By James M. Dorsey
When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
recently declared that Turkey was “the only country that can lead the Muslim
world,” he probably wasn’t only thinking of Middle Eastern and other Islamic
states such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. Increasingly, there is evidence that
Indian Muslims, the Islamic world’s fourth largest community after Indonesia
and the South Asian states is on Erdogan’s radar.
Erdogan’s interest in Indian Muslims
highlights the flip side of a shared Turkish and Indian experience: the rise of
religious parties and leaders with a tendency towards authoritarianism in
non-Western democracies that, according to Turkey and India scholar Sumantra
Bose, who calls into question their commitment to secularism.
Erdogan’s interest in Indian Muslims
goes beyond his hitherto unsuccessful attempts to persuade Indian authorities
to shutter some nine schools and collegesassociated with exiled Muslim preacher
Fethullah Gulen. Accusing Gulen of responsibility for a failed 2015 military
coup, Erdogan’s government is seeking the preacher’s extradition to Turkey from
his refuge in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
While Gulen is an obsession to
Erdogan, the president’s interest in Indian Muslims is part of bigger fish he
has to fry. Indian Muslims are too big a community to ignore in Erdogan’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia for
leadership in the Muslim world, particularly in the wake of theOctober 2
killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul that
has catapulted the rivalry to centre stage.
Erdogan’s efforts to create inroads
into the Indian Muslim community is facilitated by the Hindu nationalism of
prime minister Narendra Modi that prompted The Washington Post to headline a
recent article by Indian journalist Rana Ayyub describing mounting anti-Muslim
sentiment and
Erdogan is competing for Indian
Muslim hearts and minds with a continued flow of Saudi funds to multiple Salafi
organizations, including charities, educational institutions and political
organizations, and reporting by Turkish journalists associated with the Gulen
movement, who point to Turkish links with militant clerics.
They include controversial
televangelist Zakir Naik, whose Peace TV reaches 200 million viewers despite
being banned in India. Problematically, some of Erdogan’s interlocutors,
including Naik, seemingly prefer to straddle the fence between Turkey and Saudi
Arabia and play both sides against the middle.
If the geopolitical stakes for
Erdogan are primarily his leadership ambitions, for Saudi Arabia it’s not just
about being top dog. Influence among Indian Muslims creates one more pressure
point for the kingdom in its opposition to Indian funding of Iran’s Arabian Sea
port of Chabahar.
Saudi Arabia fears the port will
help Iran counter harsh US sanctions imposed after US President Trump’s
withdrawal from a 2015 international agreement that curbed the Islamic
republic’s nuclear program.
The kingdom is further concerned
that the port will enable Iran to gain greater market share in India for its
oil exports at the expense of Saudi Arabia, raise foreign investment in the
Islamic republic, increase its government revenues, and allow Iran to project
power in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.
Finally, Saudi Arabia sees Indian
Shiites, who are believed to account for anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of
the country’s 180 million Muslims, as an Iranian fifth wheel.
Indian media quoted a report by
India’s Intelligence Bureau as saying that ultra-conservative Saudi Islamic
scholars were frequently visiting Indian Sunni Muslim communities. The Bureau
reportedly put the number of visitors in the years between 2011 and 2013 at
25,000. It said they had distributed tens of millions of dollars – a scale
unmatched by Turkish funding.
The Saudi effort is furthered by the
fact that some three million Indians work in the kingdom, many of them from
Kerala. “The Muslim community in Kerala is undergoing the process of
Arabification… It is happening like the westernisation. Those Indians who had
lived in England once used to emulate the English way of life back home. Similarly,
Muslims in Kerala are trying to bring home the Arabian culture and way of
life,” said scholar Hameed Chendamangalloor.
South Asia scholar Christophe
Jaffrelot noted that Muslim institutions in Kerala, including the Islamic
Mission Trust of Malappuram, the Islamic Welfare Trust and the Mujahideen
Arabic College had received “millions of (Saudi) riyals.”
Like in the case of Naik, Turkey has
reportedly sought to also forge ties to Maulana Syed Salman Al-Husaini
Al-Nadwi, a prominent Indian Muslim scholar who is a professor at one of the
country’s foremost madrassas, Darul-uloom Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow.
Al-Nadwi tweeted his support for
Erdogan in advance of last June’s election. “We represent the Muslim peoples
and 300 million Muslim Indians. We want the Turkish people to take place next
to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party,” Al-Nadwi said.
Al-Nadwi’s son Yusuf was a speaker
at a conference in Istanbul in 2016 on the history of the caliphate movement in
Turkey and South Asia organized by the South Asian Center for Strategic Studies
(GASAM) founded by Ali Sahin, a former deputy minister for European affairs and
member of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Al-Nadwi sparked controversy in 2014
by offering Saudi Arabia to raise a 500,000 strong militia of Sunni Muslim
Indian youth that would contribute to a global Islamic army to “help
Muslims in need,” fight Iraqi Shiites and become part of a Caliphate. At
about the same time, Al-Nadwi also raised eyebrows by praising the Islamic
State’s success in Iraq in a letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The Turkish-Saudi competition for
Indian Muslim hearts and minds is grit on the mill of Hindu nationalists even
if Turkish moves have attracted less attention than those of their Saudi
rivals.
(IPA Service)
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the
S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of
Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture
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