Maulana Hasrat Mohani advocated MORE than tolerance. He advocated full-fledged acceptance.
The Indian general election this past June saw a surprisingly tough fight between the incumbent Narendra Modi’s government and the Opposition Alliance. Although Modi won, the tight contest led to mudslinging and xenophobic rhetoric, particularly along religious lines, as each side sought to whip up support from its voters.
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It must’ve had Maulana Hasrat Mohani turning over in his grave. (You might not know who that is, but let me tell you more about him.)
He was perhaps the first powerful person to demand complete independence for India; he did so in 1921 at a congressional session. And I guarantee: He would have been irate to hear Modi refer to Indian Muslims as “infiltrators.” He would have been incensed to hear a major leader of the Opposition call Hinduism a disease like cholera, dengue, and malaria — a disease which should be eradicated. (Despite a strong public backlash to the bigoted words, neither issued an unconditional public apology.)
In such a polarized environment, where cultural differences resemble battlelines, many suggest that the way out of such perpetual strife is to tolerate those different from us. But mere tolerance is not enough. We need active acceptance. This is the model Maulana Hasrat Mohani championed.
The Life and Times of Maulana Hasrat Mohani
Born in 1875 during colonial rule, Mohani never achieved the global fame of Mahatma Gandhi, but he’s just as deserving.
During his lifetime, India found itself in the middle of increasingly competitive communal politics between Hindus and Muslims. With the help of the British tactic of “divide and rule,” those politics would eventually tear the country apart. (As does India’s caste system, although markets are beginning to break it down.)
Against this backdrop, Mohani, instead of falling prey to the larger communal forces, stood for a paradigm of peaceful coexistence between the two religions. As a pucca anti-colonialist, credited as the first leader of the Indian National Congress to demand complete independence from British rule, Mohani was frequently put in jail.
But it was there that he wrote his first poem in praise of “Sri Krishna”, the avatar of Vishnu. Mohani would go on to write many poems in Hindi and Urdu on Krishna.
Beliefs Expressed in Poetry
According to the American scholar of Urdu, C.M. Naim, Mohani believed Krishna to be imbued with the divine, as a Mazhar or a manifestation of god. Thus, he sought a syncretic relationship between Islam and Hindu mythology. In other words, he sought to synchronize both into a united whole.
Now, he was not the only one to do so; Mohani himself mentions in his praise of Krishna that he is following the path of his spiritual mentors such as Sayyad Abdur Razzak. In fact, the usage of Hindu in Sufi poetry can be traced back to the 16th century, when Sufi writers such as Malik Muhammad Jaisi and Syed Manjhan Rajgiri made use of it.
But crucially, Mohani believed the Bhagavad Gita of Hindus and Islam had many similarities. For example, they both saw Krishna as an advocate of karm yog (the philosophy of action), an avatar of love and beauty, which is why many Sufis regarded him as a wali (saint). In 1928, in his fifth poem dedicated to the deity, Mohani asserts that loving Krishna is no sin.
And he was not restricted to poems written for or about himself. When Aurobindo Ghosh, the Hindu spiritualist and freedom fighter, was ridiculed for sharing his experience of having a vision of a deity, Mohani wrote these words of support in his Urdu journal Urdu-i-Mu’ alla:
Some internally blind people (kor-batin) say it was a made-up story. We, however, have absolutely no doubt about the truth of his statement, for we have ourselves experienced that rare and amazing bliss (ànand) which the heart receives the moment one takes the name of Sri Krishna.
As a culmination of his quest for unity between Hindus and Muslims, Mohani also opposed the Partition of India on religious lines and refused to live in an exclusivist country, instead preferring to stay in his country of birth. Both in his personal and public life, Mohani strived to create a compassionate, welcoming culture — one where each member does not just tolerate but proactively accepts the faith and beliefs of the other.
In these increasingly turbulent times, both India and the rest of the world can learn from his example. Starting by recognizing and respecting the moral and spiritual blessings of trade, we can strive to create not just a salad bowl, where each ingredient is starkly defined from the other, but a true melting pot where all ingredients can freely flow into each other … eventually, perhaps, to such an extent that differences lessen — if not completely fade away.
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