Who was the founder of the Farazi Movement ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Haji Shariatullah. The Faraizi (Farazi) movement was begun in eastern Bengal by Haji Shariatullah of Shamail in Faridpur district, who sailed for Mecca as a young man, spent close to two decades in the Hejaz absorbing the puritan reformist currents of the Arabian peninsula, and returned to Bengal in about 1818–20 to preach. The movement's name is the key to its programme: 'faraiz' are the obligatory duties enjoined by Islam, and Shariatullah's call was for ordinary Bengali Muslims to strip away accreted local custom and observe those duties exactly. His most consequential ruling was that British-ruled Bengal was dar-al-harb — territory not under Muslim rule — from which he drew the conclusion that the Friday and Id congregational prayers should be suspended, a position that turned a devotional reform into an implicitly political one. Because his following came overwhelmingly from the poor Muslim cultivators and weavers of Faridpur, Dhaka, Bakarganj, Mymensingh and Tippera, the movement carried an agrarian charge from the start, and under his son it acquired an explicitly agrarian programme. That son, Dudu Miyan (Muhsinuddin Ahmad), took charge on his father's death in 1840, built a khalifa-and-panchayat organisation, and directed the Faraizis against Hindu and Muslim zamindars and European indigo planters alike, with the famous doctrine that land belongs to God and no one may levy a tax on it. He is therefore the organiser and radicaliser of the movement, not its founder. Sayyid Ahmad, of Rae Bareli, led an entirely separate movement — the Tariqah-i-Muhammadiya, commonly called the Wahhabi movement in Indian textbooks — which was based in north India and the north-west frontier, not Bengal. Since exactly one of the three named men founded the Faraizi movement, option (d) fails its own test.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli (1786–1831) founded the Tariqah-i-Muhammadiya, the movement Indian textbooks label 'Wahhabi', and died fighting the Sikh state at Balakot in 1831. It is contemporaneous with the Faraizis and shares their puritan reformist inspiration, which is exactly why it is placed here — but it was a north Indian and frontier movement, not a Bengal one.  (c) The strongest wrong answer, because Dudu Miyan is the Faraizi leader most often named in exam questions. He was Shariatullah's son, succeeded him in 1840, and gave the movement its cell structure, its arbitration panchayats and its confrontation with zamindars and indigo planters. Succeeding a movement and building it out is not founding it.  (d) This option is correct only if at least two of the three named men can each be called a founder of this movement, and they cannot. Shariatullah founded it; his son inherited it; Sayyid Ahmad founded something else entirely. A single act of foundation with a single author leaves nothing for an inclusive option to hold.

Concept: Early nineteenth-century Bengal produced a cluster of movements in which religious purification and agrarian grievance ran together, and the Faraizi movement is the standard example. The reformist impulse came from the Arabian peninsula, carried home by pilgrims: purge popular Islam of shrine worship, saint veneration and Hindu-influenced village custom, and return to the obligatory duties laid down in scripture. What made that programme explosive in Bengal was the audience. Eastern Bengal's Muslim population was overwhelmingly a class of poor cultivators, weavers and boatmen who paid rent to largely Hindu zamindars and, from the 1830s, were being pressed into indigo cultivation by European planters. A creed telling them that their religious obligations came from God rather than from local custom shaded easily into a claim that their economic obligations to the zamindar were also not sacred. That is the pattern the exam is testing: a socio-religious reform movement whose social base converts it into a peasant movement within a generation. The same logic runs through Titu Mir's following in Barasat and the Pagal Panthis of Mymensingh.

State PCS 2024 Q42 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q42 — History PYQ with Answer