One response in The Print , written by Amana Begum, describes his ideas as an ideology that is “trapped in the past,” as though drawing upon earlier Muslim political thinkers is itself evidence of political regression.
If these questions have been debated for decades, why does a Muslim intellectual raising similar questions suddenly become evidence of intellectual regression?
Is the Indian Muslim expected to demonstrate that he is sufficiently Indian continuously?
Must Muslim political aspirations first be translated into the language of the majority before they can be considered legitimate?
Muslim political consciousness is frequently interpreted through categories such as separatism, Islamism, radicalism or communalism before the substance of the argument itself is considered.
Sharjeel Imam’s recent interview has generated considerable discussion, much of it centred not on what he actually said but on what his political thought supposedly represents. One response in The Print , written by Amana Begum, describes his ideas as an ideology that is “trapped in the past,” as though drawing upon earlier Muslim political thinkers is itself evidence of political regression. Another The Print piece , written under the pseudonym ‘Ibn Khaldun Bharti’, is little more than a polemical intervention against liberals. What deserves attention, however, is the larger question raised by these responses: why is it considered illegitimate for a Muslim intellectual in India to draw upon Muslim political thinkers and intellectual traditions to understand the political dilemmas facing Indian Muslims? In this article, I deal with certain points raised in these two articles.
Firstly, Amana has the contention: why is Sharjeel using the political ideas of Iqbal or Jinnah? But why can't we use Iqbal or Jinnah? Both men were grappling with a fundamental political problem: how does a religious minority secure political rights and meaningful collective existence in the face of majoritarian power? We may disagree with their diagnoses, their prescriptions, or the political consequences of their ideas. But that does not make their questions irrelevant. History teaches not only through repetition but also through analogy. Political circumstances change, but certain political dilemmas can persist across historical periods.
Consider this example. In his 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League, Iqbal argued that: “the Muslim desire for free development is practically impossible under the type of unitary government contemplated by the nationalist Hindu politicians with a view to secure permanent communal dominance in the whole of India.” We may reject Iqbal's diagnosis. We may disagree with his solution. But the question he posed cannot simply be dismissed as belonging to an irrelevant past. If nearly a century later Indian Muslims continue to debate representation, minority rights, cultural autonomy, majoritarianism and their place within the Indian political community, perhaps the underlying question has not disappeared. This is why history matters. Not because it provides ready-made answers, but because it gives us conceptual resources with which to think about recurring political dilemmas.
Their critique of Sharjeel becomes even more problematic when we consider the question of constitutional criticism. Ibn Khaldun has a fundamental problem because Sharjeel criticises the constitution. Why cannot someone criticise the Constitution? The Constitution is a political document. Constitutionalism itself is a political tradition and, like all political traditions, is open to criticism. Indeed, some of the most significant criticisms of the Indian constitutional order have come from those associated with the making of the Constitution itself.
Consider B.R. Ambedkar. In 1953, Ambedkar expressed profound dissatisfaction with the Constitution and famously declared that he would be the first person to burn it. Suraj Yengde, in Caste Matters (2019) , invokes this statement to highlight the distance between the Constitution Ambedkar helped draft and his later assessment of it. Yengde goes further, arguing that the idea of the Constitution has acquired a romantic quality and that constitutionalism can reproduce the state's narrative while producing what he calls “Dalit passivism.” He also argues that the attribution of the Constitution's authorship to Ambedkar has helped domesticate ‘Dalit radicalism’. So why should Sharjeel's constitutional critique be treated differently? If a Dalit intellectual can critically interrogate constitutionalism, question its political consequences and invoke Ambedkar's own deep frustration with the Constitution, why should similar intellectual freedom not be extended to a Muslim political thinker?
Similarly, the assumption that liberalism, democracy and secularism are self-evidently virtuous concepts that cannot themselves be subjected to fundamental criticism. They are not gospel truths. Political theory has spent decades questioning them. Liberalism has been challenged by Marxists, feminists, communitarians, postcolonial theorists, critical race scholars and decolonial thinkers. Democracy has never been free from criticism. For Perry Anderson , “Indian democracy is not contradicted by caste inequality, but rather enabled by it”. Secularism has also generated some of the most important debates in contemporary political theory. Talal Asad , Saba Mahmood , Wendy Brown and Charles Taylor , among others, have demonstrated that secularism is not simply the neutral absence of religion from politics. It is a historically produced political arrangement that regulates religion and determines the boundaries of legitimate religious expression. Decolonial scholarship has gone further still. Walter Mignolo's critique of modernity draws attention to the relationship between modernity and coloniality, challenging the assumption that concepts produced through particular European historical experiences can simply be universalised. His call for a decolonial epistemic shift is precisely an attempt to bring other epistemologies and political imaginaries into view.
This is exactly what Sharjeel is trying to do. If these questions have been debated for decades, why does a Muslim intellectual raising similar questions suddenly become evidence of intellectual regression? Have these critics simply not engaged with this literature, or is there a form of intellectual amnesia when the person raising the question happens to be Muslim?
Amana’s article also raises the question about multicultural societies and going beyond identity politics. Essentially, she is talking about assimilation. What exactly does assimilation mean? The modern European nation-state was built partly through the production of a common national identity. But can this model accommodate deep religious and cultural differences? Can a nation-state genuinely tolerate minority identities, or does it eventually demand that minorities surrender precisely those practices that distinguish them from the majority?
The French experience is instructive. Muslims are frequently told that they must assimilate into French secular society, yet assimilation can sometimes mean abandoning visible markers of Muslim identity. The hijab becomes a political problem. Religious symbols become a political problem. The Muslim is asked not merely to participate in the political community but to reshape his or her cultural and religious identity according to the requirements of the majority society. This further raises a fundamental question: where does assimilation stop, and who gets to decide what assimilation requires? Look at Turkiye. Few states pursued a more ambitious project of secular-national assimilation with Europe than the Turkish Republic. Yet despite decades of attempting to construct a highly secular society, Turkey was not simply absorbed into the European political community. Assimilation, therefore, does not necessarily guarantee acceptance.
Pankaj Mishra has pointed to the darker history of this demand for identity conformity. He notes how supposedly enlightened Europe repeatedly demanded forms of identity suicide from minorities. Voltaire, for instance, could celebrate reason and civility while simultaneously constructing Jews as irrational and dangerous because of their attachment to scripture. The question, therefore, is not simply whether Muslims should assimilate. It is: assimilate into what, and on whose terms?
In the Indian context, the deeper question is whether there is an essential “we” that is supposedly natural to India. Who constitutes this “we”? Is the Indian Muslim expected to demonstrate that he is sufficiently Indian continuously? Must Muslim political aspirations first be translated into the language of the majority before they can be considered legitimate? The brilliant essay “ Can a Muslim be an Indian ?” by Gyanendra Pandey raises such questions.
The Indian Muslim has long been required to demonstrate his national credentials. Muslim political consciousness is frequently interpreted through categories such as separatism, Islamism, radicalism or communalism before the substance of the argument itself is considered. This is why Sharjeel's treatment deserves scrutiny. One can disagree with Sharjeel. One can reject his political prescriptions. One can find aspects of his political thought deeply problematic. But disagreement should not deprive him of the status of a political thinker. The indiscriminate use of “Islamist” can become less an analytical category than a means of ending intellectual discussion. Once the label is attached, the argument no longer needs to be engaged.
The Constitution that Sharjeel is accused of criticising is also the constitutional order under which he has spent years in prison without trial. Imprisonment does not make his political arguments automatically correct. But it gives his constitutional critique a particular urgency. A constitutional order that promises liberty, equality and due process must ultimately be judged not merely by its principles but by how those principles operate when the accused person is politically unpopular. Sharjeel is not alone in this predicament. Umar Khalid and others remain incarcerated without conviction. At the same time, people accused of making openly genocidal statements against Muslims can remain free to participate in public political discourse. That contrast should concern anyone who takes constitutionalism seriously. The question is therefore not whether Sharjeel Imam is right about everything. He is not.
The question is whether he has the right to be wrong. Does he have the right to argue, theorise, invoke Iqbal and Jinnah, question liberalism, criticise the Constitution and articulate what he believes to be the political interests of Indian Muslims without having his entire intellectual project reduced to a single label? Perhaps this is ultimately what the Sharjeel Imam controversy forces us to confront. Are Indian intellectuals prepared to engage with Muslims as political thinkers, with their own intellectual traditions, historical memories, political vocabularies and visions of political community, or will Muslims continue to be treated primarily as sociological categories to be managed, assimilated or securitised?
