Mewat (district)
| Mewat District मेवात जिला |
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| State | Haryana |
| Division : | Gurgaon |
| Administrative headquarters : | Nuh |
| Area : | 1,507 km² |
| Residents : | 1,089,263 (2011) |
| Population density : | 723 inhabitants / km² |
| Website : | mewat.gov.in |
Mewat ( Hindi : मेवात , Urdu : ميوات Mevāt [ meːˈʋɑːt̪ ]) is a district of the Indian state of Haryana and is located south of Delhi . The administrative seat of the district is the city of Nuh . Mewat is the home region of the internationally operating Islamic missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat . The district occupies an area of 1,507 square kilometers and has a population of just under 1.1 million people according to the 2011 census. The largest group of the population are the Meos , a Muslim peasant caste who claim to be of Rajput origin.
geography
Mewat is located in the south of Haryana, south of Delhi . Neighboring districts are Gurgaon in the north, Faridabad in the northeast, Palwal in the east, as well as Bharatpur in the south and Alwar in the southwest. The latter two already belong to the neighboring state of Rajasthan . The distance from the district capital Nuh to the center of Delhi is around 75 kilometers.
The Mewat District has an area of 1,507 square kilometers. The terrain is mostly flat, but in the west the northernmost foothills of the Aravalli Mountains form the border of the district.
history
.PNG)
As the "Land of the Meos", Mewat originally comprised an area that was larger than today's district and also included the region of Alwar , Bharatpur and Mathura . After the first military expeditions against Mewat under Iltutmish , the area came under the control of the Sultanate of Delhi in 1267 . In the 14th century, a significant part of the Meos converted to Islam under the influence of Sufi preachers. At the end of the 14th century, the area came under the rule of the so-called Khanzadas , Muslim Rajputs who made themselves independent from the Sultanate of Delhi and were involved in constant wars with it. Meos gangs often raided Delhi and pillaged the city during this period. The last of the Khanzada rulers was defeated by Babur at the Battle of Khanwa in March 1527 . This made the area part of the Mughal Empire , although members of the Khanzada family continued to function as Zamindare . In the 18th century, Jats and Marathen occupied the southern parts of the Mewat region.
Until the 1920s, Meo farmers were Muslim in name only when in reality they maintained numerous Hindu customs and festivals. With them, Islam was limited to individual externalities such as male circumcision , Nikah marriage and Islamic funeral rites. Few of the Meos were familiar with the kalima , the Islamic creed . This only changed when Maulana Muhammad Ilyas founded an Islamic "faith movement" ( tahrīk-i īmān ) in Nuh in 1926 and asked the Meos to fulfill their Islamic ritual duties. As part of the Meo uprisings against the Hindu Rajas of Bharatpur and Alwar and the defense against missionary efforts by the Hindu Arya Samaj community, there was a considerable sharpening of Muslim identity among the Meos in the 1930s, which also occurred with the start of Islamic missionary activities went along. Up to the death of Maulana Muhammad Ilyas in 1944, a large number of Meos joined the Tablighi Jamaat ("community of preaching"), which he founded and which developed into an international Islamic missionary movement after the Second World War.
After the partition of India in 1947, bloody clashes broke out between Meos and Hindus in Mewat, in which tens of thousands of Meos fell victim. The area was initially part of the Indian state of Punjab , without forming a political or administrative unit ; after its partition in November 1966, it was added to the newly formed state of Haryana. A separate Mewat district has only existed since April 4, 2005. It was formed from parts of the already existing Gurgaon and Faridabad districts. Part of the district was separated in 2008 to form the new Palwal district .
population
According to the 2011 census, the Mewat district has 1,089,263 inhabitants. The population density of 723 inhabitants per square kilometer is above the average for Haryana (573 inhabitants per square kilometer). The Meo district has a very rural character: only 11 percent of the district's population lives in cities (Haryana's average is 35 percent). Only 54 percent of the residents of Mewat can read and write, among women it is only 37 percent. The literacy rate is well below the Haryana's average of 76 percent.
The largest group of people in Mewat are the Muslim Meo . Figures on the distribution of religious groups are not yet available for the 2011 census. In the 2001 census, a significant Muslim minority of around 620,000 people was counted in what was then Gurgaon district, the southern part of which corresponds to today's Meo district. This corresponds to more than half of all Haryana's Muslims.
Administrative division
The Mewat District is divided into 4 Tehsils :
Cities with Municipal Committee status are:
literature
- J. Burton-Page: Art. "Mēwāt" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. VI, pp. 1028b-1029a.
- Alexander Horstmann: "'Vying for souls': Islamic travel preachers between Mewat, Northern India, and Tha Sala, Southern Thailand" in Sociologus: Journal for Empirical Ethnosociology and Ethnopsychology 58 (2008) 49–71.
- Yoginder Sikand: "The Tablighi Jamaʿat and Sufism with Reference to the Meos of Mewat" in Nadeem Hasnain (ed.): Beyond textual Islam . New Delhi: Serials Publications 2008. pp. 221–248.
- Yoginder Sikand: "The reformist sufism of the Tablighi Jama'at: the case of the Meos of Mewat, India" in Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell (ed.): Sufism and the 'modern' in Islam . London [u. a.]: Tauris 2007. pp. 129-148.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Sikand 2007, 138.
- ↑ Census of India 2011: Primary Census Abstract - Haryana (PDF; 634 kB).
- ^ Census of India 2001: Basic Data Sheet. District Gurgaon (18), Haryana (06). (PDF; 54 kB)
