With the rise of Hindutva, the Muslim community has been pushed into an existential crisis. Facing extreme segregation, the question of how to reclaim dignity becomes unavoidable. Studying at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), a predominantly Muslim campus, I have seen firsthand how this question shapes intellectual debates and discussions. One answer to this consists in an inward turn, whereby Muslims focus on asserting their own religious identity. This inward turn converts Muslim identity into an object whose sanctity is to be protected from any kind of contamination. In this narrative, Hindutva is just the latest in a series of attempts by the secular state to regulate Muslim subjectivity. Secularism is more broadly castigated as an ideology that: a) controls religion by privatizing it and b) centralizes political power in a state enjoying a monopoly on violence. In the more dramatic words of Wael Hallaq (who has been warmly received by the anti-secularist ideologues of AMU):
Secularism is not just segregating religious life into the private sphere. It is rather the determination of the state of what religion is and is not, where and how it can be exercised. In terms of political theology, secularism is the murder of God by the State. The state can delimit, limit, exclude or curtail any religious practice, and thus has the power to determine the quality and quantity of the religious sphere as it sees fit. This is because the state is the ultimate sovereign, with its own reason for existence — what we call reason of state or raison d’etat, a relatively new concept in the long stretch of human history.
Reducing Muslim Identity to Faith
Anti-secularist assertiveness derives its legitimacy from the cry that the faith of Indian Muslim believers is in danger and that we should come to its rescue. Prima facie, nothing seems wrong with this statement. Insofar as a regime is targeting Indian Muslims on the basis of their religious identity, it appears logical that we defend this identity. However, is the attack on Indian Muslims really an attack on Islam as a theological system? The right to practice faith is just one among many human capacities that are being restricted. Even Muslims who are not particularly religious, who do not pray or wear visibly Islamic symbols, still face discrimination. Consider the following example. A study conducted in India tested hiring discrimination by sending out two nearly identical resumes for entry-level jobs. Both candidates had similar educational backgrounds, locations, and skills, with no photographs included to avoid visual bias. The only significant difference between them was their names—one had a recognizably Muslim name (“Habiba Ali”), while the other had a Hindu name (“Priyanka Sharma”).
Over eight months, 2,000 applications were sent for over 1,000 job listings. Despite being equally qualified, the candidate with the Muslim name received only half as many positive responses. This study underscores that discrimination against Muslims operates even in the absence of visible religious markers like dress, prayer, or religious expressions. Simply having a Muslim name – an ascriptive identity beyond personal choice – was enough to reduce opportunities, showing that the bias faced by Muslims in India is not necessarily about religious practice but about their very existence as Muslims. The issue is not about faith per se, but about the political and social vulnerability of a historically constituted, denominationally marked group.
Once we have decoupled first-person theological faith from the third-person status of religious identity as a marker of social vulnerability, it becomes clear that the call to assert Islam doesn’t possess legitimacy. In fact, by giving the pride of place to faith in Muslim political vocabulary, anti-secularists replicate the discursive structure of Hindutva, which conceives of Muslims as excessively religious. In the Hindu nationalist imagination, each action of the Muslim is supposed to be motivated by a totalizing religious logic. This is evident in the way Hindu supremacists attach the term “jihad” to various social, economic, and demographic phenomena, transforming ordinary actions into perceived threats to the Hindu majority. “Love jihad” accuses Muslim men of seducing Hindu women under the guise of romance to convert them to Islam, framing interfaith relationships as a covert religious conspiracy. “Land jihad” portrays Muslim settlements, mosques, and madrassas as deliberate attempts to encroach upon public spaces, reinforcing the notion that Muslims prioritize religious expansion over lawful habitation. “Population jihad” asserts that Muslims are intentionally increasing their birth rates to outnumber Hindus, turning reproductive choices into a political tool of religious warfare.
Economic interactions, too, are recast in religious terms – “economic jihad” vilifies Muslim traders for selling halal meat, framing their economic participation as an attempt to deprive Hindus of their livelihood. Even natural disasters and public health crises have been communalized. “Flood jihad” attributes devastating floods in Assam to Muslims allegedly sabotaging flood defenses, while “corona jihad” blames Muslims for deliberately spreading COVID-19 by holding group prayers. The absurdity extends to everyday bodily functions with “thook (spit) jihad,” which accuses Muslims of excessive spitting as a means of spreading disease.
These narratives collectively construct Muslims as inherently and obsessively religious, denying them any political, economic, or social agency beyond their faith. In a situation like this, it is hardly radical on the part of anti-secularists to insist that Muslims have to protect their faith. Their insistence on the centrality of religion only mimics that of Hindutva. Instead of subscribing to the religion-centric template of communalism, Muslims in India need to carefully consider what exactly they are fighting for. Insofar as faith is just one among the many capacities available to a human being, it can’t be the nucleus of a counter-hegemonic political program. The real issue is that a specific group of human beings, identified as Indian Muslims, are being systematically denied the ability to develop their human capacities, participate equally in society, and access the full rights of citizenship. If we conceptualize the Hindutva assault as an attack on Muslims-as-a-people rather than Islam-as-a-religion, then the response should not be to defend Islam as a faith. Instead, it should be to defend the full range of human capacities that are being denied—economic, political, social, and cultural freedoms. Shifting the political focus from the protection of faith to the development of human capacities necessitates confronting the internal hierarchies within the Muslim community that restrict the freedoms of many. A truly emancipatory struggle must center the rights of Pasmanda Muslims, Muslim women, queer Muslims, and other marginalized groups, ensuring that the fight for justice does not reinforce existing inequalities but actively works to dismantle them.
The Tyranny of Hurt Sentiments: When Faith Silences Reason
In the secular schema, religion becomes just one among the many capacities that citizens can deploy. In this sense, Hallaq is correct in arguing that the state gets the “power to determine the quality and quantity of the religious sphere as it sees fit”. What will happen if the secular state doesn’t treat religion as one among the many capacities? Religion would star to dogmatically override other capacities. Take the following example. In 2018, AMU was at the center of controversy after a student and three former students were booked by the Uttar Pradesh Police for allegedly posting a “blasphemous” picture on Facebook during the month of Ramzan. The image showed them holding beer bottles with a caption referring to Iftar and alcohol consumption. The post sparked outrage on campus, leading Nadeem Ansari, former vice president of the AMU Students’ Union, to file a police complaint under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code for hurting religious sentiments. AMU’s Cultural Education Centre (CEC) swiftly banned the individuals from its clubs, while the university administration and student leaders called for strict action to protect the institution’s religious and moral ethos. Amid mounting pressure, one of the accused deactivated her social media accounts and publicly apologized, yet calls for punishment persisted.
The outrage over a social media post outlines the consequences of basing our political mentality upon the dogmatism of faith instead of the plural logic of a capacities framework. Was the social media post violating the ability of Muslim people to practice their faith? For a violation of religious freedom to be meaningfully asserted, there must be some obstruction of a person’s ability to perform religious duties—whether through coercion, legal restriction, or material deprivation. But here, nothing of the sort happened. No mosque was shut down, no one was forced to drink alcohol, and no religious observance was disrupted. The mere knowledge that others were drinking in private and joking about it does not constitute an infringement on anyone’s ability to fast or pray. The only grievance was that certain individuals felt offended by seeing the post, but offense alone is not a restriction of religious liberty – it is a psychological reaction, not a material constraint.
To argue otherwise would imply that religious belief entitles one to control the behavior of others simply because their actions are displeasing. This is a fundamentally authoritarian impulse masquerading as a demand for respect. It suggests that the most easily aggrieved members of a religious community should dictate how others should live. The logic here is not one of democratic dialogue but of monopolization: the insistence that religious norms must be respected not just by adherents but by everyone, regardless of their own convictions. Here, we encounter why anti-secularists want the dismantling of the secular state: instead of being forced to participate in a democratic process of communication where everything has to be justified, they want the power to force their beliefs on others. For them, the entire realm of human capacities is exhausted by religion. The secular state, on the other hand, asks for the justification of this claim: why does the anti-secularist think that religion is all that is valuable for a human being? If the answer relies on the unverifiable claims of theology that are not accessible to non-Muslims and non-religious people, then it is not legitimate.
Theocratic Fantasies
The politics of anti-secularism reveals itself to be a minority communalism that equates the historical existence of Indian Muslims with the theological scriptures of Islam. By doing so, it attempts to construct a homogeneous religious community that has no room for the public process of questioning and critique. Its critique of secularism fails because the alternative it projects – a life lived under a totalizing religious logic – is undemocratic and hierarchical. To truly grasp the disastrous consequences of anti-secularism, let us turn to Uthman Badar, the media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia, a global Islamic political party committed to resurrecting the Caliphate—as if history were a broken DVD that simply needs to be rewound to the right empire. In his PhD dissertation, Badar embarks on an elaborate theoretical critique of secularism, declaring, in a moment of supposed triumph, that it is “as ideological and controversial as any religion or worldview, and, therefore—on its own logic and undercutting its own legitimation—in principle as oppressive.” One can almost hear the dramatic flourish of a gavel, as if this pronouncement had single-handedly toppled centuries of political philosophy.
But Badar’s pièce de résistance arrives when he solemnly warns us that secularism prioritizes “ordinary life”—a life spent in the sinful drudgery of eating, sleeping, and generally trying to avoid beheadings—over the “pursuit of some ultimate ideal.” The horror! It seems that secularism, in its sinister insistence on letting people go about their lives without being coerced into theocratic grand designs, is depriving them of a higher calling. As Badar clarifies with the moral clarity of a guillotine operator: “Apostates attract capital punishment and we [Hizb ut-Tahrir] don’t shy away from that.”
It remains unclear how exactly one is meant to pursue divine transcendence in a society where questioning a doctrine can result in public execution. Perhaps the vision is to create a utopia where spiritual enlightenment is reached by process of elimination—literally. After all, nothing cleanses a society of ideological impurity quite like the steady application of divinely sanctioned violence. But Badar leaves us with a paradox: if this world is so unimportant compared to the next, why bother ruling it with an iron fist? Surely, if the pursuit of an “ultimate ideal” is all that matters, then the logical course of action would be to renounce political power altogether, fast-track one’s own journey to the hereafter, and leave the rest of us to wallow in our mundane, godless existence.
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Alas, Badar and his ilk remain committed to their project of enforcing moral purity, convinced that only under the watchful eye of a divine class can humanity be truly free. In doing so, they reveal the true irony of their anti-secularist crusade: that while they decry secularism as an ideology of control, their alternative is nothing short of totalitarian metaphysics—a world where faith is mandated, doubt is criminal, and ordinary life is a mere inconvenience on the road to paradise. Muslims in India, facing exclusion on the basis of religious identity, are in a unique position to recognize the illegitimacy of this anti-secular ideology and militantly assert the necessity of a trans-religious political language. Indian Muslims are not just Muslims; they are full political subjects whose rights and freedoms should not be contingent on religious identity. Instead of reacting to majoritarian pressures by asserting a religious counter-identity, the response of Indian Muslims should be: we refuse to be reduced to a religious category at all. The fight, then, is not for the recognition of Islam but for a secular space where no one – Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise – is pigeonholed by religious identity in the first place.
Yanis Iqbal is an undergraduate student of political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of the book Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia. He has published more than 300 articles in different magazines and websites on imperialism, social movements, political theory, education, and cultural criticism.
