Of course, there is social interaction between Hindus and Muslims, mostly out of compulsion to survive as they depend upon each other for their livelihood. Other than this they live with mutual tolerance rather than real affection for each other. Gandhiji used the very word ‘toleration’ in describing the relationship between Hindus and Muslims. This is not only a modern reality, particularly after the recent terrorist attacks in India and all over the world. [Of course we never call them as ‘Muslim Terrorist or Islamic Terrorism]. It was there in the past as Gandhiji clearly spelled out. Rarely a Muslim will find accommodation in predominantly non-Muslim areas and a Hindu will try her best not to live with any Muslim neighbourhood. In the recent past several TV panel discussions came on this very subject. One of my relatives sold their house as more and more Muslims moved to their building complex.
Of course, there are few exceptions to the common rule like me. I had a very affectionate Muslim neighbour when I lived at Mathigiri. Similarly, I had one Muslim [like my disciple] who has done all the electric works for me both at Mathigiri and Ashram, who several times refused to accept money for his service. Two days before he called [Fyas] and told that he will come to spend one whole day with his family soon in the ashram. Now the so-called ‘Love Jihad’ whether true or false added fuel to fire and most of the Hindu parents tell their children openly that they would even accept their love marriage with any other community but not with Muslims. Note what Gandhi said about marriage alliance between Hindus and Muslims in the following extract. I heard such statements myself. This even went to the extent of parents discouraging their children not having Muslims as friends to their children. If anyone reading this annoyed, please read the following Gandhiji’s words on the same line:
216. HINDU-MUSLIM UNITY A CAMOUFLAGE?
The editorial notes in the current number of The Modern Review contain reflections on Hindu-Muslim unity, which deserve areply. The talented editor has headed them with the word “camouflage” and has evidently come to the conclusion that the unity is only so-called. In my opinion, however, it is not only not a camouflage but is fast becoming a permanent reality. I have made the admission in these pages that it is still a sapling requiring delicate handling. But it is certainly not a pretension or make-believe if only because both realize the truth of the common danger.
It is unfortunately still true, that the communal or the sectarian spirit is predominant. Mutual distrust is still there. Old memories are still alive. It is still true that at elections considerations not of fitness but of religion prevail. But to recognize these facts is to recognize the difficulty of union. When both parties know them and are honestly trying to achieve unity in spite of them, it is hardly just to call the attempt or the limited achievement a camouflage.
(p.444)
The cruellest cut however is given in the following sentence:
Reading between the lines of their speeches, it is not difficult to see that with one of them the sad plight of the Khilafat in distant Turkey is the central fact, while with the other the attainment of swaraj here in India is the primary object in view.
I claim that with us both the Khilafat is the central fact, with Maulana Mahomed Ali because it is his religion, with me because in laying down my life for the Khilafat I ensure the safety of the cow, that is my religion, from the Mussulman knife. Both hold swaraj equally dear because only by swaraj is the safety of our respective faiths possible. This may seem a lower ideal. But there is no concealment in it. For me the attainment of the Khilafat through India’s power is the attainment of swaraj. Love is the basis of our friendship as it is of religion. I seek to gain Mussulman friendship by right of love. And if love persists even on the part of one community, unity will become a settled fact in our national life….
It is unfortunately true, that there are still Hindus and Mussulmans who out of fear of one another consider foreign domination a necessity. And that has not a little to do with the delay in the attainment of our goal. We do not yet clearly perceive that the possibility of a free fight between the two communities is a lesser evil than the existence of foreign domination. And if it is the interposition of the British Government which keeps us from fighting one another, the sooner we are left free to fight, the better for our manhood, our respective religions and our country. It will not be a new phenomenon if we fought ourselves into sanity. The English carried on internecine warfare for twenty-one years before they settled down to peaceful work. The French fought among themselves with a savage ferocity hardly excelled during recent times. The Americans did nothing better before they evolved their commonwealth. Let us not hug our unmanliness for fear of fighting amongst ourselves. The able writer of the “notes” loves unity as much as any of us and suggests that there must be “a root and branch change, a radical transformation and reconstruction from the foundation”. But he leaves the reader to
(p.445)
guess the remedy. It would have been better if he had made concrete suggestions. He would evidently have us inter-marry and inter-dine if only by way of a beginning. If that is the radical transformation desired by him and if it is a condition precedent to the attainment of swaraj I very much fear that we would have to wait at least for a century. It is tantamount to asking Hindus to give up their religion. I do not say that it is wrong to do so, but I do suggest that it is reformation outside practical politics. And when that transformation comes, if it is ever to come, it will not be Hindu-Muslim unity. And what the present movement is aiming at is to achieve unity even whilst a devout Mussulman retains his faith intact and a devout Hindu his. It have therefore often said to my audiences, that the Ali Brothers { Maulana Mahomed Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali,}and I serve as an object-lesson to all Hindus and Mussulmans in Hindu-Muslim unity. We both claim to be devoted to our respective faiths. In spite of the greatest regard for the Brothers I would not give my daughter in marriage to one of their sons, and I know that they would not give theirs to my son, assuming that in spite of his being a Hindu, he so far reformed himself as to covet the hand of their daughter. I do not partake of their meat foods, and they scrupulously respect my bigotry, if my self-denial may be so named. And yet I do not know three persons whose hearts are more united than those of the Ali Brothers and myself. And I wish to assure the reader, that the unity is not a camouflage but it is a lasting friendship based upon exquisitely delicate regard and toleration of one another’s views and habits. And I have no manner of fear that when the protecting hand of the British is withdrawn from me, either the Brothers or their friends would violate my freedom or attack my religion. And I base this security from fear first upon God and His promise of safety to every creature of His who endeavours to walk in His fear, and then upon the honourable conduct of the Brothers and their friends, although I am aware that physically any one of them is more than a match for twelve like me put together. And so from the particular instance I have generalised for the whole of India, and shown that Hindu-Muslim unity is possible if only we have mutual toleration, and faith in ourselves and therefore in the ultimate goodness of human nature.—Young India, 20-10-1921, CWMG, vol. 26, pp. 444 to 446.
Appendix
…In defeat, the Ottoman Empire faced dismemberment; its sultan, whom many of them recognized as their caliph—invested, in their view, with spiritual authority that was no less than papal—was being stripped in the war’s aftermath of his control of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places. The struggle to save the caliphate, known on the subcontinent as the Khilafat, was portrayed in India’s mosques as nothing less than a struggle for Islam, an occasion for jihad and even for hijrat, meaning voluntary migration to a truly Muslim country such as Afghanistan, if Lloyd George’s imperial government remained impervious to the appeals of the subcontinent’s faithful.
No one outside India seriously cared about the feelings of Indian Muslims on this issue or granted them any standing to be heard on it. This was true not only of the victorious Allies now dictating the peace (p. 156) but also of the Arab world, which was hardly sorry to be relieved of Turkish rule; it was even true of most Turks, who’d wearied of the sultan and his decadent court. To most Hindus as well, the future of the Khilafat would have been a matter of profound indifference had they not been exposed to Gandhi’s tireless and ingenious rationalizations for making its preservation a primary goal of India’s national movement. Even then, few understood what it was all about. Gandhi’s knowledge of Islamic history derived from his reading in South Africa of Washington Irving’s Life of Mahomet and an English translation of the Koran. He didn’t try to make the case for the Khilafat. He offered a simple syllogism, telling Hindus it was of supreme importance to their Muslim brethren and, therefore, to national unity, and, therefore, to them. Using an Indian measure that stands for ten million, he asked, “How can twenty-two crore Hindus have peace and happiness if eight crore of their Muslim brethren are torn in anguish?”{The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 97 vols. Ahmedabad, 1958-94 ,, vol. 16, p. 306}
Incomparably quixotic as it may appear today, the Indian struggle to preserve the authority of the Ottoman sultan became the preeminent Indian cause among Muslims. It’s easy to say that it was doomed from the start, but that wasn’t evident to them then. The coup de grace wouldn’t come until 1924, when Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk, formally dissolved the caliphate, driving the last sultan into exile. Still the Khilafat movement lingered on in India, channelling the passion and resentments it had aroused into new reformist groupings, some of which had an influence beyond India that played back into the Arab world in significant ways. One of these was a movement {Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. London, 2003, pp. 44-45}called the Tablighi Jamaat, or Society for the Propagation of the Muslim Faith, usually known as Tabligh, which from its start in India became “the most important element of re-Islamization worldwide,” according to the French expert Gilles Kepel, “ a striking example,” he says, of “a fluid, transnational, informal Islamic movement.” That may sound a little familiar: a complex religious and ideological lineage could be traced over nearly a century from Muhammad Ali and other Indian proponents of the cause to present-day Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, who made restoration of the caliphate one of Al Qaeda’s war aims when he proclaimed his struggle against the United States.—pp. 156-57
…in the rural Malabar district on the Indian Ocean coast, where a community of Muslims known as Mappilas, also Moplahs, rose in rebellion, crying jihad and brandishing the Khilafat flag, after a couple of skirmishes with the police in which two British constables had been killed. Tiny Khilafat kingdoms were then proclaimed by the insurgents, and in some of these, Hindu homes and temples were set ablaze, women raped, and children slaughtered The doctrine of nonviolence had never reached the Malabar district; political meetings had, in fact, been banned there. That was hardly an excuse for the gruesomeness or scale of the carnage: six hundred Hindus reported killed, twenty-five hundred forcibly converted to Islam…— Josephy Lelyveld, GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His struggle with India, New Delhi, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2011, p. 162
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