In Kashmir, struggles over religious authority have long shaped the boundaries of legitimate religious expression and the meaning of communal identity. From the Dogra administration’s interventions in disputes between rival Mirwaizes in the 19th century to contemporary attempts to regulate religious institutions, the question of who speaks for Kashmiri Muslims has remained unresolved.

The recent contestation over the regulation of the Friday sermon brings history to the fore. Earlier this month, the Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board, led by the BJP leader Darakhshan Andrabi, denied having ordered mandatory, uniform Friday sermons. The denial followed considerable opposition from political parties and religious organisations.

The plan to standardise the Friday sermon through a centralised Waqf Board, and the backlash it provoked from local political and religious representatives, reveal a contest over religious authority within the Muslim community. It raises historical questions: Who determines what kind of religious knowledge is communicated to Kashmiri Muslims? How is this new religious episteme validated as authentic and aligned with Kashmiri Muslim identity? On what basis should such authority rest: with individual scholars, representative religious bodies, or a centralised Waqf Board?

The essay explores Dogra rule to understand better how Kashmiri Muslim identity is represented. It also addresses the definition of legitimate religious expression and who has the authority to determine its boundaries.

The Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board is a statutory institution responsible for administering and safeguarding Muslim religious endowments, including mosques, Sufi shrines, graveyards, and associated properties across the Union Territory. Historically, Waqf administration in Jammu and Kashmir developed under distinct laws. The Jammu and Kashmir Wakafs Act, 2001, established the State Wakaf Council and provided for Tehsil Wakaf Committees, while the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Specified Wakafs and Specified Wakaf Properties (Management and Regulation) Act, 2004, set up a separate Board responsible for specified religious endowments. These arrangements placed Waqf administration under statutory supervision rather than leaving it entirely to local religious managers.

A major institutional change followed the abrogation of Article 370 and the reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. The two state laws were repealed, and the central Waqf Act, 1995, was extended to the Union Territory from October 31, 2019. The present Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board was constituted in early 2022, with Darakhshan Andrabi elected chairperson.

The Board’s transformation has renewed debate about the relationship between government authority, local religious institutions, and religious autonomy in Kashmir. The episode has historical parallels with the Dogra state’s regulation of religious life in Kashmir.

The Mirwaiz dispute of 1888

The State of Jammu and Kashmir was ruled by the Dogra dynasty from 1846 to 1947. In the late 19th century, a dispute arose between Srinagar’s two Mirwaizes, or chief preachers, over the right to preach at the city’s shrines.

The family of the Mirwaiz of Kashmir claimed the right to preach at and oversee the Jama Masjid and religious institutions in the surrounding localities. Meanwhile, the family of Mirwaiz Hamadani had long exercised similar privileges at the Khanqah-i-Mualla shrine and in nearby areas. The historian Chitralekha Zutshi argues, in her essay “Contesting Urban Space” in Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation (2018), that the dispute began when the Mirwaiz of Kashmir started preaching at shrines located within Mirwaiz Hamadani’s traditional sphere of influence. Clashes subsequently broke out between their followers, escalating into riots. At the same time, the growing centralisation of the Dogra state and deteriorating socio-economic conditions placed increasing pressure on the religious elite to articulate broader communal concerns that transcended divisions among themselves.

In 1888, the Governor of Kashmir prohibited the Mirwaiz of Kashmir from preaching at the shrines to preserve harmony within the community. Both parties submitted petitions to the government and criticised the other side’s interpretation of Islam.

People offer namaz at a mosque administered by the Waqf Board in Srinagar on April 2, 2025, the day the Waqf (Amendment) Bill is tabled in the Lok Sabha.
| Photo Credit:
PTI

According to an 1890 vernacular record in the Jammu State Archives, the Mirwaiz of Kashmir was described as a proponent of Wahhabism, a movement associated with opposition to the veneration of saints. He, in turn, accused his critics of shirk (attributing partners to God) through practices connected with saint veneration. A petition submitted by the khadims (custodians) of the Khanqah-i-Mualla shrine alleged that the Mirwaiz promoted Wahhabi doctrines while publicly identifying with the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam. These competing accusations reveal broader tensions among interpretations and practices within Kashmir’s Muslim community.

Dogra authorities claimed administrative neutrality that was, in practice, selective. When a deputation petitioned the maharaja in 1888 to restrain the Mirwaiz of Kashmir from preaching at shrines under Mirwaiz Hamadani’s authority, the Governor replied that the government, “dedicated to religious neutrality, could not interfere in the internal religious affairs of a community”. Yet the same authorities invoked their responsibility for law and order to issue an order permitting preaching only with the consent of resident Muslims, effectively banning the Mirwaiz where more than 100 residents objected.

According to another official police report preserved in the Vernacular Records (161/S.1947 [1890]), the police then went further, denying that the dispute had anything to do with religion and describing it as a “domestic war” between two families over social influence, while characterising local people as “illiterate” and unable to understand either Mirwaiz’s preaching. Zutshi reads this as the state asserting “ostensible neutrality and at worst dismissal” towards what it termed sectarian conflict. The official view of the dispute was neither neutral nor merely dismissive; it was a governing stance that denied religion as a motive while exercising authority over religious institutions.

Together, these incidents shaped the relationship among the religious elite, the state, and emerging conceptions of Kashmiri Muslim identity. The Dogra intervention and the conflict between the rival religious groups concerned the right to preach at particular shrines and, with it, how Kashmiri Muslim identity should be defined. Various socio-religious groups have long vied to promote their own interpretations of how Kashmiri Muslims should be represented.

The sermon row

For instance, in criticising the uniform Friday sermon, the current Mirwaiz of Kashmir, Umar Farooq, who also heads the Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema, a coalition of several religious organisations, argued that determining the content of Friday sermons falls within the remit of Islamic scholars rather than an administrative body. The coalition’s own coordinated Friday sermons, announced by the Mirwaiz on October 9 and begun on October 16 with themes the coalition chooses, resemble the approach of Mirwaiz Rasool Shah, who became the new Mirwaiz of Kashmir after his father’s death in 1891. Rasool Shah claimed leadership of the Kashmiri Muslim community under a particular definition of Islam that opposed innovations such as saint worship.

In contrast to the Jama Masjid in Srinagar, where the current Mirwaiz occupies the pulpit, many other mosques across Kashmir follow a consultative process between the imam and the local congregation. The Muslim population in each village has the authority to contest the content of the sermon or appoint a different imam for the occasion. In these mosques, the Friday imam is chosen not by hereditary right but by the collective choice of the local community. This approach shows the decentralised nature of religious authority in these localities, allowing diverse expression of Islamic beliefs suited to each congregation’s needs and perspectives.

In the Valley, the Friday sermon matters beyond religious practice. It is delivered from the minbar (pulpit), where imams discuss pressing social issues such as drug abuse, suicide, delayed marriages, and the burden of dowry. The community hears its concerns addressed in familiar language.

Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board Chairperson Darakhshan Andrabi addresses media persons during a function in Srinagar on May 1, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
IMRAN NISSAR

When the Waqf Board proposed coordinating common themes across its affiliated shrines and mosques, political parties and religious organisations opposed it. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) president Mehbooba Mufti, and the Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema accused the Board of interfering in religious affairs, and opponents read the move as an attempt to script the community’s faith and culture.

Andrabi clarified that no order had been issued making uniform sermons mandatory and that preachers would retain discretion over the content. Siasat reported that this was at odds with what a Board official told preachers at an October 11 meeting; according to the Daily Pioneer, he said a directive for a common sermon had been issued nearly a month earlier.

The Board describes the plan as a proposed arrangement, not an enforced sermon. The row became a tussle over what should be preached and who gets to decide. This is where paternalism becomes a concern.

According to an Al Jazeera report published on October 15 on the backlash over the uniform sermon, a scholar from Rajouri district who had attended the meeting online said that Andrabi had passed instructions stating that only a pre-approved sermon drafted by a committee of the most senior scholars would be uniformly recited from mosque pulpits on Fridays. He said they were not told exactly who would be on this committee and that Andrabi “brushed aside our concerns and didn’t let us speak”.

Critics read the proposal as assuming that authorities know what the community needs to hear, and that sermons are better orchestrated from above than shaped by the imams and congregations who know the issues at hand. This assumption can persist without coercion; a proposal alone can redefine who has the authority to speak, on what terms, and with what legitimacy. Set beside the Dogra police report, which portrayed residents as incapable of navigating the religious contest before them, critics see a pattern in which the community is treated as an object of governance rather than an active participant in it. The issue at stake is not the content of the sermons but who is deemed worthy of voicing the concerns of Kashmiri Muslims.

Sorting mosques, then and now

In 1899, Rasool Shah, then the Mirwaiz of Kashmir, founded the Anjuman Nusrat-ul-Islam, a socio-religious society that ran a school and promoted education as a means of building unity among Kashmiri Muslims. The school became a high school in 1905. Its curriculum emphasised the doctrine of Tawhid (the oneness of God) and opposed practices it regarded as bid‘ah (religious innovation), including saint veneration. During the establishment of the Anjuman, a dispute broke out between his followers and the administrators of the Khanqah-i-Mualla shrine.

Tensions between supporters of the two rival Mirwaizes threatened public order. In July 1910, the Governor of Kashmir issued a directive outlining the jurisdictions of the two Mirwaizes in Srinagar. The intervention aimed to reduce conflict and create a structured system for the competing factions.

Under this order, every mosque and shrine in Srinagar was required to be registered under one of the Mirwaizes’ preaching jurisdictions. Custodians of these religious sites were consulted to determine which Mirwaiz had the hereditary right to preach at their shrine. Custodians also had to inform the authorities 15 days in advance if they planned to invite a preacher to their mosque. This system categorised residents based on their location and religious affiliation, effectively dividing the Muslim community in Srinagar.

For instance, the residents of Shahidganj, in consultation with the custodian of the Shahidganj Mosque, chose the Mirwaiz of Kashmir as the official preacher there, although both Mirwaizes had preached in the mosque earlier (Vernacular Records, 1968/7, Jammu State Archives).

It became the responsibility of local communities to choose which Mirwaiz would preach at their mosque. This division complicated representation within the community, as both the Dogra state and the religious elite sought to promote their own version of what it meant to be a Kashmiri Muslim.

In January 2026, the Jammu and Kashmir Police began distributing a four-page form titled “Profiling of Mosques”. The form sought detailed information about mosques in the region, including data on their imams, muezzins, and khatibs (preachers who deliver the Friday sermon). It asked for personal details such as mobile numbers and passport and bank account particulars, and for the mosque’s ideological affiliation: Barelvi, Hanafi, Deobandi, or Ahl-e-Hadees. Authorities have justified the exercise as necessary for security and to combat radicalisation; the Kashmir Reader reported that officials linked it to the investigation into a “white collar” terror module busted in November 2025. The Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema called it a violation of fundamental rights and privacy. The exercise, which maps Kashmiri Muslim traditions, resembles the efforts of the Governor of Kashmir in 1910.

Historically, ordinary people have occupied little space in the recurring dialogue between the authorities and local political and religious figures. Within these fragmented structures of authority, the community’s own voice is often marginalised, which obscures the question of why Kashmiri Muslim identity remains contested.

Two mechanisms have emerged in the formation of identity: the internal reformist initiatives of the two Mirwaizes and the administrative interventions of the Dogra state, now joined by the Waqf Board. Their interaction raises the question of whether authority over identity derives from internal deliberation or from state intervention.

Adnaan Naseer is a philosophy graduate from Aligarh Muslim University.

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