‘Ulama, Fatwas, and the Struggle for Islamic Legitimacy in Colonial India

The Malabar Rebellion, an armed conflict in the 1920s between the British and Mappila Muslims—the peasant Muslim community in Malabar—engendered numerous Islamic legal and theological debates between the Sunni and Salafi groups. Themes of loyalty to an empire, the legitimacy of the Caliphate, and the permissibility of networking for a global Ummah through pan-Islamic restatement claim abounded.

In light of these debates, two important resolutions from this period emerged in South India, published by the Kerala Majlis-ul-’Ulama and Samasta Kerala Jam’yathul ‘Ulama as part of their ‘Ulama conferences held in 1921 and 1923, respectively. I will situate this debate at the intersection of the spatial and temporal experiences of Malabar Muslims, exploring their discourses on peripheral and global Islam as well as their engagements with modern constructs.

Pan-Islamism, Nationalism, and Malabar Rebellion

Nationalism is a modern ideological construct that started as a movement during the nineteenth century. It is difficult to give a single definition to the concept of nationalism due to the differences in the way it is practiced in different places. Nevertheless, one working definition given by Jonathan Hearn is, “Nationalism is the making of combined claims, on behalf of a population, to identity, to jurisdiction and to territory.”¹ The idea of nationalism comprises certain boundaries for human collectivity with diverse narrations. Insofar as nationalism is concerned, it could be considered an exemplar of modern political ideology and the successful way for modern man’s political thinking. 

Nenad Miscevic defined the idea of nationalism along with raising two major questions in a collective form of life. First, he raises questions about the concept of a nation (or national identity), which is often defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and specifically about whether an individual’s membership in a nation should be regarded as non-voluntary or voluntary. Second, he questions whether self-determination must be understood as possession of full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or if something less is required.² In post-independent India, the nation has been built on the foundation of nationalist feeling, wherein diverse linguistic patterns, cultural entities, and religious groups came under the umbrella of one India. However, in India, political movements were also fueled by the subjects of nationalist feeling to include several races and languages.³

In contrast to the defined territorial feeling of nationalism, pan-Islamism is an extra-territorial ideology that brings all Muslims under the feeling of Ummah. The idea of pan-Islamism was inspired by the scriptural tradition of Islam, as described by many classical Islamic scholars in their legal and theological texts. Since the sixth century, the Prophetic tradition has engulfed this group feeling by the assertion of the Caliphate. Later, it took on political weight, especially as the idea of the Caliphate spread across Islamic empires. 

However, pan-Islamism received a strong political shape only during the age of the Ottoman Empire, especially after 1880, when they started to lose territories in North Africa and the Balkans.⁴ Sultan Abdul Hamid gave a fine political structure to such pan-Islamic sentiments along with substituting reasonable reformations.⁵ Muslims all over the world supported this particular restating of the ‘Global Ummah’ by supporting the Ottoman Sultan, in which the Ottoman Sultan became a Caliph of the Muslim world. 

Apart from other local political and nationalist affiliations, Muslims in India, including several ruling elites among them, endorsed the Caliphate claim of the Ottoman Sultan.⁶ In order to express their loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan, the South Indian Muslims, including the Mappilas of Malabar, were sending valuable gifts to the Ottoman Sultan for major projects like the construction of the Hijaz railway.

Historians have different opinions regarding the nomenclature of this incident: it has been variedly called the ‘Malabar Riot,’ ‘Malabar Struggle,’ ‘Mappila Riot,’ ‘Mappila Rebellion,’ etc. However, in this article, I will use the name ‘Malabar Rebellion,’ following Prof. M.P.S. Menon, who in his biography of M. P. Narayana Menon uses the term Malabar Samaram, which translates into English as “Malabar Rebellion”.⁷ The Malabar Rebellion had started as a resistance against British rule in Malabar. There was, in fact, a series of small and big encounters that happened in different parts of Malabar since 1841, and all these were open attacks between the British, high-caste Hindu landlords, and local Mappila Muslim peasants. 

Malabar was the most Muslim-populated district in the Madras Presidency of British India, where there were established systematic administrative apparatuses, courts, and other public infrastructures as part of the British administration. However, too often, most of the rules and acts of the British government were against the public interests of Mappila Muslims; at the same time, they were pleasing the high-caste Hindu landlords. Due to this administrative discrimination, Mappila Muslims, who consisted mainly of the peasantry, were extremely angered, and so they strongly opposed the British acts and rules in many ways. The British reacted with more stringent acts such as “The Moplah Act of 1854,” which fined those who were involved in outbreaks, confiscated the property of martyrs, and indefinitely exiled those who attended outbreaks. While Mappila Muslims continued their resistance to all such acts, the high-caste Hindu landlords of Malabar supported the British policies, and their pro-British stand had been taken to the rival section of the Mappila Rebellion.

The main leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC), the only mainstream political party in India in those times, had supported the Mappila interest in the initial stage. After the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate, some of the local Muslim leaders had formed a branch of the Khilafat Committee in Malabar, reflecting their global consciousness, and following the footsteps of like-minded Muslim leaders from other parts of South Asia. Mahatma Gandhi and other Congress leaders supported this novel step of Mappila Muslim leaders in Malabar. Ali Musliyar (d. 1922) and Variam Kunnath Kunjahammed Haji (d. 1922) were the two major figures of the Khilafat Committee in Malabar. In continuation of various other preceding outbreaks, there was a massive armed encounter that took place in August 1921. Although it had started at the Eranad and Valluvanad taluks of the Malabar district, the outbreak was to spread to other parts of the district very swiftly. In the Eranad taluk, it was Ali Musliyar and Variam Kunnath Kunjahammed Haji who led the outbreak. The rebellious people destroyed British police stations, government offices, and courts in different parts of the Malabar district. The rebellion is reported to have extended over 2,000 square miles, viz. two-fifths of the district area, and was in fact the culmination of a series of uprisings on various issues for over six months in Malabar. It is estimated that more than 10,000 people from both parties had lost their lives and that several people were exiled out of the Malabar region.⁸

It has to be noted here that the Malabar Rebellion was not a mere Mappilas versus British/Hindu landlord rebellion. Instead, there were various social, political, and religious factors that made the rebellion of 1921 inevitable. Thus, the rebellion can be seen as a result of persistent subversive tensions caused by the religious sectarianism among the Mappila Muslim community. 

Mappila Muslims in Malabar were pious believers of Islam, who had been following the spiritual tradition of Sufi Islam. Their religious practices had a network with the trans-regional Sufi Islam, which was connected to myriad networking in the Indian Ocean religious exchanges. This mood of piety was central in Mappila Islam.⁹ The local ‘Ulama had crucial roles in the mobility of Mappila Muslims in various social and political activities, as well as in their everyday life. Any scholarly decisions would be effective for the larger mobility of Mappila Muslims in Malabar. In spite of this potentiality of the ‘Ulama, the sectarian division among them and the lack of mutual interest were eventually to be one of the factors leading to the rebellion of 1921. Modern historians have different opinions on the nature of the Malabar Rebellion of 1921. The Marxist historians argue that Mappila Muslims predominantly were motivated by the exploitative agrarian policies of the British government and the domination of high-caste Hindu landlords, who exploited the local peasantry. They consider the British as the major exploiters, and the Nair and Namboodiri Hindu landlords as pro-British agents who supported all anti-Mappila acts. The Nair and Namboodiri are the two dominant high-caste Hindu groups according to the Varna class system in Kerala. They were the only ones with the right to own land, while the majority of Mappila Muslims worked as peasants on their lands. In those times, the Janmis (“landlords”) were the absolute owners of the land.⁹ And the British were benefitting from the blending of power and land ownership as it was the fundamental, easiest way to sustain their power in Malabar. 

The Nationalist historians, on the contrary, consider the factors of religious fanaticism and blind religiousness as the root cause of the Malabar Rebellion.¹⁰ These scholars seemed to have simply copied the British labelling of the Malabar Rebellion, and such narratives have resulted in drawing a communal line in the Mappila Muslim history, though the fact is that there was always mutual cohesion between Hindus and Muslims in centuries of lived experiences in Malabar.⁸ Beyond the Marxist and the Nationalist approaches to the Mappila Muslim history, there was possible space for reasoning that located the history of the Malabar Rebellion in a larger ‘transnational frame of pan-Islamism’.¹¹ Nevertheless, all the existing readings of the Mappila Muslim studies are subjected to the favour of mainstream narratives of Mappila Muslims, wherein the possibilities of local sounds have been muted. Along with the storyboard of the schools in history, the positions and opinions of local Mappila ‘Ulama would be effective to start rethinking about the root causes of the Malabar Rebellion and the Khilafat Movement in Malabar, especially the interplay between vernacular Islam and Western modernity.

‘Ulama Discourses in Malabar

Major ‘Ulama organizations formed during the period under review: (i) Kerala Muslim Aikya Sangham (1922); (ii) Kerala Jamiyyathul ‘Ulama (1924); (iii) Kerala Majlis-ul-’Ulama (1924); and (iv) Samasta Kerala Jam’iyyathul ‘Ulama (1924). The first three organizations belonged to Salafis among the Muslims of Malabar, while the fourth was the only group representing Sunni Islam.

In the context of the debate under discussion in this article, the major actors were two important Muslim scholarly groups who had encountered each other over the text and tradition of Islamic law in Malabar. These two groups have often been identified as Pāramparya Sunni ‘Ulama (“Traditional Sunni ‘Ulama”) and Pūrogamana ‘Ulama (“Reformist ‘Ulama”). The Traditional Sunni ‘Ulama later came to be known as the followers of Ahl al-Sunna wa’l-Jama‘ah (“the householders of the Sunni Common”), or simply ‘Sunnis,’ whereas the reformists have been referred to as ‘Mujahids,’ ‘Wahabis,’ or ‘Salafis.’ I use the terms ‘Sunnis’ and ‘Salafis,’ reflecting their common usage in the Malabar region.

Owing to geographical, historical, and linguistic factors, Islam in Malabar developed independently, without much direct cultural and intellectual impact from North Indian Islam or, in a larger frame, South Asian Islam. Therefore, the sectarian categories among the Muslims of Malabar have different meanings. Unlike the stark dichotomies between different sects in the South Asian Muslim understanding—where religious divisions are based on the Hanafi school and socio-cultural hybridity under the Mughals—Muslim social sectarianism in South Indian Islam, especially in the context of Malabar, was shaped through theological and legal exchanges across the Indian Ocean.¹²¹³ Such a historical trajectory of Islam in Malabar is the root cause of the formation of diverse groups among the Muslims.

The ‘Ulama in Malabar took two different positions on the legitimacy of the Khilafat Movement and direct resistance to British rule. In popular Mappila Muslim histories, Sunni ‘Ulama have been portrayed as a pro-British group due to their support for the British administration in Malabar. At the same time, the Salafi ‘Ulama are described as an anti-British group because of their persistence in openly opposing the British regime. This, however, is a superficial reading of the ‘Ulama positions by scholars working on Malabar history. It is essential to examine the historical circumstances within the analytical frames of the larger ‘Ulama discourse, wherein they contested each other in light of the normative forms and contents of textual Islam. More importantly, such scholarly debates should be analyzed closely in relation to Islamic law, particularly the legal proceedings of the Shafi‘ī school of thought, which the majority of Mappila Muslims embodied in their everyday lives.¹⁴

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by new debates on the authority of Islam in Malabar.¹⁵ At the beginning of the twentieth century, especially during the period from 1922 to 1924, Malabar Islam witnessed new forms of religious debates on such issues as religious authority in Islam, political intervention by Muslims, and tajdīd (“reform”) and islāh (“renewal”) of religious practices. As a result of such serious theological and legal debates among various scholars, the ‘Ulama divided into two groups, each establishing its own formal organizational system to conduct various religious and social activities.

In addition to this, various other socio-political factors influenced the formation of Muslim ‘Ulama organizations in Malabar. The abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey, followed by a global trend of pan-Islamic movements, the nationalist movements across the country against British rule in India, and the emerging reformist thinking in the Muslim world as a result of Western modernity, were all contextually coherent with the sectarian fragmentation of Muslims in Malabar. However, an open contest arose over the issue of legal rulings regarding the Malabar Rebellion, loyalty to the British Empire, and the Ottoman Caliphate, which later transformed into a pan-Islamic discourse in the region.

Conference Resolutions and Legal Contestations

In the scholarly debate on the permissibility of reclaiming and reinstating a Caliphate and fostering a global consciousness within a worldly Ummah, two major ‘Ulama organizations from the Sunni and Salafi groups published differing resolutions during the Khilafat Movement in Malabar.

In April 1921, the Kerala Majlis-ul-’Ulama published a resolution in its ‘Ulama conference conducted at Ottappalam, Palakkad. The unanimously agreed resolution highlighted the relevance of supporting the Khilafat Movement in Malabar alongside the nationalist movements led by the Indian National Congress. The resolution urged open support for the Khilafat Movement in South Asia. Most of the scholars in this group maintained close contact with various pan-Islamist leaders of the time. However, rather than focusing on sustaining a local Islamic identity in Malabar, they emphasized the idea of a global Muslim collective with a progressive, reformist understanding. All the major Salafi reformist scholars signed the resolution, and it was made public just before the Malabar Rebellion began in August of the same year.

Meanwhile, the Sunni ‘Ulama strongly opposed the Salafi ‘Ulama’s call for a direct revolt against the British regime. During the sixth annual conference of the Samasta Kerala Jamiyathul Ulama, held in Feroke, Kozhikode, in 1923, the Sunni ‘Ulama published a resolution that firmly opposed the struggle against the British regime. In their resolution, they emphasized the benefits that Mappila Muslims received from the British government, including freedom to propagate their religion and conduct social activities. The Sunni group argued that an open struggle against an established state was both anti-governmental and anti-Islamic. In contrast to the Salafi group, they sought to keep the community loyal to the state by adhering to political quietism. This stance was more tolerant of nationalist sentiments than it was supportive of a pan-Islamic approach.

The root cause of the differing opinions among the ‘Ulama of Malabar, as seen above, lies in the theological and legal discussions within Islamic tradition. Both the Sunni and Salafi ‘Ulama supported the Khilafat Movement and the idea of pan-Islamism in principle, but they diverged on the pragmatic application of such ideologies in the Malabar context. Some Sunni ‘Ulama were actively involved in the Khilafat Committee and worked to disseminate its ideology across South India.¹⁶ Scholars like Pangil Ahmed Kutty Musliyar and Qutubi Muhammed Musliyar were at the forefront of the movement. However, they opposed the establishment of a Khilafat state in Malabar or engaging in armed confrontation with the British state.¹⁷ These scholars strongly questioned the stance of the Salafi ‘Ulama, who advocated for Mappila Muslims to develop extraterritorial affiliations and supported the reconstitution of an Islamic state through political Islam.¹⁸ The reformist tendency to undermine cooperation between the state and local Muslims challenged the gradual, non-violent political engagement historically followed by ‘Ulama-centric societies in Malabar.¹⁹

The Sunni ‘Ulama consistently played the role of an authoritative body within the Muslim community, constructing Islamic authority through the texts and traditions of normative Islam.²⁰ Mappila Muslims in Malabar, being a minority group, faced numerous legal restrictions in practicing Islam, unlike Muslims in the Islamic heartlands. The Sunni ‘Ulama were acutely aware of this and made effective use of the extended scope of Islamic law, contextualizing its application to the local traditions and vernacular customs in Malabar.¹²

Salafism emerged in Malabar at the intersection of global and local religious, social, and political circumstances. This historical context also witnessed the rise of Islamic reform movements in other regions, the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate, the Second World War, and the peak of India’s independence movement. The Salafi movements in Malabar addressed various unsettled social practices in the everyday lives of Muslims in the region. Vakkam Abdul Khader Moulavi (d. 1932), commonly known as Vakkam Moulavi, is regarded as a pioneer of the Salafi reformist movements in Malabar during the 1920s. He began his reformist career by establishing a civil organization named Kerala Muslim Aikya Sangam (“Society for Muslim Unity in Kerala”) in 1922. Later, he was instrumental in forming the Kerala Jam’iyyathul Ulama in 1924.

Vakkam Moulavi was deeply influenced by the works of Egyptian reformist Muhammad Abduh, as well as those of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Rashid Rida. His intellectual endeavours were closely associated with Egyptian Salafism and the Islamic reform movements in Saudi Arabia. Many Salafi adherents in Malabar were regular subscribers to Al-Manar, the reformist journal published in Egypt. When the Kerala Muslim Aikya Sangam and the Kerala Jam’iyyathul ‘Ulama were later dissolved, the Kerala Nadvathul Mujahideen was formed in 1952, and the reformists began publishing their official newsletter under the title Al-Manar Magazine. The Salafi reformist movements in Malabar were characterized by their emphasis on islah (reform) and tajdid (renewal), their rejection of mainstream fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and madhab (school of law), and their denial of taqlid (imitation) in Sunni Islamic thought.²¹

Sanaulla Makthi Thangal was another prominent Salafi reformist figure in Malabar who shared intellectual commonalities with Vakkam Moulavi. Both scholars were vocal critics of the traditional Islamic educational system and local Sufi practices prevalent among Sunni Muslims in Malabar.¹⁵

However, recent revisionist approaches in Malabar argue that the Salafi reformist projects were rooted in modern liberal values, often compromising with the colonial, Western modernity of their time. Critics claim that the Salafi movements imported modern Western values, which ultimately replaced the local Islamic narratives of Sufi Muslims.¹⁵ According to revisionists, the Salafi scholars—such as Vakkam Moulavi—imparted modernist ideas of rationalism, materialism, and epistemological frameworks rooted in Christian civilization into the everyday socio-political lives of Mappila Muslims in Malabar.²² These critiques often question the Salafi reformist project’s reshaping of religious paradigms.

Recent scholarship in the field continues to explore the historical dilemmas of Salafi reform and renewal efforts, which were popularly referred to by terms such as Navodhanam (“Renaissance”), Purogamanam (“Progressive”), and Parishkaranam (“Reform/Renewal”)—titles that Salafi ‘Ulama frequently employed in their public engagements.

Towards Global or Local?

While the Sunni ‘Ulama stood for a local Islam that was compatible with the peripheral features of vernacular Islam in Malabar, the Salafi ‘Ulama attempted to engender an extraterritorial Islamic narrative, wherein modern Western values were immanent in the organic reform activities. The reformist agenda was also in contradiction with the spatial and temporal socio-political engagements of Mappila Muslims in Malabar. In the aforementioned conference resolutions, we saw that two different perspectives on locating the Sharī‘a in a context were offered. Rather than being receptive to a border hybridity of ideas, the Salafi ‘Ulama were more modular in accepting the pan-Islamist approach. Apart from this, the Sunni ‘Ulama appeared to be much more tolerant in accepting the forms and structures of the modern state system that was deployed by the British in Malabar, as well as accepting territorially bounded Islam within nationalism, as they could accept it from the ‘hybridity of a moderate Islam with the form features of modernity’.²³ The Salafi ‘Ulama, on the contrary, were against any such tolerance with the state, as they felt that the idea of the Sharī‘a was not morally fit for a modern state apparatus.²⁴

It is true that the Sunni scholar Sayyid Fadl, who has been considered ‘the ambassador of Islam in the Indian Ocean World’, had made claims for restating the Caliphate.²⁵ But his claims were actually for the context of a larger Islamic political realm, not for a space like Malabar, where Muslims were in the minority. Sayyid Fadl had different stands on the legitimacy of a Global Ummah and an Islamic Caliphate when he was a Qādī in Malabar and an advisor to Sultan Abdul Hameed II in Ottoman Turkey. Nevertheless, the central issue in the whole debate was the contextualization of the Sharī‘a in different times and spaces. The contesting ‘Ulama in the ground of the aforementioned situations were at the intersection of situating the Sharī‘a and defining a possible Muslim life as Mappila Muslims in Malabar. Along with that, when the interplay of the Sharī‘a and modernity occurred, the contesting process further complicated the question of locating Islamic doctrines in the peripheral forms of Malabar.

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