An examination of Jamia Millia Islamia’s contemporary academic culture highlights a drift from its founding moral and ethical vision toward unexamined liberal and Marxist assumptions. Islam is increasingly treated as identity or critique rather than a normative ethical system. The argument urges reclaiming ethical self-confidence by restoring moral reasoning and placing modern theory in sustained dialogue with Jamia’s indigenous intellectual traditions.
At the end of my first semester at Jamia Millia Islamia, I realised that the most significant thing I had learned was not contained in any single text or lecture. It was something more ambient, more structural: a sense of which ideas are considered natural, which are treated as progressive, and which are quietly rendered unthinkable. Individualism and humanism were almost always presented in a positive, affirmative light, not as historically situated philosophies, but as moral achievements of modernity. Liberal thought rarely appeared as one worldview among many; it functioned as the default grammar of discussion. Religion, meanwhile, entered academic space largely as an object of critique, sociology, history, or identity politics, rather than as a living ethical system capable of making normative claims about the good life. This dissonance compelled me to ask a larger question: Is this what Jamia was meant to become?
Jamia was founded in 1920 out of a deep intellectual and political anxiety. Its founders– among them Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, and later, Zakir Husain, believed that Indian Muslims were being pushed toward two equally destructive futures. One was colonial loyalty: advancement through British patronage, elite dependency, and cultural imitation. This path promised stability but demanded intellectual subservience. The other was communal isolation: retreating into religious separatism, withdrawing from national life, and shrinking Islam into a defensive identity. This path preserved difference but risked irrelevance.
Jamia rejected both. It was conceived as a third path, one that affirmed Muslim ethical identity without separatism, Indian nationalism without servility, and resistance without rage. Education, in this vision, was not merely about employability or ideological alignment; it was about ethical formation. Islam here was not a political slogan or a private faith. It was a moral vocabulary, capable of producing disciplined individuals, socially responsible citizens, and principled resistance.
Over the decades, this synthesis slowly weakened. After independence, Jamia, like many institutions, lost its anti-colonial adversary. In its place emerged the language of Nehruvian secularism, later followed by global liberal and left-liberal frameworks that came to dominate humanities education worldwide.
Today, liberal humanism often operates in Jamia not as an argument but as an assumption. Individual autonomy is framed as emancipation; secular ethics as neutrality; humanism as universal moral progress. These positions are rarely interrogated at the level of first principles. Alongside this, Marxist frameworks provide the dominant idiom of critique, especially in discussions of power, inequality, and resistance. On the margins, a smaller but visible far-right presence emerges, largely as a reaction to perceived left dominance. Though these camps appear opposed, they share something crucial: both occupy a space once held by ethical reasoning.
Islam, meanwhile, is frequently reduced to cultural identity, sociological data, or a structure of power to be critiqued. What is largely absent is Islam as a normative ethical philosophy, one that can speak seriously about dignity without reducing it to autonomy, freedom without detaching it from responsibility, and justice without collapsing into ideology. The growing visibility of Marxist and far-right ideologies at Jamia is often treated as the crisis itself. But this misses the point – polarisation is a symptom, not the disease.
When an institution loses confidence in its own moral foundations, it compensates by importing ready-made frameworks. Ideology becomes easier than ethics; slogans replace moral reasoning. Jamia once feared Muslims becoming colonial dependents or communal isolates. Today, the risk is more subtle i.e., intellectual dependency on inherited Western vocabularies, whether liberal or radical, that leave little room for indigenous ethical thought except as critique or mobilisation. The irony is difficult to ignore. A university founded to resist the empire now risks reproducing another kind of dependence, this time not political, but intellectual.
This is not an argument against liberalism, Marxism, or modern thought as such. It is an argument against treating any of them as inevitable. Jamia’s founders did not reject modernity; they refused mimicry. They believed ethical self-confidence was a prerequisite for genuine political participation. A university born as a moral alternative should be especially cautious about turning inherited assumptions into unquestioned truths.
At the end of my first semester, what I feel is not alienation, but a sense of loss. Jamia’s greatest strength was never ideological purity, it was moral clarity, and reclaiming that does not require rejecting contemporary theory. It requires placing it in serious dialogue with the ethical traditions Jamia once centered, rather than allowing it to quietly replace them. Jamia was founded to escape a false choice. The danger today is that, in new forms and new languages, the same false choice has returned. The question is not which ideology Jamia should adopt, but whether it still remembers why it refused ideology in the first place.
Hanaan Dar is a student pursuing English Honors from Jamia Millia Islamia
Edited By: Sharmeen Shah
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.
