Indian Muslims: A rich hunting ground for Middle Eastern rivals
By James M. Dorsey
When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently declared that
Turkey was “the
only country that can lead the Muslim world,” he probably wasn’t
only thinking of Middle Eastern and other Islamic states such as Pakistan and
Bangladesh.
Increasingly, there is evidence that Indian Muslims, the
Islamic world’s fourth largest community after Indonesia and the South Asian
states, is on Mr. Erdogan’s radar.
Mr. Erdogan’s interest in Indian Muslims highlights the flip
side of a
shared Turkish and Indian experience: the rise of religious parties and leaders
with a tendency towards authoritarianism in non-Western democracies that,
according to Turkey and India scholar Sumantra Bose, calls into question their
commitment to secularism.
Mr. Erdogan’s interest in Indian Muslims goes beyond his hitherto
unsuccessful
attempts to persuade Indian authorities to shutter some nine schools and
colleges associated with exiled Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen.
Accusing Mr. Gulen of responsibility for a failed 2015
military coup, Mr. Erdogan’s government is seeking
the preacher’s extradition to Turkey from his refuge in the
mountains of Pennsylvania.
While Mr. Gulen is an obsession to Mr. Erdogan, the
president’s interest in Indian Muslims is part of bigger fish he has to fry.
Indian Muslims are too big a community to ignore in Mr.
Erdogan’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia for leadership in the Muslim world,
particularly in the wake of the October
2 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul that has catapulted the rivalry to centre stage.
Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to create inroads into the Indian
Muslim community is facilitated by the Hindu nationalism of the country’s prime
minister, Narendra Modi, that prompted The Washington Post to headline a recent
article by Indian journalist Rana Ayyub describing mounting anti-Muslim
sentiment and Islamophobia, “Modi’s
India is a living nightmare for Muslims.”
Mr. Erdogan is competing for Indian Muslim hearts and minds
with a continued flow
of Saudi funds to multiple Salafi organizations, including charities,
educational institutions and political organizations, and reporting by Turkish
journalists associated with the Gulen movement, who point to Turkish
links with militant clerics.
They include controversial televangelist Zakir Naik, whose
Peace TV reaches 200 million viewers despite being banned in India.
Problematically, some of Mr. Erdogan’s interlocutors,
including Mr. Naik, seemingly prefer to straddle the fence between Turkey and
Saudi Arabia and play both sides against the middle.
‘One among the few Muslim leaders who appreciate, have the
guts to support Islam openly, is the president of this country, that is
President Erdogan…. You are
lucky to have a president like president Erdogan,” Mr. Naik told a
crowd in Istanbul shortly before Turkey declared its support for Qatar at the
outset of the 18-month old Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led economic and
diplomatic boycott of the Gulf state.
Mr. Naik’s remarks are unlikely to have sat well with Saudi
Arabia whose King Salman had two years
earlier awarded the preacher the King Faisal International Prize for
his “service to Islam.”
The award includes US$2 million in prize money. Unconfirmed
press reports say Mr. Naik has been traveling
on a Saudi passport since his Indian document was revoked in 2017.
If the geopolitical stakes for Mr. Erdogan are primarily his
leadership ambitions, for Saudi Arabia it’s not just about being top dog.
Influence among Indian Muslims creates one more pressure point for the kingdom
in its opposition to Indian funding of Iran’s Arabian Sea port of Chabahar.
Saudi Arabia fears the port will help
Iran counter harsh US sanctions imposed after US President Donald J.
Trump’s withdrawal from a 2015 international agreement that curbed the Islamic
republic’s nuclear program.
The kingdom is further concerned that the port will enable
Iran to gain greater market share in India for its oil exports at the expense
of Saudi Arabia, raise foreign investment in the Islamic republic, increase its
government revenues, and allow Iran to project power in the Gulf and the Indian
Ocean.
Finally, Saudi Arabia sees Indian Shiites, who are believed
to account for anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of the country’s 180 million
Muslims, as an Iranian fifth wheel.
Indian media quoted a report by India’s Intelligence Bureau
as saying that ultra-conservative Saudi Islamic scholars were frequently
visiting Indian Sunni Muslim communities. The Bureau reportedly put
the number of visitors in the years between 2011 and 2013 at 25,000.
It said they had distributed tens of millions of dollars – a scale unmatched by
Turkish funding.
The Saudi effort is furthered by the fact that some three
million Indians work in the kingdom, many of them from Kerala in southwestern
India.
“The Muslim community in Kerala is undergoing the process of
Arabification… It is happening like the westernisation. Those Indians who had
lived in England once used to emulate the English way of life back home.
Similarly, Muslims
in Kerala are trying to bring home the Arabian culture and way of life,”
said scholar Hameed Chendamangalloor.
South Asia scholar Christophe Jaffrelot noted that Muslim
institutions in Kerala, including the Islamic Mission Trust of Malappuram, the
Islamic Welfare Trust and the Mujahideen Arabic College had received
“millions of (Saudi) riyals.”
Like in the case of Mr. Naik, Turkey has reportedly sought
to also forge ties to Maulana Syed Salman Al-Husaini Al-Nadwi, a prominent
Indian Muslim scholar who is a professor at one of the country’s foremost
madrassas or religious seminaries, Darul-uloom Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow.
Mr. Al-Nadwi tweeted his
support for Mr. Erdogan in advance of last June’s election. “We
represent the Muslim peoples and 300 million Muslim Indians. We want the
Turkish people to take place next to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party,” Mr.
Al-Nadwi said.
Mr. Al-Nadwi’s son Yusuf was a speaker
at a conference in Istanbul in 2016 on the history of the caliphate movement
in Turkey and South Asia organized by the South Asian Center for Strategic Studies
(GASAM) founded by Ali Sahin, a former deputy minister for European affairs and
member of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Mr. Al-Nadwi sparked controversy in 2014 by offering
Saudi Arabia to raise a 500,000 strong militia of Sunni Muslim Indian youth
that would contribute to a global Islamic army to "help Muslims in need,"
fight Iraqi Shiites and become part of a Caliphate.
At about the same time, Mr. Al-Nadwi also raised eyebrows by
praising
the Islamic State’s success in Iraq in a letter to Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi.
The Turkish-Saudi competition for Indian Muslim hearts and
minds is grit on the mill of Hindu nationalists even if Turkish moves have
attracted less attention than those of their Saudi rivals.
The India Foundation, with its close ties to Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), warned last year in an analysis of
the significance of two Saudi-funded universities’ adoption of a palm tree in
their logos that the kingdom’s proselytization “laid the ideological
foundation for Arabisation of Muslims in India. Over time, this has dealt a
suicidal blow to the local character of Islam in the Indian subcontinent.”
Dr. James
M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture,
and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast.
James is the author of The Turbulent World
of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored
volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and
the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting
Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa
and just published China
and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
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