Pathology of the Patriarch

Kanthapuram AP Aboobacker Musliyar is a renowned Kozhikode-based Islamic scholar who has courted controversy many times in his long life as a spiritual leader of a section of Sunnis. In 2012, he had said he had acquired a strand of Prophet Muhammad’s hair which he said would be housed in a mosque, drawing vehement opposition from Islamic groups and seminaries, including the one in Deoband. Pinarayi Vijayan, former Kerala chief minister, had then described the relic as “human waste”. Years later, Musliyar claimed that the strand of hair he had preserved had grown by one centimetre, apart from making some outlandish comments that the water at the mosque in Markaz Knowledge City where the hair was kept was “laced” with Prophet Muhammad’s saliva.

Now, aged 95, this general secretary of the All India Sunni Jamiyyathul Ulama and general secretary of Samastha Kerala Jem-iyyathul Ulama wants to impose a raft of restrictions on young women appearing in public. A circular was recently issued by Samastha asking mahal committees, mosques, madrasas and other institutions to ensure young women are not “displayed” in front of unrelated men on public roads and stages. Its argument was that these are un-Islamic practices. The circular appeared around the time an Islamic festival was on, but it has caused a row thanks to Muslim women and politicians coming out against it. Kerala Chief Minister VD Satheesan attacked the nonagenarian cleric, stating that such proposals and suggestions—that young women appearing in public and being looked at by unrelated men will cause “great destruction”—reflect a 19th-century idea.

This medieval mindset to impose religious patriarchy in Kerala is nothing new among Muslims, but then things were never the same for decades after India’s independence, when progressive thoughts buffeted the state following the political and social churning guaranteed by what is often called the Kerala Renaissance. Gandhian thought and Marxism contributed to a great debate about emancipation of the oppressed and implementation of policies that offered men and women dignity.

My mother, who went to school and college from the 1950s to the early 1970s in northern Kerala, recalls that it was impossible to recognise a Muslim from a Hindu in classrooms, except that Muslim girls were comparatively light-skinned, but attires revealed no religious identity. In the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s when she taught at a government college in the region, she found Muslim girls and young women to be far more “modern” than the others, thanks to the Gulf Boom as well as a “free spirit mindset”. My personal experience of spending time in Kannur, my hometown, in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that young Muslim women were the first to experiment with miniskirts and what they described at that time as “bold” dressing. The religiously rigid lot was still around, but was too weak to make an impact.

But things changed after 1992. Suspicion started growing, especially among the educated and privileged Muslim youth. The sense of alienation of a community that had become relatively affluent thanks to remittances from the Gulf, which helped them send their children to fine schools and acquire good education and jobs, was deep, especially in the wake of the emergence of radicalised elements, including the NDF (which later merged with a few other outfits to become the Popular Front of India, or PFI) and the influence of orators of the stature of Abdul Nasser Madani. Public display of identity became the norm in a short period, with Muslim women brandishing designer purdahs and outer covering. A friend once joked that purdah-clad women are a far more regular sight in humid and scorching Kerala than in the Kashmiri winter. The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), which had a political monopoly of sorts over Muslims, had to play catch-up with radicalised groups in politics of aggression. They soon allowed a section of their leaders to preach radical, divisive thought so as to keep others from encroaching on their turf. Congress, which was in alliance with IUML, had to connive at this rise in political assertion and demand for plum ministerial portfolios whenever the United Democratic Front (UDF) came to power. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, which heads the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and was also keen on securing Muslim votes, maintained a love-hate relationship with radicalised Muslim entities, the aim being to weaken IUML’s hold. Most often, the effort backfired.

The power of Muslim clerics is evident from the counterattack launched by Musliyar’s sympathisers against Satheesan. After all, Congress is increasingly dependent on the Muslim League for its survival. Rahul Gandhi himself had to take sanctuary in the 2019 elections in Wayanad where IUML enjoys tremendous clout. In 2024, after he won from both seats he contested, Rahul Gandhi then relinquished his Wayanad seat for his sister Priyanka. Targeting this political symbiosis, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state president Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who is also an MLA, hit out at the government in an X post about a recent case of a journalist being targeted: “The Congress/IUML government’s action against journalist Aparna Kurup is not just a police case. It is a chilling statement. The Muslim League and its factions are now in full control of the State Government. They do not care about the rule of law or constitutional rights. They will prosecute those they dislike and let their own radical supporters walk free. Aparna Kurup faced intense cyberbullying and death threats simply for questioning regressive comments made by Kanthapuram. Instead of protecting her, the government filed a case against her.” Kurup had apologised for what was widely seen as a syntactically inappropriate statement while on air. Yet a case was filed against her. AM Shinas, a Kerala-based prof

Sudhir Devadas, former research head at the Mathrubhumi Group, told Open that the student arm of PFI, called the Campus Front of India (CFI), had distributed a notice among female medical students at Kozhikode Medical College asking them not to befriend Hindus, and warning that even if they did, fornication with a man with an uncircumcised penis could cause cervical cancer. The news of this memo was reported back in 2009. “Mind you, Kozhikode Medical College was a hub of radical Left activity in the 1970s,” Devadas had said (‘The Death of an Ideal’, April 12, 2026).

Now, talking about Musliyar’s circular, Devadas says that while Muslim scholars, like their counterparts in other religions, are well within their fundamental rights to adjudicate, elaborate and interpret matters of faith within Islamic jurisprudence, these have to be situated within the overarching framework of the Constitution. “They also have to calibrate their grand announcements on how people should conduct themselves in public, acknowledging the tectonic shifts that have rendered obsolete the traditional stereotypes of gender roles in a dynamic society. The benefits of modern education, historically denied to girls, like other traditionally disadvantaged classes, irrespective of religion, have transformed them into women capable of informed choice, with or without male oversight, the norm down the ages, mandated by retrograde systems of control, especially by clergy. They have a responsibility to ensure that their opinions do not lurch into misogyny, as do their well-meaning critics, whose engagement with these issues does not slither into Islamophobia.” Devadas adds, “Scholars also have a doctrinal duty to address the canker of radicalisation of youth, and raise among them the need for mutual respect of all faiths.”

AM Shinas, a Kerala-based professor of history and writer, approaches the issue from a historical point of view. He brings up the name of South African Muslim scholar and Islamic liberation theologian Farid Esack, who uses the phrase “religious landlords” for male religious authorities who have appropriated the interpretation of Islam. “In his book On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today, he writes that the religious landlords among Muslims—all male—have aborted the process set in motion by the Prophet. The interpreters of the Sharia have overwhelmingly been men. We can call this ‘Male Islam.’”

Shinas explains that Samastha was formed in Calicut in 1926. The 1989 split in Samastha created two factions—EK and AP (of which Kanthapuram Musliyar is the leader). The dispute was over institutional control and political alignment, not theology, he says and adds that on the question of women’s public visibility, the two factions have been birds of a feather. Both have been uneasy with women’s public celebration of local body election victories. He goes on to say that Salafi (Mujahid) factions in Kerala and Islamist groups (Jamaat-i-Islami and the like) appear to be more open to women’s role in the public sphere. “It is pertinent to point out that Syed Abul A’la Maududi who wrote a book titled Purdah--in which he described women as the ‘queen’ of the house—had argued that they should confine their duties to the four walls of the household. Moreover, he expressed the opinion in that book that women are, by birth, inherently intellectually inferior to men,” Shinas elaborates. According to him, the influence of Saudi-linked ultraconservative networks and migration entered the patriarchal field and pulled it in many directions, particularly towards stricter religious observances, especially in the case of purdah, hijab and niqab, which were rare among the community four or five decades ago.

Shinas, who is from a family of staunch critics of religious fundamentalism, recalls that when he was a teenager, he used to see covers of the Chandrika weekly, run by IUML, carrying images of women as normally dressed as anyone else in Kerala. Things changed drastically later, with religious landlords expanding their influence by citing an “existential threat” to Islam. Kanthapuram Musliyar is the religious landlord in this context. He has been attacked by women from within the community, with a few asserting that Gen Z Muslims are unaware of this “old man”. For her part, 32-year-old IUML MLA Fathima Thahiliya, the party’s first woman legislator, told Open, “My stand on that issue is clear and I don’t have to crane my neck and make comments every time someone says something.”

The religious landlords of Kerala simply cannot resist the itch to sermonise while the younger generation seems either utterly unimpressed or perfectly content to ignore them.