The Faraizi movement, founded by Haji Shariatullah in early nineteenth-century East Bengal, began as a call for Muslims to return to the obligatory duties of Islam — and became, under his son Dudu Miyan, a disciplined peasant organisation that ran its own courts and defied the landlords and indigo planters of the Bengal delta.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, in the river-cut districts of eastern Bengal, a preacher newly returned from Mecca began telling the Muslim peasants around him something startling: that much of what they practised in the name of Islam was not Islam at all. The festivals at saints' shrines, the ceremonies for the dead, the charms and offerings of village religion — all of it, he said, was forbidden innovation. What God required was simpler and harder: the faraiz, the obligatory duties of the faith, performed exactly as scripture commanded. From that single word came the name of the Faraizi movement, the first organised Islamic reform movement of British Bengal. Under its founder, Haji Shariatullah, it was a campaign for religious purification. Under his son Dudu Miyan, it became something more: a disciplined peasant organisation with its own courts, its own officials and its own armed clubmen, which for two decades defied the landlords and indigo planters of the delta. Historians still argue over which of those two movements — the reform or the revolt — was the real one. The evidence suggests it was both, in succession.
Table of contents [Show]
To understand the Faraizis, begin with the countryside they lived in. By 1800 Bengal had been under East India Company rule for a generation, and the Company's Permanent Settlement of 1793 had remade rural society. Land revenue was fixed forever and auctioned to whoever would pay it, creating a class of zamindars — landlords — many of them Hindu merchants and Marwari financiers who had bought estates as investments. Beneath them, the actual tillers of the soil in the eastern districts were overwhelmingly Muslim peasants, descendants in large part of local converts won to Islam during the centuries when, from the era of the Bengal Sultanate onward, the delta's eastern frontier was cleared, settled and brought under the plough. The peasants held insecure tenancies, paid rents they could not negotiate, and — most gallingly — paid a stream of extra levies called abwabs on top of the legal rent: cesses for the zamindar's festivals, his family's ceremonies, his agents' perquisites.
Beside the zamindars stood a second power: the European indigo planters. Indigo dye was among the most profitable exports of Company Bengal, and planters advanced small loans to peasants and then obliged them to sow indigo on their best land at prices that left them poorer than growing rice. The system ran on coercion — factory guards, seized crops, beatings — and everyone in the countryside knew it. Meanwhile the old Muslim order had collapsed: the community that had once supplied Bengal's rulers now supplied its tenants, and its religious life, far from courts and madrasas, had grown up around village pirs, shrine festivals and customs shared with Hindu neighbours. It was this combination — economic subjection below, religious drift above, and no organised voice anywhere — that Haji Shariatullah came home to.
Shariatullah was born in 1781 — some scholars say 1782, and the chronology of his life has been argued over ever since — at Shamail, a village in the Madaripur subdivision of greater Faridpur district, into a family of petty taluqdars, small landholders. He received a religious education in Bengal, studied in Calcutta under Maulana Basharat Ali, and in 1799, aged about eighteen, accompanied his teacher on the journey to Mecca. He stayed in Arabia for nearly twenty years. Lodging with a Bengali scholar resident in Mecca, he studied Arabic literature and Islamic law, and sat under Sheikh Tahir al-Sunbul al-Makki, a jurist of the Hanafi school. His Arabian years coincided with the rise and fall of the first Saudi state and the puritan revival associated with the Muwahhidun — the movement outsiders called Wahhabism — and the standard scholarly account, that of the historian Muin-ud-Din Ahmad Khan, holds that he came home carrying that revivalist fire.
His first attempt, on returning in 1818, failed: the preaching of pure doctrine to villagers formed by centuries of folk Islam attracted few listeners. On Khan's account — the fullest we have — Shariatullah went back to Mecca, was initiated by his teacher into the Qadiriyya Sufi order, and returned a second time in 1820, now speaking of faith held in the heart as much as of rules kept by the body. This time the message spread. From Faridpur it reached into the neighbouring districts of greater Dhaka, Barisal and Comilla within his lifetime, carried village to village among peasants and weavers. The district of Shariatpur in modern Bangladesh still bears his name. When he died in 1840, he left behind not a book or a school but a following — organised, distinctive and already in trouble with the authorities.
The doctrine was austere and, for its hearers, revolutionary in its simplicity. A Muslim's life, Shariatullah taught, was defined by the faraiz: absolute faith in the unity of God (tawhid) and the prophethood of Muhammad, the five daily prayers, the giving of zakat, the Ramadan fast, and the Hajj for those able. Everything beyond scripture's command that Bengali Muslims had absorbed — the fatiha ceremonies for the dead, the urs festivals at saints' tombs, milad gatherings, vows and offerings at shrines — he condemned as shirk, the association of partners with God, or as bid'at, sinful innovation. The whole apparatus of popular religion was swept away with it: there were to be no pirs interceding for disciples; the Faraizi leader was an ustad, a teacher, and his followers shagird, students. He preached, too, the equality of all believers and attacked the caste-like discriminations that had crept into Bengali Muslim society.
His most explosive ruling was legal. Following classical Hanafi doctrine, Shariatullah declared that India under British rule was dar al-harb — a territory of war, no longer an abode of Islam. Since the community could not wage jihad against the occupying power, he gave the lesser verdict that followed from the premise: without Muslim rule, the great congregational prayers of Friday and the two Eids were suspended. Conservative ulama were appalled, fearing the dissolution of the community's public life; the reformer Maulana Karamat Ali Jaunpuri campaigned against him across Bengal and branded him "the Khariji of Bengal". Orthodox reaction turned violent at Nayabari in Dhaka district around 1831, in a riot aimed at the Faraizis.
Doctrine, however, did not stop at prayer. Shariatullah taught that by the Quranic principle that a man receives only the fruits of his own striving, the zamindars created by the Permanent Settlement had no right to any share of the crop beyond the legally fixed rent. Followers were instructed to refuse every extra levy — including the cesses landlords imposed to pay for Hindu festivals — and to keep out of puja festivities. A religious ruling had become an economic programme, and the landlords understood it at once. In 1837 Hindu zamindars, backed actively by the indigo planters, accused Shariatullah of plotting to set up a kingdom of his own; lawsuits were filed against his followers, and the Haji himself was detained by police more than once for allegedly inciting agrarian unrest in Faridpur.
The man who turned a sect into a system was the founder's only son. Muhsinuddin Ahmad, known to everyone as Dudu Miyan (1819–1862), succeeded his father in 1840, aged about twenty-one, and set about organising the Faraizis of eastern Bengal into what contemporaries and historians alike have described as a state within a state. His headquarters were at Bahadurpur, near his father's home ground in Faridpur.
The structure — remembered as the khilafat system — was tiered and disciplined. Each Faraizi settlement, from a hamlet of fifty souls to a village of five hundred, had its gram khalifa, a village representative who coordinated between the community and the leadership. Groups of villages were gathered into a gird, or circle, under a superintendent khalifa; and at Bahadurpur a council of senior (uparistha) khalifas advised Dudu Miyan and settled the hardest cases. Through this network he revived the traditional panchayat: khalifa councils arbitrated disputes, tried offenders in their own courts and enforced their judgements, while followers were bound by a standing injunction not to carry any case to the government's courts without khalifa permission — a quiet boycott that starved the colonial legal system of witnesses and fees alike. To protect it all, Dudu Miyan raised a corps of lathials, trained clubmen, who broke the power of the hired enforcers maintained by zamindars and planters. Khan's history judges that from about 1838 to 1857, in consequence, an unusual peace prevailed across the Faraizi districts — Faridpur and Bakarganj at the core, with the network reaching into Dhaka, Pabna, Comilla, Jessore, Noakhali and Mymensingh.
Organisation made confrontation inevitable, and confrontation was the point. Faraizi villages, acting together on their leader's instruction, refused the abwabs — the illegal cesses that were the everyday texture of zamindari oppression — and resisted the planters' pressure to sow indigo. Landlords and factory owners responded as an alliance: propaganda to British officials painting the Faraizis as mutineers in waiting, and a campaign of litigation designed to crush Dudu Miyan personally under the cost and danger of criminal cases. He was arrested and tried again and again through the 1840s — 1838, 1844 and 1847 are the dates most accounts give, and some count at least four imprisonments in that decade. The prosecutions kept failing for the same reason: in case after case, the courts could find no witnesses willing to testify against him. The peasantry of the Faraizi districts, Muslim and in notable measure Hindu too, had decided where its protection lay.
The colonial state's patience ended with the great revolt of 1857. Officials in Dhaka and Faridpur feared precisely what Dudu Miyan's organisation made plausible: an alliance between the mutinous sepoys and an armed, disciplined peasantry. A petition warned the government that the Faraizis were "in a body rising" and had written to the sepoys for support. Whether any real coordination existed remains unproven; the state acted on the fear. Dudu Miyan was arrested as a precaution and held in Alipore Jail in Calcutta for the duration. Even his release date is disputed — Khan's account has him detained until 1861, while other accounts give a release in 1859, a rearrest, and final freedom in 1860. He died at Dhaka in 1862, aged forty-three, having appointed a board of guardians for his young sons.
The movement did not long survive its organiser. Dudu Miyan's sons, Ghiyasuddin Haydar and then Abdul Gafur — known as Naya Miyan — succeeded in turn, but neither commanded the network as their father had, and by the later decades of the nineteenth century the Faraizis had faded as an organised force, though Faraizi communities persisted in pockets of Faridpur and Barisal well into the twentieth century before being absorbed into the broader currents of Bengali Muslim reform and politics. The dar al-harb ruling faded with them; Friday prayers resumed, and the sect's distinctiveness dissolved into the general religious life of the delta.
What, in the end, was it? The two great readings still face each other. For Muin-ud-Din Ahmad Khan, whose 1961 Dhaka University thesis remains the standard history, the movement was basically religious: a revival that aimed to purge Bengali Islam of un-Islamic accretions and forge a self-conscious Muslim community — and which protected peasants, in his words, "Muslims, Hindu or Nama-Sudra all alike", as one duty among others. For historians such as Narahari Kaviraj and Gautam Bhadra, writing in a Marxist tradition, the Faraizis are best understood as a peasant movement: the Permanent Settlement's victims organising against zamindars and planters, with Islam supplying the language, the legitimacy and the organisational form of class resistance. The chronology lends something to both. Under Shariatullah the movement was a doctrine in search of a people; under Dudu Miyan it was a people organised — and the grievances that people carried into the khalifas' courts were, far more often than not, about rent, cesses and indigo. Some scholars also credit Faraizi resistance with helping to force the official scrutiny of the indigo system that produced the Indigo Commission of 1860.
The Faraizi legacy is written into the map — Shariatpur district carries the founder's name — and into the political education of rural Bengal. Before there were parties or unions in the delta, there were khalifas in the villages: the Faraizis taught the Bengal peasantry that it could keep its own courts, refuse unlawful demands and stand together against landlord and planter alike. Every later agrarian movement in the region, from the indigo disturbances to the tebhaga struggles of the twentieth century, worked ground that Haji Shariatullah's students had first organised.
