Islam in Modern India

The development of Islam in India is one thousand year old and has taken it unique safe due to geographical and historical circumstances. Modern India and especially the freedom movement of India produced many unique features of Islam. This book highlights Islamic development in modern India. The Young Indian Muslims of today, living new lives, think different thoughts from those of their fathers and grandfathers years before them. And the latter’s lives and thoughts were different also from those of their grandfathers fifty years still earlier. The history of ideas in Indian Islam during the period of British rule in India presents half-a-dozen principal new aspects–each corresponding to a major new development in the social environment. Two have been reactions, at some points violent, against those new development. The others have been successive phases of the constructive adaptation of Islam to the social processes. The first reactionary, movement does not fall within the scope of our study. It began in the early nineteenth century, flourished fully only among the lower classes, and was a protest, vehement and well-organised but without a constructive programme, against the exceedingly low level to which society had been reduced. The movement is often called "Wahhabi" (after the contemporary Islamic reform movement of that name in Arabia). But it was spontaneous and indigenous: though the leaders soon came in touch with the Arabian parallel, and appreciated the similarities. It is the culmination of the first main period into which the economic history of modern India may be divided: that of merchant capitalism, from the beginning of East India Company Rule on into the early nineteenth century, when the political chaos and the overseas traders drained India of her wealth and gradually reduced her to a land of incredible prostration. Culture withered and religion, as always in a moribund society, became hopelessly corrupt.