‘Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy’: Local politics, economic relations, and ‘caste’ among Malabar Muslims

What comes to mind first when one hears of caste in India? Generally, the institution of caste is associated with Hindu social life, and such a social structure is often assumed to be nonexistent among Muslims. Many Muslims tend to deny the prevalence of “caste” within their communities. Does this suggest that Muslim social life in India is devoid of caste-like hierarchies? Even when some Muslims acknowledge the existence of “caste” in their social life, they often attribute it to the influence of Hindu society. Somewhat similar views were held by PC Saidalavi, author of Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India, until 2013, when his advisor, Arshad Alam at Jawaharlal Nehru University, nudged him to investigate the existence of “caste” among Muslims of Malabar in South India.

The question of caste in Islam

More often, Islam’s egalitarian principles are invoked by Muslims to avoid deeper engagement with the question of caste within their communities. Some argue that although caste exists among Muslims in India, there is no caste in Islam. Such a position, however, seeks to detach religion from its social contexts and cultural rootedness, limiting its scope to the theological realm, suggests Saidalavi. In his reflections on the field encounters, Saidalavi noticed hierarchy in religious institutions, especially between those who offered instructions and those who pursued them. If hierarchical relationships are taken as desirable and valuable in religious institutions and interactions, Saidalavi perceptively asks: won’t that affect the social interactions of everyday life?

Ideally, Muslims of all social categories and professions are expected to treat one another equally. However, Saidalavi’s field encounters reveal “unsettling truths”, shattering his earlier belief of a non-hierarchical and “casteless” Muslim societies. Given Islam’s emphasis on egalitarianism, one expects Islamic scholars to emphasise the principles of equality and non-discrimination, and their implementation in everyday life. Saidalavi, however, recounts an incident in which a religious scholar in Malabar, during a special Ramadan prayer session that included a question-and-answer discussion, reduced Muslim barbers to the status of children born out of adultery.

According to this scholar, both children born out of adultery and Muslim barbers are considered unfit to lead prayers. This controversial position, apart from denying Muslim barbers the right to lead prayers, also opens up a broader debate about their position and status within the Muslim community. This scholar’s stance on the barber community sets the tone for the book’s wider scholarly engagement with casteism – how it unfolds, persists and what responses and strategies the subordinated groups, especially the Muslim barbers, seek for their alleviation.

Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy consists of seven chapters and an Afterword. The first chapter revolves around the concept of values. Moving beyond rigid caste-centred explanations, Saidalavi conceptualises hierarchy as a dynamic, value-centred structure shaped by piety, lineage, and wealth. Although Islamic doctrine upholds piety as the sole criterion of distinction before Allah everyday Muslim life reveals a more complex social ordering in which genealogy and material resources continue to mediate status. Crucially, Saidalavi treats caste as a regime of hierarchical inequality based on birth, manifested through bodily dispositions, structures of deference, and differential access to social capital, while emphasising that Muslim hierarchies cannot be reduced solely to caste. He further highlights how marginalised groups, such as barbers, appropriate Islamic egalitarian ideals alongside modern notions of individualism to challenge inherited hierarchies.

In the second chapter, Saidalavi first illuminates readers about how Islam spread along the Malabar coast. It is believed that during the Prophet’s lifetime, a group of around 20 Muslims led by Malik-ibn-Dinar embarked for the Malabar Coast at the request of Muhammad-ibn-Malik, the king of Medina. Upon their arrival, they are said to have constructed several mosques across the region with the assistance of local kings. Against this backdrop, Saidalavi reveals how certain groups among Malabar Muslims, like Sayyids, construct mythical narratives of Arab origins, with an underlying motive of claiming a higher status vis-à-vis others in the society.

These narratives are framed through Islamic cultural idioms that discriminate against people belonging to groups considered lower in social hierarchy, such as Barbers. Such narratives, often infused with invented histories, play a significant role in shaping society and constructing particular social identities for a certain group. Consequently, they help legitimise each group’s relative social status and standing among the broader Muslim community.

Hierarchical intimacy

In the third chapter, Saidalavi focuses on Muslim barbers of Malabar, who are often referred to by derogatory terms. Saidalavi conceptualises the patron-client relationship between the upper Muslim social groups of Malabar (Mappilas and Sayyids) and the subordinate barbers through the idea of hierarchical intimacy. While some aspects of this relationship resemble the guru-devotee or pir-murid relationship, Saidalavi notes that it clearly lacks a spiritual element. Within this hierarchical intimacy, there is visible domination, inequality and power over the subordinated group.

Moreover, barbering services are morally framed as a religious obligation toward the Muslim community. The asymmetries of power and wealth between barbers and patrons are also reflected in everyday practices – for instance, barbers crouching on the ground while the patron sits on a wooden plank, the expectations that barbers wear faded clothes, and the practice of patrons handing over money in a clenched fist. Besides this, some religious scholars in Malabar argue that hair, sweat, and odour are considered undesirable and unhygienic. Since barbers regularly deal with these elements, their work has often been perceived as undignified, while simultaneously requiring them to exercise extra care in maintaining cleanliness before performing prayers.

In the next chapter, Saidalavi notes the unequal and humiliating treatment experienced by fishers and barbers at the hands of the upper-class Muslims. The chapter’s contribution lies in the very approach the author adopts to examine hierarchy among Malabar Muslims. More precisely, Saidalavi explores how Muslims themselves operationalise and justify these hierarchical relations.

Drawing on his fieldwork, he argues that Islam is a key principle of organising caste relations among Muslims, along with the negotiation of local political and economic relations. While there are certain similarities in how caste manifests among Hindus and Muslims, these practices remain distinct and draw from their respective religious traditions. In the Malabar context, for instance, the text Fath-ul Mueen is taught in madrassas, and it underscores marriage relations among Muslims based on ethnicity, occupation, and the length of time a group has been Muslim. Such religious texts and narratives, in turn, shape how social organisation and hierarchy are structured among different groups.

How do barbers resist discrimination and pursue dignity within a social order that is primarily hierarchical in character? They adopted several strategies, including political participation, withdrawal from domestic service, refusal of unpaid work, and relocation to public barber shops. Such collective efforts enable them to come together around a common cause that affirms their worth and helps extricate them from earlier dominating and humiliating social relations. Barbers also challenge inherited hierarchies by asserting that piety – not wealth or lineage – should determine social status. The Kerala State Barbers Association (KSBA) plays a key role in fostering solidarity and advancing claims to dignity. As part of their pursuit of dignified labour, they introduced reforms such as regulating working hours, adopting new styles, and using English shop names in an effort to escape stigma and reconstruct their social identity.

Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy is a significant scholarly contribution to the field of sociology of Islam. It uncovers the dynamics and underlying forces that shape hierarchy among Malabar Muslims. Using the “lived tradition” approach, Saidalavi provides a nuanced analysis of how this form of casteism differs from that found among Hindus. While such an analysis may not be applicable to all Muslim societies in India, it nevertheless helps peel back the multiple layers of everyday social interactions and reveals how these interactions are shaped by caste-like hierarchies. For anyone interested in understanding the intersections of caste and Islam in India, Saidalavi’s treatise is indispensable reading.

Muneeb Yousuf is Deputy Editor of South Asia Research and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Research Centre for Asian Studies, Hong Kong.

Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India, PC Saidalavi, University of Pennsylvania Press.