Revival from Below
The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Fletcher Jones Foundation Imprint in Humanities.
Revival from Below
The Deoband Movement and Global Islam
Brannon D. Ingram
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2018 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ingram, Brannon D., author.
Title: Revival from below : the Deoband movement and global Islam / Brannon D. Ingram.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014045 (print) | LCCN 2018016956 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520970137 (eBook) | ISBN 9780520297999 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520298002 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Deoband School (Islam)—History.
Classification: LCC BP166.14.D4 (ebook) | LCC BP166.14. D4 I54 2018 (print) | DDC 297.6/5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014045
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. A Modern Madrasa
2. The Normative Order
3. Remaking the Public
4. Remaking the Self
5. What Does a Tradition Feel Like?
6. How a Tradition Travels
7. A Tradition Contested
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
In a way, I began working on this book as an undergraduate, long before I had even heard of the Deobandis. I think I can even pinpoint a specific moment: reading Bruce Lawrence’s Defenders of God for a seminar paper on fundamentalism and modernity. Even more precisely, I remember being captivated by a single idea from that book: that “fundamentalists are moderns but they are not modernists.” Since then, the social-scientific category of “fundamentalism” has lost much of its cachet, giving way to newer and more dynamic approaches to understanding religion and politics. But the idea that movements that define themselves against the modern are irrevocably (though never monolithically) shaped by modernity has continued to fascinate me. This idea is, by no means, some sort of skeleton key that unlocks the “truth” about movements like the one I describe in this book. On the contrary, this book argues that modernity, as an analytical lens, has certain limitations. Regardless, for me, the idea has been a generative one.
To the extent that my thinking about this topic began in college, it seems appropriate to start there in marking the profound intellectual debts I have built up over the years. At Reed College, R. Michael Feener introduced me to the study of Islam, and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Steven Wasserstrom cemented that interest. The formidable theory and method in religious studies courses I took with Arthur McCalla have stuck with me. Even today, I still think majoring in religion at Reed was probably the single most intellectually consequential decision I ever made.
At the University of North Carolina, the (literally) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study with a cluster of scholars in the Triangle—Carl W. Ernst, Bruce Lawrence, Ebrahim Moosa, Omid Safi—shaped my interest in Sufism, Islamic law, and South Asia. I thank Ebrahim for sharing with me his intimate knowledge of madrasa culture and South Africa, and for being a consistently reliable resource as this project has developed. Above all, I thank Carl for supervising the dissertation on which this book is based. He did far more than supervise a dissertation, of course. Carl modeled (and continues to model) what ethically engaged, public-facing scholarship looks like. If I can identify a specific moment when my interest in the Deobandis began, it would be when Carl lent me his personal copy of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi’s fatwas (which, I will note for my colleagues who were at the October 2017 conference in honor of Carl, I have returned, at long last).
I did research for this book on three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe). It would not have been possible without the help and assistance of numerous people. Waris Mazhari opened doors for me in Deoband and Delhi. Ashraf Dockrat and Ismail Mangera opened them in Johannesburg. Akmed Mukaddam and Abdulkader Tayob put me in touch with key interlocutors in Cape Town. Throughout my stay in South Africa, Abdulkader and the Centre for Contemporary Islam at the University of Cape Town gave me invaluable institutional support. The archival work on which the final two chapters rely could not have been done without the help of the librarians of the National Library of South Africa branches in Pretoria and Cape Town, the Documentation Centre at the University of Durban-Westville, and the University of Cape Town’s African Studies Library. I would also like to extend my gratitude to McGill University’s librarians for indulging my incessant digitization requests for materials from their Islamic Studies Library.
Revising the dissertation was nurtured in the supportive community I have been so fortunate to have at Northwestern University. I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies who have read, patiently listened to, and commented on bits and pieces of the book over the years. A number of my colleagues, in Religious Studies and beyond, read the book in its entirety: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Sylvester Johnson, Richard Kieckhefer, and Rajeev Kinra. I thank them all for their generosity. But I want to single out Beth Hurd, with whom I codirect a Buffett Institute research group, Global Politics and Religion. This book has benefitted in countless ways from my conversations with her and with the scholars we have hosted.
Beyond Northwestern, two scholars deserve extra special thanks. First, Muzaffar Alam read a draft of the book and then devoted almost an entire day to sitting with me in his office, giving me copious notes in a way that only he can: orally, quite nearly from memory, and with reference to relatively obscure late-colonial texts that most Mughal historians have probably not heard of, let alone read. Second, Muhammad Qasim Zaman also read a draft and was exceptionally generous with his criticisms and suggestions, drawing on his peerless knowledge of the ‘ulama. It’s no exaggeration to say that every conversation I’ve been lucky to have had with Qasim over the years yielded new epiphanies. I am in his debt.
Along the way, I have benefited from presenting chapters in progress at a variety of workshops and conferences. I presented chapter 1 at the University of Leipzig workshop “Muslim Secularities: Explorations into Concepts of Distinction and Practices of Differentiation,” a version of which is forthcoming in a special issue of Historical-Social Research. I thank the two anonymous readers for their valuable comments. I presented chapter 3 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and parts of chapter 4 at the University of Chicago workshop “Inhabiting Pasts in Twentieth Century South Asia.” I thank the conveners of these workshops, respectively: Markus Dressler, Armando Salvatore, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr; Margrit Pernau; and Daniel Morgan and Fareeha Zaman. I also presented bits of the book at multiple American Academy of Religion and Annual Conference on South Asia meetings, too many to list, and my gratitude goes out to all my colleagues who have heard my papers over the years and given me feedback, many of whom I
name below.
A first book accumulates all manner of debts. In addition to those I have already named, I thank the following individuals for various roles they have had in this process, from the very early stages of planning the dissertation and applying for funding, from comments on conference papers to the final months of editing and revising the book, and everything in between: Kecia Ali, Khalil Ali, Mira Balberg, Anna Bigelow, David Boyk, Laura Brueck, Farid Esack, Katherine Ewing, Muneer Fareed, Kathleen Foody, Simon Fuchs, Nile Green, Juliane Hammer, Sana Haroon, Marcia Hermansen, Owais Jaffrey, Scott Kugle, Henri Lauzière, Christopher Lee, Lauren Leve, Maria Magdalena-Fuchs, Daniel Majchrowicz, William Mazzarella, Mark McClish, Barbara Metcalf, Ali Altaf Mian, Muhammad Alie Moosagie, Austin O’Malley, Robert Orsi, Matthew Palombo, Scott Reese, Dietrich Reetz, Waqas Sajjad, Zekeria Ahmed Salem, Noah Salomon, Muhammad Khaled Sayed, J. Barton Scott, Max Stille, Randall Styers, SherAli Tareen, Alexander Thurston, Cristina Traina, Goolam Vahed, Brett Wilson, and Maheen Zaman.
The initial research for this book was supported by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Finishing the dissertation was funded by a fellowship from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Finally, at Northwestern, a Faculty Fellowship from the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities gave me the time to complete the revision into a book. My editors at the University of California Press, Cindy Fulton, Archna Patel, and Eric Schmidt, have been helpful and patient from the beginning. I also want to thank my two anonymous readers for their immensely helpful feedback. Finally, a number of people helped me get the book over the finish line. My copyeditor Carl Walesa went through the book with lapidary precision. Jeffrey Wheatley read the page proofs cover to cover. PJ Heim put together the wonderful index.
All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. I have chosen to keep diacritics to a bare minimum, using only (‘) for ‘ayn, and (’) for hamza. (One exception, for simplicity’s sake and because I use the word so often, is the word ‘ulama, for which I omit writing the hamza: ‘ulama instead of ‘ulama’.) I have generally opted to spell names and transliterate words in ways that best reflect how they are pronounced in Urdu: “Thanvi” instead of “Thanawi,” “qazi” instead of “qadi,” and so on. There are two prominent exceptions: I write “Hadith” (as opposed to “Hadis”), and “Shari‘a” (as opposed to “Shari‘at”). For English-language South African materials, I write Muslim names and other words as they are written by the authors, even though these diverge widely from standard spellings: “‘Ali” often becomes “Alie,” “‘Abd al-Qadir” is written “Abdulkader,” “masjid” is spelled “masjied,” and so on. Similarly, I write the names of South African Deobandi organizations the way they are written in South Africa—for example, “Majlisul Ulama” (as opposed to “Majlis al-‘Ulama”).
I finish this book amid the near daily assaults on women, Muslims, people of color, the poor, the environment, truth, civility, decency, kindness, and common sense that have defined our current politics. In such dark times, I feel so grateful for the love, joy, levity, and laughter that my wife, Lindsay, and my daughter, Charlotte, bring into my life. I dedicate this book to them.
Introduction
O Faithful, save yourself and your family from the torments of Hell.
—Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, sermon in Kanpur, 13 March 1923
On a chilly evening in early 2009, I was wandering around the spartan guest house of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, the renowned Islamic seminary named after the city, Deoband, where it was founded in 1866. I had just arrived from the United States to begin the research for this book. The Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband is now the central node in a network of Deobandi seminaries that span the globe. Despite its modest size, the city of Deoband is a bustling place, its markets teeming with life late into the night. The circuitous paths leading through the bazaar toward the seminary are lined with scores of shops selling Arabic and Urdu books, prayer rugs, Qur’ans, and other assorted Islamic paraphernalia. At the juncture of several of these lanes stood a dormitory for the Dar al-‘Ulum’s alumni and guests, where I was staying during my sojourn in Deoband.
The rooms had multiple beds, and this night I shared my room with some Sri Lankan Muslims undertaking preaching tours for the Tablighi Jama‘at, now the world’s largest Muslim revivalist organization, one that grew directly out of Deobandi teachings. The Sri Lankans retired early, and so I wandered into the courtyard, where a group of young men—alumni, it turned out—were sitting in a circle chatting in Bengali. Curious about my presence, they summoned me toward their circle and made a place for me to sit. In the conversation that followed, as with many to come, I had to give an account of myself. What was I doing there? Why had I traveled seven thousand miles from home for the sole reason of researching the Deoband movement? As with so many conversations I would have over the course of researching and writing this book, politics came up immediately.
Students and graduates of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband are all too aware of the accusations against their institution in the media. They know the extent to which the global War on Terror has brought the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and other Islamic seminaries under critical scrutiny. They know that journalists and policy makers have taken aim at the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband in particular because the Taliban emerged from Deobandi seminaries in northwestern Pakistan. As I sat with these alumni from West Bengal, one of them asked me, “Do you think we are part of the Taliban? People come here and do not want to know about us because of the scholars that come from here. No, they want to know about what the Taliban does, so many miles away. Look, let me show you.” He proceeded to draw a large circle on the floor with his finger. “This space here is everything this school has done. Now take just the smallest point in this circle,” he said, pointing to an imaginary, arbitrarily chosen dot in the circle. “There is the Taliban.” So it is part of the Deoband movement, I asked, not just an aberration? “Sure, fine,” he replied. “But you must look at the whole circle.”
This book is about the whole circle. Though the book will briefly address the Deoband movement’s relation to the Taliban, that relationship is only a thread of the larger fabric that makes up Deoband. The scholars, students, ideas, and texts emanating from the seminary at Deoband and from its affiliated institutions around the world, taken as a whole, constitute arguably the most influential Muslim reform and revival movement outside of the Middle East in the last two centuries. Indeed, the great scholar of Islam and comparative religions Wilfred Cantwell Smith long ago declared: “Next to the Azhar of Cairo, [Deoband] is the most important and respected theological academy of the Muslim world.”1 Thus, readers hoping for a simple diagnosis of Deoband as an “Islamist” or “fundamentalist” movement will be disappointed. However, I trust that even these readers—or especially these readers—will find something of value here.
Long before the Taliban, the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and affiliated institutions were known for a number of things: their scholarly prestige, their role in the struggle for Indian independence, and—the focus of this book—their controversial stance on Sufism, the complex of beliefs and practices that is usually glossed as Islamic “mysticism.” Deobandis were, and remain, critical of a range of practices—pilgrimage to Sufi saints’ tombs, celebration of the saints’ death anniversaries, celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday—that have been central to Sufi practice in India and elsewhere. From a Deobandi perspective, these beliefs and practices border dangerously on “worship” of the Prophet Muhammad and the Sufi saints. To counter them, Deobandi scholars have issued countless treatises, tracts, and fatwas (legal opinions) on these practices from Deoband’s inception to the present day. But Deobandis were never opposed to Sufism. On the contrary, they have seen Sufism as an essential part of a Muslim’s moral life. They sought to reorient Sufi practice around an ethics of pious self-transformation and to reorient veneration of the saints around their v
irtues, not their miracles. Nevertheless, many of Deoband’s detractors have branded Deobandis as positively anti-Sufi.
Like many Sufis before them, the Deobandis have seen Sufism as inseparable from Islamic legal norms. These, in turn, are inseparable from Islamic ethics and politics, broadly conceived. This book, therefore, treats Deoband’s interrogation of Sufism and Sufi devotions as part of several broader ways in which the movement has shaped major debates within global Islam in the modern era. By orienting the history of the Deoband movement around its understanding of Sufism, other dimensions of the movement come into focus: law (to the extent that Islamic law and Sufism were deemed inseparable, despite the fact that Deoband’s critique of Sufism was made through law), ethics (to the extent that Deobandis understood Sufism as, in essence, ethical cultivation), and politics (to the extent that Sufism informed an affective attitude toward the very conditions for politics). Thus, to say that this is a book about Sufism—which in no small way it is—misses an important point: it is also about Sufism through law, Sufism as ethics, Sufism in politics.
The Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband emerged in 1866 in the wake of a precipitous end to Muslim political power in India. Although Muslim sultans and emperors had dominated much of the Indian subcontinent since the thirteenth century, their power had steadily declined beginning in the middle of the eighteenth. But many Muslims saw the ruthlessness with which the British quashed the uprising of 1857 and the subsequent exile of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as the very nadir of their political fortunes. Like others, Deoband’s founders wondered how India’s Muslims could move on from such a catastrophe. They responded with a relatively simple program: they would revive India’s Muslims, and perhaps even the global Muslim community (the Ummah) at large, through a renewed engagement with the canons of religious knowledge that had guided Muslims for centuries. They would do so, moreover, by way of a new kind of seminary—dependent not on courtly largesse but on individual Muslims’ donations—with a central administration, a salaried faculty, and a slate of exams to gauge students’ progress. This model would be easily replicated by other institutions. The graduates of these seminaries would, in time, be known as “Deobandis”: students of the Qur’an, the Hadith (reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad), and Islamic jurisprudence, many of them Sufis initiated into one or more of the four major Sufi orders of India (Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri, Suhrawardi), and committed to the task of reform (islah). These graduates would typically go on to work as teachers, preachers, imams, writers, and publishers. Today there are Deobandi seminaries around the world, with the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband as the central node in an intricate network bound by people, texts, institutions, and ideas.
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