Indian Muslims and the Freedom Movement

Muslim participation in the Indian independence movement took many forms and pointed in more than one direction. Some worked within the Indian National Congress and argued for a single composite nation; some organised through the Khilafat committees and the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind; some joined revolutionary conspiracies; some served in the armed forces; and some concluded that separate political arrangements were necessary. The disagreements among them were substantive and were argued in public over decades.

This collection gathers the encyclopaedia's coverage of that participation without adjudicating between those positions. It includes the Khilafat leadership of the Ali brothers and their mother Bi Amman; Hasrat Mohani, who put the demand for complete independence before the Congress in 1921; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, twice Congress president and independent India's first education minister; Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who built a mass non-violent movement among the Pashtuns; the revolutionary Ashfaqulla Khan, hanged for the Kakori case; and Muhammad Iqbal, whose poetry and political thought were claimed by more than one side of the argument.

It continues past 1947, because the story does not end there. Brigadier Mohammad Usman commanded in Kashmir in 1948; Zakir Husain, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam each held the office of President of India. Presented together, these lives document a range of choices made under colonial rule and after it, and are offered as history rather than as argument.