Paper short abstract:

Focusing upon a campaign to establish an ‘Islamic Emirate’ in India in the inter-war decades, this paper examines a novel construct of Muslim minority leadership and community organisation within India which existed in separation from the language and structures of the colonial state.

Paper long abstract:

Most studies of the development of Muslim minority identities in late-colonial India have considered how such categories evolved in interaction with the communitarian language and assumptions of the public and political arenas of the colonial state. Taking an alternative approach, this paper explores the ways in which an alternative leadership for the Muslim minority evolved which, instead, drew upon ideas of kingship and political authority grounded within the Islamic tradition. From around 1914, a number of Islamic scholars began to evoke the idea of the establishment of an 'Islamic Emirate' in India, one that would at once provide a centralised direction to Indian Islam and also facilitate the closer integration of Indian Muslims within the global umma'. By 1921 and beyond, a number of religious intellectuals were establishing a programme for the effective 'independence' of the Muslim community within India: Muslims were to have not only their own structures of communal leadership, but their own social, charitable and legal institutions. By examining the development of vernacular constructs of Islamic leadership, this paper establishes how many Islamic scholars of the era combined their own participation in agitations for India's independence with a simultaneous evocation of the legal and structural independence of the Muslim minority within India.