Anti-Imperialist Currents in Muslim Thought: A Response to Colonialism

When the British East India Company tightened its grip over the subcontinent in the nineteenth century, the question for every thinker was simple but heavy: how should one respond to foreign rule? Among Muslim intellectuals, two very different answers emerged. One urged accommodation and loyalty to the Crown. The other called for resistance, rooted in faith and forged in solidarity with fellow Indians. This second strand, the anti-imperialist current in Muslim thought, drew its energy from figures like Jamaluddin al-Afghani and later flowered in the lives of leaders who placed the freedom struggle above sectarian caution. Understanding this current helps explain not only the intellectual debates of colonial India but also the very dynamics of Hindu-Muslim relations that shaped the path to independence.

The colonial backdrop and two responses 🔗

The defeat of 1857 left Indian Muslims in a difficult position. The British viewed the community with suspicion, blaming it disproportionately for the revolt. Out of this crisis grew two distinct political instincts. The first, associated with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, argued that survival lay in cooperation. The second, which we can broadly call the anti-imperialist current, argued that dignity lay in resistance.

These were not merely tactical disagreements. They reflected deeper differences about identity, religion, and the place of Muslims in a shared Indian future. To grasp the anti-imperialist position fully, it helps to first understand what it was reacting against.

The loyalist stance of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan 🔗

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan is rightly remembered as a pioneering reformer who saw modern education as the path out of backwardness for his community. Yet his political philosophy rested on a foundation of loyalty to the British. He urged Muslims to stay away from the nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress, believing that political agitation would only deepen British hostility toward a community already under a cloud after 1857.

His guiding principles are sometimes summarised as a trinity: loyalty to the British, devotion to modern education, and aloofness from agitational politics. The institution he founded at Aligarh became the main vehicle for this vision. Over time, his thinking also moved toward the argument that Hindus and Muslims were distinct communities with separate interests, a position widely regarded as the foundation of the two-nation theory. It is worth noting that scholars debate his motives; defenders argue his loyalism was a protective shield for a vulnerable community rather than mere flattery. But whatever his intentions, the political consequence was clear: a Muslim leadership that stood apart from the broader anti-colonial struggle.

Jamaluddin al-Afghani and the spark of resistance 🔗

If Sir Syed represented accommodation, Jamaluddin al-Afghani (1839-1897) represented its opposite. A restless traveller and agitator, al-Afghani is regarded as one of the central figures of Islamic reformism, pan-Islamism, and anti-colonialism in the nineteenth century. Wherever he went, his message was the same: Muslims and the peoples of the East must awaken and shake off the roots of Western colonial domination.

The subcontinent was a particular focus of his energy. During his travels through the major cities of British India, he worked tirelessly to rouse the Muslim population against passivity. His critique cut directly against the loyalist outlook. Where Sir Syed counselled patience and cooperation, al-Afghani argued that European powers used the supposed “backwardness” of Eastern societies to justify their domination, while simultaneously trying to block every attempt at reform or renaissance among Islamic peoples.

Islamic universalism as a political framework 🔗

What made al-Afghani’s anti-imperialism distinctive was its grounding in religion. He championed what European writers labelled “political pan-Islamism,” the idea of uniting Muslims across borders into a single community of allegiance, the ummah. For him, this unity was not an end in itself but the strongest available force to mobilise Muslims against imperial domination.

This is a crucial point for understanding the entire current of thought. Religion here was not a retreat into private piety. It was a public, political resource. The shared identity of the worldwide Muslim community became a basis for collective action against colonial powers. Al-Afghani also feared that narrow ethnic nationalism would fragment this unity, so he prioritised solidarity of faith over divisions of language or region.

[Image: A nineteenth-century portrait of Jamaluddin al-Afghani alongside a map showing his travels across Egypt, India, Persia, and the Ottoman lands]

His influence was enormous and long-lasting. In Egypt, his pupil Muhammad Abduh carried forward his ideas, and the two together published the pan-Islamist, anti-colonial newspaper al-Urwa al-Wuthqa. In the subcontinent, his thought shaped a remarkable range of later figures, including Muhammad Iqbal, Ubaidullah Sindhi, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. The seed he planted, that faith could be a weapon against empire, took deep root.

From pan-Islamism to the freedom struggle 🔗

The most important development in this story is how an idea about Muslim unity across borders translated into participation in a shared, multi-religious struggle for Indian independence. This was not automatic. It required leaders who could connect the global concern for Muslim dignity with the local fight against British rule.

Maulana Azad and composite nationalism 🔗

No one embodies this transition more clearly than Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958). Azad began as a pan-Islamist who spoke fiercely against the subjugation of Muslim nations by imperial powers. Through his influential journals Al-Hilal and later Al-Balagh, he criticised colonialism so sharply that the British came to regard him as one of the most dangerous people in India and exiled him for years.

Crucially, Azad interpreted the Quran as commanding believers to fight against slavery and therefore against British imperialism as a religious duty. His ideological journey eventually carried him from pan-Islamism toward what is called composite nationalism, the conviction that Hindus and Muslims could together form a single nation. He argued that Muslims would be stronger and more influential within a united, pluralistic India than in a divided one.

His religious framework did not weaken this stance; it strengthened it. Azad pointed to early Islamic history, recalling how the Prophet of Islam had formed the first political community in Medina by aligning with Jews and other groups. For Azad, then, working alongside Hindus against a common oppressor was entirely consistent with his faith. As a committed anti-imperialist, he saw the two-nation theory as a betrayal of the freedom struggle, and he fought on multiple fronts, against the British and against communalists of every kind. He found Sir Syed’s loyalty to the empire shortsighted, arguing that it diminished the role Muslims could play in the larger national movement.

The role of the ulema and Deoband 🔗

The anti-imperialist current was not confined to journalists and reformers. It also ran strongly through sections of the traditional religious scholars, the ulema. The Deoband seminary produced influential figures who opposed colonial rule outright. Maulana Mahmud al-Hasan, head of the Deoband madrasa, was among the leaders who treated European attacks on Muslim institutions as an attack on Islam itself.

Later, the Deobandi scholar Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani became a powerful voice for composite nationalism, arguing that Hindus and Muslims could unite under a single banner to throw off the colonial yoke. This is a striking feature of the current: it drew religious conservatives and modernist reformers alike toward a shared anti-colonial goal.

The Khilafat moment and Hindu-Muslim unity 🔗

The clearest practical expression of this anti-imperialist thought came with the Khilafat Movement (1919-1924). After the First World War, the Allied powers moved to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, whose Sultan was regarded by many Indian Muslims as the Caliph and spiritual head of global Islam. The threat to the Caliphate crystallised anti-British sentiment that had been building since Britain declared war on the Ottomans in 1914.

What is remarkable is what happened next. Rather than remaining a purely Muslim concern, the movement merged with the broader nationalist struggle. Leaders like the Ali brothers, Maulana Azad, and the Deoband ulema joined forces with Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. Gandhi embraced the Khilafat cause precisely because he saw in it an opportunity to bring Muslims into the mainstream of the national movement and to build unity. The combined Khilafat-Non-Cooperation agitation became the first all-India movement against British rule, marked by an unprecedented degree of Hindu-Muslim cooperation.

[Image: A photograph of a 1920s Non-Cooperation Movement gathering showing Hindu and Muslim leaders sharing a public platform]

Here we see the full arc of the anti-imperialist current. A religiously framed concern for the global Muslim community, the legacy of al-Afghani’s pan-Islamism, became the vehicle for mass participation in a multi-religious freedom struggle. Faith and nation, far from being opposed, reinforced each other for a crucial moment.

The fragility of this unity 🔗

It would be dishonest to present this story as one of uncomplicated success. The Khilafat Movement collapsed by 1924, both because of violent incidents that led Gandhi to suspend Non-Cooperation and because the Turkish republic abolished the Caliphate itself. The unity it generated proved difficult to sustain, and the following decades saw the communal divide widen dramatically.

The very religious framing that mobilised mass support also carried risks. Building a national movement around a religious symbol like the Caliphate created a precedent that could later be turned toward division rather than unity. Azad spent the rest of his life battling the communal forces, both Muslim and Hindu, that ultimately led to Partition. The anti-imperialist current, then, was powerful but fragile, capable of producing extraordinary solidarity and yet unable to prevent the eventual fracture.

Why this current still matters 🔗

The anti-imperialist strand in Muslim thought offers a more complex picture than the simple narrative of separatism that often dominates popular memory. It reminds us that many of the most committed opponents of colonial rule were Muslims who drew their resistance directly from their faith, and that a significant body of Muslim opinion saw its future within a united, plural India.

This tradition also reveals an important truth about political thought in colonial India: religion was rarely a private matter. For thinkers from al-Afghani to Azad, Islamic universalism supplied not a reason to withdraw from politics but a moral framework for opposing injustice and domination. The debate between loyalism and resistance, between separate identity and composite nationalism, was ultimately a debate about how a community should carry its faith into public life under conditions of foreign rule.

What do you think? If religious identity could be the very source of anti-colonial resistance and Hindu-Muslim solidarity during the Khilafat moment, why do you think the same identity later became a force for division? And in a diverse society, where should the line fall between faith as a private conviction and faith as a basis for collective political action?

References

1. https://www.eurasiareview.com/22102024-sir-syed-ahmed-khan-and-the-muslim-renaissance-in-south-asia-analysis/
2. https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/contributions-sir-syed-ahmad-khan/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Islamism
4. https://al-islam.org/history-muslim-philosophy-volume-2-book-8/chapter-74-jamal-al-din-al-afghani
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Abduh
6. https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3125.html
7. https://scroll.in/article/1046130/s-irfan-habib-maulana-abul-kalam-azad-espoused-composite-nationalism-all-his-life
8. https://countercurrents.org/2024/10/abul-kalam-azads-blueprint-for-inclusive-india-relevance-today/
9. https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/khilafat-movement