Much has been written about the dangers of The Waqf Amendment Bill 2024 and its majoritarian goals. After some debate, the Bill was referred to a Joint Working Committee that approved all the government’s amendments, rejected and redacted all the objections raised by the opposition. The JWC has now tabled the Bill in the parliament to much uproar. As these conversations continue, I want to draw our attention to the encounter between the Waqf tradition and the British in the Indian subcontinent. Dismantling the waqf was a tool of dispossession for the British as well.
Control over land and property and its dispossession is central to a colonial project. The extraction of revenue and resources from the subcontinent for the British, for example, was majorly mechanised through a system of controlling land and property. The British did this by constructing the idea of property and regulating it in places where these ideas didn’t exist. In nomadic parts of the subcontinent, such as parts of Punjab, for example, the British appointed aabadkars (settlers) to settle villages and enforce organised, and therefore, taxed, farming in regions that did not comprise settled communities. In more settled regions, the British controlled land by rewriting, through law and revenue manuals, the existing relationship of societies with land. The development of zamindari, mahalwari and ryotwari systems across North India is an example of this second phenomenon.
The British sought to dismantle and weaken the Waqf system because first, it presented a resistance to the British mechanisms of controlling land and property.
For the British, Waqf was an odd object to tackle. While the British colonial state sought to redefine and control land and remake the economy in South Asia, it had explicitly left matters of religious and personal laws out of colonial jurisdiction. Waqf stood somewhere in the fuzzy boundaries between religious customs and systems of recognising and organising property. It was a religious matter that the British had committed themselves not to meddle with, and at the same time, it was a system of land ownership that the colonial project could not have sustained without controlling.
The earliest attack on Waqf was about its definitions of charity and ownership. While the Protestant and secular European ideas thought of charity as unrelated to family, Islam emphasised on charity given to one’s closest relatives as the highest form of giving alms. Scholars like Gregory Kozlowski and Eric Beverly have shown how conflicts such as these provided a window for British judges to redefine, recategorise and re-form Waqf into British law. The idea that charity could be done within family was propagated by the British as evidence of corruption in the Muslim society. This attack was met with resistance with several ‘native’ lawyers like Faiz Badrudin Tayabji challenging the British remodelling of Waqf into their morality and institutions of law.
Also read: Why Muslims Fear Communal Backlash as JPC Clears Waqf Amendments
Secondly, Waqf created autonomous public space for Indians and the British wanted to control and diminish ‘native’ public spaces. Public spaces are arenas of politics. They are used to claim belongingness to one’s own city, interact with other city dwellers, discuss problems, organise help for the community and mobilise support for socio-political movements. From the barricades on the streets of Paris during the French Revolution, to Jallianwala Bagh in India’s resistance to the British, and Ramlila Maidan, Sindhu Border and Shaheen Bagh in our time, it is clear that a people cannot have a politics without having access and control over public space. “Taking to the streets,” is an undying metaphor of people’s movements against oppressive powers.
Shaheen Bagh on March 10. Photo: Twitter/@UmarKhalidJNU
Waqf provided (and still provides) this public space to Indians. Waqf was the only mechanism through which Indians created their own public space and infrastructure without relying on the British government. Waqf made it possible to create schools, traveler’s rest houses (sarais), homeless shelters, mosques, community halls and graveyards – all independent from the British rule and maintained and managed with complete autonomy. These spaces were mostly syncretic and provided a space for Indians to interact, trade, and build and nurture community life. In his book Causes of the Indian Revolt, for example, Sir Syed criticised the British for meddling in the public spaces of Delhi and impacting the socio-cultural and religious life of Indians – Hindus and Muslims alike. Dispossession of public space, therefore, required attacking and controlling the institution of waqf.
Thirdly, the British were uncomfortable with continued usage of existing buildings and infrastructure and Waqf provided a robust system that kept the built environment alive and thriving. This was not to the liking of the colonial occupation. Mughals had built a lot of public buildings, plazas, and infrastructure such as bridges and canals – many of which still serve their function. A continued usage of these buildings acknowledged the presence of and legitimised the rule of the Mughals in India. The British, however, viewed these buildings as either antiquarian objects that were to be museum-ised as evidence of a regime that has passed, or as infrastructure, and therefore, a regime, in decline.
Also read: What Concerns About the Waqf Amendment Bill Does the JPC’s Report Identify?
Dispossession of public buildings and establishing redundance of civilian infrastructure, therefore, was central to declare the demise of the Mughal rule and announce the arrival of the new British colonial order. Architectural historiography and British institutions such as the Asiatic Societies and local Archeological Societies that led to the establishment of the Archeological Survey of India in 1861, made sure that buildings were written strictly as “stone texts” – as James Fergusson put it. That is, exclusively as dead material that can at best be historical evidence, and without the people that continue to use them. Architectural historians like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan provided a resistance to this erasure.
The British, therefore, attacked the Waqf tradition and tied it to the ideas of modern law and property. First, the British promoted the idea that a continued usage of Mughal buildings was evidence that Indians were still stuck in the past and continued to use buildings and neighbourhoods that were dirty and unhygienic, and therefore, needed to be civilised into modernity and Waqf came in the way. Historian Faridah Zaman has shown how such arguments were used to attack sacred spaces in North India and securitise them after the rebellion of 1857.
Secondly, the British painted Waqf properties – especially those under waqf-e-aulaad – as centres of economic abuse. In this propaganda, wealthy Muslims used Waqf to cement their hold on generational wealth and as a channel for corruption. These properties, in British propaganda, needed government surveillance and control to put them to better “public use.” The awqaf (assets donated for charitable causes) were already creating public spaces and promoting public good but by demonising Waqf, the British promoted their judicial and legislative interventions as a necessity for greater public good, and their control as a much-needed reform in the interest of Muslims themselves.
All of this sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? The attack on the Waqf is not new and neither are its mechanisms. The Waqf Amendment Bill, the arguments of the Indian government and public discourse and propaganda around Waqf echo the British technologies of occupation. Just like human progress happens on the shoulders of those who came before us, successive regimes also learn from regimes of the past. Unsurprisingly, then, as coordinated attacks on Muslim lives and spaces in India have intensified, the Islamic institution of Waqf has come in the saffron crosshairs. But this time, the tools of dispossessions that our colonisers used, are being used against our own people.
Fahad Zuberi is a doctoral scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A version of this piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
