The Mahomedans, the other great religious community of India, [59] have been far less stirred by the new era than the Hindus, whom hitherto we have been chiefly considering. Only a small number of Mahomedans belong to the professional class, so that modern education and the awakening have not reached Mahomedans in the same degree as Hindus. Quite outnumbered also by Hindus, they identify themselves politically with the British rather than with the Hindus, so that as a body they do not support the Congress, the great Indian Political Association, and have no anti-British consciousness. Mahomedan solidarity is strong enough, but it is religious not national, and so it is only in the religious sphere that we find the new era telling upon Mahomedans. Two small religious movements may be noted curiously parallel to the Ārya and Brāhma movements among Hindus, and suggesting the operation of like influences.
As the Āryas preach a return to the pure original Hinduism of the Vedas, the first Mahomedan movement inculcates a return to the pure original Mahomedanism of the Koran. In particular, it urges a casting off of the Hindu customs and superstitions that the Indian converts to Mahomedanism have frequently retained,—the offerings to the dead, for example. In the first instance, the movement came from a seventeenth century Arabian sect, the Wahabbis, but the movement reached India only about the year 1820, and therefore is a feature of the period we are surveying. The movement belongs specially to Bengal and the United Provinces north-west of Bengal, and is known by a variety of local names, Wahabbi and other. Significant, as supporting what has been said regarding the absence of anti-British feeling among present-day Mahomedans, is the fact that in the first stages of the Wahabbi movement, both in Eastern and Western Bengal, the duty of war upon infidels—on the British and the Hindus in this case—was a prominent doctrine of the crusade. In Mahomedan language, India was Daru-l-harb or a Mansion of War. In these later years, on the contrary, it is generally recognised by Mahomedans that India under the British rule is not Daru-l-harb, but Daru-l-Islam, or a Mansion of Islamism, in which war on infidels is not incumbent. [60] It may be noted that the decree, recently issued from Mecca, that British territory is Daru-l-Islam, can only refer to India.
Exactly like the Brahmas, the other new Mahomedan sect, in the modern rational spirit, have refined away their faith to a theism or deism purged of the supernatural. Mahomed’s inspiration and miracles are rejected. These represent the modern rationalising spirit in religion; reason is their standard, and “reason alone is a sufficient guide.” According to Sir Syed Ahmad, founder of the movement, “Islam is Nature, and Nature Islam.” Hence the sect is sometimes called the Naturis, [61] or followers of Natural Religion, the adoption of the English word identifying them again with the Brāhmas, who are essentially the outcome of English education and Christian influence among Hindus. The Naturis, the modernised Mahomedans, have as their headquarters the Mahomedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in the United Provinces. It ought to be said that they also claim to be going back to pure original Mahomedanism before it was corrupted by the “Fathers” of Islam.