Decoding Narendra Modi’s Praise for Sufis Amid His Earlier Misinterpretations of Indian History

The Prime Minister certainly surprised me by his startling acceptance of Muzaffar Ali’s invitation to inaugurate the “Jahan-e-Khusrau” music festival in the amphitheatre of the Sunder Nursery, next door to the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya, in New Delhi on the last day of February. In his speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanked His Highness the late Prince Karim Aga Khan IV “whose efforts in enhancing the Sunder Nursery have been a blessing for millions of arts enthusiasts”. He went on to invoke the famed Sufi mystics Baba Farid, Amir Khusro, Bulleh Shah, Mir, Kabir, Rahim, and Ras Khan, besides the Iranian Sufi, Rumi, in defining the Sufi contributions that “collectively embody the essence of India’s rich cultural legacy”.

So, has the leopard changed its spots and the tiger its stripes? How does Modi reconcile his lavish praise of Sufi preaching and practice with condemning a “thousand years of slavery” under Muslim rule?

Presumably, by distinguishing between the spirituality of the Sufi mystics and the political and military deeds and misdeeds of the Muslim rulers who sat on the throne of Delhi for 666 years. Muslim rule started from Muhammad Ghori’s defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan in 1192, from whom he took the throne of Delhi, through the “slave kings” Qutbuddin Aibak, Balban, Iltutmish and his daughter, the legendary Razia Sultana (Mamluk dynasty 1206-90), followed by the Khiljis (1290-1320) and the Tughlaqs (1320-1413) before they were succeeded by the Lodis (1451-1526) who were eventually subdued by the Mughals, who then went on to consolidate and extend their Empire for over three centuries (1526-1858).

India’s composite culture

Modi’s speechwriters seem to have forgotten to remind him that all these rulers had Sufis as their spiritual advisers—indeed, they included many of the Sufis mentioned by Modi. Had these rulers not extended their royal patronage, the Sufi tradition would not have flourished in India as it did, giving to India the “composite culture” that is the answer to the utterly false charge of “one thousand years of slavery”.

Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, who founded the Chishti Silsila (school or order), settled in Ajmer in the mid-12th century. His fame and influence spread so far and wide that when Iltutmish ascended the throne in 1211, the sultan requested the Khwaja to come to Delhi. The latter preferred to remain in Ajmer but sent his disciple, Qutbuddin Bakhtiya Kaki, to Delhi as the spiritual adviser to Iltutmish. Thus began the close association of the Sufis with the Muslim throne of Delhi, which is what makes Modi’s assertion of a thousand years of slavery incompatible with his fulsome praise of the Sufis.

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Consider this: under Sufi spiritual influence, the temporal prime minister of Iltutmish famously proclaimed that the Muslim community in India was “as small as the sprinkling of salt in food”, and that if, therefore, the Muslim ruling elite were to impose Islam on their Hindu subjects, they would soon lose their empire. This spirit of “live and let live” animated the intermingling of Sufi traditions and beliefs with the nascent Bhakti cult. The simultaneous growth and spread of Bhakti Yoga under Muslim rule, fruitfully interacting with Sufi Islam, gave us the “rich cultural legacy” that Modi spoke of.

Remember too that this was the time at which the Muslim ummah were left without a Caliph as Hulegu Khan (better known in India as Halaku Khan) had cut off the head of the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad in 1258, obliging much of the Turco-Persian Muslim elite to seek refuge with dignity in an almost entirely Hindu India. It was this historical coincidence that rendered Islam in our subcontinent so different from the Islamic kingdoms in the huge swathes of the world that fell to Muslim conquest.

A history of coexistence

When the British took over from the mid-18th century onwards, after, according to Modi, “a thousand years of slavery” of Hindu Bharat to Muslim sultans and badshahs (kings), the Brits conducted the first Census in 1872. It revealed—astonishingly—that after that infamous millennium of “slavery”, only 24 per cent of the population espoused Islam. The principal reasons for the persistence of Sanatana Dharma (eternal religion, or Hinduism) were the inherent resilience of the Indic civilisation and the advice tendered to Muslim rulers by their Sufi spiritual advisers to not base their imperial rule on forced conversions to Islam but by coexisting with the widespread and ancient Hinduism.

Thus, Balban (ruled 1266-87), the early “slave king”, became a great devotee of the renowned Sufi poet Baba Farid, and sultan Qaiqabad (ruled 1287-90), the last of the major “slave kings”, inducted the immortal Amir Khusro into the royal establishment as the “court poet”. Sultan Alauddin Khilji (ruled 1296-1316) not only continued Khusro as his principal spiritual adviser but also invited the greatest Hindu musician of the time, Gopal Nayak, to his court for Khusro and Nayak to carry forward their seminal contributions to both Hindustani and Carnatic music. This was also when the practice of great Sufi pirs being ordained “Sheikh-ul-Islam” began, which persisted through all the years of Muslim rule from the Delhi sultanate to the Mughals. Should not someone have pointed this out to the Prime Minister so that he might retreat from his mischaracterisation of Muslim rule in India?

Artists perform during the 25th edition of Jahan-e-Khusrau, the annual Sufi music festival attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at Sunder Nursery in New Delhi on February 28.
| Photo Credit:
PMO via PTI

While the Tughlaqs distanced themselves from Khwaja Nizamuddin owing to his close association with their rivals (the Khiljis), they continued the association of Sufis, not the Muslim orthodoxy, with the throne, leading to Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq (ruled 1320-25) issuing an imperial decree that no Hindu should be converted forcibly to Islam. Slavery anyone? The Lodis who followed, especially the last Lodi ruler Ibrahim Lodi (ruled 1517-26), was deeply devoted to the most famous Sufi of his time, Abdul Quddus Gangohi.

It was this devout Muslim ruler, not any Hindu, whom Babur defeated in 1526. This was in line with the history of Islam that is splattered with the blood of Muslim kings and soldiers that rival Muslims killed, even as the history of Hindus in India is splattered with the blood of Hindus killed by Hindus. That was the nature of politics and warfare in the “Age of Kings”—the feudal era the world over. This is why the historian Romila Thapar has been able to provide the long list of Hindu kings who looted the temple of Somnath for years before Mahmud of Ghazni sacked the temple. (Incidentally, as India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru points out in his The Discovery of India, Ghazni’s train was, in turn, looted of its stolen treasures from Somnath as he sought to march through the burning Thar desert; so revenge did not have to await Modi’s ascension!)

Babur’s son Humayun’s Sufi mentor was Ghaus and the emperor was neck deep in Hindu astronomers and astrologers. The contribution of his son, Akbar the Great, to synthesising the supposed incompatibility of the Hindu faith with Islamic injunctions, is recorded in the Ain-e-Akbari, a paean to the greatness of Hindu philosophy and religious belief by the Muslim historian and litterateur, Abul Fazl. It shows that long before the millennium of “slavery” was brought to an end by two centuries of genuine slavery under British imperial rule, India’s civilisational heritage had been enriched by the defining contribution of Sufi saints patronised by Muslim rulers.  Akbar himself was an ardent devotee of Sheikh Salim Chishti and indeed moved his capital to Fatehpur Sikri to be within calling distance of Salim’s khanqah (establishment). By the time Jahangir and Shah Jahan came to succeed Akbar, the ruling House of Mughals was three-quarters Hindu by birth!

I dare not mention Audrey Truschke and her assessment of Aurangzeb for fear that my fate will be that of Abu Asim Azmi, the Samajwadi Party legislator in Maharashtra who has been suspended from the Assembly (of which he is an elected member) for daring to say that Aurangzeb was “a good administrator” who patronised the building and upkeep of “numerous Hindu temples” and “was not cruel”.

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Passing that over, I will come to the poet Mir, mentioned by the Hon’ble Prime Minister. Mir Taqi Mir, in the mid-1750s, raised Urdu above the soldier’s camp and made possible the presence of Zauq and, above all, the liberal Mirza Ghalib in the court of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Not to mention the breakaway Awadh of Wajid Ali Shah to whom we owe the Kathak dance form, and the fusion of the Radha-Krishna legend with the mainstream of Islamic culture in India.

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Not until Modi complements his praise of the Sufis with withdrawing his historically unsound charge of “a thousand years of slavery” will we be able to halt the denigration of Muslims that we have seen in just the one week that has passed since Modi’s address: Yogi Adityanath’s sneer that teaching Urdu only leads to “mullahs”; the Delhi University Vice Chancellor Yogesh Singh removing the Baburnama from the history honours course because, in his view, it “fosters societal divisions”; the continuing Hindu-Muslim strife in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh; the BJP Kerala chief K. Surendran’s description of Hajjis as “urban Naxals for whose support there is jihadi money”; a Special Judge of a Delhi court pulling up the new BJP Law Minister of Delhi (Kapil Mishra) for “very skillfully” weaving the word “Pakistan” into his highly provocative  speeches to “spew hatred” and “promote enmity on the grounds of religion”; a BJP Union Minister (K.P. Gurjar) arbitrarily changing the name of the road on which he is resident from Tughlaq Crescent to “Swami Vivekananda Marg”; and a BJP MLA in Rajasthan calling the Congress Chief Whip in the Rajasthan Assembly, Rafeek Khan, a “Pakistani”. Of what use then are the Prime Minister’s soothing words?

Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009. He has published nine books, the latest, A Maverick in Politics, the second part of his memoir.

This column owes much to the author’s daughter, Suranya, whose magnum opus, India, Hindutva and History, may be accessed on her blog, thinkindiasabha.blogspot.com