Theorizing the Individual in Anticolonial Muslim Thought

Abstract

This article contests the tendency to see Islam as overwhelmingly collective and theorizes the individual from Islamic history and tradition of thought. It does so by recovering and recasting the ideas of Abul Hashim (1905–1974), a prominent South Asian anticolonial Muslim thinker and political actor. It examines how Hashim reconstructs Qur’anic ideas to oppose modern individualism primarily due to its loss of moral unity and advances a theory of the individual that argues for a unified ethical framework, which binds the individual, God, and others in an embedded relationship of love and care in the community. The article explores a unique trajectory for self-constitution developed within Islamic history and tradition—a trajectory that goes beyond the rise of the autonomous, reflexive, and self-serving individual without compromising the importance of one’s intention and conscience in shaping the self. This theory of the individual from the Islamic tradition refutes the Eurocentric framework of theorizing the concept by presenting a distinct framework that transcends the dichotomy between the individual and the community, a battle that is pervasive in contemporary Euro-American political thought.

Introduction

There is a general tendency in the West to see individualism as a product of Western thought, primarily developed in the Christian tradition. It is argued that the interiority of Christian belief—the priority of the quality of personal intention and conscience—provided an ontological foundation for the invention of the self-reflexive, autonomous individual in the West. ¹ It is however implied that such a priority of intention and conscience exclusively developed in the Christian tradition; other traditions, particularly those in Islam, did not underscore such an internal aspect of the self. An inclination to see Islam as overwhelmingly collective is ostensible. ² Even the historians of Islam, including those who take Islamic traditions seriously, assert that Islam and Muslim social and political conditions prioritize the community over the individual. ³ In response, Islamic scholars and Muslim reformists either rejected such claims, agreed with them, or offered passing commentaries without seriously engaging with the question of the individual within Islamic tradition. ⁴ Little has been written to theorize and historicize the concept of the individual in Islamic political thought and practice. My modest objective in this article is to theorize the idea of the individual from the Islamic history and tradition of thought, situating it within the Muslim social and political conditions in the anticolonial moment in South Asia. I do so by recovering and reconstructing the political ideas and actions of Abul Hashim (1905–1974), an anticolonial Muslim thinker and influential political actor who served as the secretary of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League (BPML) in the 1940s and contributed to mass mobilization for anticolonial causes and the Pakistan movement.

I demonstrate how Hashim creatively draws ideas from the Islamic tradition of thought to refute individualism and advances a theory of the individual within the anticolonial condition of South Asia. Hashim mobilizes the Qur’anic concepts of fitra (innate human nature) to reject individualism and rabbaniyat (God-oriented life/ethical discourse) to develop a theory of the individual. He rejects individualism for its moral fragmentation and reconstructs rabbaniyat as a unifying ethical framework that binds the individual, God, and others within an embedded relationship of love and care in the community. Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat argues for an ethical individual constituted within the constant interplay of the self’s intimate relationship with God and the intersubjective relationship between the self and others. It invites the individual to accommodate others with a compassionate heart and view oneself through the lens of others while acting in the embedded relationships of shared community ethics and practices. Hashim rejects individualism but endorses the idea of the individual with an individuality. He negates how individuality is thought of as a cult of individual genius and originality, which evokes conflict between the individual and society, and overemphasizes the supreme value of individual subjectivity in the Eurocentric framework of theorizing the individual.

Hashim places the individual at the center of his political thought at a unique anticolonial moment when the empire was nearing its end, which offered a rare opportunity in South Asian history to reconsider the founding principles of postcolonial social life and public order. His theory of the individual from the Islamic tradition of thought not only served to refute colonial pedagogical and conceptual architecture but, more significantly, to articulate a vision for postcolonial life in Pakistan. Hashim’s idea of the individual was profoundly shaped by the political and intellectual context in which he was writing and undertaking political action. It was a rare momentum for Muslim politics in colonial India. The anticolonial Khilafat movement of the 1920s, the MacDonald communal award of 1932, and the Government of India Act of 1935 organized Muslims more than ever. These events gave Muslims an electoral advantage by granting voting rights to the upper stratum of peasants, resulting in a significant increase in the Muslim electorate. ⁵ The Muslim community won a majority of seats in the 1937 Bengal legislative council election that engendered a space for the first time to claim their share of power, not only in parliament but also in every aspect of life, from education to employment to culture. This challenged the cultural, political, and economic superiority of Hindu Bhadraloks, and their fierce reaction made the political conditions precarious, marred by communal violence and hatred. Within this political precarity, while fighting British colonialism and Hindu dominance as well as conceiving Pakistan as a separate state for Muslims, Hashim sought to reimagine the individual, community, and state, drawing conceptual resources from the Islamic traditions of thought. His focus, however, was distinct from the previous generation of Muslim thinkers, who placed greater emphasis on the concerns of Muslims as a community. ⁶ Hashim rather rethought community, prioritizing the cultivation of the individual or fashioning the self in the transformed political conditions of late colonial India. Hashim differed from his contemporaries in the intellectual milieu of early twentieth-century Bengal, including the dominant strain of Muslim rationalist thought spearheaded by the intellectual movement called Emancipation of Intellect (Buddhir Mukti) popularly known as Sikha Ghosti, which carried the lineage of the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance, and the rationalist thought of the early Islamic Mu’tazila school. ⁷ In contrast, Hashim prioritized the Sufi traditions of thought in Islam, especially drawing from the thought of eleventh-century Islamic scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). ⁸ Despite his wide recognition as a philosopher and a thinker in vernacular literature, academic works primarily refer to Hashim for his contributions as a political actor. ⁹ In this article, I reconstruct Hashim as a political thinker, more specifically as a theorist of the individual. In doing so, I not only refute the misconception that only in Christianity did such attention to individual conscience and intention lead to a conception of the individual, but I also suggest we revisit some other exceptionalist arguments about Christian and European notions of individual subjectivity. ¹⁰ I show how Hashim prioritized the individual’s inwardness from the Islamic tradition of thought—in a way that differs from the modern European individual’s inner turn yet shares commonalities with early Christianity and potentially with Abrahamic faiths generally. Hashim’s theory of the individual argues for an embedded self bound within an ethical unity, neither compromising the importance of its inner priority nor prioritizing the distinction between the inner and outer selves. It advances a distinct idea of the individual from Islamic history and tradition by rejecting the dichotomy between the inner and outer selves that is pervasive in the Eurocentric framework of theorizing the individual.

The article is divided into three major sections, with concluding remarks. The first section shows how Hashim draws from the Qur’anic concept of fitra to critique the contractarian understanding of human nature and broadly to refute individualism, drawing from al-Ghazali’s understanding of the concept and mobilizing it to articulate his theory of the individual. The second section shows how Hashim reinterprets the Islamic concept of rabbaniyat to advance his theory of the individual. The final section reconstructs Hashim as an anticolonial thinker. It illustrates how he centers the individual in his postcolonial political vision and situates his theory of the individual with respect to other anticolonial Muslim thinkers’ thoughts on this topic.

Mobilizing Fitra, Refuting Individualism

Hashim has a rich conception of the individual’s self-making through the inner dispositions instilled by God and its development through relations with others, but he has a pessimistic view of individualism. Describing individualism, he contends that modern individuals as developed in Europe can be accurately depicted through their “acts of cruelty, hypocrisy, and artificiality.” ¹¹ For him, they always “speak about peace but act against it. They argue for equality among humans, but inequality is inherent to modern societies.” ¹² Hashim’s reservation about modern individuals is their becoming individualistic. ¹³ In other words, his primary object of criticism is individualism in the possessive sense, which holds that an individual can possess himself, his body, labor, and material possessions. ¹⁴ Hashim criticizes individualism on two registers. First, it produced an empty, hollowed out self, taking away the richness the individual possessed within collective relational living in the community. Individualism reduces the individual to merely a self-absorbed, consumerist, hedonistic self. ¹⁵ The second criticism is that individualism disrupted a moral unity that Hashim presumes prevailed before modernity. Individualism, or bektisorbosotabad, in Bengali is a state of affair when the individual (bekti) loses his richness due to his separation from social, religious, and cultural contexts and traditions. ¹⁶ It is a grim state of man, nothing but a shell of the ethical, shared, flourishing life of its previous theistic, community-based living that was disrupted by modernity and liberal world-making. For Hashim, the contradiction lies in the individual’s going away from their life of richer moral unity, the life that produced what Charles Taylor calls the “porous self.” The porous self’s sources of powerful and important emotions lie not within the inner self but outside of the mind, where there is no clear boundary between the inner self and the rest, whether psychic or physical. In contrast, a boundary is much firmer to the self of modern individuals in the West, the “buffered self.” ¹⁷ By bektisorbosotabad, Hashim denotes the state of the individual who either does not consider or only selectively chooses his religious, community, and other aspects of traditions as sources of morality or a good life, prioritizing, instead, his own rational understanding and interest over them. It is somewhat similar to what Alasdair MacIntyre defines as liberal individualism in the modern European context with fragmented survivals of tradition and morality where “individuals pursue their own self chosen conception of the good life, and political institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes such self-determined activity possible.” ¹⁸

Hashim contends that the source of the rise of individualism in modern Europe is the individual’s inability to realize his fitra as Allah created it. He takes the Islamic concept of fitra and mobilizes it to reject modern individualism. The way Hashim narrates the gloomy state of modern, civilized man, it might appear that like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he assumes that human nature is inherently good but became corrupted and miserable with modern civilization. He indeed quotes Rousseau’s famous saying, “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” ¹⁹ However, a close reading shows that Hashim does not have a particular human nature in mind—whether the Rousseauian “good nature” or the Hobbesian idea that the life of man in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He is, rather, critical of such dominant Western interpretations of human nature, arguing that they are misguided because they take only the visible aspects of human being as the human nature (fitra), completely ignoring the invisible and more significant aspects of them (Qudrat) that created its visible part. Qudrat is not God but His creative power. According to Hashim, theories of human nature take human beings themselves as given, ignoring their connection with what created them, the Qudrat. He writes, “The greatest tragedy of our age is that its discoveries of the secrets of fitra have led man astray to think that the creation is an automatic mechanism, an evolutionary process, and that he with only his intellect can establish his own sovereignty over fitra.” ²⁰

For Hashim, the misguided interpretation of human nature in the Western political thought is the result of European Enlightenment thought’s vision of a secular, human-centric world—what he calls a nihilistic materialist world—that tends to undermine the significance of transcendental entities like God in the lives of humans, with the assumption that humans possess the capacity to comprehend everything around them. ²¹ He comments, “Man is the vanity of the little knowledge of his immediate surroundings and material environment [which] puts himself always in opposition to his own nature which cannot be comprehended with men’s limited knowledge about himself and the universe.” ²²

Even though Hashim identifies the “limits” of the theories of human nature in Western political thought and repeatedly claims that modern individuals are miserable because of their deviating from their own nature, we do not find a clarification of what that “own nature” entails.

It rather seems that humans do not have a God-created fixed nature. There is no a priori model of the individual in Hashim’s thought, as contemporary theorists argue in the European tradition of thought or broadly in the Islamic Sufi tradition of thought from which Hashim derives his ideas. ²³ For Hashim, God created humans with a specific fitra, which renowned Islamic Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) refers to as the human being’s original disposition, but this is not a fixed nature. The question of what constitutes the original disposition, or fitra, in al-Ghazali’s thought, is a topic of significant debate in Islamic thought, and there is little consensus on the matter. ²⁴ For Hashim, as for al-Ghazali, human beings are not created as blank slates; they are rather created with original disposition, and individuals must themselves realize their own nature or dispositions to become ideal individuals. ²⁵ I will elaborate on this point and how Hashim draws from al-Ghazali’s thought on fitra later in this section; first, I briefly situate Hashim’s thought within the wider debates on fitra in Islamic intellectual traditions.

The concept of fitra and its relationship with the development of the individual is a contested subject in Islamic traditions of thought. There is no one translation or meaning of this idea in Islamic history and philosophy, and it has been variously used in Islamic traditions of thought based on different temporal and spatial contexts. ²⁶ The core debate around the concept involves whether fitra is immutable—created by God in a specific way—or malleable, to be shaped by relationships with others in political and social contexts in which individuals reside. ²⁷ The core of the view that human nature is immutable is that if God is evident and immanent (Q 57:3), and thus certainly immutable, then what comprises His essence must also be immutable. ²⁸ The advocates of mutability of human nature, on the other hand, argue that the norms, and customs and political conditions that rightfully differ at different ages can contribute to the distinct formations of human nature. ²⁹ Hashim’s idea of fitra belongs to this latter interpretation of the concept. He argues that God created humans as part of His own fitra, which is immanent and immense. However, the human nature that one would ultimately assume would depend on the context in which one lives, on the one hand, and one’s intention and action to internalize God’s fitra, on the other. ³⁰ That means fitra is malleable and subject to change according to particular circumstances, laws, norms, and customs one inhabits and the action one undertakes to internalize God’s fitra. Hashim interprets the Qur’anic verse (Q 30:30) to argue that God created man on the basis of His Fitra and with the ability to internalize His attributes. ³¹ According to this Qur’anic verse, as Hashim analyzes it, there is an original inner constitution according to which God created humans, and the responsibility of humans is to discover it and internalize it to become ideal individuals, “good” Muslims by submitting to God.

For Hashim, God not only created humans with original dispositions but also guided them to manage their directions, the immense potentials and possibilities—whether they would turn into positive or negative directions—depend on how individually and collectively human beings realize God’s teaching revealed in the Qur’anic and apply them to the formation of their lives in everyday actions. More specifically, Hashim argues that God created humans with two inner dispositions: one toward egoism (ohong sotta) and another toward altruism (bhuma sotta). ³² This may be what is referred to as the dualistic interpretation of fitra in Islamic thought, meaning that God created human beings with two innate ontological realities—good and evil—and the individual must accept responsibility for tending toward either while he is to fulfill his role as khalifah. ³³ Hashim rather simplifies this complex and controversial categorization of inherent dual tendencies of human nature in his own terms: evil as egoism (ohong sotta) and good as altruism (bhuma sotta).

Hashim’s illustration of human nature is, to some extent, Ghazallian. Like Hashim, al-Ghazali argues that human beings are pliable with original disposition; they are not good or bad in their original state. Two aspects are prioritized in al-Ghazali’s thought on fitra: first, seeking the true meanings of the fitra or original dispositions—which are common to all humans—and second, how specific shape the dispositions take within the particular context of one’s community, guided by parents and teachers, among others. ³⁴ However, it is contended that the discovery of the true meanings of original dispositions was the lifelong intellectual quest of al-Ghazali. ³⁵ While Hashim draws from al-Ghazali—which was common to his contemporary Islamic thinkers—and places the discovery of one’s own original disposition at the core of his thought, he seems to place greater emphasis on the development of humans through their interactions within the community. It becomes evident if we carefully look at how Hashim interprets the original dispositions that are innate to human beings. Hashim classifies them into two categories: egoistic, which encompasses negative, beastly potentials, and altruistic, which comprises positive, virtuous tendencies. He places the divine potential within the category of altruism. That means the divine is not merely managing inner dispositions while developing a genuine connection with God but is inherently connected to one’s selfless or altruistic relation with others. Al-Ghazali, on the other hand, argues that there are four innate tendencies in humans: the aggressive, beastly, satanic, and divine, where the potentiality of the divine, which encompasses inner abilities of knowledge, intellect, cognition, and understanding, is bestowed with the power to have mastery over the aggressive, beastly, and satanic tendencies to subjugate and vanquish them. ³⁶ Al-Ghazali’s divine is primarily internal, while Hashim’s divine is intimately connected to human beings’ interaction with the world. Hashim disrupts the assumed distinction between the inner and outer selves in cultivating one’s divinity, a move that has larger conceptual significance for how he rejects the Eurocentric framework of the individual. We will elaborate on it later in this article. At any rate, Hashim’s altruism is more than merely internally realizing God’s divine attributes to overcome the elements of egoism; it is not simply a matter of the spheres of the soul (nafs) and heart (qalb), where the inherent human tendencies reside and compete to dominate over each other. ³⁷

Hashim conceptualizes altruism not just as a way of orienting oneself toward God or as individual selfless acts toward others. For him, altruism, along with developing an intimate relation with divine disposition, transforms the souls of individuals by uniting people through the cultivation of mutual love, trust, and respect in everyday business and, thus, securing human dignity. In his words,

When a person prioritizes altruistic tendencies and sees himself within the embedded relations with others in the community, accommodating others with a compassionate heart (aponar koriya loy), he naturally receives love, respect, and admiration from those around him. Everyone accepts him as one of their own. ³⁸

Facilitating others with a compassionate heart is essential for Hashim’s cultivating altruistic tendencies in the making of the individual, against egoism’s self-centered formation. Such an ego-driven, self-centered constitution of the self is what Hashim views as individualism where individuals exploit social relationships for their own interests, thereby disrupting the embedded, shared connections within the community. For Hashim, as for al-Ghazali, the construction of the individual is primarily to manage the innate capacities of the self, not to prioritize the self at the expense of others. While the individual remains at the center, the self-making is not an individualized mechanism. Individuals are to be made, first of all, by orienting them toward God. Specifically, the individual’s conscience and intention occupy the central place in determining one’s relation with God and managing the God-implanted tendencies in his soul. For Hashim, an abstract relation with God in one’s soul cannot entirely cultivate the individual’s moral dispositions that inherently require a social sphere to interact with others. Hashim’s emphasis thus remains, more than al-Ghazali, as discussed previously, on the individual’s inherent relations with the social sphere. Hashim’s theory of the individual, while deriving from Ghazali and the Sufi tradition of thought, more generally, also makes a distinction from them, as he emphasizes the role of community for inner purification. This emphasis on the role of community in the formation of the individual is further revealed in Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat. The section that follows makes a detailed examination of his thoughts on rabbaniyat and how he mobilizes this Qur’anic concept to theorize the individual.

Theorizing Rabbaniyat: Cultivating the Individual in the Spirit of God

Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat determines the individual’s relations with God and others, as well as how the individual is shaped in a society in which God’s presence is central to their everyday business. Yet, individuals are not passive; they are active agents who shape themselves in relation to others in their temporal and spatial conditions. The theory of rabbaniyat was not introduced by Hashim. It had existed in Islamic political thought and reemerged in the writings of early twentieth-century South Asian Muslim thinkers–namely, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), Ghulam Ahmad Parwez (1903–1985), and Maulana Azad Sobhani (1873–1957), among others. ³⁹ Though all of these scholars derived the idea from the Qur’an, their interpretations differ.

Hashim takes the concept rabbaniyat from the Qur’anic verse (3:79), which is traditionally translated and understood as signifying the devotion to God. ⁴⁰ Hashim, however, reconstructs the concept kūnū rabbāniyyīna in the verse as the theory of rabbaniyat that invites the individual to be rabbani, like God—to cultivate oneself with the nourishing attribute of God and take care of oneself and others in the community with the spirit of God. ⁴¹ It envisions a form of life that complicates modern subjectivism by proposing an alternative way of life in which individuals are embedded within shared religious ethics and community norms. Hashim reconstructs rabbaniyat as an ethical unity that binds the individual with God on the one hand, and with others in the community on the other. Rabbaniyat rejects subjectivism and, broadly, individualism, and yet the individual remains at the center of his thought. The Arabic concept rabubiyyat originates from Rab, which has a distinct connotation, not adequately conveyed by English words (God, Lord) or the Bengali word (Provu) often used to translate it. ⁴² The problem for Hashim is that by using God, or the Lord as it is done in modern Christianity, Rab is reduced to something anthropomorphic, which is a fabrication because Rab is amorphous, the embodiment of all attributes of Him revealed in the Qur’an. The attribute of Rab that Hashim prioritizes is preservation; God as Rububiyah, the nourisher and sustainer of all things, without Whom nothing could be created and maintained. ⁴³ Rububiyah (God) is neither an individual nor the combination of what is in the universe. The core of Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat is that God, the ultimate sovereign, has created man as part of His fitra and bestowed man as God’s viceregent, a khalifa, an agent of God on earth.” ⁴⁴

Hashim’s thoughts on man as the viceregent of God provide a distinct perspective on the concept. In modern Islamic thought, the individual as God’s viceregent is primarily discussed in conjunction with the concept of divine sovereignty, claiming a distinct political authority from it. ⁴⁵ While arguing for absolute God’s authority, as we have mentioned in our discussion on fitra, Hashim emphasizes more how man as a viceregent of God is to become an ethical, responsible individual who cares for himself and the creations surrounding him. Hashim proposes a conception of the individual based on intersubjective relationships between the individual, God, and others bounded within an ethical framework as an alternative to the atomistic, possessive, morally fragmented individual. In Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat, the individual’s relation with God, akin to St. Paul’s early Christian conceptualization of it, is a relation of love (olohiyat). It is not a relation of merely fear and punishment, nor a hierarchical subject-object relation. Hashim believes that an individual’s relation with God will not be secured unless he submits himself to Him unconditionally, as a friend with a firm belief and conviction that he can internalize His attributes if God so wishes. It demands developing the right intention to embody God’s attributes and cultivating the desire to do so. Despite similarities between early Christianity and Islam in their emphasis on intention and conscience, Christianity’s emphasis on the individual’s conscience—which promotes moral equality and individualizes salvation—leads to a gradual erosion of the social’s role in the formation of the self, laying the foundation for the development of individuality as later developed in liberal European tradition. ⁴⁶ In the Islamic tradition of thought, as Hashim explores in his theory of rabbaniyat, the emphasis on inner priority neither individualizes salvation nor contributes to the individual’s autonomy; therefore, unlike the liberal tradition, the autonomous, atomistic, self-serving individual has not emerged in the Islamic tradition of thought. ⁴⁷ The social remains integral to developing an individual’s conscience to realize God’s attributes and materialize them while interacting with others in the community. ⁴⁸ Hashim considers conscience as something not merely internal but intrinsically rooted in social interactions; for him, a social sphere is a precondition for the development of a conscience. The priority of conscience, which is celebrated as the first step in the invention of the autonomous individual in the liberal tradition, is what contested by Hashim due to its erosion of the social, which, according to Hashim, ultimately contributes to the individual’s moral alienation. ⁴⁹ Hashim implies that prioritizing conscience as something inward as opposed to understanding it as embedded in the social is the first step in producing the morally confused autonomous individuals, subsequently developed in the liberal tradition. Hashim argues that it does not happen in Islamic tradition, as the individual is intimately connected to God in the process of his submission to God. Gillespie correctly observes that the absolute submission to God in Islam, which is distinct from Christianity, contributed to the emergence of a different pathway for the individual’s development, distinct from the liberal autonomous individual. ⁵⁰

The inward priority that emphasizes conscience and intention, although it is claimed to have exclusively developed in the Christian tradition, is contested by Hashim. We observe that, albeit differently, they are also central to Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat. Conscience and intention (niyya) are central not only in Hashim’s thought but largely in Islamic tradition of thought; particularly niyya is critical to everyday religious practices like salat that cultivate the individual’s attitudes towards God in His presence. ⁵¹ Although Hashim does not explicitly illustrate the details of the theological significance of niyya, Islamic jurist tradition confirms that niyya determines the validity or invalidity of worship in Islam. ⁵² The frequently referenced ahadith (the Prophet’s sayings) indicate that each person is accountable for their actions and that actions are judged based on the individual’s intentions. ⁵³ It is even argued that the term “islam” was associated with accepting a personal responsibility for action that had transcendent authority even in pre-Islamic Arab culture. ⁵⁴ This priority to the inner self in Islamic thought, however, is not the same as the modern individual’s “inwardness and self-reflexivity,” and it would be thus misconstrued to assert that the individual with an inner turn to self in the modern sense existed in Islam even before the invention of the individual in Europe, as scholars tend to contend. ⁵⁵ Hashim derives the inner priority of the individual from the Sufi tradition of Islam through al-Ghazali’s thought as illustrated in the previous section. Hashim, like al-Ghazali, maintains that the heart, not solely the mind, is the seat for growing the individual’s sincere conscience and intention, and without the coordinated efforts of mind and intuition, the knowledge of transcendental truth or realizing God’s attribute cannot be comprehended. ⁵⁶

The individual’s actions as a representative of God are crucial in determining his relations with others for Hashim. Among all ninety-nine attributes of God, it is the quality of Rabuubiyyat, God as nourisher, that Hashim accentuates the most. Rabuuiyaat invites the individual to work for others without demanding service in return as God being a nourisher entails that He offers things to His creatures without receiving anything in exchange. ⁵⁷ Hashim wants to fundamentally transform the conditions of relations among people by starting relationships not with skepticism but with trust and faith in others. He unsettles the modern, liberal relations of individuals—the relations of exchange—and transforms them into a relation of trust, faith, love, and care. However, this is not a secularized relation of brotherhood or merely being part of each other’s stories in a shared community, as MacIntyre argues in his discussion on the unity of the self, but more profound, where God’s presence is integral: maintaining a relation of love with others and taking care of them is part of one’s faith in and relation with God. ⁵⁸

The relation of love and care, according to Hashim, is disrupted by an individual’s sense of autonomy that misleads him into believing that the glory of their success and the burden of failure are entirely their own, thereby contributing to life’s misery, killing the individual from the inside out. ⁵⁹ Against this, Hashim declares that the individual could be liberated from misery by the sincere belief that he is “rab under Rab,” not autonomous but a part of the fitra of a larger being, God. Hashim writes:

Whoever actively believes that Allah is the Rab of the universe and that he is the Caliph (Isme Sifat) or His representative on earth, and who ardently strives to become an ideal human being in his daily life by embodying Allah’s virtues, and who gradually becomes accustomed to helping others and receiving the assistance of others with gratitude, his mind becomes liberated from all afflictions and diseases, making him tranquil and content. ⁶⁰

However, for Hashim, sincere faith in God and a consciousness that man is not autonomous do not come naturally; they require training and disciplining individuals’ hearts and minds. It requires knowing God well and realizing an individual’s relation to Him within Islamic discursive tradition by regularly reciting God’s hamd (praise) and performing religious rituals. Such practice and knowledge help fill the heart with the sensibility of love and care. This ethics of love and care derived from Islamic texts and traditions produced within everyday interactions has little to do with the modern state and its juridical moral making of the individual. This God-oriented unified ethical framework however bounds the individual with God and others in the community that refutes modern individualism’s atomism and fragmented morality. Hashim’s theory of the individual, then, refutes individualism and advocates for the individual with individuality, opposing the duality between the individual and community entrenched in the Eurocentric framework of theorizing the individual. As I will elaborate in the next section, Hashim sees that this individual is not cultivated by the state or the pedagogical and institutional frameworks of colonialism. Hashim’s ideas about the individual and how it can rightly be cultivated are, then, essential to his anticolonial movement and his vision for postcolonial social and political life.

Theorizing the Individual in an Anticolonial Moment

Hashim’s theory of the individual posits that individuals are constituted through an intimate inner relationship with God and shared, embedded relationships within community life. This theory emerges from an anticolonial moment that contributed to Hashim’s anticolonial thought and his vision for postcolonial social life and public order. Although Hashim was always consistent with his anticolonialism, at the beginning of the 1940s, he began to vigorously write and speak out against imperialism at public events. He later utilized the platform of the Weekly Millat, which he founded and served as editor-in-chief, to effectively spread anti-imperial and pro-Pakistan discourses to ordinary people beyond the metropoles. In an editorial for Millat, he famously states,

The British rulers are our enemies. They once subjugated four hundred million people in India, ruling them despotically and oppressively for two centuries. They plunged one hundred million Muslims into destitution. The British imperialists, the arch enemies of Muslims, are the primary targets of our movement. All Muslims must act as mujahids [holy warriors]. They must renounce the titles and special privileges bestowed by imperialists and ultimately act to subjugate them in order to achieve the independence of Pakistan. ⁶¹

Hashim iterated his fiery anti-imperial message in public speeches aimed at both urban educated youth and rural peasants. He called on the oppressed people of India to join their liberation struggle and pledged to persist in their fight until the last remnants of British imperialism were eliminated. ⁶² He addressed the rural audiences with distinct language and rhetoric that reflected their experiences. Hashim particularly emphasized how the removal of empire and the independence of Pakistan would provide the peasant community with genuine opportunities to embrace Islamic ways of life and secure rights to the land they were cultivating. ⁶³ Under Hashim’s leadership, the discourse was produced and propagated very effectively, having a profound impact on rural Muslim voters in the 1946 election, which resulted in a landslide victory for the Muslim League in Bengal that ultimately provided the strong foundation of the demand for Pakistan. ⁶⁴

While anticolonial political thought and action are often assumed to be nationalist, and nationalism and anticolonialism are often used synonymously, Hashim’s anticolonialism is notable for being without, and even against, nationalism. In a legislative assembly meeting in 1939, Hashim stated,

We Muslims are never bound by territories or geographical limits. So far as the Muslim organizations we have here in India are not communal organizations; they are Indian branches of an international brotherhood. Let it be more clear that we Muslims do not believe in nationalism. According to our idea, shouting for nationalism and condemning imperialism are paradoxical because we believe that imperialism is the direct result of too much nationalism. . . . It is only for satisfying national greed, imperialism emerges. ⁶⁵

At the height of nationalist anticolonialism in India, Hashim declares that he, and Muslims generally, do not believe in nationalism on two registers. First, nationalism is contradictory to Islam’s universal brotherhood, and therefore, the Muslim League and other Muslim organizations in India were not nationalist organizations. Second, and more importantly, he tells his fellow assembly members from the Indian Congress that their nationalism, which they claim is anti-imperial, paradoxically leads to imperialism, which Hashim sees as a direct outcome of nationalism—the ideology that he views as a European invention. Hashim later reiterated that he did not believe in nationalism. He outrightly rejected both the idea of the Indian Congress’s Akhand Bharat (the United India), which he alleged represented Hindu nationalism, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s two-nation theory. ⁶⁶ Hashim maintained that India is a subcontinent composed of multiple nations. He believes in the existence of nations but rejects the ideology of nationalism. For him, nationalism, when it emerges as an ideology—a totalizing entity—becomes a threat to the existence of nations. Kabir’s recent work correctly maintains that Hashim’s anticolonial political thought and action were beyond nationalism and that a detailed examination of them would contribute to a recent body of work that rejects such an assumed connection between anticolonialism and nationalism. ⁶⁷

Hashim is an anticolonial thinker not only because he actively wrote and acted against imperialism and colonialism at their eleventh hour, but more importantly for focusing on envisioning politics after colonialism and empire. Reading Hashim as an anticolonial thinker, particularly examining his vision for postcolonial social and political life, helps us excavate and forcefully present his broader ideas regarding the individual, society, and the state. Kabir maintains that Hashim embodied an anticolonial critical spirit that contributed not only to decentering European epistemological frameworks but also to seeking alternative political-theoretical foundations for postcolonial political order. ⁶⁸ While physical dismantling of the empire was significant, what was prioritized in Hashim’s thought and action was an epistemological venture to rethink foundational principles of modern politics and social life. Getting a sovereign state and the authority for self-determination was inadequate for Hashim. Starting in the late 1930s, Hashim sought to recast political concepts and utilized the position of the general secretary of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League (BPML) to cultivate a dedicated group of thinkers and political actors to develop a practical political framework based on the philosophy of rabbaniyat and tried to disseminate it to different parts of Bengal. ⁶⁹

The core of Hashim’s anticolonial writing, public speech, and other such actions was an attempt to transform the individual and collective selves in a direction that prioritizes Islamic values, or to shape the self based on the spirit of God, as discussed in the previous sections. In this, his anticolonial vision may be unique. To consider how, let us now consider how Hashim’s thought compares with that of his contemporary, the Iranian thinker Ali Shariati (1933–1977). Shariati articulated anticolonialism through attention to self-transformation by using an Islamic pedagogical process. To unburden the Muslim self from the colonial pedagogical impositions and recreate it, Shariati’s Islamic pedagogy sought to produce a “fictional-story-like” past. ⁷⁰ This Islamic pedagogy, however, focuses on a specific process by which an individual would be transformed to arrive at an Enlightenment subjectivity that is suited for modern democracy. Hashim, while working for democracy, would be suspicious about Shariati’s argument for distinct enlightened Muslim selves that are, as Devari has put it, “relentlessly skeptical, rational, and atomized individuals critical of even themselves.” ⁷¹ To liberate the Muslim self from colonial pedagogy, Hashim instead sought to foster an intimate relationship with God and embody His attributes, as suggested by his philosophy of rabbaniyat. Hashim’s individual, specifically his inner, self is not Shariati’s autonomous or atomistic self, as he is intimately associated with God and His other creations in the universe through an ethical bond. In Hashim’s thought, the individual’s interiorization is actually going beyond oneself.

In his discussion of the individual, Hashim particularly emphasizes the self's practices in everyday life, referencing those in the early Islamic communities. ⁷² Asad’s seminal work on the practices of the self in the Islamic tradition discusses how individuals are shaped by submitting to tradition, obeying traditional norms and practices within the community, and disciplining themselves through a discursive practice. ⁷³ For Asad, disciplining the self in Islamic discursive tradition is fundamentally different from self-constitution as understood and practiced in the West. In the discursive tradition, the individual’s moral appeal goes beyond his self-reflexive inner conscience; it primarily lies in the shari’a norms and other practices of the discursive tradition to which one belongs. ⁷⁴ Understanding how Hashim considers conscience as essential to the individual’s constitution can help us see that Asad’s emphasis on the individual’s discursive making does not give adequate importance to the role of conscience in self-making in Islamic tradition. As we have seen, Hashim argues for the individual’s constitution by simultaneously prioritizing one’s inner conscience to realize and embody God’s attributes and cultivating those within the discursive tradition. In other words, inner conscience is an intimate part of the discursive self-constitution.

We already know that the individual occupies a central place not only in Hashim’s anticolonialism but also in largely anticolonial Muslim thought; however, the inwardness and role of conscience in self-constitution are not expressed as forcefully in other thinkers’ thought as they are in Hashim’s philosophy. The most prominent of them, Syed Abul A’la Maududi (1903–1979), places the individual at the center of his social and political thought, rejecting the battle between the individual and community and arguing that individualism places the individual in opposition to the community. ⁷⁵ Like Hashim, Maududi argues for a balance between the individual and the community to achieve a stable social order, but either he places less priority on the inwardness of the individual than Hashim does, or his attention to that inwardness has not yet been fully explored by scholars. Instead, we have seen more focus on the individual’s engagement with externality and engagement with society. ⁷⁶

We can observe a similar quality in Sayyid Qutb’s (1906–1966) thought. Against the fragmented self of modern individualism, Qutb wanted to construct an integrated and emancipated modern self, creating a balance between prosocial, innate human dispositions and the individual’s relations with society. ⁷⁷ Qutb’s individual, however, cannot be entirely constituted within an inward turn, merely via a private relationship with God or through losing oneself in God; the development of personality must occur within comprehensive social relationships. According to Qutb, modern individualism has disrupted the equilibrium between the individual and the community, contributing to the individual’s suffering from something like schizophrenia. ⁷⁸ To escape individualism and foster a balanced individual within the Islamic tradition, therefore, Qutb prioritizes adherence to Islamic law, sharia, in everyday life. Hashim’s priority, in contrast, remains the innate dispositions of human beings, more on the individual’s intention and conscience to embody God’s attributes within oneself first and then cultivate that within the everyday relationships in the community. More similar to Hashim’s inner focus on self-formation is the concern of Tunisian Islamist thinker, Rachid al-Ghannouchi (b. 1941). However, while al-Ghannouchi attends to the inward in self-formation, he emphasizes the cultivation of “inner restraint,” specifically, somewhat akin to Qutb’s, to ensure the self’s compliance with revealed law. ⁷⁹ So here, again, we see that Hashim’s ideas about the relationship between the individual’s inner self, intention, and conscience are a unique articulation of Islamic self-fashioning, one that he took to be essential for postcolonial social and political life. Others have traced very different lines of connection between Islamic thought and ideas of individual self-fashioning; though the idea of “intention” was central to their thought, they did not put adequate emphasis on it and connect intention to the constitution of the self.

Conclusion

In the preceding sections, I have illustrated how Hashim mobilizes the Islamic concept of fitra to reject modern individualism primarily for its failure to recognize the innate dispositions of individuals with which God created them and for losing “porous life” due to the loss of moral unity and social embeddedness in which the individual lived in premodern societies. In his terms, the individual was created by God with enormous potentiality for living a “porous life” prior to modernity but had been reduced to individualism in modern Europe. His criticism of modern individualism, although advanced far before communitarian, postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial criticisms of liberal individualism, bears some resemblance to them.

Hashim not only refutes modern individualism for its production of atomistic, morally fragmented individuals, but also, against it, he reconstructs the Qur’anic concept of rabbaniyat to advance a theory of the individual that argues for a unified ethical framework that binds the individual, God, and others in a relationship of love and care. Hashim’s theory of the individual, in other words, argues for the making of an individual constituted within the constant interplay of the self’s intimate relationship with God, on the one hand, and the intersubjective relationship between the self and others, on the other. It invites the individual to learn to accommodate others with a compassionate heart and to view oneself through the lens of others within the embedded relationships in the community. For Hashim, the individual is defined by his relationship with God and others, with intention (niyyah) and conscience at the core of his constitution. The individual is to be constructed within the shared norms of the community, but without undermining his individuality. Regarding the priority of inner intention and conscience for the self-constitution, Hashim primarily draws from the Islamic Sufi tradition of thought, contesting the claim that the inner focus of the individual is an exclusive development that happened only in the Christian tradition, which ultimately contributed to the emergence of the autonomous, self-reflexive subject with unique interiority in the liberal tradition of thought. ⁸⁰ While both early Christian and Islamic traditions emphasize intention and conscience in the formation of the self, the development of the individual within the Islamic tradition took a different trajectory. The Islamic tradition’s absolute submission to God is founded not on an ontological relationship between man and God, as in Christianity, but on their fundamental difference. This distinction between man and God in Islam, which we also explored in Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat, has specifically shaped a unique trajectory for self-constitution that goes beyond the rise of the autonomous individual, yet emphasizes the individual’s interiority as convincingly argued by political theorist Michael Gillespie. ⁸¹

Hashim draws from Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali’s thought, specifically his priority of managing individuals’ inner dispositions in order to purify the intention through an intimate, loving relation with God, thereby cultivating a God-oriented ethical foundation. ⁸² This inner turn to self-constitution is a pervasive theme in modern Islamic thought, especially in the Sufi tradition. However, Hashim’s contribution to this tradition lies in his prioritizing the individual’s inner relation to God without overemphasizing it, often found in the Sufi thought, which advocates for the deontological annihilation of the self—to be like God or merge with God—as variously revealed in the thought of Mulla Ṣadra (1572–1641), Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762), and Mohammad Iqbal (1877–1938), among others. ⁸³ In Hashim’s reconstruction of rabbaniyat, the individual’s inner relation with God is to embody His attributes, not to annihilate the self but to take care of the self and others in the intersubjective relation in the community. Hashim’s emphasis on intersubjective interaction with the community, however, is not the argument for the submission of the self entirely to Islam’s discursive tradition to discipline the self within everyday religious rituals and norms. ⁸⁴ While the discursive disciplining of the self is significant for Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat, and he would agree that “exteriority could be a means for interiority,” to use Saba Mahmood’s words, Hashim would still argue that its advocates do not put adequate emphasis on the management of an individual’s inner dispositions for the self-constitution. ⁸⁵ In a similar vein, Hashim’s thoughts on the individual are distinct from those of his contemporary anticolonial Muslim thinkers, including Maududi, Qutb, and al-Ghannouchi, who prioritize the communitarian making of the self within the shari’a rituals and norms without adequately accentuating or forcefully asserting the state of the individual’s inner dispositions. ⁸⁶ Nevertheless, Hashim and anticolonial Muslim thinkers variously interpret the sovereignty of God in Islam to refute individualism on moral grounds.

The argument for the formation of the individual with ethical perfection from Islamic tradition and social practices in an anticolonial moment, revealed in Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat, is profoundly political. It is political, not merely arguing for institutional ways of managing society and polity following the colonial and modern state’s frameworks, but more profoundly, as Hallaq argues, a political vision that is “paradigmatically ethicized,” which prioritizes a spiritual, higher order of things. ⁸⁷ In such an “ethicized” vision of politics, Hashim envisioned a postcolonial subject that is not constituted by the state’s centralized authority or pedagogical enterprises, nor even simply within discursive disciplining technologies of everyday Islam, but rather within a unified ethical framework of rabbaniyat characterized by ongoing interactions among the individual, God, and others in the community. This articulation of Islamic self-fashioning seeks to revive alternative ways of social and political life from within the Islamic tradition of thought and social practices—the ways of dwelling that colonialism and European modernity destroyed. By doing so, Hashim sought to cure the “malaise of modernity,” to use Charles Taylor’s words, the core of which is individualism. ⁸⁸ Although Hashim’s theory of the individual overlaps with communitarian thought animated by modernity’s fragmentation of morality, it broadly refutes the Eurocentric framework of theorizing the individual. ⁸⁹

Liberal and communitarian theories dominate the theorization of the individual within the Eurocentric framework. Central to any liberal theory is the assumption of an autonomous, self-serving individual produced within the “ethic of authenticity” and “moral subjectivism.” ⁹⁰ The argument, put simply, is that an authentic inner voice is more important than external relations, and this true voice determines one’s individual and collective life. The norms of the community and state, along with their customs and policies, are designed to cultivate this authentic inner self. Individual desires are placed against the responsibilities in social life. In contrast, the communitarian perspective argues that the inner self should be deemphasized, focusing instead on the individual as situated within community relations, where an atomistic, self-serving individual is impossible to develop. ⁹¹ It prioritizes the external relations of the individual in its constitution over the liberal argument for the inner self. The distinction between the inner and outer selves nonetheless is integral to liberal and communitarian theories. Hashim’s idea of the individual, drawn from Islamic history and tradition of thought, rejects this distinction inherent to the Eurocentric framework. In Hashim’s theory of rabbaniyat, the individual’s relationship with others—the external world—is inherently connected to his inner relationship to God. Inner salvation is impossible without having a deep relationship with the community; taking care of other people and creatures is innate to one’s salvation and self-constitution. As a viceregent (khalifa) of God, by submitting oneself to Him and embodying His attributes, the individual is constituted as a collective, situated self, making absolute autonomy—an idea core to liberal thought—impossible. Hashim’s framework of the individual argues for an embedded self with ethical unity, neither compromising its importance for inner priority nor prioritizing the distinction between the inner and outer selves. It thus advances a theory of the individual that is uniquely Islamic, presenting a framework that is distinct from the Eurocentric framework. It advances a new way of thinking about the individual, negating the dichotomy between the individual and the community, the battle that has plagued the liberal and communitarian debates in contemporary Euro-American political thought.