Social constructionism is the notion that Economic forces- i.e. how humans respond to scarcity in their bid to stay alive and reproduce- have no real existence. This is the opposite of the Marxian theory and thus during the Fifties and Sixties pushing this silly doctrine could be seen as part and parcel of fighting the Cold War. One way it could do so was discovering 'identities' which were naturaliter Revolutionary, or anti-Revolutionary. Prior to the rise of the Ayatollahs, Shias were seen as mystical and passive while Sunnis were considered inherently aggressive and thus likely to succumb to Soviet blandishments and heavy weaponry. This narrative was turned on its head 9/11 with the Wahhabis being once again viewed with suspicion as they had in the early nineteenth century. More recently, the Iranian Shias- and Alawis and Zaidis- are once again the bad guys while the Sunnis are seen as beleaguered.
It is tempting to say that conflict about things which matter- money, oil, who gets to bomb the shit out of whom- arise out of some 'narrative'- i.e. a fairy story- which evil Whiteys told us nice brown kiddies long ago. However, if you don't have a PhD from an Ivy League school, people will think you are very stupid if you talk bollocks of that stripe.
Stupidity, of course, is no bad thing. What matters is whether you use your stupidity to make money.
A case in point is Dr. Shashi Tharoor who writes-
Thus the British can be largely blamed for the creation of previously non-existent Shia-Sunni tensions within the Muslim population of Lucknow.
How? Shia-Sunni tensions existed long before there was a British nation. While the Brits ruled, rioting was limited because the Brits decided to ban what they considered provocative innovations. Once Congress formed a Ministry in U.P, they agreed to let the Sunnis recite praise of the first 4 Caliphs which led to Shiah Civil Disobedience and then bloody riots and further Congress flip flops. Nehru felt the Shias had helped his 'mass contact' program and Rajendra Prasad was close to some Shia lawyers. But the upshot of Congress dithering was that the anti-Hindu- i.e. Muslim vote- went to the League. In Pakistan, the Shia-Sunni problem could subside precisely because the country was created to kill and expel the common enemy. In India however, Shia-Sunni strife continued and then was exported to Pakistan via the Deobandi and Barelvi networks.
Shia Sunni relations in India tended to be better than elsewhere because both sides had a common enemy- the Hindus, who, providentially, have always been almost infinitely divided amongst themselves. Still, where Hindus didn't matter, there was a long history of internecine strife within Islam. Thus, Ismailis were driven out of what is now Pakistan by Sunni Sultans and had to take refuge in Gujarat a thousand years ago. Enmity against Twelver Shiaism came later at the time of Savafid conquest of Iran and their conflict with the Hanafi Ottomans. The Mughals took a middle course. Humayun needed Iranian Shia help to regain his throne. Akbar who sought to make himself Juristically supreme by 'ijtihad', would pick and chose from Shia and various Sunni mazhab legal doctrines to suit his convenience. Aurangzeb, though introducing codification, wanted to retain this 'forum shopping' privilege for the ruler. But the plurality of legal codes inhibited the development of Civil Society and thus destroyed cohesiveness. The British, by contrast, had intense sectarian differences but were willing to commit to a 'Common Law' which smoothed commercial and organized political activity of a rational sort.
Prior to the British annexation of Oude (Avadh), the two sects had lived in harmony under a Shia nawab, whose celebrations of the Shia festival of Muharram
Muharram is the second holiest month after Ramadan for Sunnis. Tharoor thinks it is an exclusively Shia festival. His ignorance is par for the course for a Congress Member of Parliament.
It is quite true that Shias and Sunnis did at one time and still can observe Muharram with perfect amity. But that was not what was happening in Lucknow under Shia Nawabs. Rather, the resources of the State were used to popularize the Shia form of observance and the lower classes- i.e. Sunnis and Hindus were enrolled in it. Thus what was at issue was whether the sect of the King and his elite chums should gradually absorb the hoi polloi.
During the post-Aurangzeb wars, Shias had won in some places and lost in others despite being a minority in all regions. Where one side dominated they sought hegemony in religious matters and accused the other side of disloyalty. The Brits propped up the Shia Nawabs in Lucknow but were not concerned with religious matters. However, they would intervene if communal riots started to wreck the economy of the region which, because of the profligacy of the Nawabs, was already weakening along with the legitimacy of native rule.
had included Sunnis and Hindus as well in a public affirmation of his people’s fraternity.
An English woman who married a Shiah from Lucknow and lived there for 12 years wrote in 1832- ' the two sects (Shias and Sunnis) hoard up their private animosities and dislikes until the return of Mahurrum, which scarcely ever passes over, in any extensively populated city of Hindoostaun, without a serious quarrel, often terminating in bloodshed.'
What was the cause of this enmity? The answer is simple. The Shias believed in the dynastic principle- just as Tharoor's party believes in the dynastic principle. The Shias felt that the descendants of the Fourth Caliph were unjustly deprived of the Caliphate. The Sunnis disagreed. Since, in democratic India, Shias are a minority, they are not able to rule the country. This distresses them. Many Sunnis too are disaffected because of the very large numbers of Hindus roaming around the place. However, in Lucknow, they also find the Shia minority behaves objectionably.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, grandson of a major financier of the Muslim League, writes in the Indian Express- 'Recently, a PIL was filed in the Supreme Court by the former chairman of the Shia Waqf Board, Waseem Rizvi, calling for the removal of 26 verses from the Quran. The petition tries to argue that these verses were interpolated into the Quran by the first three Caliphs of Islam and encourage violence and terror. The reality is that since the compilation of the Quran by the third Caliph Usman ibn Affan, Muslims of all sects have unanimously agreed that the Usmanic codex is the correct version of the Quran. Importantly, neither the first Imam of the Shia, Ali ibn Abi Talib, nor his 11 descendants questioned the veracity of the Quran. Ali was a contemporary of Usman’s and after him became the fourth rightly-guided Caliph, according to the Sunnis. The attempt to blame the Caliphs for the so-called “violent” verses and, thus, linking this to the genesis of modern-day terrorism is a brazen attempt at provoking sectarianism.'
Ali Khan is an aristocratic Shia, albeit also the grandson of Foreign Secretary Jagat Mehta. He does not mention what is obvious. The Shia Sayyad Caste gains by being seen to be the inheritors of the Caliphate. Suppose a pan-Islamic Caliphate does emerge. If it is a Shia Caliphate, all Sayyads would receive an income from the Government. This is a game for big stakes- as ISIS taught us.
After Aurangzeb's death the Shias made a bid for power and a struggle followed in which they were able to retain Avadh and Bengal but lost elsewhere. Shah Waliullah advised Sunni rulers to curb public displays of Shia religiosity on the tenth of Muharram. However, it was the Durrani incursions which first saw widespread violence against Shias by Sunnis. Shias were expelled from Delhi. The restoration of the Mughals permitted their return but this angered Waliullah's son who also considered Tafazzul Husain Kashmiri, the first translator of Newton's Principia into Arabic, to be an apostate. This scholar had studied at Firangi Mahal and was close to the Nawab. It is clear from the writings of contemporaries, like Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, that Shias considered Sunni hostility to be something recent and connected with the rising power of England. The British too spoke of the 'Wahhabi' threat to their power which the Egyptian Khedive contained. At this time, there was a tendency to see the Shia as the good and reasonable Muslim while the Sunni was distrusted as fanatical and opposed to science. Thus, when the Begum of Bhopal married a Shia convert to the Waliullah camp, the British Resident tried to intervene by suggesting, ludicrously, that he might be dabbling in the occult.
Once the British had deposed the nawab in 1856, the unifying symbol of the throne was lost, and the relationship between the ruling Shia nobility and the non-Shia subjects of the kingdom (Sunnis and Hindus) irrevocably transformed.
The truth is the 'Oude bequest'- i.e. the transfer of millions of Rupees from the taxpayers of Oudh to finance the irrigation of Kerbala & Najaf (which many believe is what caused Iraq to become majority Shia) was not popular with non Shias. After 1856, the Sunni majority started to gain wealth while the Shia elites stagnated. Increased Sunni assertiveness led to the first Madh-e-Sahaba (praise of the first 3 Caliphs) riots in 1905.
The exaggeration by the British of communal identities now embraced sectarian differences between the two Muslim sects.
The British were ruling Avadh. They didn't want anybody to run amok in the streets. They could not 'and did not want to exaggerate' pre-existing identities. The truth of the matter is that Oudh, like Bengal, had failed to defend itself. Its people may have beaten each other in the streets from time to time but they couldn't get together to chase away the foreign rulers. Whatever their sectarian differences, their collective power was unimpressive.
As the scholar Keith Hjortshoj recounts: ‘By 1905, religious rhetoric between Shias and Sunnis had reached such heights that Sunnis in Lucknow did not join in the Marsiyah elegies during Muharram, but instead recited a praise of the first three Caliphs called the Madhe-Sahaba.
So what? Why should they have continued to show a slavish obedience to a deposed ruler from a minority community who had quietly become a pensioner of the Brits in Calcutta?
Shias responded with Tabarra curses upon the Sahaba.’
That wasn't very smart of them, was it? They were a minority within a minority. They needed to be tactful and diplomatic.
Shia leaders also managed to persuade the British government that Sunni practices during Muharram were largely irrelevant, so the British enacted strict laws against practices by Sunnis that could be offensive to Shias.
So, the Shias just went on pissing off the Sunnis till they began to retaliate. It appears that massacres of Shias in Pakistan in recent years are directly linked to fatwas from a Sunni leader in Lucknow.
Before long the British had decided to authorize separate Shia and Sunni processions to commemorate Muharram.
Because they were asked to do so and it was the right thing to do. In my neighborhood, on match-days- the police keep Chelsea supporters well away from the supporters of the visiting side. Is this a sinister ploy by BoJo to destroy the solidarity of the working class?
There was increasing native participation in local government from the 1870s onward but even before that it was native 'darogas' and other such officials who maintained law and order. This requires doing sensible things so nutters don't run amok in the streets till blood overflows the drains. Spending your time 'constructing' mutually hostile 'social identities' would result in a loss to the treasury. The Brits had conquered the place with ease. The people simply weren't any good at fighting. Why on earth would they need to pit these poltroons against each other?
The British-sponsored Shia-Sunni divide in Lucknow is one of the clearest examples of how the British encouraged differences, and how Indians sought to create communities that the Raj would recognize and to which it would give political weight.
There was a pre-existing divide which the District administration had to accommodate. This is what happened before Independence and after Independence. All we can say is that the Brits were a sensible bunch who found a cheap way to maintain law & order.
This occurred, as it happened, at the very time when various political groups were competing for space in the expanded Indian representation announced for the viceroy’s and governors’ councils under the Minto-Morley Reforms. ‘When the British authorities assumed responsibility for banning or approving commemorations, arbitrating disputes, and regulating procession routes,’ Hjortshoj has explained, ‘they transformed religious differences into public, political, and legal issues. And so they have remained.'
In other words, as the Brits improved governance- by increasing local participation in decision making- they did more and more sensible things. After Independence, District Magistrates and IPS officers tried to do the same sensible things- unless the politicians stopped them, in which case there was bloodshed.
The Brits briefly ruled Palestine. No doubt, Tharoor thinks the problems between Jews and Arabs were 'socially constructed' by some British officer. Iraq too was a British mandate. This means the Shia-Sunni or Yazidi and Kurd and other such problems were all created by the Brits. It is also a fact that the Brits went to Antarctica where they 'socially constructed' the division we still see between penguins and seals.
What has the dynasty which Tharoor serves 'socially constructed'? Anti-Hinduism as the first step to anti-Nationalism? Perhaps Tharoor foresees a Congress which spends most of its time planning for Muharram celebrations free of Shia-Sunni riots. This can only be achieved with active U.S involvement and under UN supervision. As Rahul Baba said to some former American Under Sec of State-
“I don’t hear anything from the US establishment about what’s happening in India. If you are saying partnership of democracies, I mean what is your view on what is going on here?” How can we say Biden is promoting Democracy when he is not intervening in the activities of the Indian National Congress not just to defeat dynasticism but to promote Shia Sunni fraternity?
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