ABSTRACT
The Momin Conference took formal shape a few years later at a meeting in Calcutta in 1924. The All India Momin Conference held at Kanpur decided to affiliate the provincial branch headed by Ansari. The one led by Latifur Rahman came to be associated with the Muslim League. In 1940 when the Muslim League passed its Lahore resolution, a Bihar Provincial Momin Conference meeting announced that the community would oppose it ‘tooth and nail’. There was a point of view in the Momin Conference that the Muslim League was leaving Momins in the lurch to find security for sixty million Muslims in Pakistan. The Momin Conference had been contesting the Muslim League’s claim of sole-speak for all Indian Muslims since the late 1930s. Likewise, Hafiz Manzoor Hussain, speaking at the Shahabad district Momin Conference, said that it was the un-Islamic razil–sharif divide maintained by Indian Muslims that relegated the vast majority of Muslims to the status of ‘lower’ classes.
