Bihari Muslims Erotic

Ask where the Bihari Muslims live and there are two right answers. One is Bihar, flat river country in eastern India with the Ganges running through it, rice and sugarcane, and a Muslim population of roughly one in six that has been settled there since the Delhi sultanates. The other is Dhaka, where the descendants of families who left Bihar in 1947 still live in camps in the Mohammadpur district. Almost everything about the group runs through that fork. In Bihar they speak what their neighbors speak: Bhojpuri in the west, Magahi around Patna and Gaya, Maithili in the north, all Indo-Aryan. Urdu is the language of the sermon, the ghazal and the qazi's court, and the state made it a second official language in 1980. Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school predominates, worked into daily life through Sufi lineages, the Firdausi order at Bihar Sharif, the shrine complex at Maner, the khanqahs of Phulwari Sharif on the edge of Patna. Since 1921 Phulwari Sharif has also housed the Imarat-e-Shariah, which maintains its own network of qazis handling marriage, divorce and inheritance for Muslims across Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha, running alongside the state courts.

The internal line that matters most is not sect but descent. Ashraf families claim Arab, Persian or Afghan origin. The Ajlaf majority are weavers, butchers, oil pressers and cultivators, and they have their own politics. The Momin Conference, built among Ansari weavers under Abdul Qaiyum Ansari in the 1930s and 1940s, argued against the Muslim League and against Partition on the grounds that a landlord's country would not be theirs. The Pasmanda movement that took shape in Patna in the 1990s is its direct heir. Events made the counterargument. Bihar's massacres of Muslims in late 1946 pushed tens of thousands east into Bengal, and Partition sent many more. They went to East Pakistan rather than West because it was close and there was work on the railways and in the jute mills. In 1971 that choice curdled. Bangladeshi independence left them stateless and branded as loyalists, and roughly a quarter of a million remain in camps that were never meant to last, the largest known as Geneva Camp for the Red Cross money behind it. A 2008 High Court ruling granted citizenship to those born after 1971, which settled the legal question and little else. Back in Bihar, life stayed braided with the neighbors. Sher Shah Suri, who took Delhi and laid the Grand Trunk Road, was born at Sasaram, and Bismillah Khan, born at Dumraon into a family of Muslim court musicians, spent his life playing the shehnai at a Hindu temple in Benares.