What Jammu University gets wrong about removing ‘Muslim’ thinkers from the syllabus

The recommendation by a committee at Jammu University on March 22 to purge material about Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Syed Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Iqbal from the MA Political Science syllabus is a distressing signal about the state of higher education in India.

The decision has been framed as a response to public sentiment, but it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a university. Aristotle once said that it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

By removing apparently “controversial” figures, the university is telling its postgraduate students, who are ostensibly being trained for high-level analysis, that they are not intellectually mature enough to study the architects of the subcontinent’s history without being “corrupted” by them.

The primary casualty of this erasure is critical thinking. Studying the Two-Nation Theory advanced by Iqbal and Jinnah, alongside Khan’s concepts of Muslim distinctiveness, is essential to understanding the evolution of Muslim political dynamics in South Asia. Not reading the primary proponents of those ideas is akin to studying the French Revolution without mentioning the Jacobins or the Cold War without reading Karl Marx.

When a curriculum is sanitised to include only thinkers deemed “acceptable”, it ceases to be a tool of education and becomes an exercise in indoctrination. If students are not exposed to conflicting, uncomfortable, and even antagonistic ideas, the classroom transforms into a sterile echo chamber.

Understanding Jinnah or Iqbal is a prerequisite for understanding the modern Indian state, its borders and its constitutional journey. To ignore them is to leave a vacuum in a student’s historical consciousness – a vacuum that will inevitably be filled by polemics rather than scholarship.

The complex ‘Muslim mind’

The controversy often stems from a reductionist view of these figures as mere villains of Partition. However, scholarship suggests a far more nuanced and often contradictory reality. In her seminal work, Secular and Nationalist Jinnah, Ajeet Javed meticulously documents the secular aspects of Jinnah’s early politics.

Before Jinnah’s communal pivot, he was hailed as an “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”, a legal thinker who staunchly opposed the mixing of religion with mass politics. Students deserve to analyse this metamorphosis – not to praise the man, but to understand the political failures and the hardening of identities in the 1930s and ’40s that led to such a shift.

Similarly, Rajmohan Gandhi in Understanding the Muslim Mind provides a balanced lens on Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Iqbal. Gandhi illustrates that Khan’s primary impetus was the modernisation of the Muslim community through Western education and scientific temper.

The career of Iqbal, the “poet-philosopher”, is equally layered. While he is celebrated in Pakistan, his earlier poems, such as Tarana-e-Hindi, remain foundational to the Indian soul.

Iqbal and the ‘Imam-e-Hind’

To truly understand the “adventure of ideas” that defines the subcontinent, one must look at the syncretism that often defined these thinkers. Iqbal was a philosopher rooted in India.

In his famous poem Ram, featured in his book Bang-e-Dara, Iqbal elevates Ram to a position of supreme spiritual leadership, famously referring to him as Imam-e-Hind – the Spiritual Leader of India.

For Iqbal, Ram represented the pinnacle of ethical conduct. In removing Iqbal, the university removes the record of this syncretic heritage. Without exposure to such verses, students are left with a one-dimensional caricature, losing the chance to ask the vital historical question: How did a poet who praised Ram as the soul of India eventually come to envision a separate state? Engaging with this transition is the very “dissection” Aristotle spoke of.

Rafiq Zakaria, in Iqbal: The Poet and the Politician, notes that Iqbal’s transition from a poet of universalism to a proponent of a separate Muslim identity was a complex reaction to the socio-political anxieties of the 1930s. If a master’s student of political science is denied the opportunity to grapple with these contradictions, they are being denied the tools to understand the roots of South Asian political thought.

Rationalism and Heterodoxy

The removal of Syed Ahmed Khan ignores one of the most significant intellectual reforms in South Asian history. Long before he was a political figure, Khan was a champion of rationalism and a pioneer of scientific temperament. His approach to the Quran was radical for its time. He famously argued that the word of god (scripture) cannot contradict the work of god (nature). He insisted that if a traditional religious interpretation contradicted the proven laws of science, the interpretation must be re-evaluated. This “naturalist” (nechari) approach sought to bridge the gap between faith and the burgeoning scientific age.

For Khan, any religious belief that shackled the human mind or prevented the adoption of modern scientific education was a misinterpretation of the faith. In his Tafsir-ul-Quran, Commentary on the Quran, he challenged traditional dogmas. He was sceptical of supernatural phenomena that violated the laws of physics. He often interpreted Quranic accounts of miracles – such as the splitting of the sea or the nature of angels and jinns – as metaphors or psychological states, rather than literal, physical disruptions of the natural order.

He argued that many legal injunctions in the Quran were specific to the socio-historical context of seventh-century Arabia and were not intended to be immutable laws for all eternity. This distinction between the essential faith and accidental social laws was a landmark in modern Islamic reform.

This heterodoxy was the driving force behind the Aligarh Movement. When Khan founded Aligarh Muslim University in 1875, he wanted to create a “learned mind” that could, as Aristotle suggested, entertain modern, Western scientific thought without losing its cultural identity.

By removing Khan from the political science syllabus, the Jammu University is erasing the history of indigenous secularism and rationalist reform. Without understanding Khan’s appeal to reason, students lose the context of the internal debates that shaped the modern South Asian identity. To study the “Muslim mind” without its most prominent rationalist is to study a caricature. By erasing Khan’s philosophy, the university succumbs to demands of the modern-day echo chamber while denying students the tools to navigate the complexities of the past.

Academic autonomy

The head of the Political Science Department at Jammu University, Baljit Singh Mann, correctly argued that the inclusion of these thinkers is consistent with the norms and curricula of the University Grants Commission, followed by premier universities nationwide.

Universities must be spaces where diverse viewpoints are presented for critical evaluation instead of being sidelined fearing controversy.

Shielding students from the “unpleasant” parts of history, produces graduates who are ill-equipped to defend the democratic and secular values of India against uninformed critique.

Faisal CK is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Views are personal.