Debate on cow slaughter on Eid-al-Adha

(The writer can be reached at s_arshad7@rediffmail.com)

Come Eid-al-Adha and the debate on the sacrifice of cows starts in India. In India where about 80 per cent of the population is Hindu and the cow is revered by them, the sacrifice of cows on Eid-al-Adha every year becomes a cause of social and religious conflict. The Muslims in India prefer the cows for sacrifice because the sacrifice of a cow can be shared by seven individuals, and therefore, sacrificing a cow is less expensive. The same advantage is with sacrificing a camel but its unavailability in India compels Muslims to prefer the cows. However, this cannot be a strong argument for cow slaughter when the Muslims have an option of sacrificing goats, sheep and camels.

Sacrifice (Qurbani) is offered by Muslims as a sunnah of Prophet Ibrahim a.h. who had offered to sacrifice his son to please Allah but just before the act of sacrifice, his son Hadhrat Ismail a.s. was replaced by archangel Jibril with a sheep. In the Arab region, cows are not easily available and so sheep, camels and goats are sacrificed there. It is not known when was the sacrifice of cows for Qurbani or general consumption started in India which has been a Hindu majority country since ancient times. It was most probably started during the Muslim rule but it is also a truth that Muslim rulers had also started to realize that cow slaughter in India was not a right practice as it hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus. According to eminent legal expert Mr Faizan Mustafa, Babur had advised Humayun not to allow cow slaughter as it would offend the religious sensibilities of Hindus. The greatest Mughal emperor Akbar who had taken several administrative and cultural steps to promote communal harmony among the Hindus and the Muslims had banned cow slaughter to honour his grandfather's will. However, his move was opposed by the Sufi Mujaddid Alf Sani Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi who was of the view that Muslims should not be prevented from cow slaughter under a Muslim government.

However, in certain periods of pre-Independence and post-independence India Muslims have not only advocated a ban on cow slaughter but have themselves taken the initiative to abandon cow slaughter for the sake of forging Hindu-Muslim unity for a bigger political and national cause. Muslims had abandoned the practice of cow slaughter during the revolt of 1857 to bring greater unity between the Hindus and the Muslims to fight against the East India Company.

The most successful campaign against cow slaughter was started in 1919 by the Muslim leaders of the Khilafat Movement like Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, Maulana Shaukat Ali, Hakeem Ajmal Khan, Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, Maulana Abdul Bari and others. The purpose was to bring Hindus closer to Muslims to form a powerful platform against the British government. Under this campaign, Muslims not only abandoned cow slaughter but also rescued cows meant for slaughter and returned them to Hindus.

The movement received another shot in the arm by an ideological campaign run by one of the greatest Urdu writers and a Sufi of Chishtiya order Khwaja Hasan Nizami who wrote a book titled Tark-e-Gaukushi (Abandoning the practice of Cow slaughter) in 1921. In his book, he presented arguments from Quran and hadiths against cow slaughter in a multicultural society. Therefore, these political and ideological campaigns had a great impact on the collective Muslim psyche and cow slaughter was discouraged, though not abandoned, among the Muslims of India.

Interestingly, before the partition of India, Muslims in the Sindh, Balochistan region had mostly sacrificed goats, sheep and camels. They did not sacrifice cows much. This may be because Rig Veda was composed in this region and Hindus and the region was a centre of Vedic culture before the advent of Islam. Therefore, even after converting to Hinduism, people did not eat beef. After the partition, Muslims migrating from India brought their habit of beef consumption to Pakistan. And gradually, cow slaughter and beef became popular in Pakistan. Still, buffaloes, bulls and goats are widely sacrificed in Pakistan because of the traditional and cultural background.

In post-Independence India cow slaughter has remained a major cause of social conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims. Cow slaughter was the cause of many communal riots in India. In later periods, cow vigilantism grew among Hindus and cow slaughter became a political issue. More than 20 states have banned cow slaughter. Recently, the union territory of Muslim majority Lakshadwip banned cow slaughter but Bengal, Kerala, Goa, and other non-Muslim majority states like Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh have not banned cow slaughter or beef.

Growing cow vigilantism has caused the growing instances of mob lynching of Muslims in recent years and stirred the conscience of both Muslim and Hindu leadership. For example, the chief of Mohan Bhadwat recently condemned mob lynching of Muslims by the so-called cow vigilantes saying that mob lynching in the name of protection of cows was against the spirit of Hindutva. In 2016, reacting to several mob lynching incidents, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had criticized the so-called cow vigilantes and said that cow vigilantism had become a business for some Hindu groups. He had said,

"I get angry at those who are into the Gau-Raksjak business. A Gau-bhakt (cow devotee) is different, Gau Seva (cow protection) is different. I have seen that some people are into crimes all night and wear the garb of Gau-rakshak in the day".

Some prominent Muslim leaders and clerics have called for a central law on cow slaughter to stop communal incidents of Hindu Muslim riots or mob lynching. In 2015, an activist of Hyderabad Maulana Syed Hussain Madani had started a campaign against cow slaughter. Many clerics and Islamic scholars of Andhra Pradesh, including Maulana Anwar Ahmad of Jamia Nizamia and Maulana Anisur Rahman Azmi of AIMPLB had joined the campaign and asked Muslims to adopt a pragmatic approach on animal sacrifice on Eid-al-Adha in the light of the Quran and hadith and given the communal conflict arising out of cow slaughter. Prominent cleric Maulana Mahmood Madani also demanded a central law banning cow slaughter to get rid of the ghost of mob lynching. Darul Uloom Deoband also issued a fatwa advising Muslims to avoid the sacrifice of cows on Eid-al-Adha and instead sacrifice small animals to avoid communal conflagration. Controversial Muslim figure Arif Mohammad Khan laments the fact that despite the ban on beef and cow slaughter in many states, cow slaughter has not been stopped because of the lack of will of the state governments.

On the other hand, some hardline Muslim clerics have opposed a ban on cow slaughter terming it a violation of the religious rights of Muslims. During the Khilafat Movement when Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, Maulana Shaukat Ali and Hakeem Ajmal Khan advocated a ban on cow slaughter, Islamic scholar Syed Abul Ala Maududi was against it. Recently when activist Hussain Madani advised Muslims to avoid the sacrifice of cows at festivals, a cleric of Bengal Maulana Sharafat Abrar opposed his advice. Similarly, when the J&K High Court issued an order to strictly implement the already existing law against cow slaughter in the state, some prominent Muslim clerics, including Mir Waiz Umar Farooque opposed it saying that the cow slaughter ban in a Muslim majority state was against the rights of the Muslims.

Therefore, thanks to the campaigns of Muslim intellectuals and liberal clerics against cow slaughter and the involving social and political crisis in India, a consensus is gradually emerging among the Muslim intelligentsia in favour of cow slaughter in the country but it seems that economic and political constraints and compulsions and not the opposition of Muslims has restrained the successive central governments from implementing a blanket ban on cow slaughter in the country. According to statistics, India has emerged as the largest exporter of beef in the world. This seems paradoxical in a country where the cow is revered as a religious symbol and where individual Muslims are lynched for possessing cows. All the beef exporters of the country like Al Kabir, Al Noor, Arabian Exports, MKP Exports, AOB Exports and others are owned by non-Muslims and their arbiters (butcherkhana) are located in Unnao, Muzaffar Nagar (UP) Delhi, Nuh( Haryana) etc. A blanket ban on beef or cow slaughter will badly hit the national economy.

Given the diverse cultural and religious traditions of India and also due to economic and political compulsions of the respective governments, the cow slaughter ban has become a challenge for the national governments. Therefore, placing the blame for cow slaughter solely on the shoulders of the Muslims will not be a correct understanding of the problem.