World War I and Muslim Politics

The widening of specifically Muslim preoccupations in the civic arena was in part an outgrowth of the wartime crisis. Between 1914 and 1919, many Muslims of Surat, like many Hindus, suffered from inflation, new municipal policies, higher taxes, and restrictions on trade. Perhaps recognizing the saliency of appeals to religious sentiment in the colonial context, Muslim groupings increasingly defended themselves against these intrusive developments by evoking the language of Islamic principle and of community in their petitions to the government. Surat's butchers, upset at new municipal bylaws that would restrict their business activities to well-defined markets, argued that the measures would prohibit acts of sacrifice in homes, thus forcing women living in purdah to abstain from celebrating important Muslim occasions.^[4] Masud Alam Khan, head of the Nawab of Bela family, objected to new housing regulations by suggesting that Muslims might be especially affected: "The Municipal Commissioner is acting against the feelings and sentiments of a large majority of the people of Surat, particularly of the Mahomedan community, in not allowing them to construct or reconstruct privies in the upper floors of their homes." ^[5] Clearly, one way of responding to the intrusion of the provincial and local administrations into previously inviolate areas of local life was to

represent one's own concerns as being the grievance of a religious minority that the British had a special duty to protect.

In some instances, it was possible to detect more narrow personal and group interests underlying the rhetoric of community. But a few municipal measures during these years clearly affected the religious sensibilities of many of the city's Muslims. In 1913, for instance, the local body had passed a bylaw calling for restrictions against overcrowding in cemeteries, for clear demarcation of graves, and for the registration of all burials. The managers of local burial places, whose incomes were directly endangered by the measure, were particularly alarmed by the new regulations. But many other Muslims, fearing that the practice of burying their dead in family graves was in danger, also reacted strongly. Islamic scholars took up the cause, asserting, according to the second-hand account of one British officer, that the "Koran is full of prohibitions against anything like a demarcation of a grave or the counting of the number of graves in a burial ground." ^[6] The heads of the Edrus, Bakza, Nawab of Surat, and Nawab of Bela families eventually persuaded the municipality and the district collector to drop the most worrisome of the new laws.

A more serious instance occurred in 1920 after it was discovered that the municipality had built a public urinal in Kelapith on a location thought to have once been the site of a mosque. A number of leaderships in the city, including members of the gentry, Islamic scholars, and a few Muslim professionals, organized a movement to have the urinal removed and a mosque restored on the spot. At one point in the struggle, Muslim merchants offered to buy the site; on another, the Muslims asked the municipality to grant the community the plot of land. The local body, however, remained largely unresponsive to both approaches. Its intransigence prompted the Muslim community, in a meeting headed by Nasrullah Khan of the Nawab of Surat family and Sheikh Ali Bakza of the Bakza family, to draft a "monster" petition to the council. Containing nearly five thousand signatures, the petition complained that "the religious feelings and susceptibilities [of the Muslims] have been greatly wounded by the majority of the Hindu councillors strongly opposing the granting of the plot of land for the purpose of a mosque." ^[7] When the issue came before the municipality for final consideration, the council agreed not to approve any new construction on the site but referred the matter of how to dispose of the land to the sanitary committee, essentially killing the possibility that a mosque would ever be built there. All the Muslim members of the municipality walked out of the meeting hall in protest. The issue of the Kelapith mosque simmered for months before being overwhelmed by the affairs of the Khilafat movement.

As dissatisfactions with government and municipal policy grew, the most prominent Muslim families found it increasingly difficult to preserve their status as natural leaders through old political methods. The descendants of the Mughal nobility had come to pride themselves on their reputation for loyalty to empire and were extremely reluctant to take actions that could jeopardize their special relations with imperial officials. But many underclass Muslims were no longer content to allow a collaborating leadership to act as community spokesmen. Surat's collector warned provincial officers at the time of the burial grounds movement that "if they are betrayed by their leaders, the mob is quite capable of being stimulated to disorder on the instigation of the persons who derive their profits from these graveyards."^[8] Like other older elites in the city, the Muslim gentry struggled to maintain its credibility in the face of this growing undercurrent of resistance.

These pressures from below made possible serious challenges to the dominance of the Muslim notables from men who had never before exercised any significant influence in the civic arena. While the old elite was drawn exclusively from the ranks of immigrant Muslims, the new contenders included several figures from convert communities. Most prominent among these people were Sheikh Ali Hamdani, a Daudi Bohra trader, and Muhammad Afzal Narmawala, a Patani Bohra and a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University. Both were attracted to the program of the Home Rule League and supported the Lucknow alliance between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. During the later war years, they and their supporters began to organize meetings in Surat to protest government policy on a number of Muslim issues. In November 1917, for instance, they held a meeting attended by perhaps fifteen hundred Muslims to pass resolutions against the arrest of the militant Muslim brothers from North India, Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali, and to organize a chapter of the Muslim League in the city.^[9]

The more established gentry families clearly felt threatened by these activities and redoubled their own efforts to reassert community leadership. In order to deflate the claims of Narmawala and his followers, however, members of the older Muslim elite had to abandon their quiet, deferential political style and show that they, too, commanded the support of their coreligionists. Several days after the meeting to protest the Ali brothers' arrest, Sayyid Ali Edrus, president of the local Anjuman-e-Islam, organized a countermeeting to register community objections to the Congress-League pact and to the activities of the Home Rule League. He later claimed that twenty-three prominent Muslim leaders had called the meeting and that more than two thousand Muslims had supported resolutions introduced there.^[10] The nota-

bles also began to revitalize the Mahomedan Union—which had not met for several years—recruiting new members and raising substantial funds for Muslim education in the city.^[11] They took up such causes as that of the Muslim burial grounds, the Kelapith mosque, Islamic education in primary schools, and orphanages for Muslim children. Seemingly, then, the challenge of Narmawala and his supporters prompted many of the prominent notable families to intensify their efforts to sustain recognition as Muslim leaders. By the beginning of noncooperation, the conflicts of the war period had already led to the heightened significance of religious identity in civic politics.