Faraizi movement

The Faraizi Movement was founded in 1818 by Haji Shariatullah to give up un-Islamic practices and act upon their duties as Muslims (Fard(or obligatory)). The movement protected the rights of tenants to a great extent.

The Faraizi's adhered to the Hanafi school with certain differences in practices.

The leader of the Faraizis was called Ustad or teacher and his disciples xagird or students instead of using the terms like pir and murid. A person so initiated into the Faraizi fold was called Tawbar Muslim or Mumin.

The Faraizi movement was widely received in the districts of Dhaka, Faridpur, Barisal, Mymensingh and Comilla.

Some Muslims, on the other hand, particularly the landlords of Dhaka, hence, reacted sharply against him and this caused a riot in Nayabari, Dhaka District. Due to the reaction of these landlords and Hindu landlords and European indigo planters, this movement swelled into a socio-economic issue.

The landlords levied numerous abwabs (plural form of the Arabic term bab, signifying a door, a section, a chapter, a title). During Mughal India, all temporary and conditional taxes and impositions levied by the government over and above regular taxes were referred to as abwabs. More explicitly, abwab stood for all irregular impositions on Raiyats above the established assessment of land in the Pargana) over and above normal rent and such abwabs were horribly dishonest in the eye of law. Several abwabs were of religious nature. Haji Shariatullah then intervened to object to such a practice and commanded his disciples not to pay these dishonest cesses to the landlords. The landlords had even inflicted a ban on the slaughter of cow, especially on the occasion of Eid. The Faraizis ordained their peasant followers not to obey such a ban. All these heated instances added up to tensed and stressed relationships amongst the Faraizis and the landlords, who were all Hindus.

Gradually gathering up incidents under the Islamic-led Faraizi movement could be witnessed in various parts of Bengal, with overwhelming English-Bengali agreement for perhaps the very first time. The outraged landlords built up a propaganda campaign with the British officials, incriminating the Faraizis with mutinous mood. In 1837, these Hindu landlords indicted Haji Shariatullah of attempting to build up kingdom of his own. They also brought several lawsuits against the Faraizis, in which they benefitted dynamic co-operation of the European indigo planters. Shariatullah was placed under the detention of the police in more than one instance, for purportedly inciting agrarian turbulences in Faridpur.

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Wikipedia