An Open Letter on Ideological Opportunism, Public Intellectualism, and More

Dear Professor Faizan Mustafa,

In recent years, your public profile as a legal commentator has expanded considerably through frequent columns in national dailies.

In enhancing your public profile, Ravish Kumar has played a considerable role. On NDTV Prime Time he provided you with a platform. He never brought you into a panel discussion though. He always provided you with a solo programme with no uncomfortable, critical questions and counter-questions being put to you. That is how he initiated the practice of Godi Media (Milquetoast Media) with you on NDTV Prime Time Shows. Today, Ravish Kumar, on his own YouTube channel also does not expose you by criticising your pro-Sangh columns in the Indian Express and elsewhere. Of course, no Liberal, Left remains Liberal when it comes to exposing and critiquing Muslim conservatism-communalism!

However, a systematic review of your published op-eds alongside your institutional footprint reveals a troubling pattern of political accommodation, academic displacement, and prolonged reliance on university deputation rules. In short, this appears to be a form of the crassest possible opportunism that you have consistently been displaying for the last nine years or so.

This open letter addresses three distinct areas where your public record stands in sharp contrast to the expectations of a senior constitutional law professor.

Early Writings and Conservative Stance on Affirmative Action

Your ideological shifts are not a recent development. As far back as 1992, in an essay titled “Reservation-Politics or Social Upliftment” published in the AMU-Arts Faculty Magazine (1992-93, pp. 128–131), you articulated a deeply conservative and critical stance against social justice initiatives.

Writing as a Lecturer in the Department of Law, AMU, you argued that affirmative action had failed, was monopolised by elites, and was driven purely by electoral vote-bank politics (such as the Mandal Commission implementation in 1990). You went on to advocate for drawing a hard line against reservations in science and technology, capping benefits to a single generation or stage of career, and ultimately calling to “do away with reservation policy step by step.”

This early record underlines a long-standing ideological pattern that prioritised anti-reservation rhetoric well before your later shifts toward political accommodation with right-wing majoritarianism.

The Timeline of Ideological Shifts and Selective Silence

Your commentary over the past decade demonstrates a consistent eagerness to accommodate Hindu majoritarian power structures, juxtaposed against a complete absence of critique toward conservative elements within your own institutional and religious baseline.

January 18, 2018 (The Tribune): On the eve of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to India, your piece titled “Learn from Israel’s Legal Pluralism” praised Israel’s legal framework, deceptively likening it with Ottoman-era Millet personal law system. Written while serving as a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University, the article presented Israel’s religious legal autonomy as a model for India, choosing to ignore the ongoing structural disenfranchisement of Palestinians.

May 28, 2019 (The Indian Express): Following the 2019 general elections, your column “Reaching out to Muslims” argued that the Muslim community should expect better treatment from the RSS, initiating a public stance of seeking reconciliation with Hindutva leadership. Obviously, this was less because of your conviction in the principle of “Truth and Reconciliation”, and more intended to appease the RSS-BJP for personal favours?

March 21, 2020 (The Indian Express): In “Why Hindu Rashtra should not terrify Muslims”, you engaged in an accommodating re-reading of majoritarian nationalism, a piece subsequently amplified by right-wing media outlets like Swarajya (April 22, 2020) as an endorsement from a prominent Muslim academic.

July 6, 2021 (The Indian Express): In “What Mohan Bhagwat Said”, you offered praise for RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat’s public statements on Hindu-Muslim shared ancestry. This was part of a broader pattern of synchronized op-eds from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) leadership—followed closely by the then-AMU-VC (now BJP Vice President cum MLC, Uttar Pradesh), Tariq Mansoor in The Hindu (July 13, 2021) and his son, Assistant Professor (Law), Mohd Nasir in Hindustan Times (July 15, 2021).

Projecting yourself as a champion of social justice and Pasmanda uplift, you tweeted a respectful tribute to Manu’s statue in the Rajasthan High Court (Jaipur Bench), in late 2021. What you chose to ignore is the fact that the name Manu is just an epithet and imagine calling a misogynist-casteist to be the greatest law giver! No wonder, then, that you endorse Instant Triple Talaq (ITT) and extend support to the Muslim regressives! Your extraordinary brilliance of reading thousands of pages of judgments and elucidating –in writing or video your analyses ready to be published in a few moments to publish in next morning’s English daily/portals has already made you acquire an-almost divine untouchable position. Salman Khurshid’s book, The Sunrise over Ayodhya exposes this with a subtle sarcasm; also excerpted on The Print.in, October 26, 2021.

Your great respect shown to Shri Ram Madhav Ji of the RSS on your YouTube video is already the subject of jokes and ridicule.

June 14, 2024 (The Indian Express): In your column titled “Unity with diversity“, published following the 2024 general election results, you asserted: “This author continues to believe that declaring Hinduism as the dominant spiritual heritage of India may be a good thing for our secularism.” Commentators have highlighted how egregious this observation is for a constitutional scholar. Under the pretext of defending federalism and constitutionalism, such arguments effectively build a case for ethnocracy. Applying political geographer Oren Yiftachel’s framework, endorsing a dominant religious/spiritual heritage erodes essential democratic structures—specifically equal citizenship, a unified territorial demos, and basic protections against majoritarian tyranny.

And now comes the latest. A nail in the coffin?

August 31 / September 1, 2026 (The Indian Express): Your column “Mohan Bhagwat’s Hindutva is not narrow: Are his words in New York heard in India?” again selectively praised the RSS Chief’s address in New York, asserting that Bhagwat’s stance demolishes the foreign-origin argument against Muslims. Written from the position of a university head, this piece minimises contemporary ground realities under the guise of intellectual engagement. The very same day, Professor Tahir Mahmood (also an AMU Law alumnus) published his piece in the same Indian Express, appreciating the Manusmriti.

Is this just a mere coincidence? Or, part of something else, moves of sections of the Muslim elite towards co-option into a specific narrative-setting?

The Ideological Paradox

While you continuously seek to project moderation onto majoritarian leadership (which is actually your pretence and sophistry), you have systematically avoided issuing any public critique of Muslim Right-Wing orthodoxy, reactionary student outfit politics, or conservative religious organizations (such as, for example, the alleged Saudi-funded frameworks linked with the Institute of Objective Studies).

This calculated dualism allows you to cultivate favour with the ruling saffron dispensation as a “pragmatic bridge-builder” while retaining support among conservative Muslim elites (maslehat; actually, it is collective makkari of the Muslim elites), who view your manoeuvres as strategic preservation rather than principled scholarship.

Intellectual Production vs. Administrative Dominance

A review of your academic trajectory reveals that for over two decades, classroom teaching and peer-reviewed legal research have been displaced by administrative appointments.

Lack of Peer-Reviewed Output: Since your 1991 publication (Strict Liability in the Criminal Law) from a non-descript publication house, you have produced virtually no top-tier, internationally peer-reviewed academic monographs or high-impact journal articles. Media op-eds have replaced rigorous legal research.

The 1991 title is “plagiarized” from Richard Wasserstorm’s 1960 essay, in the Stanford Law Review. As per news-report (mark the word, only, in the news-report), in The Hindu, Aug 20, 2014, “India’s only book on ‘Strict Liability in Criminal Law’ was written by him in 1991 and he was awarded Commonwealth British Fellowship to further pursue this subject”. Have you really produced anything with the fellowship? No. The truth of your Fulbright (not the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship! you got the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Programme, as the VC in NLSIU Hyderabad, Oct 2018. You got the best SAARC Teacher award, in 2014, whereas since 2004, you have not been teaching. You are aimply governing various universities.

Administrative Tenure: From your tenure as AMU Registrar (2004–2007; when AMU was pushed into a judicial crisis of minority status. The issue is still sub judice and far from resolved) to successive terms as Vice-Chancellor at NLUO (Odisha), NALSAR (Hyderabad), and CNLU (Patna), you have operated primarily as an administrative officer rather than as an active teacher or researcher. Receiving teaching awards or academic fellowships while serving exclusively in executive officer roles, raises serious questions regarding academic evaluation standards.

AMU Deputation Rules and Systemic Accommodation

Your continuous absence from your substantive academic post at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) highlights a significant administrative anomaly regarding University Grants Commission (UGC) and AMU service rules:

Statutory Limits on Deputation

Under standard UGC guidelines, Central University Ordinances and Govt of India Service rules, there is a cap on deputation. Deputation or Extraordinary Leave (EOL) to serve in external organizations or state universities is strictly capped—typically not exceeding 5 years continuously, with an absolute career ceiling of 7 years (or less) under exceptional circumstances.

AMU allows you to retain lien on your permanent substantive post. Holding a post on deputation for nearly two decades flagrantly violates the fundamental intent of the AMU recruitment ethics and rules. It freezes departmental vacancies, and prevents fresh/junior faculty recruitments and progression. Nobody however asks the AMU-VCs and its Executive Council (EC) as to why do they keep extending your deputation endlessly? Shall they extend similar favour to anyone except you?

Governance Failure within the AMU Executive Council

The repeated granting of continuous deputations and extensions by the AMU Executive Council (EC) over two decades demonstrates how institutional governance is bent to accommodate elite networking. By retaining your lien at AMU while continuously holding Vice-Chancellorships elsewhere, you have used the university as a safety net while denying the institution your active teaching presence.

Furthermore, the en masse support you received from the AMU Court and EC during Vice-Chancellor empanelment processes (October 2023) underscores how internal political networks prioritise opportunism and administrative clout over academic output and institutional integrity.

Conclusion

A constitutional law professor owes an unambiguous duty to truth, institutional ethics, and systemic accountability. When commentary routinely aligns with the politics of the ruling power, when administrative tenure stretches past statutory limits, and when community critique is applied selectively, the credibility of the public intellectual is entirely compromised.

The above account reveals a lot about you and also about the Muslim elites as much as about the Liberal-Left in not exposing you; in fact they have been promoting you. So much so that recently, the Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi proposed your name to the Prime Minister Modi to appoint you as the Chief Information Commissioner of India (The Hindu, April 24, 2026).  This only means, the Liberal-Left as well as the Muslim elites have kept Rahul Gandhi ill-informed about your pro-Sangh credentials articulated in the prominent English dailies of New Delhi.

The academic community deserves clear answers: On what statutory grounds has AMU extended your deputation for two decades, and why has your constitutional critique remained silent on Muslim reactionary politics while consistently validating the ruling power?

Respectfully,

Members of the University and Academic Community

(The authors who are currently teaching and studying at the AMU have requested anonymity)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

Links:

The Tribune https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/comment/learn-from-israel-s-legal-pluralism-530205/

The Indian Express, May 28, 2019   https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/muslims-india-narendra-modi-bjp-elections-2019-5751350/

The Indian Express, 21 March 2020  https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/narendra-modi-govt-6324468/

July 6, 2021 https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/are-mohan-bhagwats-recent-remarks-a-sign-of-moderation-in-hindutva-7390598/lite/

Salman Khurshid, Sunrise over Ayodhya, https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/if-you-cant-beat-them-join-them-cant-be-our-response-to-hindu-rashtra-salman-khurshid/756821/

June 10, 2024 https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/new-government-diversity-constitutionalism-federalism-india-9382218/

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtHFAJ5ZH78

Sept 1, 2026 https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/mohan-bhagwats-hindutva-is-not-narrow-are-his-words-in-new-york-heard-in-india-10857107/

Tahir Mahmood, Sept 1, 2026, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/on-women-manusmriti-has-a-context-dont-go-by-colonial-interpretation-10857186/

April 24, 2026 https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rahul-gandhi-disagreed-on-government-cic-candidate-rti-response-reveals/article70901317.ece

Richard A. Wasserstrom, Strict Liability in the Criminal Law (Stanford Law Review, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Jul., 1960), pp. 731-745 (15 pages), https://doi.org/10.2307/1226524

The Hindu, 20 Aug 2014, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/NALSAR-V-C-gets-SAARC%E2%80%99s-best-law-teacher-award/article11208173.ece

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