The Weight Of Hindutva, The Wager Of Hope: Muslim Politics And The Labor Of Imagination – OpEd

Under the rule of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in India, Muslims have faced a series of discriminatory measures: attempts at disenfranchisement, bulldozer demolitions of homes, anti-conversion laws, hate speech, bans on hijab in educational institutions, and recurring mob violence with state impunity. The targeting of Muslims is a core agenda of the BJP’s ideology of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism. 

When the state targets individuals not for what they do but simply for being Muslim, it forces a confrontation with an identity that may not have previously defined everyday life so starkly. For Indian Muslims, religious belonging has long been interwoven with regional, linguistic, caste, and class identities, a complexity underscored by empirical research. Cross-cutting economic, social, and caste affiliations often outweigh religious solidarity, as seen in electoral patterns where Muslims did not uniformly support Muslim candidates

Hindutva’s attempt to streamline this complexity into a Hindu/Muslim religious binary can lead to two outcomes. It can: 1) turn Muslim-ness into a psychological possession to be protected; or 2) compel Indian Muslims to make explicit what has been the implicit nature of their religiosity till now, namely an ethical disposition that is woven out of diverse social interactions, instead of being an abstract doctrine. 

The two outcomes don’t have equal weight. In a situation of existential threat, retreating into the comfort of a fixed identity is far more accessible than inhabiting the fragility of a re-imagining that treats religion as the hope of intermingled social existence. Yet it is precisely in this precariousness, where identity is neither fixed nor erased but interrogated, that unexpected possibilities emerge.

Reactive Identity

Currently, a reactive religious identity is strengthening its hold over Indian Muslims. Reaction implies a response shaped by the very thing it opposes. In the Indian context, Muslim reaction is shaped by the structure of Hindutva discourse. In the Hindu nationalist imagination, every aspect of Muslim life is seen as animated by a singular, totalizing religious motive. This worldview functions through a semiotic inflation of the term ‘jihad’, which is appended to a wide range of phenomena to suggest that ordinary Muslim actions are covert acts of war against the Hindu majority. For instance, ‘love jihad’ accuses Muslim men of seducing Hindu women under the guise of romance to convert them to Islam, presenting interfaith relationships as a form of religious infiltration. 

The Muslim Right, instead of deconstructing this accusatory framework, responds by inverting its moral valuation. They do not challenge the premise that religion determines all behaviour; they merely assert that Islam is good and just rather than dangerous and deceitful. For instance, in response to ‘love jihad,’ the idea of a “bhagwa love trap’ has emerged, accusing Hindu men of seducing Muslim women to lure them away from Islam. Here too, the structure remains intact: interfaith relationships are framed as religious warfare, merely with the roles of hero and villain reversed.

This reactive mirror politics does not break from Hindutva’s politics but reproduces it. Identity is still seen as religiously absolute, action as religiously motivated, and difference as inherently conflictual. Rather than disrupting the totalizing structure of religious identity, this reactive politics reinforces it, foreclosing the possibility of pluralistic forms of coexistence.

Reading Talal Asad at AMU: The Crisis of Muslim Political Thought in India

The reactive politics of Muslim identity has come about due to an intellectual failure to imagine futures, instead of just critiquing Hindu majoritarianism. Constant denunciations of Hindutva have failed to transform into a sustained envisioning of what an alternative can look like. This has allowed religion-centric politics to fill the vacuum. 

Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) plays a pivotal role in shaping Muslim political thought in India, producing graduates who become intellectuals, academics, politicians, and bureaucrats. As a Muslim student at AMU, I participated in anti-secularist student study circles, which offered a unique window into the intellectual sensibilities shaping contemporary Muslim right-wing politics. These circles engaged with thinkers like Talal Asad, Wael Hallaq, and institutions like the Ummatics Institute.

Talal Asad’s theoretical framework exemplifies the failure to imagine productive futures. His critique of secularism diagnoses its discursive and institutional operations with nuance but stops short of offering a constructive political vision. This absence of futurity leads Asad to implicitly favour non-liberal religious life, particularly collective Islamic expression, without proposing a viable framework for political organization. 

Asad argues that the category of ‘religion’ is historically contingent, shaped by colonialism and Protestantism, which privatized belief, reducing religion to individual, cognitive assent. This privatization, he argues, makes non-liberal religious forms seem irrational or threatening within secular frameworks. But Asad’s critique remains incomplete: it lacks a normative stance on why collective, embodied religiosity should be valued over privatized forms, especially when the latter allows personal spiritual autonomy without imposing collective norms.

Asad’s failure lies in conflating genealogy with critique. He shows secularism’s historical contingency but assumes this deconstruction defeats secularism itself. However, the Western origins of liberal secularism are separable from its normative aspirations: individual rights, legal equality, and democratic contestation. Cecile Laborde argues that liberal secularism doesn’t suppress religion but embeds it within a system of moral equality, protecting all ethical life systems as long as they respect others’ rights.

This public/private distinction is not anti-religious but ensures no worldview dominates the political sphere. Liberal secularism pluralizes public life, enabling diverse ethical traditions to coexist in fairness and non-domination. Asad, however, fails to theorize why this liberal commitment to ethical independence should be rejected. By critiquing secularism and positing collective religiosity as its counter-hegemonic other, he risks privileging one form of religious expression over another.

At AMU, anti-secularist groups have used Asad’s critique to advocate for autonomous governance by religious communities. Each religion, they argue, should establish its own norms through internal democratic processes, free from state interference. However, if religion is made the basic unit of social organization, it must possess authoritative boundaries, yet the very idea of internal democracy presupposes that Islamic norms are contested and open to interpretation. 

The same Islam that is used to legitimize segmented religion-based governance can also be invoked to support non-religious democratic elections. This tension exposes the difficulty of critiquing secularism without engaging with the viability of religious regimes themselves. Unless religious alternatives can demonstrate a self-sustaining model of human welfare, critiques of secularism risk devolving into tacit endorsements of religious collectivism, while ignoring its potential coercions.

Is Individual Rationality Western? Reflections on Muhsin Hendricks 

The anti-secularist can still argue that the defence of ethical independence carries hidden assumptions about what it means to live a meaningful life. Liberal societies imagine that people should consciously choose their values, reflect on them, and decide for themselves what kind of life is best. That might make sense in cultures where individual choice and personal belief are seen as central. 

But in many traditions, anti-secularists argue, people don’t necessarily pick their values in this way. Their commitments might come from community, family, ritual, or inherited ways of life that are lived out through practice rather than belief. Not everyone thinks of themselves as an individual who ‘chooses’ their path; they may simply live in a way that’s shaped by habits, traditions, and obligations.

What is problematic about this anti-secularist criticism is the geographic restriction of individual rationality as a Western patrimony. People in the Global South have used individual rationality in radical ways to challenge hierarchies. Consider Muhsin Hendricks – a South African imam, Islamic scholar, LGBTQ activist, and husband to a Hindu man. Assassinated in February 2025, he developed a philosophy of Islam that is congruent with individual rationality. 

While Asad’s framework highlights the embeddedness of Islamic norms in the practices of a historical collectivity, it also displays a concern with maintaining coherence. By emphasizing the study of ‘established social practices’ in the anthropology of Islam, Asad asserts durability (establishment) and visibility (practices) as gatekeeping conditions for whether something can be rendered intelligible as ‘Islamic’. 

His statement that ‘not everything Muslims say and do belongs to an Islamic discursive tradition’ suggests that only practices that are explicitly authorized and transmitted within this tradition are considered truly Islamic. This marginalizes: 1) affective, unconscious, or non-discursive aspects of religiosity; and 2) subaltern or fragmented practices that may not align with institutional authorization.

Hendricks intervenes at the very point where Asad forecloses unlicensed theological creativity: he insists that no one has a monopoly on faith, asserting that ‘God is not within the theology’ or mosque but resides in inner reflection, and ethical intuition. This assertion rests on a radical ontology of the divine. Unlike the juridical God who punishes, disciplines, and commands, Hendricks conceives of Allah as ar-Raḥmān (indiscriminately compassionate) and ar-Raḥīm (infinitely merciful). 

For him, God’s mercy is non-discriminatory, encompassing all of creation, including that which tradition has labelled as defective or unnatural. He draws upon Sūrat an-Nūr to evoke a non-anthropomorphic divine: not a God enthroned in transcendence but a radiant light that animates all being. 

This theological aesthetic dissolves the distinction between sacred and profane, rendering every moment of reflection, suffering, and love a potential site of divine encounter. The angry, punitive God, Hendricks argues, is a projection of our own emotional states; punishment is not externally decreed but emerges from the ethical consequences of our choices. 

Hendricks’ ontology reshapes every other aspect of his approach to Islam. Religious life is no longer centred on the reproduction of norms but on the cultivation of values. Islam becomes an ethical orientation, not a doctrinal system. Rituals like fasting are not pursued out of fear of divine retribution, but as practices that deepen values such as patience, solidarity, and inner peace. 

Hendricks’s Islam is thus not one of juridical obligation but of spiritual intimacy. It calls for a value-based engagement with religious life that privileges compassion, authenticity, and mercy over legalistic conformity.

This theological shift directly challenges the authority of canonical tradition and the scholarly monopoly over interpretation. While Hendricks does not reject tradition, he insists it becomes problematic when it marginalizes the space for “quiet reflection” in favour of collective discipline. 

While Asad might see this as secular fragmentation, Hendricks argues that it is ethical immediacy, not individualism, that drives his theology. While he cherishes the collective spirit of Ramadān and Hajj, Hendricks is clear that this communal Islam must not override the sanctity of the personal. 

The values taught by the Qur’an are, in his account, nurtured most profoundly in solitude, where one can attune to the ethical core of divine teaching without the pressures of performed religiosity. While Asad valorises historical continuity and canonical authority, Hendricks asserts a moment of spiritual rupture where all forms of stability are dissolved by the divine intensity of a person engaging with Allah. 

Moreover, Hendricks’s life – married to a Hindu man and deeply engaged with other spiritual traditions – challenges Asad’s emphasis on Islamic coherence. He rejects the logic of exclusion and sees heterodoxy not as a danger but as an invitation to theological humility. 

In sum, where Asad reads Islam through historical intelligibility, Hendricks reclaims it through existential truth, emphasizing inward illumination, value-formation, and love. Politically, Hendricks’ Islamic philosophy sidesteps the Indian Muslim right’s ideology of religious purity, doctrinal coherence and exclusion, by focusing on authenticity and open-ended sociality. 

In a time when Muslim identity in India is reduced to a threat or reaction, his life reminds us that another Islam is possible, one unburdened by the need to mirror its persecutors, one capacious enough to live with others, and courageous enough to imagine new worlds.