Muslim Identity and the Colonial Nationalist Public Sphere

This paper explores the question of Muslim identity as articulated by the Indian political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah, or Aga Khan III (1877-1957). Following in the footsteps of the famous nineteenth century Muslim reformer, Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Shah campaigned against issues of “backwardness” among Muslims, advocated British rule, and insisted that Muslims not involve themselves with what was seen as Hindu-dominated Congress. As the first president of the All-India Muslim League, Muhammad Shah played an integral role in pushing for the installation of separate electorates for Muslims, and ultimately, in the call for Partition as well.

This essay examines how Muhammad Shah’s invocation of the secular civic Muslim – educated, progressive and, non-sectarian – falls in line with both British colonial and Indian nationalist understandings of the “model Muslim.” Muhammad Shah’s pan-Muslim political agenda was driven by secular values of the colonial public domain that ultimately necessitated the erasure of all difference and plurality within Islam. I frame Muhammad Shah’s articulation of Muslim identity in the colonial period within recent debates on the formations and workings of the “secular.” I situate these practices of the secular at work in Muhammad Shah’s project of Muslim reform within a historical continuum of colonial discourse on Muslim “backwardness” and culminating in a specifically communitarian notion of Muslim identity in the early nationalist period.