Clash of civilizations

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The Origins & Development of Deendar Anjuman (1924-2000) *
By Yoginder Sikand
Posted on September 28, 2000


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Between Dialogue and Conflict: The Origins and Development of the Deendar Anjuman (1924-2000) by Yoginder Sikand

Introduction

Between May and July 2000, a series of bombs went off at twelve places of worship in different towns in the south Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa. Most of these were churches, but a Hindu temple and a mosque were also targeted and were badly damaged. Anti-Christian hate literature, purported to have been issued by Hindu chauvinist groups, was found at the site of many of the blasts. Fingers of suspicion were initially pointed at Hindu groups, who have, in recent years, been involved in violent attacks on Christians and Christian-owned properties in large parts of India. However, in July 2000, the police and Union Home Ministry sources claimed to have discovered evidence of a hitherto little-known Muslim group, the Deendar Anjuman, in masterminding the blasts, accusing it of seeking to provoke further hostility between Hindus and Christians. The Indian press gave much publicity to these reports, indeed much more so than it had to confirmed evidence of earlier Hindu attacks on Christian churches and priests. The manner of reporting about the alleged role of the Deendar Anjuman in the incidents strongly suggested that the events were sought to be given the image of a Muslim-Christian confrontation or as yet another expression and evidence of Muslim ‘terrorism’ and Islamic ‘fundamentalism’. Further, the distinct impression was sought to be created that Hindu militant groups, whose role in previous attacks on Christians in India had been clearly proven, had been all along wrongly blamed, and that behind much of the current anti-Christian wave in India was a hidden ‘Islamic’ or ‘Pakistani’ hand. For right-wing Hindu organisations, the attacks came as a blessing in disguise, which they sought to use to absolve themselves of accusations of violent anti-Christian activity in order to salvage their sagging public image, which had attracted sharp criticism at home and abroad.

In the wake of the attacks, many Indian papers went so far as to claim that the alleged involvement of the Deendar Anjuman in the incidents was part of a larger Pakistan ‘plot’ engineered by its secret service, the Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI) to instigate Hindu-Christian conflict and, thereby, further ‘destabilise’ India. ‘ISI Twin-Plan: Attack Christians, Blame Hindus’, screamed a headline in the influential daily Economic Times, accusing the Anjuman of working at the behest of the ISI and the Lashkar-i-Taiba, a militant group based in Pakistan and active in the ongoing struggle in Kashmir. It was said that the next target of the attackers had been the famous Venkateshwara temple at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, which they had planned to blow up, and thereby trigger of large scale communal rioting all over south India. The Home Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Devender Goud, claimed that these attacks were merely a prelude to a grand conspiracy planned by Deendar Anjuman leaders based in Pakistan to launch a jihad against India with a vast army of 9,00,000 Pathans from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, reportedly ‘planned as per the dictates of the ISI’. A Union Home Ministry source claimed to have discovered ‘significant evidence’ of the Anjuman’s involvement in the blasts, and declared that this was part of a sinister campaign to ‘spread terror among Christians and hatred between Christians and Hindus’. Echoing this view, the influential English fortnightly India Today commented, ‘It is clear that the followers of the sect …are now part of a larger game of waging jehad against the Hindus and Christians in India…and [their] long term goal is to make Indian an Islamic state’. For this purpose, police sources claimed, members of the Anjuman had, from 1992 onwards, been crossing to Pakistan, ostensibly on pilgrimage, but actually for receiving armed training at camps set up by the head of the Anjuman’s Pakistan wing, Zia-ul Hasan, son of the founder of the sect, based at Mardan in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Hasan, a Indian newspaper report alleged, had been ‘brainwashed’ by the ISI into helping it in its alleged mission of ‘destabilising’ India. A special report prepared by the Andhra Pradesh police claimed that in 1995, Zia-ul Hasan had ‘hatched a conspiracy to disturb communal harmony and the secular fabric of Indian society, thereby affecting internal security’. The report accused him of a plot to ‘create nifaq (hatred)’ between different communities in India, as a prelude to a grand jihad to invade India and convert the Hindus to Islam. As the initial stage in this ‘conspiracy’, Indian Anjuman members are claimed to have been trained at an Anjuman camp in Pakistan in handling explosives, after which they returned to India, and were reportedly involved in the destruction of several statues of the Dalit hero Ambedkar at several places in Andhra Pradesh, in an effort to instigate conflict between Dalits and the caste Hindus. It was alleged that Hasan had paid a visit to Hyderabad in mid-May, 2000, and at a secret meeting had selected a group of his Indian followers, taken them to Pakistan to be given armed training, and sent them back to south India to bomb places of worship, so that, as J.Dora, the Director General of Police, Andhra Pradesh, put it, with the south torn apart with communal rioting, the Anjuman, leading an army of almost a million Pathans from Pakistan, could invade India from the north some time in 2001. An arrested member of the Anjuman is said to have revealed to the police during his interrogation that Zia-ul Hasan had announced to his followers that, ‘The time had come for attacking Hindustan and that everybody should be ready to give up their lives [sic.] and become a mujahid’. He had allegedly promised them that all of India would soon turn Muslim. In the wake of these allegations, the Indian government came out with a statement asking its intelligence agencies to expose the ‘grand design’ of the Anjuman to ‘foment communal tension in the country’ with what it alleged to be the ‘active support’ of the ISI. The Indian Home Minister, L.K.Advani, declared that the Government of India was contemplating a ban on the sect.

Predictably, leaders of the Deendar Anjuman based at the group’s headquarters in Hyderabad (Deccan) strongly rebutted the allegations levelled against them. They asserted that the Anjuman had nothing to do with the forty persons said to be responsible for the attacks, almost all members of the Anjuman, who were later taken into police custody. The acting president of the Anjuman, the eighty year-old Maulana Muhammad Usman ‘Ali Mallana, declared that his organisation ‘strongly condemned any such activity that would hurt the religious sensibilities of people’ and offered to co-operate with the police in tracking down the attackers. He went on to add that the Anjuman firmly ‘believes in peace, brotherhood, tranquillity, tolerance and communal harmony among the followers of various religions’, and that it had full respect for the law of the land and the Indian Constitution. He claimed that the Anjuman was itself set up for the purpose of promoting brotherhood, unity and understanding between people of various different faiths, and that this it had always been doing, using strictly peaceful means such as organising inter-religious dialogue conferences. Given this history of the sect, Mallana claimed that the members of the Deendar Anjuman ‘are the last persons to preach hatred or intolerance’. He also categorically denied any association with the ISI, and said that allegations of the Anjuman’s links with it and of its involvement in the attacks were ‘a conspiracy’ to defame the group. He claimed that it was the CIA that had possibly masterminded the blasts. Some Anjuman members commented that their success in winning converts to their version of Islam had won them the wrath of the Indian establishment and that the entire controversy about the blasts was simply a means to defame them and put a halt to the spread of their faith.

Just as the various reports of the involvement of the Anjuman in the blasts presented contradictory images, so, too, did reports about the nature, history and identity of the organisation. Several Muslim groups denied that the Deendar Anjuman was Muslim at all, for the sect believes that Allah and the Hindu Ishwar are one and so are Imam ‘Ali and the Hindu god Ganesh. The Amir-i-Shari‘at of Karnataka, Mufti Ashraf ‘Ali, reiterated a fifteen year-old fatwa declaring the founder of the Anjuman as a kafir and well outside the pale of Islam for having claimed that he was the incarnation (avatar) of a Hindu deity, Channabasaveswara. Some described it as a strange, and, in many ways, unique syncretistic cult, drawing upon Islam as well as local religious and cultural traditions. According to one newspaper account, it was ‘a concoction of Hinduism and Islam’ which was ‘not acceptable to a large number of Muslims’ because it believed that ‘Allah and Om were the same’. According to another version, it represented ‘a strange alchemy of religion and mysticism’, ‘propagating the concept of the universal appeal of all religions’ and ‘giving a new meaning to the principle of showing mutual respect and peaceful co-existence’. It was portrayed as ‘a fighting team taming the rising communal passions’, preaching ‘harmony and peace’ between followers of different religions, and ‘doing yeoman service in bridging the differences based on religion, race, caste and colour’. Likewise, according to another report, it was a group based on ‘liberal teachings’, representing a ‘syncretic culture’. For their part, the Anjuman authorities based in Hyderabad claimed that the main focus of the community ever since its founding some three-quarters of a century ago, had always been to ‘propagate peace and harmony’ and asserted that never in its history had the Anjuman ever been ‘involved in controversies’. They maintained that the organisation had ‘never indulged in activities detrimental to mankind’. A report prepared by the Andhra Pradesh police presented quite a different image of the Anjuman, describing it as ‘a highly fanatical and shrewd Muslim militant organisation’, with its ‘sole objective’ being ‘to Islamise India through proselytisation and preaching’. The Anjuman was said to have ‘cleverly masked its hatred towards other religions under the guise of universal peace and brotherhood’, using this as a cover to carry on with its agenda of Islamising India. In a similar vein, the Andhra Pradesh Home Minister, echoing the views of senior police officials, claimed that the Anjuman’s annual inter-religious dialogue and peace conferences and other such activities were simply a ‘guise’, under which, he declared, ‘the organisation planned to spread terror through violence and incite communal trouble in the state and in other parts of the country’.

These widely differing representations of the Anjuman clearly point to the fact that little seems to be actually known about the group. This article seeks to unravel several complex issues involved in the present controversy in which the Anjuman has been implicated. While it is not possible, for lack of any firm evidence, to ascertain whether or not the Anjuman has actually been involved in the recent bomb attacks in south India, a critical analysis of the history of the group can provide critical insights into how the Anjuman has tended to perceive other religious groups and how it has sought to relate to them over time. This could provide valuable clues to as to the how the group today sees its place in and engages with the contemporary Indian context of religious pluralism, which is being increasingly challenged by the rise of ethnic and religious chauvinist groups. In particular, the Anjuman’s own inter-religious dialogue project is closely looked at, to see what this entails as regards the group’s relations with members of other religious communities. Is this project geared to the creation of universal brotherhood and love between people of all faiths, as the Anjuman authorities insist it is, or is it simply a cover-up for a political agenda or for religious proselytisation, as Indian police and newspaper accounts allege? Focusing on the Anjuman’s peculiar doctrinal positions which mark it as quite distinct from other Muslim groups, this booklet traces the origins and development of the Anjuman in early twentieth century south India and, in the process, looks at the ways in which it has sought to position itself vis-à-vis other groups, Muslim as well as Hindu. This examination of the historical development of the Anjuman might help shed some light on the present controversy.
The central argument that this booklet seeks to advance is that the genesis and the development of the Deendar Anjuman cannot be seen apart from the charged political context of the 1920s when it was founded, a period of intense hostility and conflict between Muslim and Hindu groups. Indeed, the setting up of the Anjuman in 1924 by Siddiq Hussain, the founder of the Anjuman, is said to have been a response to the shuddhi movement of the Arya Samaj, in the course of which several thousand Muslims in north India are believed to have been brought into the Hindu fold. At this juncture, Siddiq Hussain publicly declared that he had been appointed by God as the incarnation of the Hindu deity Channabasveswara to bring all Hindus to Islam. From then on till his death in 1952 he was actively involved in efforts to spread Islam in south India, presenting Islam as a fulfilment of Hinduism rather than as a completely separate religion. In the course of his missionary work he came into conflict with other Muslim groups who suspected the Islamic credentials of the peculiar claims that he put forward for himself. He was also confronted with stiff opposition from various Hindu groups, particularly the Lingayats, the Arya Samajists and the Sanatanists, for his religious views and his missionary activities. Indeed, it can be said, contrary to what Anjuman authorities have claimed in response to allegations about their involvement in the recent bomb blasts, that conflict with other groups, rather than peaceful co-operation, has been a characteristic feature of much of the history of the Anjuman. Although the organising of an annual inter-religious conference became a regular feature of the Anjuman as early as in 1929, such activities must be seen as part of a broader agenda. In this way, the Anjuman’s inter-religious dialogue work, which its leaders today present as proof of their commitment to inter-religious harmony, was seen as just another means for combating rival religions, including, implicitly, rival expressions of Islam, and asserting its own claims to truth. In other words, this booklet argues that conflict has been a defining feature of the Anjuman, a pervasive feature of the life of its founder, although in the period after 1947 this has taken on less overt forms in order to carry on with the mission of Siddiq Hussain in the changed political context.

Siddiq Hussain: The Founder of the Deendar Anjuman

Sayyed Siddiq Hussain, the founder of the Deendar Anjuman, was born to Sayyed Amir Hussain and his wife Sayyeda Amina, in 1886 at Balampet in the Gurmatkal taluqa of the Gulbarga district, then part of the Nizam’s Dominions and now in the Karnataka state in south India. His family traced their descent to the Prophet Muhammad, and were known for having produced numerous leading Sufis belonging to the Qadri order. Siddiq Hussain received his primary education first at Gulbarga and then at Hyderabad, where he learnt Arabic from one Maulana ‘Abdul Nabi. Later, he enrolled at the Muhammadan Arts College, Madras, and from there he went on to the Bursen College, Lahore, for his higher education. In the course of his studies he is said to have mastered eleven languages and developed an expertise in medicine and the martial arts.

As a young man, the hagiographic accounts tell us, Siddiq Hussain developed a great interest in various religions, and came into contact with several noted Sufis and Islamic scholars of his time. These included Shibli Numani, the noted ‘alim, Baba Tajuddin of Nagpur, Maulana ‘Abdullah of Tamapur, Hazrat Miskin Shah Baba, and Zohra Bi and Maulana Mir Muhammad Sa‘id of Hyderabad. From the last mentioned he took the bai‘at or oath of initiation in the Qadri Sufi order. In 1914, in his ‘passion’, as he puts it, ‘to study the Qur’an’, he joined the Qadiani branch of the heterodox Ahmadiyya community, considered outside the pale of Islam for its belief that its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a prophet sent by God, and, in doing so, denying the Islamic belief in the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad. He took the oath of allegiance at the hands of the then head of the Qadiani jama‘at, Miyan Bashiruddin Mahmud Ahmad, son of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, but fourteen days later he renounced his membership, accusing the Qadianis of being kafirs for considering the Mirza as a prophet. It is likely that at this time he moved closer to the rival Lahori branch of the Ahmadis, who split off from the main Ahmadi jama‘at in 1914 on the question of the status of the Mirza. Unlike the Qadianis, the Lahoris, led by the well-known Islamic scholar Maulana Muhammad ‘Ali, insisted that the Mirza was not a prophet but simply a mujaddid (‘renewer of the faith’). He quoted the well-known tradition attributed to Muhammad that at the end of every Islamic century God would send a mujaddid to the world to revive the faith, and claimed that the Mirza was the mujaddid of the fourteenth century of the Islamic calendar. It is possible that Siddiq Hussain might actually have formally joined the Lahori jama‘at, for in his tract A‘ada-i-Islam (‘Enemies of Islam’), dating to the mid-1920s, he wrote that he and members of his Anjuman believed that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had been sent by God as the mujaddid of the fourteenth century, indicating the regard he continued to hold the Mirza in great esteem, despite having parted ways with the Qadianis. In one of his early writings, dated to the late 1920s, he wrote that after he left the Qadiani jama‘at, he spent some time in the company of Maulana Muhammad ‘Ali and Maulvi Khwaja Kamaluddin, the leading lights of the Lahori branch of the Ahmadis.

The Launching of the Mission

In the early hagiographic accounts of Siddiq Hussain written by his followers and even in his own writings, we hear little of his activities till 1924, when he publicly declared what he claimed was his divine mission, and established the Deendar Anjuman (‘The Religious Association’). The 1920s were a crucial period for Hindu-Muslim relations in India, witnessing a marked rise of Hindu-Muslim conflict after a brief spell of inter-communal harmony in the course of the short-lived Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements. In early 1923, the Arya Samaj, a militant and openly anti-Muslim Hindu chauvinist group, launched a massive drive to bring into the Hindu fold hundreds of thousands of Rajput Muslims in the north-western districts of the United Provinces. Soon, the campaign, which the Aryas referred to as the Shuddhi Andolan (‘The Purification Movement’) and the Muslims as the Tehrik-i-Irtidad (‘The Apostasy Movement’), spread to other areas of India, and Arya leaders began issuing calls for converting all the Indian Muslims. Muslim leaders responded with alarm, launching efforts at countering the Aryas through various Islamic missionary (tabligh) groups. Siddiq Hussain is said to have actively worked with one of the leading Tablighi activists of this time, the Amristar-based lawyer, Ghulam Bhik Nairang, and his Anjuman Tabligh-ul Islam, in attempting to prevent the Aryas from making further inroads among the Muslims and also in spreading Islam among non-Muslim groups, particularly the ‘lower’ castes. This is the first evidence that we have of the beginning of what was to become his life-long involvement in missionary work and in combating the Arya Samaj.

After spending some time in the north with the Lahori Ahmadis, with members of the Ahl-i-Qur’an and with Nairang and his Tablighi group, Siddiq Hussain returned to Hyderabad and established a medical practice there. By this time, aggressive communal politics, which had become such a characteristic feature of north Indian life, had made its way into the state. Ruled by a Muslim Nizam and a small, feudal class, largely Muslim, Hyderabad was a Hindu-majority state, with a Muslim population of hardly one in ten. By the 1920s, resentment against the predominance of Muslims in the upper echelons of government service increasingly led a rising generation of newly-educated Hindus to the path of confrontation, which soon assumed the form, as elsewhere in India, of Hindu-Muslim antagonism. In response to this growing Hindu aggressiveness, the Majlis-i-Ittihad ul-Muslimin (‘The Committee for the Unity of Muslims’) was set up in 1927, with its headquarters at Hyderabad, whose avowed purpose was to protect Muslim interests, reflecting, as ‘Alam says, ‘a concern with the growing dissatisfaction of the Hindus with the government’. In 1933, the Arya Samaj, which, till then, had been limited by its predominantly north Indian base, turned its attention to Hyderabad, where it had already established a small presence in the late nineteenth century. Beginning in 1931, a series of clashes took place between the Aryas, who saw themselves as defenders of the Hindus, and the Nizam’s forces. Several branches of the Samaj were now set up in the Nizam’s Dominions. In 1938, the Aryas launched a mass struggle, along with the Hindu Mahasabha, against the Nizam which carried on for several months, in the course of which some 8000 Aryas and other Hindus were arrested. The Arya agitators, according to one report, are said to have exhorted the local Hindus to ‘rise and fight the Muslims, kill them and overthrow them, as the country belonged to the Hindus and not the Muslims’, in addition to appealing to them not to pay their taxes to the Nizam. A fierce communal riot broke out that year, in which scores of Muslims living in Hindu localities were killed. In January 1939, the Aryas launched a fresh agitation against the Nizam, this time assisted by the Hyderabad State Congress, which came to an end six months later, when the Nizam was forced to agree to many of the demands of the agitators. In the aftermath of the 1938 riots, the Majlis, alarmed at the rising tide of Hindu aggressiveness, took on a more militant posture. It now modified its Constitution to declare that ‘The ruler and the throne are the symbols of the political and cultural rights of the Muslim community in the state’, and that, therefore, ‘this status of the Muslims must continue forever’. As ‘Alam puts it, beginning in the late 1920s ‘a warlike atmosphere’ between Hindus and Muslims seems to have taken hold of Hyderabad.
Deeply involved as he was, by this time, with various Islamic movements, having spent many years in the company of Sufis and leading ‘ulama, the Qadianis and then the Lahoris, followed by his association with Nairang’s Anjuman Tabligh ul-Islam, Siddiq Hussain seems to have been greatly affected by what he saw as the grave threats to Islam and Muslim interests at the hands of aggressive Hindu groups at this time. Launching a large-scale missionary campaign, aimed at nothing less than the conversion of all the Hindus of India to Islam, suggested itself to him as the need of the hour. This was to go on to become his life’s major vocation, in response, he asserted, to a divine command which he claimed to have received.

Siddiq Hussain’s missionary career may be divided into three phases, each related to the changing nature of Hindu-Muslim relations and the general socio-political context of the times. To begin with, roughly from 1924 to 1930 is what could be called the phase of ‘peaceful persuasion’, in which preaching, persuasion and distribution of literature were adopted as means to spread his message among, first, the Lingayats, and then the Hindus in general. This phase corresponded with the emergence of rumblings of discontent among the Hindus of Hyderabad, but which had yet to take on violent, aggressive forms. The period from 1930 till 1948 could be termed as the phase of ‘violent aggression’, in which, among other means, Siddiq Hussain advocated the declaration of actual war, styled as a jihad, in addition to being involved in several court cases with his detractors. This corresponds to the period when the Arya Samaj had grown into a powerful oppositional force in Hyderabad, challenging, like the emerging Communist and the Congress parties sought to do, the power of the Nizam and the largely Muslim feudal elite. After his release from prison two months before his death in 1952, Siddiq Hussain once again seems to have gone back to his earlier mode of preaching, and this short phase can be termed as one of ‘pragmatic accommodation’.

Missionary Work Among the Lingayats

Siddiq Hussain began his missionary career among the Lingayats, a group of Shiva-worshippers living mainly in the Kannada-speaking districts of the Nizam’s Dominions and in neighbouring Mysore. According to Anjuman sources, once, while on a trip to the shrine of Kodekkal Basappa, a Sufi highly venerated by the local Lingayats, he reportedly heard that the Sufi had predicted the arrival of a saviour of the Lingayats, in the form of ‘Deendar Channabasaveswara’, who would be born in a Muslim family and would ‘make the Hindus and Muslims one’. This, he was to later claim, was a prophecy heralding his own arrival. By this time, as he writes, he had already dedicated his life to the cause of the spread of Islam, and, noting the ‘special features’ (khususiyat) of the Lingayats, decided to work among them. In order to communicate with them, he married a Kannada-speaking Muslim woman from Talikotta who taught him their language. After his marriage, he visited several Lingayat temples and monasteries, spending much time with the priests, learning Sanskrit and their scriptures from them. Then, it is said, he received divine inspiration in the form of a dream informing him that he had been appointed by God as an avatar of the Lingayat saint Channabasaveswara, in the form of Deendar Channabasaveswara, to bring all the Hindus of India to Islam. Accordingly, he travelled to Gadag, a small town near Hubli, and on 7 February, 1924, publicly announced that he was much-awaited messiah of the Lingayats, the Deendar Chanabasaveswara and the saviour of the Hindus. ‘Oh Hindus!’, he declared, ‘I am the guru who has been predicted in your scriptures’. Besides claiming to be the Deendar Channabasaveswara, he also, at this time, declared himself to be the kalki avatar, the tenth and last incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu, who, the Hindus believe, would arrive to extirpate misery from the world, put an end to the ‘evil age’ of kali yug and herald the arrival of the ‘age of truth’(sat yug). This, he said, had been revealed to him by God Himself, who had told him that he would establish the sat yug in 1943. As he put it, ‘ Shri Bhagwan has informed me that I will appear as the kalki avatar. The kali yug is soon to be abolished and the sat yug inaugurated’. Shortly after that, he said, in the second half of the fourteenth (Islamic) century, the Day of Judgement (qayamat) shall come.

In his A‘ada-i-Islam, a tract penned to convince Muslims of his claims, Siddiq Hussain wrote that it was as a response to the successes of the Arya Samaj in bringing to the Hindu fold several thousand Muslims in northern India that he received a divine inspiration, informing him that ‘God had willed that the greatest incarnation (avatar) of the Hindus should emerge to declare to the Hindus that their only hope for salvation lay in converting to Islam’. Elsewhere, he wrote that in the wake of the shuddhi movement of the Aryas, India had witnessed ‘heinous assaults’ on Islam and the person of Muhammad. ‘God’, he said, ‘was watching this, and had decided to take revenge by making all India Muslim’. He now assumed the name of Siddiq Deendar Channabasaveswara, and in doing so, he claimed that he was simply fulfilling the prophecies contained in the holy books of the Lingayats and the Hindus, which, he claimed, had predicted his arrival and had also indicated the truth of Islam. In his words:

Allah has appointed their biggest avatar in order to make them Muslim by pointing out the directions contained in the books of the enemies of the Muslims (dushmanan-i-islam), and he [this avatar] has announced: ‘Oh Hindus! If you seek salvation then become Muslim because you can see that till your avatars recited the creed of confession (kalima) of our Master, Muhammad, peace and Allah’s blessings be upon him, they did not gain salvation, so how can you be saved if you do not do so?’.

Siddiq Hussain’s choice of the Lingayats as the first group to direct his missionary concerns to was probably motivated by the fact that the Lingayat tradition, being, in its original form, sternly monotheistic and having emerged from a powerful protest movement against idolatry and caste dating back to the twelfth century, shared much in common with Islam. Aware of the powerful anti-Brahminical traditions of the Lingayats, Siddiq Hussain probably believed that his claims would fall on receptive ears and that the Lingayats would respond warmly to his appeals. Many Lingayats of what is today northern Karnataka are also followers of the cults of the Sufis, whose shrines are found scattered all over the countryside. Some of these are revered as local deities by the Lingayats, such as the Bahmani ruler Ahmad Shah Wali, worshipped as an incarnation of the Lingayat deity Shah Allama Prabhu, or the Sufi Shah Muinuddin of Thinthini, known to the Lingayats as Munishwar. Given this syncretistic tradition among the Lingayats, Siddiq Hussain probably felt that his appeals to them to convert to Islam, claiming himself to be the incarnation of Channabasaveswara, son-in-law of the founder of the Lingayat sect, Basava, and the one responsible for consolidating and leading the community texts after Basava’s death, might evoke a positive response.

In a pamphlet written in the mid-1920s addressed specifically to the Lingayats, Siddiq Hussain declared that the time had come for the entire world to be united as one on the basis of Islam. He claimed that if the Muslims were only to fulfil their religious duties, ‘all the people of the world are ready to fall into their lap’. In particular, he said, the Lingayats, whom he estimated numbered some 50,00,000, were ripe for conversion to Islam, because, in his words, they were ‘pitiable, powerless, bereft of friends’ and ‘their source of support has always been the Muslim community’. He described the Lingayats as an oppressed group, awaiting a messiah who would deliver them from the persecution of the Brahmins, and saw himself as having been appointed by God for that purpose. As he put it:

This community is crying out, saying: ‘Oh Mercy of the Worlds (rahmat al lil ‘alamin)! You are most merciful. Take pity on us. We are without any support and helpers. Save us from the clutches of our oppressors and take us into your refuge. For thousands of years the worshippers of Vishnu (hari wale) have oppressed us and our neighbours, the Dravidian communities, and have reduced us to the status of Shudras. They snatched away our political power and forced us to flee to the forests, where, for thousands of years, we roamed the jungles like barbarians’.

Employing the logic so central to the discourse of the emerging Dravidian and Dalit movements of his times that saw Brahmin/Aryan hegemony as the source of the plight of the ‘lower’ castes, Siddiq Hussain then went on to suggest that it was Islam that has historically played a crusading role in liberating the downtrodden castes from the shackles of caste oppression, a role that it can once again play in mobilising the Lingayats and other Shiva-worshipping ‘lower’ caste groups against the control of the Brahmins, the worshippers of Vishnu [hari wale]. Thus, he added:

The Lingayats now tell us : ‘Some eight hundred years ago, when the Muslims arrived in the Deccan and established their political power, they helped us to rise again and, with their help and in the face of the opposition of the worshippers of Vishnu, we set up large thrones (singhasana) in many towns, but, now, unfortunately, our helpers (Muslims) have been ousted from power’.

The message then is clear: the Lingayats must join hands with the Muslims and work to re-establish Muslim political power if they are to be able to effectively counter the forces of Brahminical revival which is set to reduce them, once more, to the status of slaves. Siddiq Hussain claimed that the Dravidians were being rapidly absorbed into the fold of Vaishnavism as part of a conspiracy on the part of Vishnu-worshipping ‘high’ caste Hindus to enslave them. On the other hand, the Dravidians wer, he said, also being targeted for conversion by the Christian missionaries and the Arya Samajists. The time was not far off, he predicted , when the entire Dravidian race might finally be extinct. If this happened, the Lingayats would be ‘forced into free labour ( begar)’ by the Brahmins, a form of social slavery that had been imposed on the Dravidians for centuries. In this context, Siddiq Hussain saw a glimmer of hope for the Lingayats, and wrote:

[The Lingayats say]: ‘Our only source of hope is the prediction in our sacred scriptures that one day a saviour will appear who will deliver us from all our woes and will take us to the pinnacle of glory and will make us triumph over all our enemies. He will come in the form of Deendar Channabasaveswara, who, in accordance with the predictions of Mauneswara, will make the Hindus and the Turukus (Muslims) one’.

Siddiq Hussain then went on to claim that it was he who had been foretold of in the Lingayat scriptures and by some seventy medieval Puranthanars or saints of the Lingayat tradition, as the would-be saviour of the Lingayats, the Deendar Channabsasveswara, and that now the only way for salvation for the community was by following his instructions and converting to Islam. What is interesting about Siddiq Hussain’s appeals to the Lingayats is that in appealing to them to convert to Islam he did not repudiate the legitimacy of the Lingayat scriptures or deny that they might also be of divine origin. On the contrary, he accepted that these scriptures were true and had a certain validity, at least insofar as he claimed that they had foretold his arrival in the form of Deendar Channabasaveswara. In his writings, he presented the Lingayat tradition as almost identical with Islam. This entailed a radical revisioning of Lingayat history, of course. Thus, he claimed that the Lingayats were ‘actually Arab by race’ and so ‘are neighbours and, in matters religious, very close to the Muslims’. In effect, he sought to present the Lingayats as a people Muslim in origin, whose own real history they have forgotten, and which he saw himself as resurrecting. Thus, he wrote that the founder of the Lingayat community, Basava, was himself a Muslim and that he actually preached Islam. As evidence for this he cited the fact that the colour of the flag of most Lingayat monasteries (mutths) is green, and claimed that Basava himself recited the Islamic kalima on his death-bed. He also claimed that Channabasaveswara, nephew and successor of Basava, had installed a medallion with the kalima inscribed on it, which, he said, was still to be found in the sprawling Lingayat mutth at Chitradurga. If the Lingayats were actually Muslim in origin, then, Siddiq Husain suggested, they must now go back to Islam. He explained the consequent ‘straying’ away of the Lingayats from what he saw as the original teachings of Basava as a result of the conspiracy of ‘some biased people’ who had misled them and created hatred between them and the Muslims. However, he hoped, now that he had appeared as an avatar of Channabasaveswara, the Lingayats would ‘realise their real roots’.

In another booklet, titled Deendar Channabasaveswara, Siddiq Hussain sought to impress upon the Lingayats as well as other Hindu groups the truth of his claims of being the much-awaited messiah prophesied in their ancient texts. He wrote the various Hindu scriptures speak of the Deendar Channabasaveswara being sent by God to unite the world, bearing 56 ‘bodily signs’ and coming at a time when 96 ‘evidences’ would be apparent ‘in the earth and the skies’. All these, he argued, had been fulfilled with his arrival. He claimed that the Hindu and Lingayat scriptures predict that through Deendar Channabasaveswara ‘the entire Hindustan will turn Muslim’. This, however, will not be by gentle persuasion alone. It will be accompanied by much tumult and conflict. The Deendar Channabasaveswara, along with his army of Pathan followers will, so he claimed that the Lingayat scriptures foretell, ‘empty the treasuries of the [temples of] Tirupati and Hampi’, the latter allegedly containing the riches that belonged to the legendary Ravana and the monkey-king Vali. They shall ensure that ‘there is not one idol left standing in any temple’ in the country. The first idol to be destroyed will be that of the temple at Tirupati. This will be followed by the idols at Hampi and then in the great temples at Amapur and Pandharpur, and ‘there will be a great destruction of idols’ (buton ke todne ki dhum hogi) throughout the country. <span style='color:red'>Deendar Channabsaveswara would then set about ‘uniting all the 101 castes [zat]’, by making all Hindus Muslim. In the process, the power of the Brahmins will be completely destroyed.</span> Finally, Deendar Channabsaveswara will be recognised as the ‘king of kings’ (badshahon ke badshah).

By this time, Siddiq Hussain appears to have made a small band of disciples, almost all from Muslim families, attracted to him by his messianic appeal and charisma. He now set about training them in the Qur’an as well as in the Lingayat and Hindu scriptures, taking them along with him on his missionary tours of Lingayat villages, temples and monasteries. Among the prominent disciples whom he made at this point was one Abu Nazir Vitthal, who was earlier a priest (swami) of the Manvi Lingayat monastery at Belgaum. He gave several of his disciples Hindu names, in order to make them more acceptable to the Lingayats and the Hindus among whom he was preaching. Thus, four of his chief followers were given names of Hindu deities-Vyas, Shri Krishna, Narasimha and Virabhadra. He styled himself as Dharamraja or ‘the Righteous King’. He and his disciples donned robes which, in many respects, closely resembled those of Lingayat priests-ochre coloured cloaks, green turbans and white lungis. Despite these attempts to inculturate his message in a form he thought would be acceptable to his audience, Siddiq Hussain’s appeals to the Lingayats to accept him as Deendar Channabasaveswara and to convert to Islam raised a storm of protest. ‘The Hindu world was shaken from its roots’ when Siddiq Hussain declared his ‘divine mission’ to the Hindus, following which ‘many Hindus, including their gurus converted to Islam’ says an Anjuman source, obviously exaggerating the success of Siddiq Hussain’s missionary efforts among the Lingayats. Apparently, while some Lingayats are said to have heeded his call and accepted Islam at his hands, several attempts were made on his life by enraged Lingayats, egged on, Siddiq Hussain alleged, by enraged Arya Samajists. According to one account, in 1924 alone he was physically attacked 25 times in an effort to eliminate him. He was to claim that these attempts failed because he was under divine protection.

The Aryas, according to him, rose in furious protest against his efforts to spread Islam among the Lingayats. In a bid to discredit him among the Muslims, whose support he had hoped for in his work among the Lingayats, the Aryas of Lahore are said to have published an Urdu tract titled Naqli Channabasaveswara Ya Khanjar-i-Zalim (‘The False Channabasaveswara or the Dagger of the Tyrant’) and distributed it in thousands among Muslims, claiming that the Deendar Anjuman was actually a secret branch of the Ahmadis. The alleged Ahmadi link was hardly surprising. After all, Siddiq Hussain had earlier joined the Qadiani Ahmadis, and although he disassociated himself from them a fortnight later, he did, as he himself admitted, maintain a close relationship with the leaders of the Lahori branch of the sect. Moreover, the fact that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadi community, had himself made similar claims for himself, of being the promised messiah and the kalki avatar of the Hindus, suggests the possibility of a distinct Ahmadi influence on Siddiq Hussain’s own missionary strategy among the Lingayats.
In response to the publication of the booklet by the Aryas, Siddiq Hussain announced a sum of Rs.5000 to anyone who could prove that he was a false claimant of being the Deendar Channabasaveswara of the Lingayats. The Aryas took up the challenge and instituted a case against him in the courts, accusing him of creating religious disharmony. The case lasted eight days, after which, so he claimed, the court decided that he had ‘solid proof’ of being the real Deendar Channabasaveswara. The Aryas, not to be cowed down, are accused of having ‘bought’ some Muslims to argue the case that Siddiq Hussain was an imposter and that his claims effectively put him outside the pale of Islam. Siddiq Hussain later wrote that the opposition to him by certain Muslims, in addition to the Aryas, was to last several years, after which, despairing and disillusioned, he decided to migrate to Yaghestan, in the Pathan borderlands, following in the footsteps of Muhammad in his migration (hijra) from Makkah to Madinah.

Siddiq Hussain’s Missionary Efforts Among the Hindus

It is possible that, not finding a warm response to his appeals among the Lingayats, Siddiq Hussain now turned his attention to other Hindu groups as well. An interesting shift may be observed here in his missionary strategy. While addressing the Lingayats his focus was largely on himself, claiming to be the avatar of the revered Lingayat figure Channabasaveswara. Turning to other Hindu groups, for whom the figure of Channabasaveswara held little or no appeal, the image of the Prophet Muhammad was now given central prominence. Muhammad, insisted Siddiq Hussain, was the much-awaited kalki avatar of the Hindus, the promised messiah who would deliver the world from sin and misery. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that earlier, as we have seen, Siddiq Hussain had claimed himself to have been the kalki avatar, this status being attributed to the Prophet only later. As in his missionary work among the Lingayats, here, too, Islam was presented not as the negation but, rather, as the fulfilment of Hinduism. Yet, as will be seen presently, despite accepting the legitimacy of the Hindu scriptures, a strong strain of opposition and animosity characterised Siddiq Hussain’s attitude towards the Hindus, which was to bring him and his followers into conflict with the Hindus of Hyderabad.

What appears to have sparked off a vehement protest on the part of the Hindus of Hyderabad against the activities of the Deendar Anjuman was the publication in 1926 of Siddiq Hussain’s two-volume Kannada book, Jagat Guru Sarwar-i-‘Alam, in which he argued that the Prophet Muhammad was actually the kalki avatar whose arrival had been predicted in the scriptures of the Hindus, and that, therefore, the salvation of the Hindus lay in converting to Islam. In the book Siddiq Hussain contended that God had sent him on a special mission to reveal this ‘truth’ to the Hindus. According to Deendar Anjuman sources, in early 1926, 33 gurus of India put forward the claim of being the jagat guru or ‘Teacher of the Whole World’. So enraged was Siddiq Hussain by these claims that he at once set about penning a book countering these ‘false’ claims and asserting, instead, that the real jagat guru was none other than the Prophet Muhammad. The publication of the book is reported to have raised a storm of protest. On 9 September, 1927, a large rally of Hindu nobles was held at Hyderabad, demanding that the book be banned. A case was instituted in the Nizam’s court to this effect. Although the court dismissed their plea, the Hindu opposition to Siddiq Hussain continued, and some years later, in January 1932, another large rally of Hindus held at Hyderabad demanded that the Nizam should curb Siddiq Hussain’s activities, which, they alleged, were calculated to defame their religion and incite communal strife. Accordingly, the Nizam issued a decree banning Siddiq Hussain from addressing public gatherings. The controversial book was confiscated by the state authorities, but later allowed to be circulated without any pictures included. According to Siddiq Hussain, because of his untiring efforts at spreading Islam among the Hindus, he was sent to jail 84 times, spending a total of almost ten years in prison.

In his Jagat Guru, Siddiq Hussain sought to present Islam, and his own personal mission, as a fulfilment of the scriptures of the Hindus. He wrote that God has sent prophets to all peoples, including to the Indians, all of whom taught the same religion (din), al-Islam, and that the last of these was the Prophet Muhammad. The holy books of other peoples had been distorted over time and the only scripture that had maintained its purity was the Qur’an. Yet, he argued, the previous scriptures had predicted the arrival of Muhammad as God’s last prophet for all mankind, whereas all the previous prophets were sent by God only for their own particular communities. In other words, Muhammad is the jagat guru, the ‘Teacher of the Entire World’. His scripture ‘envisages or comprises the teachings of all the scriptures of the foregone prophets’ and does not in any way ‘confront’ them. Rather, as ‘the World Teacher’, Muhammad will ‘provide protection’ to all of these other prophets ‘under his banner’ on the Day of Resurrection. Therefore, it is the duty of all non-Muslims to accept Muhammad and his teachings in accordance with what their own prophets and scriptures have predicted about him. In effect, therefore, what Siddiq Hussain sought to advance was a plea for non-Muslims to convert to Islam, in accordance with what he saw as the teachings of their own holy books. These holy books, insofar as portions of them have survived corruption and distortion, were accepted as legitimate and of divine inspiration, but were employed merely a means to lead their followers to the Qur’an. As Siddiq Hussain put it, ‘Islam is like an ocean and all other religions, in comparison, are rivers which ultimately drain into the ocean. In other words, other religions are comparable to the branches of a tree, while Islam is like the seed’.

Siddiq Hussain argued that all other prophets had predicted the arrival of Muhammad and that ‘Allah Almighty has taken from them a ‘covenant regarding the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)’, ‘compelling them’ to believe in him as ‘the World Teacher’ and to ‘help him in every possible way’. Since all the prophets before Muhammad had attested to their faith in him before God, it was the duty of their followers, to follow in their path and do the same. Here, Siddiq Hussain quoted not only from the scriptures of the Jews and Christians to prove the coming of Muhammad as ‘the World Teacher’, but also from the books of ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Zoroastrian, Greek and Roman scholars. Since his particular concern was to present Islam to the Hindus, he devoted a large section to seeking to show that the coming of Muhammad as the universal saviour had been predicted in many Hindu scriptures.

Quoting liberally from the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagwat, Kalki and Bhavishyokt Puranas, Siddiq Hussain remarked that the arrival of Muhammad as ‘the World Teacher’ had been ‘prophesied so vividly and in such detail’ in the books of the Hindus as ‘cannot be found in any other religious texts’. He wrote that ‘they have not spared any incident of his life from his birth till his demise, whether of great significance or of no significance at all’ and even claimed that the ancient Hindu seers had prepared an exact horoscope of Muhammad’s life some three thousand years before his birth. The Vedas [Atharva Veda Ch. 20, v.3] were claimed to have predicted Muhammad’s arrival, using the two names of Mamahe (which Siddiq Hussain interpreted as a corrupted form of the Prophet’s own name) and Narashams, ‘the Praised One’, the Sanskrit form of the meaning of the word ‘Muhammad’. Narashams was said to have been described in the Atharva Veda as possessing ‘one hundred gold coins, ten chaplets, three hundred steeds and ten thousand cows’, which Siddiq Hussain explained as referring to Muhammad’s ten close companions, their three hundred horses and the ten thousand Muslims who accompanied Muhammad in his victorious entry into Makkah. The mantra in the Sama Veda recited by a person on his death-bed when a Brahmin priest pours water into his mouth, ha ha hu hu hi hi, was, Siddiq Hussain maintained, actually an ‘abbreviation’ of the Islamic creed of confession (kalima),’ la ilaha ilallahu muhammadur rasulullahi’.

According to Siddiq Hussain, the post-Vedic literature of the Hindus also contains ample references to the arrival of Muhammad as the jagat guru or kalki avatar. Thus, he wrote, the Bhagwat and the Kalki Puranas both mention that the father of the kalki avatar/jagat guru would be called ‘Vishnu Bhagat’ or ‘servant of God’, which is the meaning of the word ‘Abdullah’, the name of Muhammad’s father. They also predict that the kalki avatar’s mother would be called ‘Sumati’ or ‘peaceful’, which is the Sanskrit equivalent of ‘Amina’, the name of Muhammad’s mother. Both these texts predict that the kalki avatar/jagat guru would gain divine knowledge from Parasuram, an incarnation of Vishnu, whom Siddiq Hussain equated with the angel Gabriel (Jibra’il). The Bhavishyokt Puarana is said to have predicted the coming of Muhammad thus: ‘A great person would manifest himself among the Mlecchas, along with his disciples. His most famous name would be Mahamad’. Interestingly, Siddiq Hussain presented Muhammad in a form reminiscent of that of Manu, the progenitor of the human race according to the Hindus, from whose sacrifice the four castes (varnas) were born. Thus, Muhammad is described as ‘a perfect model to the four religions’, being the perfect scholar (Brahmin), a brave warrior (Kshatriya), an enterprising trader (Vaishya) and one who serves humanity (Shudra). Further, the Kamadhenu, the vehicle which Hindus believe will transport the kalki avatar through the seven heavens, is shown to be the same, even in physical terms, as the Buraq, on which many Muslim believe the Prophet Muhammad rode while on his ascension to heaven (mi’raj). Both the Kamadhenu and the Buraq have a woman’s head, a horses’ body, a peacock’s tail and the wings of an eagle. Ganapati or Gansesha, the elephant-headed god whom the Hindus regard as the deity of wisdom, Siddiq Hussain asserted, was none other than Imam ‘Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad, whom the Sufis regard as the ‘gateway of knowledge’, most Sufi orders tracing their spiritual descent from him, claiming that he was the recipient of esoteric wisdom from the Prophet. Siddiq Hussain observed that the figure of Ganesha in the form of half-man half-elephant resembles the word ‘Ali as it is written in Arabic, as well as the Hindu holy syllable ‘Om’. Om, the most sacred mantra of the Hindus, is, then, nothing but ‘Ali.

The Ramayana, arguably the most popular post-Vedic text for the Hindus, is also said to have predicted the arrival of Muhammad. Thus, Siddiq Hussain wrote, the method of prayer that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, taught the monkey Hanuman, was identical with the form of worship (salat, namaz) that Muslims perform. Hindus, therefore, must also pray in the Muslim fashion if they are truly devoted to Rama. He explained that Ayodhya, the legendary city of Rama, actually referred to Makkah, the word ‘Ayodhya’ translating as ‘the place where war is prohibited’ or, alternately, ‘the place which is unconquerable’, both of which, he argued, held true for the Muhammad’s Makkah. He claimed that many religious figures whom the Hindus revere had held the Prophet Muhammad in great esteem and were actually Muslims themselves, although this had been forgotten by their followers. Nanak, for instance, is said to have been a Muslim Sufi, and several of his utterances in praise of Muhammad as well as his cloak, preserved at the gurudwara at Dera Baba Nanak with verses from the Qur’an embossed on it, were presented as evidence in this regard. Manak Prabhu, a saint with a large following among the Hindu agriculturist castes of the Deccan, whose shrine is located at Manak Nagar near Gulbarga, was also presented as a Muslim. Likewise with the case of several Lingayat saints. In other words, Siddiq Hussain concluded, ‘The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as a sublime entity seems to pervade the entire India’.

This technique of quoting Hindu scriptures to prove the truth of Islam and to commend Islam to the Hindus is also used in a tract penned by Siddiq Hussain in 1361 AH (1942) titled Jami‘a al-Bahrain (‘The Union of the Two Oceans’), patterned and probably named after the well-known treatise by the seventeenth century Mughal Sufi Dara Shikoh, the Majm‘a al-Bahrain. Like Dara Shikoh, Siddiq Hussain also draws parallels between the doctrines and practices of Hindu and Muslim mystics. Unlike Dara, however, Siddiq Hussain uses this to suggest the need for Hindus to convert to Islam, this being presented as the only effective mean to solve the Hindu-Muslim conflict that had assumed such alarming proportions by this time. He opens his essay with a curious remark to the effect that India is ‘heaven on earth’ (jannat-i-nishan), and he quotes a hadith according to which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ‘felt cool breeze coming from India’, this being the land where Imam Hussain had wished to migrate to in order to spread Islam. He writes of Rama (‘Shri Ramji’) and Krishna (‘Shri Kishanji’) as ‘exalted incarnations’ (buland paye ke avatar), but says that unless the various communities in India come together on the ‘point of unity’ (nukta-i-wahdat), which is religion, true unity can never be established in the country. He notes that several efforts have been made over the centuries to bring Hindus and Muslims closer to each other by Sufis as well as Muslim kings, such as Babar, who forbade cow-slaughter, or Akbar, through his din-i-ilahi. They had all been inspired by the spirit of Imam Hussain, grandson of the Prophet, who had expressed the wish, before the battle of Karbala, to migrate to India to spread Islam there. The cult centred round the martyrdom of Imam Hussain played, he writes, a particularly important role in cementing Hindu-Muslim unity, for in the annual lamentation rituals marking Hussain’s murder at Karbala, both Hindus as well as Muslims traditionally participated with equal faith and fervour. The British, he remarked, plotted to destroy this close relationship between Muslims and Hindus when they came to power, and, following them, the Arya Samajists had taken it upon themselves to persuade Hindus not to participate in the Muharram observances. However, Siddiq Hussain wrote, ‘Allah wished to preserve the honour of Imam Hussain’ and ‘respected his mission of Hindu-Muslim unity’, and so, from among the Imam’s descendants, He had chosen him as an avatar of a Hindu deity, born in a Muslim family, to preach Islam to the Hindus, thereby carrying on the Imam’s mission. By combining the ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ titles of ‘Siddiq Deendar’ and ‘Channabasaveswara’ respectively, he had, he said, ‘destroyed the conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims’ and had showed to them ‘how the mysticism (tasawwuf) of Shri Ramji and Shri Kishanji were in full accordance with Islamic Sufism’.
At this point Siddiq Hussain refers to Dara Shikoh’s own efforts at uniting Hindus and Muslims through his Majm‘a al-Bahrain, but comments that Dara does not point out what exactly can unite the two, and, consequently, failed in his endeavours. Some argue, he says, that Hindus and Muslims can unite to jointly fight the British for self-rule (swaraj), but he remarks that God has created human beings not simply for ‘material pursuits’ but for ‘spiritual progress’. Hence, the joint struggle for swaraj cannot really provide a firm foundation for Hindu-Muslim unity, as the abortive attempts during the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movement show. God is now said to have stepped in to resolve this seemingly insoluble tangle and, Siddiq Hussain says, has sent him in the form of an avatar of a Hindu saint, confirming the prophecies contained in various Hindu scriptures relating to Muhammad as the jagat guru/kalki avatar and of himself as Deendar Channabasaveswara. To the Muslims the Deendar Channabasaveshwara would prove that these scriptures and the prophets unto whom they were revealed, which most Muslims had dismissed as false, were ‘actually true’. In other words, if Hindus were to accept Muhammad and Islam as the final truth and thus convert to Islam, the Muslims, in turn, would be made to understand that the Hindu prophets and scriptures, too, are of divine origin. In effect, then, what Siddiq Hussain is arguing for is a ‘conversion’ on the part of Hindus as well as Muslims, with Hindus recognising Muhammad as the last prophet of God, and Muslims recognising and respecting the prophets of the Hindus. ‘Creating inter-religious harmony’, Siddiq Hussain stresses, is a two-way process, for ‘it takes two hands to clap’. ‘Love and cordiality’, he asserts, ‘can only be cemented when both [Hindus and Muslims] cleanse their hearts and let the fire of unity burn brightly’.

While the Hindus are expected to convert to Islam, for Muhammad is the last prophet of God and, as Siddiq Hussain, echoing Muslim belief, says, Islam is the only true religion, Muslims are expected to considerably revise their own views about Hinduism. Before his advent, Siddiq Hussain claimed, the Muslims were completely ignorant of the scriptures of the Hindus. They looked upon them and their avatars contemptuously ‘as kafirs’, as ‘without religion’ (be-din), as having had no prophet sent to them by God and as lacking in any ‘truthfulness’ (sadaqat) and spirituality (ruhaniyyat). No Muslim, he says, would ever assume the name of a Hindu avatar, while, on the other hand, many Hindus used Muslim names. Prior to his advent, Muslims would never take the name of Rama, Krishna or Shiva in a mosque, but now the missionaries of the Anjuman ‘freely talk of these avatars in mosques and their teachings are discussed’. As a result, he claimed, ‘Many Muslims are taking the name of Hindu elders (buzurgan) and are talking about them in mosques and in religious gatherings’. Now, because of his work, he remarked, he had convinced the Muslims that ‘there is light [nur] even in the religion of the Hindus’, and that prior to Muhammad God had indeed sent many holy men, including prophets (nabi), saints (wali, ghawth and qutb) to India. In this way, Siddiq Hussain argued, true Hindu-Muslim unity was being established by his efforts, and that soon ‘Hindustan would be converted into a veritable heaven’.

Echoing Dara’s own writings on the subject, Siddiq Hussain, in his Jami‘a al-Bahrain, seeks to draw out similarities in the teachings of the Hindu and Muslim mystics, reinterpreting Hindu mystical doctrines so as to present them as identical to their Islamic counterparts. The numerous deities whom the Hindus worship are explained away as simply different names for the one God or as terms used to describe His various attributes (sifat). Thus, for instance, Brahma, considered by Hindus to be the Creator, is said to actually be a term to describe Allah in his capacity of being khaliq (the Creator) or rahman (the Beneficent). Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation, is said to refer to Allah’s attribute of rahm (mercy) and Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, denotes Allah in his capacity of ‘Lord’ or ‘Master’ (malik). Just as Hindu mysticism and Islamic Sufism share a common stress on monotheism, so, too, Siddiq Hussain contends, do they have identical views on issues such as God’s powers, His essence and His attributes, the creation and position of Man in the cosmos, the soul, divine revelation, prayer, meditation, the concept of the five elements and the notion of life after death. The ‘union of these two oceans’ of spirituality (jami‘a al-bahrain), he argues, holds the key to the problem of Hindu-Muslim unity. The two streams are shown as being united by one person, the Prophet Muhammad, whom the pre-Muhammadan ‘mystics of India’ (fuqara-i-hind) have referred to as the sangamnath, the ‘Master of the Confluence’. By bringing to fulfilment the prophecies of the Hindu scriptures and by stressing the oneness of the spiritual traditions of the Hindus and the Muslims, their differences being merely apparent, owing to the different languages in which they are expressed, Muhammad is said to be the ‘Master of the Union of the Oceans’ (sardar-i-majm‘a al-bahrain). To the Hindus, he is also the kalki avatar, the jagat guru and ishwar.

This appropriation of Hindu figures and reading new meanings into Hindu religious texts is the means that Siddiq Hussain employs to further his mission of propagating his version of Islam to the Hindus, which emerges as a far more central concern for him than to present the message of the Hindu prophets to the Muslims, although this is not completely ignored, as we have seen. For Hindus to convert to Islam, he suggests, is not to betray their ancestral faith. On the contrary, a ‘true’ reading of the ‘prophecies’ in their scriptures demands that Hindus should, in fact, declare their faith in Muhammad as the kalki avatar/jagat guru/sangamnath, and, accordingly, embrace Islam. In this manner, the Hindu scriptures are not denied, but, rather, used in order to be superseded by the Qur’an. In line with orthodox Muslim opinion, Siddiq Hussain asserts that all prophets of God, from Adam to Muhammad, have preached the same din-al-Islam-al