Opinion - News Analysis

Islamic university falls victim to Kashmir’s shrine war

Shaukat Ahmad Shah is scheduled to speak at Sringar’s Idgah on Friday. His words will guide the actions of tens of thousand of protesters who believe their faith is being besieged by a predatory Hindu India.

Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadis president Shah, who heads Kashmir’s most influential neoconservative order, has been a central figure in the ongoing Shrine Board protests — protests ignited by Islamist claims that the former Governor, S.K. Sinha, and the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board were engaged in a secret war to alter the State’s demography.

But in an apparently-inexplicable twist of fate, Mr. Shah is also one of Gen. Sinha’s few supporters in Kashmir. “People say Gen. Sinha was a Hindu fanatic”, he says, “but that is not my experience of him. He was sometimes ill advised, but he was not a communalist”. Odd? Mr. Shah’s dream, an ambitious Islamic university to rival the best in the world, was made possible by Gen. Sinha — and swept away by the same agitation which brought down the Congress-PDP alliance government.

Jamiat leaders first started pushing the Transworld Islamic University over two decades ago, responding to calls from their constituency for a modern Islamic university. Internal turmoil meant nothing came of the idea until 2002, when Mr. Shah and other Jamiat leaders revived the project.

Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who was then engaged in setting up an Auqaf-funded Islamic University at Awantipora opposed the Jamiat’s plans. Like the National Conference before him, Mr. Sayeed hoped to use the Auqaf Trust’s massive financial assets as a means with which to bolster his political legitimacy. The Jamiat’s plans constituted competition — and Mr. Sayeed saw no reason to countenance it.

In 2006, though, Gen. Sinha announced controversial plans to set up the Sharada Vidyapeeth, a Hindu denominational university funded by the Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board. Islamist hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani initiated a campaign against the Sharda Vidyapeeth, which he cast as part of a larger Indian project to subvert the integrity of Islam in the State.

But Jamiat officials saw opportunity in the situation. If a Hindu denominational university could receive State support, they told Gen. Sinha, there was no reason to oppose the setting up of the TMU.

Jamiat officials pointed out that the PDP-led government had handed over land to several Hindu charitable trusts. For example, in May 2005, the Jammu Development Authority had leased 283 kanals of land to the Shree Yog Vedant Sewa Samiti. According to a January, 2006, letter issued by the JDA, Mr. Sayeed had supported the decision on the grounds Samiti chief Bapu Asa Ram was “a renowned saint of national repute.”

Faced with the facts — which, parenthetically, make the PDP’s decision to oppose the temporary use of land by the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board somewhat mystifying — Governor Sinha threw his weight behind the Jamiat. He also won the support of Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who saw in the Jamiat an instrument with which to challenge Mr. Sayeed’s claims to speak for Kashmiri Muslims and Islam. In February, 2008, the State government leased 100 kanals of land to the Jamiat for its university.

Fate, however, intervened. Even as the Jamiat received its land, a private members bill was moved in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, to give the TMU legal sanction. However, both Mr. Azad and Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffar Beig insisted that the Congress-PDP alliance would together move the bill. In May, 2008, both politicians initialled their determination to do so on a letter to the Jamiat. But the government fell before action could be taken — and the TMU project is now stalled.

Followers of Sayyid Ahmad Khan of Rai Bareilly, who died at Balkote while waging an unsuccessful jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, founded the order in the nineteenth century.

Khan’s followers rejected the accommodation Islam in India had made with its environment. They also called on Muslims to reject the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and instead model themselves on the companions of the Prophet.

Sayyed Hussain Shah Batku, a Delhi seminary student who carried the Ahl-e-Hadith message to Kashmir in 1925, received a hostile response. However, the Jamiat later grew into a significant force, drawing the emerging middle class of Muslim businessmen and government employees to its ranks.

Historian Chitralekha Zutshi has noted that the “influence of the Ahl-e-Hadith on the conflicts over Kashmiri identities cannot be overemphasised”. It is now, arguably, Jammu and Kashmir’s largest religious order, which claims control of 1.5 million followers, 600 mosques and 120 schools.

In Pakistan, the Jamiat spawned the Markaz Dawa wal’Irshad — a powerful Islamist movement in turn gave birth to the Lashkar-e-Taiba. But in Jammu and Kashmir, the dominant faction of the Jamiat proved resistant to the terrorist group’s cause. In 1997, terrorists assassinated the Jamiat’s president, Mohammad Ramzan, for failing to push the Lashkar project. A decade later, Shah and Bhat were almost assassinated.

Some fear that, despite the Jamiat’s current leadership, the TMU will be hijacked by the Lashkar, and turned into a version of Pakistan’s al-Dawa University: an educational empire which has put learning at the service of the Lashkar.

Mushtaq Siddiqi, an eminent microbiologist who heads the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences’ Advanced Centre for Genetic Diseases and will be vice-chancellor of TMU, is at pains to still the fears. “I’m not a member of the Jamiat,” says the eminent microbiologist. “and believe in traditional Kashmiri practices like worshipping at shrines.”

Mr. Siddiqi has ambitious plans for TMU, which he hopes will evolve along the lines of major denominational universities in the United States of America. “Ethics and social concern are at the core of our vision,” he says, “but the university will not be in the business of selling a particular sectarian vision.” Islam, Mr. Siddiqi says, will form an important part of TMU’s curriculum, but insists its School of Sharia will not be a traditionalist seminary. “Our students will emerge not just with a sound grasp of Islamic theology,” he says, “but also of comparative religion and ethics.”

“Rather than become a factory turning out graduates who end up being a burden on the State,” he says, “we want to produce self-reliant entrepreneurs.” For example, TWMU’s School of Farm Technology will offer job-oriented diplomas in leather production, generating revenue from sheepskin which is now shipped out of the State.

“We hope Governor N.N. Vohra will fulfil the promises made to us,” says Jamiat secretary-general Abdul Rehman Bhat, “because the future of tens of thousands of young people is at stake.”

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