The mid and late 19th century was a highly charged period in India. The centuries-old Muslim Empire in the region had collapsed and the British were consolidating their colonial rule over a vast expanse teeming with millions of people belonging to a number of faiths.

Though powered by superior military might and the novel vintages of the ‘Industrial Age,’ the British colonialists somewhat struggled to determine the religious complexities found in the region — especially when a wave of reformist religious movements erupted in India just before and after the complete downfall of the Mughal Empire in 1857.

These movements emerged from within the Hindu majority as well as from among the significant Muslim and Sikh minorities of India. One of the triggers in this respect was the intensifying of Christian missionary activity that was indirectly encouraged by the British.

The reformist movements also tried to tackle ideas introduced by the British culled from the zeitgeists of the ‘Age of Reason’ and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ that appeared in the West (in the 17th and 18th centuries).

During these eras, social and political emphasis in the West had gradually shifted away from religious / clerical authority, feudalism and tradition to reason / rationalism, empiricism and science.

In 1875 the Hindu reformist movement, the Arya Samaj, emerged. It attempted to configure Hinduism as a unified and ‘enlightened’ faith. To counter Christian and rationalist criticism of it being outmoded and even exploitative, the Samaj introduced a Hinduism that was centred entirely on the Vedas and devoid of idol worship. It accepted women’s rights and the belief in a single supreme deity, the Om. It also claimed to be superior to Christianity and Islam.

On the other hand, four strands of reformers appeared from among the Sunni Muslims. The ‘Deobandis’ were a kind of reformed believers of Sufism who advocated a more scholastic understanding of Islam as a ‘pristine faith’ that should be liberated from ‘innovations’ popular in South Asian folk Islam. They also rejected the modernist interpretations of the faith’s scriptures.

The ‘Baralvies’, however, defended the rituals and beliefs associated with the region’s folk Islam that was a hybrid of Sufism and various local traditions associated with a majority of Muslims in India.

On the other end were the Ahl-i-Hadees who were directly inspired by the puritanical and stern doctrines of Saudi ‘Wahabism’. There also emerged prolific ‘modernists’ who advocated a more rational and ‘scientific’ understanding of Islamic texts.

As frantic polemical treatises and literature flew thick and fast between these four strands; and between the Hindus and Christians; and then between Hindus, Christians and Muslims, a battle of propaganda too erupted in which reformist religious groups proudly paraded the number of converts they had managed to bag.


The reformist movements also tried to tackle ideas introduced by the British culled from the zeitgeists of the ‘Age of Reason’ and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ that appeared in the West (in the 17th and 18th centuries).


One of the most intriguing cases in this context was of Ghazi Mehmood that became all the rage in the early 1900s but has faded away from history books.

In 2011 a Pakistani historian of repute and researcher, Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, brought it back to life in his brilliant study of the enigmatic ‘Ahl-i-Quran’ Movement in the Punjab (that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

Before Usman, Mohammad Ishaq Bhatti had penned a whole article (in Urdu) on the Ghazi Mehmood case in Al-Ai’tasam (in 2003).

Ghazi Mehmood was born into a middle-class Sunni Muslim family and exhibited a great interest in the study of Islam. As a teenager, however, he was put off by a sermon that he had heard in a mosque and increasingly became sceptical about his faith.

In 1899 he moved close to a small Hindu reformist outfit, the Dev Samaj. Though he did not convert to Hinduism, he did change his surname to Dharampal and became Ghazi Dharampal.

Unable to reconcile to some beliefs of the Dev Samaj, Ghazi broke away from the group. But soon he was successfully engaged by the Arya Samaj. In 1903, at the age of 21, he finally embraced Hinduism and began working for the Arya Samaj.

The Samaj aggressively publicised this conversion through pamphlets and Hindi newspapers and then financed Ghazi’s first book, Tark-i-Islam, in which he explained why he renounced his original faith.

He continued to publish treatises for the Samaj. He was challenged by counter-treatises that attempted to blunt his criticism. Most of these were authored by Sanaullah Amritsari, an aggressive Ahl-i-Hadees polemicist, and Hakim Nuruddin, a member of the Ahamadiyya community.

Ghazi also began publishing a Hindi monthly dedicated to promoting Arya Samaj beliefs. However, in 1913 he fell in love with a Brahmin widow and married her. This is when he had a falling out with the Samaj whose leadership did not approve of the marriage.

Distressed by the way his friends in the Samaj had responded to his marriage to a Brahmin widow, Ghazi authored an appeal to scholars of all faiths (in India) pleading which religion could guarantee the rights of his wife and children without discrimination.

He received dozens of responses. But it was the response from a judge and scholar from the Ahl-i-Hadees branch, Sulayman Mansurpuri, which appealed the most to Ghazi.

The judge wrote that he (Ghazi) was lawfully married and that his children had equal rights even if their mother chose to remain a Hindu.

This response saw Ghazi visit the judge and agree to re-enter the fold of Islam.

Ghazi now spent his scholastic energies in writing treatises against the Arya Samaj (denouncing their ‘hypocrisies’).

But he was soon at loggerheads with the Ahle-i-Hadees, founding their ideas to be too cumbersome and retrogressive. It was at this point that he was adopted by the so-called ‘Ahl-i-Quran’ Movement. The movement insisted that the Quran alone should be the focus of all law-making in Islam and rejected all other Muslim texts as being largely ‘man-made’.

So, from being a curious young Sunni Muslim, Ghazi became a poster-boy of Hindu reformists, to becoming a scholar of the Ahl-i-Hadees branch, to finally being adopted by the rationalist Ahl-i-Quran Movement.

His conversion to Hinduism and re-conversion to Islam were both highly publicised events. Interestingly, though the memory and mention of his case eventually faded away, historians who dragged it out again referred to him as Ghazi Mehmood Dharampal.

This is because though after his re-conversion to Islam he restored his Muslim surname, Mehmood, he did not discard the Hindu surname that he had adopted in 1899.

He died in 1960 at the age of 78 and was given a proper Muslim burial. Little is known what became of his beliefs after the withering away of the Ahl-i-Quran Movement in the early 1940s.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine August 2nd, 2015

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