THE TRUE HISTORY OF 1921

Foreword

Jihad and Genocide in Malabar

Ramachandran

This book has been written to put the record straight- there has been a sustained effort among the modern researchers to paint the Mappila rebellion of 1921 in Malabar as a peasant struggle or class war. The route to class war becomes easy if it is labelled as a peasant struggle. There had been better peasant struggles in Tambov and elsewhere, while Lenin was the Communist dictator in Russia. The Mappila rebellion was directed by the Muslim fanatic clerics, waged as a Jihad. This is evident in the official history written by R H Hitchcock, the Superintendent of Police in south Malabar in 1921. His work titled A History of the Malabar Rebellion 1921 has been published by a modern researcher with the misleading title, Peasant Revolt in Malabar: A History of the Malabar Rebellion 1921. Hitchcock has not termed it as a peasant revolt. He wrote it to prove that the rebellion had been religious fanaticism. But peasant revolts have a market in modern research. Hence the modern European interest in the Mappila rebellion.

Abani Mukherjee, a member of the Soviet Communist Party had given a note during the rebellion to Lenin, interpreting it as a class war. Modern European historians like Conrad Wood followed the hint and Indian Marxist historians like K. M. Panicker followed suit. The Muslim fundamentalists and Jihadists became very happy, and theses on the rebellion flourished. The Muslim gangsters and Jihadist clerics of 1921 have become Marxists now. The Marxists in Kerala recognized the Jihad as a freedom struggle, betrayed the Hindus and they rewarded the Jihadists with titles, rewards, and pensions.

Even the old Mappila outbreaks were fanatic in nature. According to British records, the excitement in the Muslim world over two events outside Malabar aided the spirit of unrest among the Mappilas: The state of Sudan in 1884 and that of Turkey in 1896. Sudan and Yemen are neighbouring countries, divided by the Red Sea. Yemen of course was the motherland of the Jihadists Mambram Alavi Thangal and his son Fazal Pookkoya Thangal, religious leaders of the Malabar Mappilas. The Mahdi revolution in Sudan was a Jihad against the British rule, and the communists were interested in that-the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had been published in 1848, and the Paris Commune had happened in 1871. The Mahdist Revolution was an Islamic revolt against the westernised Egyptian government in Sudan. An apocalyptic branch of Islam, Mahdism incorporated the idea of a golden age in which the Mahdi, translated as “the guided one,” would restore the glory of Islam to the earth.

Turkey in 1896, through the Hamidian massacres, showed the way for the genocide of Christians by Muslims. Between 1894 and 1924, the number of Christians in Asia Minor fell from some 3-4 million to just tens of thousands—from 20% of the area’s population to under 2%. Turkey has long attributed this decline to wars and the general chaos of the period, which claimed many Muslim lives as well. But the descendants of Turkey’s Christians, many of them dispersed around the world since the 1920s, maintain that the Turks murdered about half of their forebears and expelled the rest. Turkey’s Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian (or Syriac) communities disappeared as a result of a staggering campaign of genocide beginning in 1894, perpetrated against them by their Muslim neighbours. By 1924, the Christian communities of Turkey and its adjacent territories had been destroyed. The systematic Armenian genocide happened during 1914-1916 in which 1.2 million Armenians were massacred.

This Armenian genocide became the guiding force for the Mappilas, driven by pan-Islamic forces. Mysterious people like the Lawrence of Arabia landed in Malabar. The Khilafat struggle, promoted by Gandhi came in handy for the extremist Islamic forces and the Congress in Malabar fell into extremist hands. M P Narayana Menon, a close friend of K Madhavan Nair dressed like a Mappila and addressed them in mosques. Former dacoits like Variyankunnath Haji found themselves in exalted positions. A Jihad was declared against the British; there was talk of an Afghan invasion of India and Mappilas were led to believe that the British have been defeated in the World War. A temporary Khilafat kingdom was established by Ali Musaliyar, where Sharia laws alone prevailed. A lot of Hindus, belonging to the proletariat were massacred. Hindu priests were attacked and temples desecrated.

I have tried in this book to go deep into the roots of the Mappila and the advent of Islam in Malabar; it is evident from records that Jihadi texts existed in Malabar from the Portuguese period onwards. This inner stream of Jihad was at work in 1921. It is important to understand this inner meaning to comprehend the true history of the rebellion.

© Ramachandran