Muslim Freedom Fighters

Muslims have been presented by people of certain ideology as unpatriotic. For the last seventy years, there has been a conscious and continuous effort to paint Muslims as anti-nationals, who are not just unpatriotic, but plot against the nation. This is a monumental lie and has no basis. Muslims led the first war of independence and fought the initial incursion of the East India Company in the country. Tipu Sultan and his father, Hyder Ali, the rulers of Mysore, were the only rulers in the country who tried to face the British expansionism in India and gave it a tough fight, beating the colonial armies on multiple occasions. Without the support of Marathas and Nizam, the East India Company wouldn’t have been able to emerge victorious. The first war of Independence, called Mutiny of 1857, too was led by none other than last Moghal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. In Lucknow, it was Begum Hazrat Mahal who gave a tough fight to the marauding colonial armies and their agents. She defeated the British army and for around a year remained a thorn in the neck of the British Raj, before being driven out of the country. The Mutiny of 1857 and the subsequent freedom movement were launched and fought together by Hindus and Muslims. In the first and the second decades of the last century, it was neither Indian National Congress nor anyone else that was in the forefront of fighting for the nation’s independence. The struggle was waged by Mahmud al-Hasan and supported by the ulama of Deoband. The author dexterously profiles 40 prominent Indian Muslim freedom fighters who rose to fame due to the huge sacrifices they made for the cause of the freedom of the nation and their opposition to the two-nation theory espoused by the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha.