Introduction
I was sitting in Suhanaben's living room near the Sonal Cinema border,Footnote 2 not far from the plot where she and her brothers had organized the Sonal relief camp for Muslims displaced during and after Gujarat's 2002 riots.Footnote 3 Suhanaben said, ‘dhamaal ke baad basti badi hai’ (after the riots the population has grown). All I could see from her living room were boards of various sizes advertising low-investment housing schemes (from one room-kitchen tenements to four bedroom row-houses) and housing loans on very low interest rates. Suhanaben was a Sunni VohraFootnote 4 from Charotar in Kheda district. A native Gujarati speaker, she nonetheless insisted on speaking to her children in a Gujarati version of Urdu. She had originally lived in Haleem-ki-Khadki in Shahpur, in the heart of Ahmedabad's walled city,Footnote 5 but had moved to Juhapura after the 1985 anti-Muslim riots. Although, Suhanaben had a postgraduate degree in Hindi Literature from Gujarat University, she was also a qualified beauty-therapist, making a decent living by running a beauty parlour in the heart of Juhapura. But at the end of the 1990s, she gave away her business, concerned that she had been encouraging women to commit numaish (beautification and exposure of a woman's body), and hence that any money earned from such a business was haraam (money not earned by fair means). The living arrangement in her drawing room had also changed after the riots of 2002: her modern sofas and chairs were shifted to a corner of the room and replaced with simple mattresses and pillows on the floor; silk curtains in the living room were replaced with cotton drapes. She had destroyed her television as she felt that it was an instrument of shaitan (evil). Now she prayed five times in a day and had altered her lifestyle in order to suit what she called an ‘Islamic’ way of life. Suhanaben was now involved in the construction business, supervising two construction sites and playing an active role in letting and selling properties. She justified this rather unusual occupation by arguing that her work was a means of ‘service’ to the community; she was helping riot-affected Muslims moving into the Sonal Cinema area to obtain affordable housing.
Suhanaben's doors were open to all the poor women in the locality. While counselling and supporting women experiencing economic difficulties, she also tried to reform their religious practices. She told me that, ‘These women are jahil (ignorant) and are on their way to jahanoom (hell) as they have forgotten the promise they made to Allah. . .. they were suffering like this because they had become ‘gumraah’(lost) and were not praying’. To avoid divine punishment they should become chust (strict) in the their faith and abandon bidas (innovation from the path of Prophet Mohammad). Suhanaben started organizing women's ishthemas (religious congregations) in her living room every Thursday, inviting alemas (women preachers) to deliver sermons. The alema belonged to the Tablighi Jamaat,Footnote 6 a reformist organisation which deplores a range of customary practices—such as saints’ worship, durgahs (monuments built in the memory of saints) and elaborate life-cycle celebrations—while endorsing a stricter dress code for women.
Though she preached and conformed to a ‘Tabligh’ way of life, during periods of extreme stress Suhanaben sought comfort by recourse to what in the locality were commonly understood as Sunni Barelvi practices. She would call a Maulana to her house for recitation of Fateha (verses of the Quran) and distribute tabarooq (pieces of fresh coconut and crystal sugar) to neighbours. In Suhanaben's living room hung a picture of Baba Garib Nawaz, the famous Sufi Saint from Ajmer, Rajasthan. I was told by her friends that she was diwani (crazy) about the Saint. Once, while I was looking at this picture, she understood my confusion and explained, ‘The picture has been here for many years. I believe in him. I used to go there every Friday, with whatever money I had, a few years ago. I don't go there anymore. . . I am not saying that I will never go back . . . I cannot disrespect him, he has taken care of me in a very difficult phase of my life . . . we did not have anything before . . . all this (gestures to her latest construction site) is thanks to him’. After rolling her hands on her face and kissing them as a sign of respect for the saint's picture, she continued, ‘But now I have understood what real Islam is’.
Suhanaben's newly found piety undershot by ambiguity over her practice of Islam emerges in the aftermath of the 2002 riots which have led to a spatial segregation of Ahmedabad along religious lines (following relocation of Muslims into ‘safe’ neighbourhoods) and have witnessed the growing influence of Islamic reformism in the city. Suhanaben's is not an isolated story. It is the story of many men and women who moved into Juhapura after the riots and who were attempting to redefine their Muslim identity in order to gain social acceptance in the neighbourhood.
Work on post-terror societies (such as Sri Lanka, see Parera Reference Perera, Das, Kleinman, lock, Ramphele and Reynolds2001) has often over-stressed—and romanticized—the role of popular religion as a mechanism for coping with the horrors of violence and war. Mehta and Chaterjee (Reference Mehta, Chaterjee, Das, Kleinman, Lock, Ramphele and Reynolds2001: 202), considering how people whose existence have been ravaged by violence re-establish a degree of ‘normality’ in their everyday life, instead draw links between ‘collective disorder’ and ‘rehabilitation work’. They observe that, ‘What remains after the riots is not a coherent moral and local world but a multiplicity of fractured communities, each charting, through rehabilitation work, its strategies of survival and co-existence’. Similarly, Hansen discusses the predicament of Muslim migrants in post-1992 riot Mumbai (Reference Hansen2001). Expelled from formal industrial employment and continually harassed by Shiv Sena thugs, these Muslims have been torn between a strategy of ‘community purification’ and one of ‘plebeian assertion’ as promoted by small entrepreneurs and local strongmen linked to the Samajwadi Party. Research on post-disaster reconstruction has shown linkages between resettlement of survivors and religious reform. Simpson (Reference Simpson, Osella and Gardner2004: 137), for example, discussing post-earthquake Kachch reconstruction, argues that a Hindutva politico-religious agenda became objectified through the construction of segregated villages/neighbourhoods and led to increased support for a particular kind of Hinduism. A new religious economy managed by non-elected populist charismatic individuals has been central to the reconstruction of Kachch, in the same way as, he suggests, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Front for Salvation gained support following earthquakes in Egypt and Algeria respectively.
Building on the above analyses, I will consider the moral meanings of reconstruction and resettlement for the riot-affected Muslims of Ahmedabad, focusing in particular on the growing influence of Islamic reformism in Juhapura between 2002 and 2004.Footnote 7 I will focus on the impact which three Islamic organisations—the Tabligh Jamaat, the Jamat-e-Islami (J-e-I) and the Jamiaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind—had on Muslims displaced during and after the communal riots of 2002. Despite their different doctrinal orientations and styles, these Jamaats encouraged a practice of Islam which focused on particular styles of worship, dress and everyday behaviour. Moreover, these organizations all supported and propagated interpretations of Islam which were broadly opposed to worship at the tombs of Sufi saints, practices of animal sacrifice, sanctification of food and water, pilgrimages and urus (birth or death rituals of holy men near their tombs) and the taking out of taziyahs (symbolic tombs of Qarballah martyrs).Footnote 8 These Jamaats were active in providing and facilitating resettlement of refugees after the 2002 riots.
The Jamaats
In the city of Ahmedabad there are about 41 Shia and Sunni Jamaats. These are composed of people who might share the same occupation, ethnicity or regional origin; or might comprise people who recognize the authority of a particular shrine, or follow a specific school of jurisprudence or doctrinal orientation (Simpson Reference Simpson, Osella and Gardner2004: 87). Membership of a Jamaat is not exclusive. A member of an occupational Jamaat, for instance, can also be associated with a specific doctrinal Jamaat. Most of the occupational Jamaats are generally endogamous, and marriages across doctrinal Jamaats are not common. After the 2002 riots, boundaries between Jamaats became blurred. Violence and the subsequent displacement into refugee camps led many people—who did not want the added burden of having to control young unmarried women in the precarious living conditions of the camps—to marry their daughters across Jamaats through mass marriages organized free of cost by various religious organisations. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus predominantly on the three doctrinal Jamaats active in the resettlement of Muslims after the violence of 2002.
J-e-I is one of the most active and well-organized Islamic movements in South Asia. Founded in 1941 by Syed Abu Ala Maududi, it considers Islam as a ‘perfect way of life’, informing not only people's relations with God, but also wider community affairs, considering the construction of Islamic states as essential to the preservation of Islamic civilization. However, in India, J-e-I militants and supporters have to strike a balance between remaining part of a larger Muslim Umaah while also being citizens of a state which calls itself ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ (Sikand Reference Sikand2002). J-e-I participated in relief and reconstruction work in riot-affected areas of Ahmedabad, and Gujarat more generally, through its relief wing, the Islamic Relief Committee (IRC). Unlike J-e-I and Tablighi Jamaat, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind (the All India body of the Ulama) had already been active in the city after previous episodes of communal violence. Founded in 1919 in the wake of the Khilafat movement,Footnote 9 Jamiat (which, claiming nationalist leanings, did not support the Muslim League and partition of British IndiaFootnote 10) was responsible for a 1920 fatwa sanctioning Muslim participation in favour of the non-co-operation movement (Mayaram Reference Mayaram1997: 235). During the 2002 riots, its ‘nationalist’ credentials allowed Jamiat to maintain good relations with the BJP-led Gujarati government. Its activists secured curfew passes and ran ambulance services within the city, taking riot victims to various city hospitals. The Jamiat, however, does not have a separate ‘relief wing’. The Tabligh Jamaat is one of the most popular reform movements in the Islamic world (Robinson Reference Robinson2001: 15). It was founded by Maulana Muhammad Illyas (1885–1944) in the 1920s as a movement whose objective was to ‘purify’ the Meos of Mewat in Rajasthan (and Indian Muslims more generally) of un-Islamic beliefs and practices. Sharing roots with nineteenth century Deoband reformism, its main objective is to promote mass Islamic education in order to ‘correct’ Muslims’ religious practices and ‘perfect’ their relationship with Allah. Overtly non-political, Tabligh Jamaat focuses on the moral reform of individual believers, working towards ‘making Muslims true Muslims’. Emphasizing voluntary missionary work, male activists go for ‘tabligh’ (preaching) for a number of days in a year; at least once in their lives, activists should spend 120 days of uninterrupted missionary work (Metcalf Reference Metcalf1982: 17). In some cases, men are joined in tabligh by their wife. Hence, unlike Deoband and other reformist groups, the Tabligh movement has moved the dissemination of Islamic teachings away from the madrasa and into the community at large (Metcalf Reference Metcalf1982: 16).
These three Jamaats built resettlement colonies for Ahmedabad Muslims who had been displaced by the 2002 riotsFootnote 11 and were extremely active in the ‘rehabilitation’ of refugees. While relationships were generally marked by co-operation, the Jamaats competed for establishing doctrinal hegemony in Jahapura. Eventually, local people recognized that Tabligh Jamaat had emerged as dominant in the neighbourhood. The growing influence of reformist Jamaats could be gauged in many ways: in the number of new masjids (mosques) and madrasas (schools of religious learning) they built; in the number of ishthemas (religious congregations) they organized; in the ways that the changes in language, dress and religious practices they promoted were taken up by local Muslims; in the enrolment and adoption of destitute children by reformist madrasas and more importantly, in the number of resettlement colonies they built in this and other parts of the city. Some Hindu as well as secular organizations complained that Muslims had become more kattarwadi (extremists), inward looking, and that the number of purdahs (veils) and beards in the community had increased. Even though the process of Islamization among riot-affected Muslims was brought about by the active involvement of the reformist Jamaats, I will argue that it was also closely linked to labour migration patterns in North India and to the movement of people from the mill districts to Juhapura. These factors also determined the ways in which the displaced Muslim communities received the Jamaati brand of Islamic reform. The survivors were aware of the political agenda of the reformist Jamaats, and negotiated their relationship with these organizations through tact and diplomacy. They used the Islamist agenda to secure ‘safe’ living conditions.
Violence and Movement of Muslims within the City
Camps
Camps in the city of Ahmedabad were started on 28th February itself. Most of the big durgahs (shrines), mosques and jamaatkhanas (community centre) in Muslim areas became sites for the camps. School buildings and in some cases Muslim cemeteries also became sites. Initiatives for organizing the camps came from within the community. Most camp organizers were people who had played some role in the community during the previous incidents of violence; they were mostly local ‘big men’ from the area. For example, the organizers of Shah Alam camp owned a construction company in the area where their camp was located. They had considerable clout in the area and had a trust registered in their names. They had organized relief camps during previous episodes of violence. I was told by a survivor: ‘Decent people want to save their skin and stay safe at home. . ..it is only the goondas (thugs) who come out and carry out relief’. For procuring assistance from the state, organizers had to register camps under the name of a private trust. Individuals with no backing from a trust or society had also run relief camps in the city. Such camps could not secure any kind of help from the Government as they were not recognized. It is important to note that none of the Jamaat organizations played any active role in the setting up of relief camps in the city. One commented, ‘There was enough attention being paid to the city by private trusts and hence we concentrated on rural relief. We thought we would come in when people needed to go back into their houses.’ The survivors, on the other hand, said, ‘They got scared. . ...it was too risky to come out at that time. . ..they came to build houses after it became quiet’.
People from the locality started donating clothes and food in the mosques so that those affected could be fed and clothed. Local doctors in the area were called to attend to people being brought in from the affected areas. Local pharmacies were opened with pressure from goondas and survivors were given the necessary first aid. Arrangements were made for people with serious injuries to be taken to the Civil Hospital. Ambulances owned by community trusts were evacuating people and admitting them to hospitals. The government resolution recognizing the relief camps and promising aid came only on 6th March. It was on the 7th that the government started providing assistance to the riot affected; NGOs started helping in the camps after 5th March. These NGOs (both secular and religious, mainly Jesuit) had formed a collective Citizens’ Initiative in order to respond to the violence. There were no camps run by NGOs or any secular organizations. In response to my queries about NGOs not running relief camps, a Director of a noted organisation which had played a role in relief said, ‘This has never happened in the history of the city. . ..and it was not possible for the community to trust us after what they went through’. Most camp organizers acknowledged the help they received from the NGOs. Since these NGOs were located in the western part of the city, most of the work was co-ordinated by volunteers from within the Muslim community. These volunteers were later joined by non-Muslim volunteers from other states. Such volunteers formed an important link between the camps and the NGOs.
By May 2002, the city had a total of 60 small and big camps. The majority of camp organizers informed me that the state only provided grains and that they managed on help which came from Muslim trusts and organizations from other parts of India.Footnote 12 This was subject to a head counting exercise, which the Collector's office engaged in regularly in order to determine the accuracy of demand made by camp organizers. Within 2 months of setting up relief camps, the camp organizers were informed that the Collector's office was going to stop the assistance. Six relief camp organizers approached the Gujarat High Court through a writ petition asking for continuation of assistance. Finally, the Gujarat Government gave an assurance in court that it assumed responsibility for providing adequate relief to the camps. The petition also urged army protection for the relief camps, since on more than one occasion (instigated by politicians belonging to the ruling party and by the police) relief camps had been attacked. The Gujarat Government however, closed all relief camps in mid-July 2002. The closure of camps coincided with the arrival of the monsoons. Survivors who could not go back to their houses shifted to indoor camps on the initiative of the Collector. These indoor camps were shut down in October 2002.Footnote 13 The setting up of indoor camps was the last step the state took towards the complete closure of camps and to declare that conditions in the city were ‘normal’ for conducting state assembly elections in December.
Despite recommendation from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) that the displaced should not be asked to leave the camps unless appropriate relief and rehabilitation measures were in place—and contrary to the Prime Minister's pledge on his visit to the city that camps would remain open as long as required—the state government had been pressuring the camp organizers to close down without offering the inmates any feasible rehabilitation measures or any guarantee for their security upon returning to the very places where they had seen their near and dear ones killed.
The Process of Displacement
The forceful closure of relief camps left displaced Muslim survivors with very few options: moving back to their original place of residence or moving into larger Muslim areas within the city. The worst affectedFootnote 14 did not want to live in the same space where they had lost their loved ones. They also feared attack. The majority of them were migrant Muslims from the suburbs and outer suburban part of the city. Their parents had come from Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal to work as economic migrants in the textile mills. The closing of the textile mills in the late 1970s and 1980s created unemployment among these migrants, forcing them to find work in the informal economy around their places of settlement or within the old city. It was mainly these migrant groups who were found in the indoor camps. They had registered their names for resettlement with various Jamaat organizations and meantime decided to move into larger Muslim neighbourhoods or in proximity to the sites where they were going to be resettled.
Within the city, the pattern of displacement was then such that Muslims were moving to the peripheries of the city or into areas which were outside the Municipal limits. Muslims could not move back to the walled city as it was overcrowded and did not receive migrants. As most Muslims were daily wage earners, they had found their means of livelihood in their immediate neighbourhoods or in the mill districts, located not far from where they lived. Being pushed to the eastern or the western periphery implied moving further away from the informal economy and a lack of employment opportunities. Even though some were provided with vegetable lorries and fruit lorries to start work in the resettlement colonies, survivors found it hard as they had not done that type of work in the past.
Jamaat, Philanthropy and Community Purification
As the state did not have an official policy for resettling affected Muslims, the Jamaats and Jamaat organizations stepped into the void. Islamic organizations in Gujarat had their first exposure to humanitarian work after the earthquake of January 2001. Their experience in post-earthquake reconstruction, along with the collaboration with international organizations like the United Nations Development Fund, formed the back-drop of discussions around their present work and activities in the city after the violence.
With regard to the working of the Islamist organizations, there were differences in their modus operandi. While J-e-I liaised publicly with other secular organizations, the Tablighs preferred working quietly without publicizing their work, or mingling with other organizations. Jamiat was very careful about the image it was portraying and the work it engaged in.Footnote 15 It was very conscious to portray a ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ image. In my understanding, this could be attributed to the fact that Jamiat worked very closely with political forces—Congress in the past and the BJP in the present. All three groups were engaged in rebuilding houses and resettling displaced Muslims. Each group also engaged in ‘community purification’ through running regular ishthemas for both men and women in the newly established resettlement colonies. This was done in most cases by playing upon a sense of guilt and relating the conditions of riot survivors to their neglect of prayers and having become gumraah (lost), by getting caught up in worldly desires.
There seemed to be an unspoken understanding between Jamaat organizations for the criteria of preference for allocation of new houses. Women who were widowed during the violence were given the first preference. Destitute children and widowers came second, followed by survivors who had lost two or more members of their family. Witnesses, who had identified perpetrators of violence in their First Information Reports (FIRs), and who were waging legal battles with the assistance of NGOs and finding it difficult to live in their previous places of residence, came last. In most cases, houses were distributed free of charge. Tabligh Jamaat was the only Jamaat which provided housing on subsidized rates. This was done with the intention of instilling a sense of responsibility among recipients, I was told. In cases where houses were distributed free of cost, informal housing contracts were signed, but in most cases, there was no paperwork at all. Survivors were allotted houses verbally and they simply moved in. The property continued to remain in the name of the Islamist organization for an initial period of 3 years. Inhabitants were told that on the observance of ‘good conduct’ and ‘satisfactory behaviour’ by the maulana of the masjid located in the colony, ownership would be transferred to the male head of the family. In the case of widows, they had to prove that they were living ‘respectable’ lives in accordance with what was deemed as ‘respectable’ and ‘moral’ by the maulana and his wife. In one resettlement colony in Anand, displaced Muslims were made to sign informal contracts promising that the J-e-I's ‘Akida’(doctrinal beliefs) would become the philosophy of the families inhabiting these resettlement colonies and would be respected and observed.
Applications for housing were made by affected Muslims while they were in different relief camps around the city. Their new location depended upon which Islamist organization approached which relief camp and which NGO got involved in mediating the process of resettling inhabitants from a particular locality.
The colonies had a more or less uniform look—a row of houses, with a small living room white-washed in pale green or white, a kitchen with an attached mori (open space to wash utensils, used as a bathroom) and a toilet behind the houses. The toilet in most cases was clogged and people had to go out in the open in the early hours. The inhabitants had practically identical possessions—a set of pots, same brand of cooking stoves, water storage drums, a few glasses and plates. Most utensils had letters inscribed on them showing which organization they had come from or which relief camp they were distributed in. In some cases, people were able to retrieve their old beds and half-burnt furniture which sat in their new living-cum-bed-rooms. Some organizations provided water and electricity connections, but in some colonies only the masjid and the maulana's house had electricity, while the rest lived without it. Water and electricity connections were dependent on registering a change of residential addresses for ration cards, but residents were afraid to change their residential address, having no legal rights over these new houses. Survivors thus also had to fetch rations from their previous places of residence.
The planning of these colonies was done in such a way that each had a masjid, a maqtab (a primary school) and madrasa, a community hall in the centre (used for conducting religious meetings, tailoring classes for women and running a nursery for the children). This was a conscious strategy against the secular NGOs which had got involved after the riots in honing the skills of women and providing them with livelihoods. As one maulana put it, ‘Now they don't have to go out for seevan class (tailoring classes) or any other classes, as we will start things here eventually. We will also start schools and classes for children’. The colony resident maulana would come from the school of jurisprudence that the sponsoring organization was affiliated to. Some Maulanas were accompanied by their wives, who worked as an alema (preacher) among colony women. In most cases, maulanas drew a salary from the parent organization and lived from the goodwill of colony inhabitants.
Rebuilding of destroyed shrines and mosques in general was identified as an immediate priority by leaders of Islamic organizations.Footnote 16 Despite acknowledging this priority, none of the organizations’ annual reports had separate funds earmarked for reconstruction of shrines. It was also hard to discern the linkage between the relief work of the organizations and the broader ideology of the Jamaat. Queries related to the rebuilding of shrines were avoided, with, ‘We cannot do everything; there are almost 100,000 people who don't have a roof over their heads. It is for somebody else to do . . . what do you want us to build, durgahs or houses for homeless people?’ It also appeared that the state was supporting Islamist organizations in their agenda of not rebuilding shrines. The fact that flat roads had been built, with state resources, on the sites of destroyed shrines, implied that the state was complicit in the agenda of the Islamic organizations. One such was the famous seventeenth-century Urdu poet Shah Wali Gujarati's tomb,Footnote 17 located just outside Shahibaug police station, a few miles away from the City Police Commissioner's office. This tomb was broken on 2nd March, and a make-shift Hindu temple with a saffron flag put up in that place. On 3rd March, that too was levelled, and by 5th March 2002 a flat road was built on the site, implying that nothing had ever really existed there (The Indian Express, 13th March 2002). The rebuilding of the poet's tomb was extensively debated in the media and eventually, over 2 years after the riots, rebuilding was taken up by the Urdu Academy and a secular organization from the city.By observing the work conducted by the Jamaats around Ahmedabad, it became clear that there was a demarcation of tasks. The rebuilding of destroyed masjids was taken up by J-e-I, while the Tabligh Jamaat engaged in building new structures—masjids and madrasas—in areas where Muslims were moving in. The Chand Committee (the relief wing of the Sunni Barelwi Jamaat), which was not reformist and did not have very good relations with the reformist organizations, took up the responsibility of rebuilding broken durgahs and mosques and was trying to get funds for this from the State Waqf board and the municipality. Overall, all of this activity implied that through reconstruction and resettlement a specific meaning of Islam was being reinscribed in these neighbourhoods: an Islam which did not believe in veneration at shrines and which was based on the principle of tawhid (oneness of Allah).
The money for most of the Jamaat work came from individual grants. These grants ranged from help from Gujarati migrants in other parts of India to donations from the diaspora, routed through individuals (mainly maulanas affiliated to various Jamaats, who visited Gujarat at the time of crisis); sometimes, cash was collected through travel by Jamaat representatives. Most of this money was zakaat (a certain percentage of an individual's income, removed for charity at the time of Ramzaan) and sadakah (voluntary donation) money. The head offices of various Jamaats collected money for these groups by making announcements in local masjids and also by making appeals to people through circulating CDs and reports about the violence. There were rumours floating among the secular organizations about how each Islamic organization had a jeep parked outside Ahmedabad airport. Any Muslim businessmen or NRI arriving was whisked off for a guided tour of activities in the Jamaat. There were rooms in certain three-star hotels owned by Muslim businessmen where such visitors were put up. There was also discussion about maulanas from certain Jamaats making tours to Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom to collect Fala (contributions) for their relief and rehabilitation work. Jamaat organizations also co-ordinated with transnational Muslim organizations like the Indian Muslim Relief Committee (IMRC), North American Islamic Relief and the American Federation of Muslims from India. They also established contacts with the British Muslims’ Association and with the head offices of their respective Jamaats globally.
Tablighs and their Popularity
On one of my visits to a resettlement colony built by Tablighs, I bumped into Maroofbhay, who was, I was told, a Tabligh sympathizer. He hung around the colony and helped inhabitants with water and electricity connections. He told me:
M: Fifty percent of the population of Juhapura belonged to Sunni Barelvi Jamaat. Thirty percent were Shias, Memons and Bohras which are mainly Gujarati speaking, and the remaining twenty percent were a mixture of Tabligh Jamaat, Ahle-Hadith and other smaller Jamaats. It is changing now: after these riots it has changed drastically. The Tablighs are on the rise. Now they constitute almost over 20 percent of the population and are on their peak. Take the example of FatehwadiFootnote 18; it was an open piece of land - now the population is more than 20,000 people! There are seven masjids and two madrasas that have come up on this piece of land. All belong to the Tablighs. They have the money. The money comes from Saudi Arabia, from the world over. They are very strong and powerful people.
RJ: What had brought this change?
M: The Muslims who moved to Juhapura in the 1980s were from the walled city. They were mostly Barelvis and were the older migrants . . . The change came after 1992, after the rathyatra. Hoards of Muslims from the walled city and the suburbs moved here. It started developing as a Muslim area. The Al-Fazal Masjid (the area's main masjid) was built by the Tablighs.Footnote 19 After the establishment of this masjid, their influence has increased. After these riots they did a lot of imdad [Service] in the area. But they don't publicise the work they do. A lot of aid was disbursed from the masjid. Our maulana kept providing food and other help for people moving into Juhapura. They did not work in the camps. Now they have built colonies. They also have a very strong organisational base.
From the above discussion, I wish to draw out the fact that the popularity of the Tablighs in Juhapura is related to the changing social composition of Juhapura. As migrant Muslims started moving into Juhapura, they brought with them their ideas of religion and reform and built what became the most popular Masjid of the area. Reform in the city must then also be linked to histories of earlier labour migration from North Indian states. The oldest Tabligh Masjid was located in Gomtipur, very close to where migrant Muslims from Uttar Pradesh had settled. There is, then, a very clear linkage between migration and the spread of religious reform.
During the period I was in Gujarat, the Tablighs were referred to as the dominant Jamaat, especially in areas where riot-affected Muslims were moving in and also in the new resettlement colonies. I took it for granted that their popularity was related to their vigorous resettlement work. As all the new institutions in the area were being built by the Tabligh Jamaat and as they had built resettlement colonies, I assumed that this would have an impact upon the people moving into these localities. But to my surprise, Tabligh was the only organization which charged (a subsidized rate) for houses. As one Maulana put it: ‘We are religious people . . . we are not into social work. The scale of devastation was so high that we got involved for the first time’.
How to account for the Tabligh's growing popularity after the violence was my growing interest. There was a standard response which visitors received from maulanas and Jamaat leaders across the city: that people had forgotten the violence, that life had returned to ‘normal’, that there was ‘peace’ and ‘calm’ and people had been resettled, while anybody trying to speak to survivors was an intruder who had come to Gujarat to unsettle Muslims by making them re-visit memories of 2002; outsiders had no right to extract the experiences of poor Muslims. This made finding answers from the leadership difficult.
There was certainly an increase in Isthemas (congregations) or meetings after the riots.
They did, [hold meetings] but we were not bound. Now that we live in the houses they have provided and we have signed these contracts, it has become mandatory to attend. If we don't attend, the Maulana asks us the next day when he sees us in the neighbourhood. We have nowhere to go; we are scared that if we don't attend we might have to leave these houses. Secondly, they did not have a base, now they have this hall which was built when our houses were rebuilt. . ...so monitoring becomes easier.
The building of resettlement colonies then provided Jamaats with an organized base among the survivors, which made the reformists’ task easy.
I attended a few ishthemas organized by Tabligh Jamaat and Dawat-e-Shariah. In one such meeting, women were reminded that shame came to the community in the form of sexual violence, (in places like Naroda Patia, Naroda Gaam and countless villages in Gujarat) because the promise made to Allah by them had been forgotten. Women were also reminded that they had a very special role to play in restoring the community's lost izzat (honour) by adhering to an Islamic way of life, wearing the burqah (veil)Footnote 20 and keeping away from the influences of modernization (television and fashion). A woman's body was compared to a house: the house had to be happy and safe. . .the house would need good curtains and doors to protect it from sunlight, dust and intruders; in the same way, women need the burqah to protect their honour and pass on the right values to their children. They were asked to spread the word in their respective areas and to bring younger women, who were becoming shikaar (entrapped) in modernization. Each woman was asked to bring another woman along for the next ishthema. The emphasis was on self-improvement and improvement of their immediate environment (family, neighbourhood) through dress, rituals and simple living. Women were asked to promise that for the next ishthema, at least one-third of them would wear a burqah and that attendance would also improve. Violence thus became a reference point for introducing the need for discipline and dealing with the disgrace that the community had gone through.
Nilofar, who had moved into Juhapura from a nearby village and attended most of the of the Tabligh Jamaat ishthemas, told me:
What is nice about them is that they simplify religion. I think they are right – we should have a direct relation with Allah. They have no selfish interest. They don't pass judgements. I come from a village where ours was the only Muslim household, and we only knew that we were Muslims, but did not practise religion. I did not even know how to do namaaz. Coming here, my children are growing in a dini [religious] mahol [environment]. My son has gone to the madrasa in Kaleej. There is a total change in him. He has become so disciplined; he does not wear civilian clothes anymore. He has taught us so many new prayers we should say while performing various kriyas [daily chores]. I am going to send my daughter to Baruch where this behensaaheb [the alema conducting the ishthema] has done her training. I was beginning to feel embarrassed that my children know so much and so I started reading the Quran and learning the namaaz from my neighbours, who are Chaubisyes [a term used to describe Tablighs in the city]. . . They don't laugh at me and they teach me with a lot of mohabbat [love].
Nilofar's story shows how moving into Juhapura from a village and sending her son to a Madrasa had transformed their practice of religion within the family. The fact that her son was respected in the neighbourhood and did not waste his time like the other children of his age made her proud.
Amina, who was a Hindu Brahmin by birth but had married Yusufbhay, a Muslim, and had moved from Naroda Gaam, told me:
I have been married to him, but never really practised Islam. I used to celebrate festivals for the sake of it. But now I actually understand the significance. This is my chance to get to know the religion my children will practise. I like listening to them, they make me think about my role in this world. They make me think of myself as an individual and my relation with Allah. They don't treat me differently because I was a Hindu. They don't make me feel different. In fact, they never mention my Hindu past.
In Nilofar's and Amina's cases, attending the isthemas not only became a means of finding social acceptance within the new place they had moved into, but they also found it liberating that they could embrace their Muslim identity, despite their ignorance about it, without being judged. The economic class of the alema delivering the sermon was not very different from theirs and they also found it uplifting to see the kind of respect and social status that the alema enjoyed. Indeed, Nilofar was so inspired by the alema that she wanted to train her daughter to be a preacher.
The Tabligh alemas had a unique style of working. They did not engage much with the violence, issues of survival, poverty or politics. Their non-political approach, coupled with an emphasis on the ‘individual self’ for improvement and change within oneself and one's immediate environment, worked very well for women. Sikand (2004: 67) discusses the idea of it being the religious duty of each Muslim to see himself or herself as a muballigh or missionary of Islam. Such an emphasis on the self put extra responsibility upon women and they took on the role of informal tabligh (spread) in and around their houses. In one resettlement colony, instead of taking an afternoon nap, women would teach women moving into Juhapura either how to do namaaz or read the Quran. Alemas reiterated what the male leadership preached: that life was back to normal and people had forgotten the violence. Women—no matter where they came from, how they looked, which Jamaat they belonged to, or what doctrine they had followed before—were made to feel welcome. Behensahebs—dressed in finery (black burqahs, hand-gloves, special nets covering their eyes and black nylon socks) and carrying an aura of piety—visited individual houses with invitations, another factor appealing to women. Mayaram (Reference Mayaram1997: 280) shows how reform among the Meos instilled a new sense of social worth by participating in a discourse which was ‘de-hierarchising’ and offering an opportunity to common people to become teachers and preachers. Becoming teachers and preachers was something that women attending these ishthemas found very appealing. In many cases, attending ishthemas became a means of social acceptance in new neighbourhoods.
It would be tempting to argue that reconstruction (of institutions and houses) provided an organized base for Islamist organizations among the survivors of 2002. But the number of houses built by the Tabligh Jamaat was very few when compared to Jamiat or J-e-I. Moreover, the Tabligh was the only organization to charge money for houses. Hence, the Tabligh success must also be linked in to the labour migrations of the past two decades, to growing transnational linkages, to the organizational growth of the movement and to the growing influence of the ‘global’ upon the ‘local’. The latter influence manifests itself in discussions by visiting UK Gujarati diaspora about what was a more desired and acceptable form of Islam. The Tabligh Jammat—a movement that was local (here I mean had its origin in South Asia)—was going through a process of ‘authentication’ and ‘hybridization’ through support for it among migrants.
Razakbhay came from Shahpur Chakla in Ahmedabad, old city. He migrated to the United Kingdom in 1970 and lived in Birmingham, where he married a daughter of another Gujarati Muslim from Central Gujarat. He ran a grocery shop and was associated with the Tabligh Jamaat in the United Kingdom. When I met him, he was visiting his sister, who had newly moved into Juhapura. He used to spend his evenings giving advice to young boys on how to migrate and what life is like in London.Footnote 21 He was helping his nephew Firoze to migrate, having lost everything after the riots. One of Razakbhay's favourite topics was ‘din’ (religion) and ‘dini mahol’ (religious environment) in the United Kingdom. I used to hang around with Firoze, who arranged for me to meet his uncle. I found him wearing a white Kurta and white trousers hanging short on his ankles. He was addressing five young men:
The way you practise Islam is wrong. You want everything . . . you want the durgahs. . ..niyaz. . ...fatehas [shrines and auspiciousness of food and water] and you want Allah. Allahpaak has said that you should not bow your head before anybody else . . . then why do you bow your head in front of these durgahs? In the UK we follow the Tabligh Akaid . . . .that is what is practised in the Muslim world . . . in west Asia . . . in the middle-east. It is a very chust [strict] and simple path . . . You will realise the importance of what I am saying in the near future. I go on Tabligh with other men to the mosques in other parts of the UK. You will be surprised that most of them are well-educated professionals who decide to dedicate time for the spread of ‘din’. I used to dress up like you in shirts and trousers . . . but not anymore. I wear Islamic clothes . . . It is very fulfilling to engage with people and explain to them what Islam is about. I can show you evidence that this is the way to be.
Through discourses like this, Tabligh (or, more generally, reformist) agenda, was becoming more authentic in these neighbourhoods.
Ambiguities and Practice—Hum Sabka Sunte Hai aur Apna Karte Hay (We Listen to Everybody and do Our Own Things)
People were, however, contesting the intentions of the Jamaats and their work and not silently accepting what the Jamaats were offering. ‘Relief committee’ was a generic term used for the work of all Jamaat organizations, and in some cases Muslims did not even know the subtle differences between them. Life had changed so much after the violence that they were preoccupied with negotiating survival and making a living rather then engaging with religion.
I came across the same group of women attending meetings organized by both the Tabligh Jamaat and Dawaate-e-Shariah. When I asked about this, women responded ‘din ki baat sunne main achi lagti hay, to hum bhegi hokar jate hai. Dil halka ho jata hai’ (religious sermons are nice to hear, that is why we get together and leave our homes, it is like a social thing, our hearts feel lighter).
The fact that many Muslims moving into Juhapura had lived in relief camps organized on the premises of durgahs also implied that these durgahs had very special significance to experiences of survival. The biggest camp organized in the city was located in the premises of Shah Alam durgah. Footnote 22 Nilofar had sent her son to a Tabligh madrasa in central Gujarat; she attended Tabligh ishthemas regularly, she aspired to train her daughter to become an alema. Yet Nilofar's husband refused a job as a cleaner in Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Services (AMTS) bus company because he used to spend Wednesday afternoons in Shah Alam durgah; he told me that he had faith in Baba Shah Alam, who had saved their lives. He refused to work in a job where he would not be able to take a day off in the middle of the week to do bandagi (meditate) over Baba. The fact that his wife and children were following a Tabligh Akida did create some family tensions. It was also common to come across families where two brothers followed different doctrines and hence went to different places to offer prayers and followed two different styles of worship.
The fact that shrines were present on the landscape certainly held meaning for people living in the neighbourhood. Baba Qutb-e-Alam's shrine, located in Vatwa, was central to the lives not only of the Syed Bukhari family—who traced their lineage from it and were essentially Sunni Barelwi in their practice of Islam—but also to members of the same family who over the years had become Shia under the influence of preachers from Iran and the middle-east. At the annual festival of the durgah, the qaramats (miracles) of the Baba and his sons were being told and re-told: to visitors curious about the history of the place but also, of course, to the new settlers.
Pre-existing relationships with shrines also retained significance. Another resettlement colony housed Muslims from those parts of the main ‘Muslim city’ which were close to Hindu settlements and who hence could not go back to their houses because of perceived threat from their Hindu neighbours. Here, the visits of Shaukatbhay (a resident of the colony) to Jamalpur (where he had lived prior to the riots) to fetch rationed kerosene and grain would be incomplete without a visit to Gosh Paak Baba's durgah in Jamalpur. He told me, regarding reformism, ‘We hear it from one ear and remove it from the other’. He had started growing a beard, wearing a kurta-pyjama (tunic like top and trousers), attending the ishthema in his colony every Wednesday night and was active in helping the maulana to sort out electricity and water connections for the colony inhabitants. But when it came to Friday prayers, he would offer them at Sarkhej RozaFootnote 23 and not at the Tabligh masjid Al-Fazal. He told me, ‘Where will we go if we don't grow beards, and if we don't work for the community who will look at us?’ Since resettlement was being provided by Jamaats and because the riot-affected did not want to go back to their original place of residence, wearing an Islamic identity became inevitable. For people like Shaukatbhay, becoming involved was also a way of finding a purpose and dealing with the anger and frustration that the riots had brought on.
Perceptions of the Tabligh's motives also varied. There was a rumour among some of my respondents that the initiative by the Tabligh Jamaat was an American game plan to keep the community divided. On the other hand, a group of young boys tried to convince me that the Tabligh had roots in Saudi Arabia (they wrongly equated it with ‘Wahhabism’).
When I asked Ishaqbhay, who lived in a colony built by the J-e-I, what the difference between Tablighs and J-e-I was, he told me:
There is not much difference between the two. They all tell us the same thing. . . Tablighs probably are more chust [strict] about the practice of religion. But these people too [J-e-I] speak about doing the namaaz [prayers], keeping rozas [fasts], doing qurbani [sacrifice] and doing zakaat [paying a section of your income to the needy]. They remind us why Allah created us, that there is a life after death and we are travellers in this world who have to prepare ourselves for the next journey. They also tell us that we suffered this dhamaal [riots and the devastation that followed] because we had forgotten our duty towards Allah, and that this happened not because Modi hates Muslims and wanted to win in the name of Hindutva but because it is Allah's way of reminding us that we have forgotten him. But how can we think about din [religion] when our children are hungry? We have no money. They have built these houses and are building air-conditioned masjids, but nobody is talking about building a factory with that money and giving us our livelihoods.
Another man listening to the conversation added:
I think they both also object to durgah, darood, niyaz, nazre [shrines, auspiciousness of food and water]. They also don't believe in babas and hakims [local healers] or the tombs of great poets. They tell us only to concentrate on Allah and his Prophet. They tell us not to fight, not to do immoral things like going to prostitutes and drinking alcohol.
I asked Ishaqbhay:
Does that mean that now you are a Tabligh or that your Akida [dominant philosophy] has changed?
He answered:
These are all ways and means of furthering their agendas. Everybody has their matlab [own selfish interest]. They don't realise that the qaum [community] needs unity now. They should not be dividing us. I do what I want to do, but attending the meetings becomes inevitable. The maulana or the Relief Committee people, when they see you in the neighbourhood, embarrass you by saying, ‘Have you forgotten what happened in Patiya?’
Jamaats, Reform and the Perceptions of the People
Associating oneself with the Tabligh Jamaat was construed very differently by different people after the violence. Violence and displacement had brought about the disruption of established social hierarchies within the old neighbourhoods. Wearing a ‘new Islamic identity’ was a means of dealing with such displacements. For the ashraf (high-born) and more specifically for the leadership of the Jamaats (mostly from North India) it was a means of reclaiming their superiority while refining the Islam practised by the common ajlaf (common Muslims). For Muslims of Gujarati descent, especially the middle class (Memons, Ghanchis and Sunni Voras), it was a means of upward mobility within North Indian Jamaat leadership structures. It also assuaged insecurity associated with commonalities shared (culture, food habits and language) with the majority of Gujarati Hindus. For the ashraf from Gujarat, who claimed their lineage to a local shrine, reform meant losing control over erstwhile means of patronage and control, which had been carried over with migration and manifested in the cities with privileges like allotment of special houses in the backyard of mosques.
For my ajlaf (common people) informants, the meaning of reform varied. While for a few it was a means of reclaiming a lost sense of ‘self’ after the violence and not letting one's mind get ‘out of control’, for others it was a means of upward social mobility and feeling accepted by the leadership of the ‘community’. For many it was a means of clinging to something when nothing else around them made any sense. The majority looked at it as a means of having a roof over one's head, given the deteriorating economic conditions after the riots. Also, at play was a positive feeling of the reformist atmosphere enabling their children to grow up in a religious environment. Reform also became a means of gaining social acceptance in the new neighbourhoods where people moved to after the violence. For women, attending isthemas served as a means of socialization but also a chance to break out from the everyday routine, as manifested in phrases like ji halka ho jata hai (we feel lighter), hasi majaak bhi karte hai (we laugh and entertain ourselves), ghar se nikalne ka mauka milta hay (it gives us an opportunity to get out of our houses). Overall, ideas of religion and competing ways of living one's religiosity certainly did become more pronounced after the riots, but this was surely to be expected, given that Muslims had been persecuted exactly because of their religious identity.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have explored the politics of religious reform within one low-income neighbourhood housing displaced Muslims in Ahmedabad. Instead of establishing a simple cause and effect relationship between violence and reform, I have drawn out the social complexities around the meaning of conflict and the restructuring of religious practices. I have also contested simplistic (academic and popular) assumptions about riot-affected Muslims, especially claims that, ‘The entire community had become extremists after the violence’. Simpson's (Reference Simpson, Vavos, Wyatt and Hewitt2004: 164) work on post-earthquake reconstruction in Kachch, Gujarat shows how a new religious economy managed by non-elected populist charismatic individuals can be central to rebuilding a devastated community. My analysis takes Simpson's work further and shows that a religious economy, managed by competing understandings of religious practices, can also affect the nature of subjectivities (what it means to be a ‘true Muslim’). In their engagement with the reformist agenda, survivors made strategic choices in relation to religious practices, clothes or rehousing in colonies built by Jamaat organizations. Here I have deviated substantially from Mahmood's (Reference Mahmood2005) understanding of piety and agency within the context of religion and reform. She makes a claim for understanding agency not only through the lens of subversion but also through passivity and feminine docility. Mahmood's contribution, though important, fails to look at the personal desires or public actions of women who attended meetings occasionally or have a strategic agenda. I have explored here the ambiguities around people's participation in and boycott of reformist meetings, even though religious revival remained the dominant discourse among the survivors. A complete ‘hands-off’ attitude from the state vis-a-vis riot-affected Muslims and the limited intervention from secular organizations certainly paved the way for Islamist organizations to build resettlement colonies, which eventually became a base for organized reform. But I have suggested that the success of reform organizations also needs to be linked in with the growth and expansion of these organizations globally and with the impact of both these complex developments and wider networks—such as those produced by migration—at the local level. I have then kept in mind Van der Veer's (Reference Van Der Veer1987: 283) analysis that, ‘Religious experiences cannot be seen apart from religious organizations and group formation; and since the latter changes over time, the former changes with it’. This perspective usefully enables us to develop a better understanding of reform and competing religiosities.
