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Why did the muslims participate in the khilafat non-cooperation movement?

The Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and the martial law in Punjab belied all the generous war-time promises of the British. After the withdrawal of the Rowlatt Satyagraha, Gandhi got involved in the Khilafat movement, in which he saw a splendid opportunity to unite the Hindus and the Muslims in a common struggle against the British.

Muslim League which was formed in 1906, had was formed in 1906 had found unification in the hands of Mohammad Ali Jinnah by this time. When Britain declared war against Turkey in November, 1914, the Muslim refused to believe that it was non-religious war, as leaders like Ali brothers with pro-Turkish sympathies were soon put behind bars.

Moreover, behind the Khilafat Movement were the rumours about a harsh peace treaty being imposed on the Ottoman Emperor, who was still regarded as the Khalifa or the spiritual head of the Islamic world.

The movement launched by a Khilafat Committee formed in Bombay in March, 1919 had three main demands:

a) The Khalifa must retain control over the Muslim holy places.
b)  He must be left with his pre-war territories so that he could maintain his position as the head of the Islamic world.
c) The jazirat-ul-Arab (Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Palestine) must not be under non-Muslim sovereignty. It was thus a pan-Islamic movement in all its appearance as the cause had nothing to do with India.

But as Gail Minault has shown, (in his book The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India), the Khilafat was being used more as a symbol while the leaders actually had little concern about altering the political realities in the Middle East. It was found to be a symbol that could unite the Indian Muslim community divided along many fault-lines such as regional, linguistic, class and sectarian. To use Minault’s words, ‘A pan-Islamic symbol opened the way to pan-Indian Islamic political mobilization. It was anti-British, which inspired Gandhi to support this cause in a bid to bring the Muslims into the mainstream of Indian nationalism. Initially, the Khilafat movement had broad trends: a moderate trend headed by the Bombay merchants and a radical trend led by the younger Muslim leaders like Muhammad Ali, Shaukat Ali, Maulana Azad and the Ulama. The latter group wanted a mass agitation against the British on the basis of unity with the Hindua. Gandhi took up the Khilafat cause and initially played a mediating role between the moderates and the radicals took charge of the movement, as emotions ran high after the publication of the terms of the Treaty of Serves with Turkey in May, 1920. The Allahabad Conference of the central Khilafat Comitte held on 1-2 June, 1920, decided to launch a four stage non-cooperation movement: boycott of titles, civil services, police and army and finally non-payment of taxes. The whole movement was to begin with a hartal on 1st August. Muslim opinion on non-cooperation was still divided and throughout the summer of 1920, Gandhi and Shaukat Ali toured extensively mobilizing popular support for the programme. The hartal was a grand success, as it coincided with the death of Tilak, and from then on support for non-cooperation began to rise.


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