Do Muslims Need a New Political Philosophy? Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi on Contract, Justice and the Ummah

Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi came to national politics from Kashmir about a year and a half ago, and in his second conversation with the Nous Podcast he tells host Ali Javed something that might seem counterintuitive. Looking back on that time in Parliament, Mehdi said he could not have picked a better moment to arrive, because the crisis facing Indian society is large enough to force basic questions. What are Indians politically, ethnically, culturally and religiously? What was the seventy-year journey of the republic built on: a real settlement, or an illusion? And where do Indian Muslims stand in it?

Javed pushes back throughout, at one point playing devil's advocate for Hindutva. The episode, which runs a little over two and a half hours, is best read as an extended attempt to answer those questions from inside an Islamic vocabulary without giving up the constitutional one. Mehdi says openly that some of what he offers may be wrong.

A politics of reaction, not of principle

Mehdi's diagnosis of Muslim politics is blunt. What he has seen since entering Parliament, he says, is a series of responses to events: a lynching, a remark by a right-wing politician, the Waqf Amendment Bill, a controversy over food, dress or the loudspeaker. Each produces statements and protests. None, in his view, adds up to a comprehensive political philosophy that Muslims can stand on when the RSS and the BJP tell them they are not compatible with Indian society, or with any society they live in. He says he has not seen anyone answer that charge with clarity, and that the debate stays stuck at the level of meat, clothing and prayer in the street.

He extends the criticism backwards. Muslims in India, he argues, have not built a political ethic of their own. They have not adopted the values of the left or of liberal movements, and they instinctively side with right-wing politics when it speaks in the name of their religion while objecting to it when it does not. He asks when Indian Muslims last tried to turn the universal principles of the Quran into a political discourse, and suggests that after Maulana Azad it has hardly been attempted, and that Azad did not go as far as the task requires. He uses the loose term fiqh-e-siyasat for the body of political jurisprudence he thinks is missing: guiding principles and objectives (maqasid) for people living as a minority.

Two ideas would have to go for such a philosophy to exist, he says. One is that Islam demands authoritarianism. The other is that Islamic law must be implemented literally, everywhere, as it was in Medina. What the Quran and the Prophet's life offer, he argues, are principles, and it is the principles that should be carried forward.

Mehdi is careful about how this should be framed. "I don't believe in identity politics," he says, and he does not see himself as speaking only for Kashmiri Muslims, or even only for Muslims. He speaks of Muslims because, in his account, they are the primary target of state aggression at the moment, and he says he wants to reimagine India as its founders imagined it.

What secular parties owe the Constitution

A large part of the conversation concerns the parties Muslims are told to rely on. Javed raises a familiar pattern: after electoral losses, as in Bengal or Bihar, Muslim voters are blamed, though they were already voting for the secular side while those parties failed to win over Hindu voters. He asks Mehdi where secular politics is failing.

Mehdi's answer is that these parties are themselves in an identity crisis. Sometimes they think they should go far for Muslim rights, then fear drifting from the majority. His message to them is deliberately unusual. He does not ask them to stand up for Muslims or to invest in secularism as a favour to Muslims. He asks them to fall back on the spirit of the Constitution, which he calls the contract between all Indians, and to be as honest to it as they demand Muslims be. They should not do politics for Muslim identity or for Hindu identity, he says; they should do it for the contract.

His account of how the vacuum arose is a critique of Congress in particular. Principle-based politics, he argues, was diluted after 1947 in every camp, with electoral calculation taking over. He gives two examples: a ruling on divorce after which the locks of a mosque were opened to placate another community, and the use of governors and presidential orders to override states when a regional party seemed to challenge the centre. India was federal in spirit if not in letter, and parties tampered with that spirit to stay in power. The right wing grew in the vacuum this left. He names the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the DMK and the TMC as parties that could still change course.

His prescription is a politics of federalism, institutions and functional democracy. If secular parties defended the protections of states and their cultural identities, whether Kashmiri, Bengali, southern or Awadhi, and stood against the centre's overreach, he says, Muslim and Hindu identity alike would be protected without either being named.

The Quranic case for contract

Having asked secular politics to return to the contract, Mehdi turns to what Muslims bring to it, and here he is most explicit about sources. He builds what he calls a political jurisprudence from three ideas in the Quran, citing verses from memory and paraphrasing them.

The first is peace. If others initiate peace, he says, the Quran tells believers to establish it, and it attaches no condition that the other party be Muslim, follow the sharia, give up beef or recite the creed. The second is fidelity to agreements: promises made must be honoured, and a citizen who has entered the constitutional compact is bound by it, answerable in a court of law and, he adds, in the hereafter. The third is justice. He points to the Quranic word qist and argues that it rules out second-class citizenship, since justice rests on equality.

From this he draws the point that gives the discussion its edge. In Islam, he says, the label does not matter; the fruit does. A system with an Islamic name that tramples justice is less pleasing to God than one without the name that establishes it. He cites a saying he attributes to Imam Ali that justice is the foundation of a state. On this reading, Indian Muslims are obliged, not merely permitted, to take part in a constitutional order that promises equal citizenship, to abide by its terms and to help it deliver justice. He sums up the resulting role in a phrase: Muslims have a contributory role, not "a clashing role."

Hindutva and the broken contract

Javed asks the question the conversation has been heading towards: how does Mehdi read Hindutva within contract theory? Mehdi separates the Hindutva of the RSS and BJP, of Golwalkar and Savarkar, from Hinduism and from Sanatan dharma, with which he says he has no quarrel. His charge is that this project is breaking a contract made with every Indian community. Seventy years ago, he says, nobody was told the country would be run on a particular right-wing ideology, a theocracy or a supremacist idea. Had they been, many people, Muslims and Hindus and whole regions, might have chosen differently.

Javed, voicing the argument Hindutva's advocates make, says the contract was imposed on a majority and that a nation's character can change through amendment and the people's will. Mehdi replies that the claim of imposition fails on the facts. The Constituent Assembly included the Hindu Mahasabha and figures from across the ideological spectrum, and by religion nobody but Hindus was in a position to impose anything. Founding a country on religion was an available choice, as Pakistan showed, and the founders chose otherwise. He then asks what the founders' outreach to princely states and regions such as Kashmir actually offered, and argues that it rested on plurality, diversity and the protection of identities. Neither Kashmiris nor the Dravidian south, he says, would have joined a project defined by RSS Hindutva, and even Sardar Patel, whom the right claims, cannot be shown to have offered that.

Javed observes that the same logic covers Dalits, Sikhs, OBCs, Jains and linguistic communities. Mehdi goes further, in the passage that is most clearly his own argument. If the outreach was made on the strength of the Constitution and is now being undone once territory is consolidated and the state has an army, police and institutions, he asks, was it a way of claiming land under cover of diversity? He does not conclude that it was. He says the character of India is what was offered then, and that it is the current project, not Muslims, that is on trial.

His conclusion is that anyone who wants a Hindu state should turn the clock back, put the reality before every community and let each choose again. That, he says, is impossible, because everyone has given blood for the republic as it exists.

Ummah is not a nation-state

The second half turns to a tension Javed says is rarely faced head on. If Indian Muslims are citizens of a nation-state, how do they relate to Muslims elsewhere, and to Gaza and Iran, where recent events have shaken the world?

Mehdi begins with identity. Nobody answers the question of who they are by naming the whole, he says. Asked by a European, an Indian says he is from India; asked by another Indian, he says Delhi or Uttar Pradesh; asked in Kashmir, he says Budgam rather than Kashmir. Identity is layered and subjective, and everyone defines himself partly by whom he is not. An Indian Muslim carries linguistic, regional, national and religious identities at once, and none has to cancel another.

The Quran, he argues, never addresses a nation-state. It addresses an ummah, a community of belief in a shared moral and ethical code, and calls it the best community raised up for humanity. His metaphor is a university and its alumni. Islam is the discipline and curriculum; its graduates go into every sector and country, and the question is whether they contribute to the institutions they enter or undermine them. "The best citizen of your country" is what such a graduate should be. Ummah, in this sense, is a matter of merit and conduct rather than birth, and those who violate the code, such as ISIS, are outside it. Millions of Indian Muslims, he notes, did not identify with them.

He offers a hard-edged illustration of why the nation-state cannot be wished away. Indians who work in the Gulf, Muslim or not, help build those societies, yet would not be given citizenship or equal rights and would not be regarded as Arabs. The identities of nation-states are established, he says, and it would be hypocrisy to pretend otherwise. He says Muslims speak up for Palestinians because they are oppressed for what they are, and equally when Hindus are attacked in Bangladesh, violence he calls equivalent to terrorism.

Merits, demerits and the Iran question

Javed puts the sharpest form of the challenge on the table, one he expects from the right: why demand democracy and equal citizenship in India yet celebrate or defend theocratic states elsewhere, whether Iran, Saudi Arabia or Turkey? Mehdi calls it a genuine question that must be answered or it exposes hypocrisy, but says it is wrongly framed, because Muslims do not universally endorse those systems. The Iranian doctrine of guardianship of the jurist, he notes, has been criticised by scholars inside Shia thought itself.

His own answer rests on will. An order that people establish collectively, as India's Constituent Assembly did, belongs to them. He does not belong to Iranian society and his will does not act there. Asked what he would want if it did, he says he would want the equality of citizenship he defends in India: no classification of rights by faith and no authoritarian system. He would contest those demerits in Iran as he does at home while still counting its merits, among them, in his account, its stand against imperial powers for the people of Palestine and for its own sovereignty. Identifying with a merit, he says, does not mean adopting the demerits, just as admiring India's constitutional achievements does not mean endorsing its foreign policy.

On humanity, he cites the Quranic idea of fitrah, an innate human nature, to explain why people who share no faith rally together when moral character shows itself. Nobody became a Muslim or a Shia overnight, he says; they responded to visible courage and to injustice.

Foreign policy and India's moral standing

The conversation then turns to the present government's foreign policy. Javed sets the context: India's closeness to Israel while Gaza and Iran are under attack.

Mehdi argues that the policy is flawed, counterproductive and damaging to India in the long run even if the Muslim population is left out of the equation. His reasoning is material. India's energy, including the fertiliser, gas and petroleum that drive its industry and agriculture, comes largely through the Gulf region; its workers and remittances are there; trade with Israel is nominal by comparison. Defence imports, he says, do not justify staking energy security on Israel, and India bought defence equipment elsewhere in the 1990s. What remains, he argues, is ideological alignment with a government whose own project is built on racial superiority and authoritarianism.

He ties this to a loss of India's moral standing. India, he says, was never a military or economic superpower, and its claim to global leadership rested on taking moral positions. He argues that has been surrendered, pointing to India's response to strikes on Iran, which he says involved neither condemnation nor condolence, and to a US trade deal he says is still unfinalised while tariffs remain. These are Mehdi's assessments, offered as opinion.

Reform first

Asked for a theory of change, since a constitutional democracy requires ideas to be carried through politics, Mehdi returns to the two roles he has been developing. As a citizen, the Indian Muslim is bound by the contract and by the duty to contribute to justice. As an individual, he keeps his faith without compromise and grants the same to others. For this he cites the Quranic line that each has his own religion, and a verse urging believers to compete with one another in good works. Coming out of mosque and temple alike, he says, people are Indians competing to contribute more to humanity.

He insists that internal reform must come before any engagement with the right wing or with secular politics. If Islam is universal, people should be able to see that from Muslim conduct, and if they cannot, the fault lies in Muslim understanding and behaviour. Muslims, he says, need to reimagine the world, reconstruct their political philosophy and show how the Quran complements humanity rather than clashing with it. India, he adds, had a chance to show the world a secularism in which religions complement one another, unlike the Western model that minimises the role of religion.

He also argues that the conditions of Indian Muslims, living among many faiths, languages and philosophies, could produce a jurisprudence that accommodates everyone, unlike Muslim-majority countries with little diversity. That, he says, is something an Indian Muslim can show the wider community. Javed gives the idea a historical frame, likening the Indian Muslim position to the Meccan period, an intellectual rather than institutional one. He adds that Indian Muslims are neither a protected minority like the refugees in Abyssinia nor part of a ruling order as in Medina, which puts them in a position to produce philosophical thought that speaks to universals, something he says Gaza cannot do while it remains grounded in oppression.

Both men close in the same spirit. Neither claims the last word, and Mehdi says these are ideas he is open to having corrected. Javed says the aim of Nous is not to impose one person's views, and that these discussions for now take place mostly within the community. The point, they suggest, is to begin the argument and then carry it to everyone else.