Persian Ellora, Tamil Medina

In the 18th century, a fatwa was demanded from Hadrat Shah Waliullah Mohaddis Dehlavi, a spiritual authority respected all over the Islamic world. The issue was: what should Islam think of India?

The conclusive view of India that emerged in the Islamic world is worth knowing. By Muslim reckoning, it is neither Dar-us-Salam (an Islamic state) nor Dar-ul-Harab (where Islam is not free).

Since Islam is not the uniform rule of law here, India should technically be Dar-ul-Harab. But in all other respects that characterise an Islamic country, it is very much Dar-us-salam. The azaan is proclaimed aloud, there are no restrictions on namaaz or the Friday prayer, the hijab, beard and cap are freely worn.

So the fatwa was proclaimed that India could not be categorised by anybody, it was a unique entity. And so it remains in the Islamic world. As Maulana Syed Athar Hussain Dehlavi of the Anjuman-e-Minhaj-e-Rasool says: ‘India is India. It has its own identity’.

Everyone knows that young Mohammad bin Qasim’s attack on Sindh in 712 CE was the first Muslim military attack on India. What we may not know about however is the attack which was disallowed. In the time of Hadrat Umar the second Khalifa of Islam (634-644 CE), the Muslim ambassador was apparently killed by the Iranis.

The Sindh Raja sided with the Iranis. When the Muslims wanted to launch a punitive attack on Sindh, Hadrat Umar refused to allow it, saying there was no need.

As for the famous Abbasid ‘Caliph’ Haroun al-Rashid, how many of us would remotely suspect that when he fell seriously ill, he was cured by a Hindu vaid, Pandit Manik? When he recovered, the Khalifa appointed him the Head of the Department of Sanskrit Translation.

In fact, Arabic was the first language to take the Panchatantra from the original Sanskrit (Abdullah ibn-e-Makhfa’s work). Al-Rashid’s son, Al-Mamun, invited a pandit on permanent appointment to Baghdad university to expound Hindu mathematics.

Hence, around 825 CE, the great geographer-mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi wrote his world-changing book On Calculation With Hindu Numerals which went west in Latin translation.

In a recently published book Beyond Turk and Hindu, modern western scholars tell us that as far back as 1612, Rafi al’din Shirazi waxed eloquent over Ellora in his Tazkirat-al Muluk, a history of Indian and Persian dynasties composed in Bijapur.

Though a believing Muslim, he lamented the destruction of certain Hindu temples as an ‘offence against beauty’ and ‘God’ and assessed Ellora as a political, not religious monument.

An outstanding literary example meanwhile, is Umaru Pulavar, the 17th century Tamil poet, whose Sirah Puranam is modelled on the 9th century Tamil Ramayana by Kamban, the Iramavataram.

Just as Kamban, who had never been to Kosala, described the Tamil country instead, so did Umaru imagine Arabia in terms of Tamil Nadu, through voluptuous images. His ecstatic description of the wedding of Fatima and Ali in Medina, as scholar Vasudha Narayanan points out, was closely paralleled on Kamban’s description of Sita Kalyanam. Tamil Muslims called ‘Marakkayar’ trace their community to the time of the Prophet himself, to the influence of seafaring Arabs of old, and see themselves proudly as Tamils (they were vigorous participants in the Tamil resistance to Hindi).

Similarly the Tamil Sufi, Mastan Saipu, believed to be a 17th century itr seller, wrote spiritual paeans to Allah that are profoundly Muslim (All-pervasive is the Light of our Perfect Lord), yet harmonise with the Shaiva outpourings of Manikkavachagar (O Light without beginning or end).

If we disseminate the research of present-day scholars from India as well as those based in the US, Macaulay’s ghost might finally quit India and the shared spaces of our past may find light again.