I love living in
Nepal. One small aspect of that love is that Routledge publishes a “Special
Nepal Edition” for any of their works pertinent to the country. These works run
between 500 and 1200 rupees (between $5.25 and $12.65) for a new copy—as
opposed to $45 upwards to $150 for their US counterparts! Granted, the paper is
of lesser quality, so the book will fall apart in less time than those copies
in my university library. And with all the “For Sale In Nepal Only” warnings on
the covers, I feel like I’m buying contraband. But I tell myself that, by the
time they do fall apart, perhaps I’ll have a job (tenured professor?!) that will
allow me to actually afford purchasing new, good copies of these books.
The lure of cheap
academic books makes me browse Mandala Book Point and Wisdom Books more
frequently than I should. One of my browsings brought me to the book under
consideration here, on Islamic revival in Nepal. Despite the fact that Nepal
was a Hindu kingdom until 2006, it has always harbored multiple religions and
more recent scholarship has drawn attention to some of those other religious
practices. Because most of it has centered on various forms of indigenous
practices (usually some derivative of Buddhism), I was pleasantly surprised to
see a title looking at Islamic revival in Nepal. This peaked my interest in two
ways.
First, growing up in
Nepal, my family would regularly pass the mosque at the end of Durbar Marg, or
King’s Way, in the area of town known as Ganta Ghar (Clock Tower), on our way
to find a taxi or bus to take us back to Patan after a day of shopping between
New Road and Thamel. As a young girl, I was also mesmerized by the glittering
glass beads and bangles on display in the bead market at Indra Chowk, but I was
equally taken with the Arabic script that decorated many of the shop doorways.
It was such a contrast to the Hindu temples that dominated street
just outside the enclave of bead shops. Where did these Muslims come from, and what
were they doing in Nepal? was something I had wondered as a young girl.
Second, Islam is
grouped with Judaism and Christianity as a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion.
Familiar with the challenges that Christians faced as a minority religion in a
Hindu state, I had often wondered when passing the mosque in Ganta Ghar when I
was younger if Muslims in Nepal had similar experiences? As a scholar now
looking at this book, I wondered what light this might shed on my own thoughts,
research, and writing concerning Christian identity and practices in Nepal?
Sijapati—a
Fulbright-Hayes scholar in 2005-2006 (an interesting time to be in Nepal, when
it was becoming a secular state)—outlines in her book why Nepali Muslims are
consciously creating a distinct Nepali Muslim identity: this is their response
to centuries of marginalization and more recent religious violence due to their
presence in a historically Hindu state, in addition to all the new identity
politics that abound in Nepal now as a result of secularization, but also in
line with a global Sunni Muslim revival, which has provided them with tools to
participate in Nepal’s identity politics.
Sijapati does an
exceptional job of outlining the historical alterity of Muslim identity in
Nepal, in regards to the Hindu kingdom in Chapter Three. This is perhaps my
favorite chapter. Drawing on historical texts written by Hamilton (re.pub.
1971) and Hogdson (1880), Hofer’s famous analysis of the 1854 Muluki Ain, and
works by Gabrorieu and Burghart, she shows how Muslims were the “Other” for the
Hindu kingdom of Nepal, where much of the definition of Hinduism was made
against the “Otherness” of Muslims. She shows how new concepts of nation that
came into play in the 1990s and early 2000s opened up new spaces for Muslim
identity in Nepal, but at the same time shows how the idea of Nepal as a Hindu
kingdom still prevails through Hindu extremist groups at work in Nepal.
Sijapati also outlines
the diversity of religious thought, as well as cultural and linguistic diversity
of the Nepali Muslim population, primarily in Chapter One. This diversity
within the population has caused tension as to how the community is to present
a unified front to the rest of Nepal, which many Muslim leaders see as
essential to their recognition. Yet despite all this diversity, for non-Muslims
in Nepal Muslims are seen as one homogenous group. The religious violence
perpetuated against them during Kalo Buddhvar (August 30, 2004)—where, in
reaction to Nepali migrant workers being killed by Islamic extremists in the
Middle-East, Islamic mosques, schools, businesses and even homes were attacked
by enraged mob violence—helped propel Muslim leaders to seek to educate the
wider public about Muslim beliefs, way of life (especially distilling the idea
that madrasas were incubators for terrorists), and place in Nepali society. Sijapati
outlines the incidents and community reactions to Kalo Buddhvar (Black Wednesday) in Chapter
Four.
These modern and
historical instances inform the activities of Nepali Muslims. Sijapati examines
the activities of two organizations—the National Muslim Forum and the Islami
Sangha—as windows into how the Nepali Muslim community is responding to these
circumstances. The National Muslim Forum is rather political in nature (though
as of yet, it is not a registered political party) seeking both to realize an
(somewhat unified) Islamic community, while also acting as a platform to
articulate Muslim needs to the Nepali government, while the Islami Sangha is
more culturally oriented. Both however have goals and activities that are
inward facing (for Nepali Muslims) as well as outward facing (for non-Muslim
Nepalis).
Chapter Five focuses
on the work of the National Muslim Forum, which seeks to create a community
feeling for Nepali Muslims by drawing on what they perceive as shared
experience of being Muslim in Nepal, despite internal differences, namely: being
citizens of Nepal; experiencing hardship, marginalization and victimization as
Muslims in Nepal; and sharing religious symbols like the Prophet and the Quran.
Their activities include mapping the Nepali Muslim population (as there are
huge “methodological errors in the census data collection” [pg. 89] and thus
the census doesn’t accurately represent the Muslim population of Nepal. This is
not ill-founded; its rather common knowledge that census takers, upon arriving
in a remote village, will only talk to a village headman about the religious
composition of the village, and even if they go house to house, only talk with
a family head about the religious composition of the household. But more often
than not, they will just assume someone is Hindu and not even ask the question
pertaining to religious affiliation), attempting to standardize Islamic
institutions (such as madrasa education and moon siting), and using print and
electronic media as a tool to cultivate this unity.
Chapter Six focuses
on the work of the Islami Sangha, which draws from a variety of strands of
revivalist Islamic thought to piece together a discursive religious vein
applicable to the Nepali Muslim situation as a minority religion rather than
the majority one. Their activities seek to educate Muslims about their religion
(cultivating “an epistemology of discursive learning that is open to the
individual and group,” pg. 130), to reform culture (in essence, purging what
they see as Hindu cultural practices from their own society. Many of these
actually focus around the lives of women—remarrying widows [Hindu widows do not
remarry], women covering themselves in public [Hindus women do not], and
limiting interactions with men to whom they are not related [though the
increasing mobility of Nepali women can be attributed more to modernity than Hindu
mores]), and to educate non-Muslims about the principles of Islam (in a way
that is non-proselytizing) and Nepali Muslim way of life.
Sijapati clearly
meets her goal of showing how Nepali Muslim identity creation is deeply seated
in a specific local history of Muslims as the alterity in a Hindu state and new
identity politics that characterize Nepal. She did an exceptional job showing
the construction of Islamic alterity in a historical and cultural context of a
Hindu Nepal in Chapters Two and Three. For someone like myself who is more
familiar with the texts and concepts she exposited these chapters, I found her
engagement exhilarating, and for a scholarly audience perhaps more familiar
with Islamic religion and cultural context than the Nepal context, such
exposition is probably necessary. However, I didn’t feel that she adequately showed
how this identity formation was also related to and informed by an “increasing
exposure to global ideologies of Sunni revival” (pg. 134). As a result, I felt
that I had a good grasp of Islamic alterity in Nepal and thus an idea for how
this history motivated some of the decisions and actions of the Islami Sangha
and National Muslim Forum, but I wasn’t as sure how their actions fit into or
were influenced by (or perhaps counter or an anomaly to) the wider Sunni
revival.
The other
disappointment was that, even though she said Nepali Muslims sought to distance
themselves from Christians, seeing them as competition for rights and resources
(pg.72), Sijapati mentions Christians multiple times, implying that Christians
have similar experiences of alterity in Nepal as do Muslims. However, she
rather off-handedly included this label of “Christian,” and I wish she had
provided more substantial commentary on specific instances of Christian
experience in Nepal in footnotes or references. While apart from two PhD
dissertations (Perry 1997 and Sharma 2012), there hasn’t been research done on
Christian communities in Nepal, there is a dearth of public commentary on their
work and presence in Nepal, found in local newspapers (Nepali and English) and
magazines, which she could have referenced. Well, doesn’t this just leave more
space for research…?
