Meo (ethnic group)

Meo (pronounced as May-o & Mev) (also called Mewati) is a Muslim Meenas community who converted to Islam from North-Western India and Pakistan particularly in and around Mewat which includes Mewat district of Haryana and parts of adjacent Alwar district and Bharatpur district in Rajasthan moreover they are also found in the Pakistani cities of Kasur, Lahore, Sialkot, Sheikhupura, Narowal, Nankana Sahib, Multan, Karachi etc. Meos speak Mewati.

Quotes

• Gurgaon district abounds in Meos. They are the same stock as Minas of the Aravalli Hills. They fought the Muslims for long, but eventually succumbed to become Muslim. Now, although almost all have become Muhammadan, they have retained Hindu customs which are now under attack of tablighis.
  • Lal, K. S. (1995). Growth of scheduled tribes and castes in medieval India. 19

• Meos from Gurgaon, Bharatpur and Alwar not very long time ago, on the instigation of the Muslim League, demanded Meostan and they were involved in very serious rioting against the Hindus—their neighbours at the time of Freedom. Right in 1947 a serious riot was going on by these Meos against their Hindu neighbours. These Meos, under this very lax permit system, are returning and demanding their property. This is secularism no doubt, but a very one sided and undesirable type of secularism which goes invariably against and to the prejudice of Sikh and Hindu refugees.
  • Bhupinder Singh Mann in Nani Gopal Mahanta - Citizenship Debate over NRC and CAA_ Assam and the Politics of History (2021, SAGE Publications India)162

• Shafia Zubair said, “Meo community resides in Alwar, Bharatpur, Nuh, and in some parts of Mathura, where Krishna was born. I traced the ancestry of the community to know what our history is. The result says that we are from the lineage of Lord Krishna. Even if we have converted our religion, the blood does not change, and it belongs to Ram and Krishna.” Shafia Zubair added, “You should all remember who Meos are (descendants of Ram- Krishna) and consider them as Mewa (dry fruits). Nobody should tell us again and again that we are backward. It has given three MLAs (Zubair, Wajid Ali from Nagar, and Zahida Khan from Kaman) and you will see where the Mewat will reach in the next 10 years.” Therefore, Mewat should not be considered a backward region, she said.
  • ‘Meo Muslims are descendants of Ram and Krishna’: Says Rajasthan Congress MLA Shafia Zubair

• Meos are the inhabit­ants of Mewat, the term for the hill country in the states of Alwar, Bhurtpur and…Delhi, and are probably folk of pre-Aryan origin. They are all Moslems in name…
  • In his 1933 book, Martial Races of India, George MacMunn

• [Maulana Wahiduddin, a former official at the Jammat-i-Is­lami who wrote the Tabligh Movement describes the Meos that Ilyas saw:] “These uncouth and illiterate people…in practical life…were far from Islam. They kept their Hindu names, like Nahar Singh and Bhup Singh; they left a lock of hair [chõtî] on top of the shaven head as Hindus do; they worshipped idols, celebrated all the Hindu festivals and made sacrifices to the pre-Islamic gods and goddesses. They could not even recite the…kalimah. So unfamil­iar…was the sight of …namaz…that if by chance they came across someone praying, they gathered to enjoy the spectacle, assum­ing that the person must either be mad or suffering from some ailment due to which he was kneeling and prostrating himself again and again.”
  • quoted in Time for Stock Taking, Whither Sangh Parivar?

• The Meos, like the Hindus, did not marry within the gotra… Meos… continued with their Hindu names or suffixed them with Khan, and celebrated not only Diwali and Dashehra but most important, Janamashtami. Because of geo-historic tradi­tions of proximity to Mathura and Vrindavan, Krishna is inte­grated into Muslim consciousness at folk level in the Brij and Mewat area…Few Meos…could recite the kalima.
  • K.S. Lal: The Legacy of Muslim Rule