Red Maulanas: Revisiting Islam and the Left in twentieth-century South Asia

Abstract

In the early 20th century, colonised people across empires rejected their status quo with visions and articulations of different emancipatory futures. The more radical and creative of these projects fused socialist thought with national, cultural or religious traditions. Grounded in ideas of equality, redistribution and common ownership, these visions offered futures of freedom beyond nationalism. Islamic Socialism was one of these revolutionary currents alongside Arab socialism, African socialism and Black Liberation Theology. The article reviews the historical scholarship on the relationship between Muslims and Left politics in 20th century South Asia and proposes Islamic Socialism as a new field of study. Some of the earliest articulations and enduring commitment to the politics of Islamic Socialism emerged from South Asia, yet the topic is not easily located in the existing scholarship on the region or elsewhere. Employing a diverse set of texts, I show how we can approach through three categories - time, space, and ideas– and map out subaltern Islam as a future area of research. Existing studies have treated Islamic Socialism variously as crude readings of Islam and Marxism, an immemorial Islamic tradition, the intellectual product of theoretical congruence, or as a novel and creative experiment. Reflecting on its minor status in historiography, the article argues for the importance of Islamic Socialism in thinking beyond Islamic literalism and furthering our understanding of decolonisation experiments, everyday subaltern politics, and the possibilities for Marxism and Islam in the Global South.