While the book revolves around Thanvi and his outsize status in the movement, a number of other characters are crucial to the book’s narrative arc: Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri (1852–1927),89 Gangohi’s associate and disciple, whose defense of Deobandis against their critics was instrumental in defining the movement; Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlavi (1865–1944), a graduate of Deoband who founded the Tablighi Jama‘at to revive Muslims’ commitment to Islam along Deobandi lines; and Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi (1898–1982), arguably the Tablighi Jama‘at’s most ardent defender, who presided over the global expansion of Deobandi thought in the mid–twentieth century. Finally, the trajectory of the Deoband movement broadly, and Thanvi’s predilections especially, take root in South Africa more than any other place outside of South Asia through the work of three figures: Mahmud Hasan Gangohi (1907–1996), a chief mufti of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband who undertook numerous tours of South Africa to promote the Tablighi Jama‘at and initiate Sufi disciples; Muhammad Masihullah Khan (1910–1992), perhaps Thanvi’s closest Sufi disciple, who was almost singlehandedly responsible for spreading Thanvi’s approach to Sufism, politics, and everything else among scores of South Africans; and, finally, Ahmed Sadiq Desai (1939-), the vituperative student and disciple of Masihullah Khan, whose stringent polemics against fellow South African Muslims shaped how those same Muslims viewed the Deoband movement in the twilight of apartheid.
If these are the main characters,90 let me conclude the introduction with an outline of the book itself. The first chapter—“A Modern Madrasa”—situates the emergence of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband in 1866 and the Deoband movement itself within the sense of political and social crisis many Indian Muslims felt in the wake of the failed uprising of 1857. It also provides the social context for Deobandis’ belief that a revival of classical learning and the revivification of the Sunna could reverse the perceived decline of Islam. The chapter shows how the decline of first Mughal and then British patronage for Islamic learning, as well as the post-1857 British policy of noninterference in “religious” matters, opened up a space for Deobandi scholars to reconceive the madrasa as a purely “religious” institution rather than one engaged in the production of civil servants, to reimagine the ‘ulama as stewards of public morality rather than professionals in the service of the state, and to reframe the knowledge they purveyed as “religious” knowledge distinct from the “useful” secular knowledge promoted by the British. Within this nexus of shifts, in turn, we see also how an Islamic legal discourse was made to function in the absence of a traditional legal apparatus—in other words, without courts or qazis (judges)—a discourse for which mass printed texts in Islamic belief and practice and the publishing of fatwas (Islamic legal opinions), traditionally issued to judges but now issued directly to lay Muslims, were key.
Building on the first, the second chapter—“The Normative Order”—further develops the context for the Deobandis’ mission of mass reform. It begins with a brief overview of two formative concepts—illicit innovation in religion (bid‘a), and ascribing divine attributes to entities other than God (shirk)—that animate Deobandi thought. It argues that Deobandis appropriated the fecund legacy of the anti-bid‘a and anti-shirk campaigner Muhammad Isma‘il even as they distanced themselves from his hermeneutical populism—namely, the notion that the Qur’an and the Sunna are “easy” to understand and, therefore, do not require the mediation of the ‘ulama. Focusing on the teachings of Hajji Imdad Allah al-Makki and his disciples Rashid Ahmad Gangohi and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, the chapter then shows how Deobandis applied the discourse of bid‘a and shirk to two forms of devotional piety that were central to Indian Sufism: honoring the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (mawlud), and celebrating the Sufi saints’ death anniversaries (‘urs).
If the second chapter explains what Deobandis wanted to reform, the third chapter—“Remaking the Public”—explains how, exploring ways that Deobandis conceived the very task of reform, its limitations, and ambivalences. After providing an overview of the rise of the Indian “public” in the latter half of the nineteenth century and its multiple configurations—technological, social, textual—the chapter looks closely at an exchange of letters in 1897 between Rashid Ahmad Gangohi and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi in which Gangohi chastised his disciple Thanvi for attempting to reform devotees of the mawlud by preaching to them directly. For reasons I show, Thanvi concluded that reforming Muslim publics through the publication of reformist literature was a far more reliable means of implementing reform, second only to the reform that could take place in the confines of the seminary (madrasa) and the Sufi lodge (khanqah). In subsequent years, Thanvi would go on to compose a staggering number of reformist texts. But it also shows how he struggled with the ambivalence of reform through books: at every stage, he stressed the irreplaceability of the ‘ulama as custodians of religious knowledge for lay Muslims and urged readers not to delve into, let alone publicly discuss, difficult legal-theological issues (masa’il). The chapter also argues that Deobandi–Barelvi polemics, which exploded at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, were precisely the form of public debate about such difficult issues that Thanvi and other Deobandis (though, we will see, not all) were keen to avoid.
The fourth chapter—“Remaking the Self”—shows how Deobandis conceived of Sufism itself, in two complementary ways: as coterminous with the Shari‘a, and as a discourse of ethical self-fashioning. The chapter begins by contextualizing the “self” at the center of the reformist public, arguing that the self-fashioning which that individual is called to perform is never a quest for autonomy in the sense of auto-nomos (arrogating to oneself one’s own law), but an autonomy that simultaneously liberates the self from the strictures of “customs” (rusum) and illicit innovations (bid‘at), and realigns the self around the Sunna, as mediated by living scholar-Sufis. It details how Deobandis saw the crux of the Sufi path as the process of divesting the self of “base” ethical qualities (akhlaq-i razila) and embodying “praiseworthy” ones (akhlaq-i hamida). The chapter elucidates an all-important concept in Deobandi Sufism: suhbat, the “companionship” with Sufi masters by which one acquires the dispositions and affects that aid translating religious knowledge (‘ilm) into practice (a‘mal). The corollary to the need for the ‘ulama to make sense of religious knowledge is the need for companionship with living Sufis to make sense of the Sufi path—not only because the most reliable knowledge is embodied knowledge, but because Sufi books without a living interpreter harbor complex metaphysical concepts that pose spiritual dangers for the uninitiated. The chapter concludes by illustrating how Deobandis reconceptualized the very definition of Sufi sainthood (walayat) by way of Sufi ethics, arguing that any pious Muslim not only can be but is a saint (wali) by virtue of that piety. This entailed, I will show, expanding the semantic parameters of the concept of the wali (connoting “ally,” “friend,” and “protector”) in the Qur’an. Accordingly, they viewed Sufi saints primarily as moral exemplars, not as miracle workers or as conduits for intercession with God.
The fifth chapter—“What Does a Tradition Feel Like?”—examines how “Deobandi” tradition is mediated through scholarly and pedagogical networks, in theory and practice. The first part of the chapter focuses on Qari Muhammad Tayyib (1897–1983), chancellor of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband for half a century and the foremost theorist of Deobandi identity, arguing that mid-twentieth-century Deobandis like Tayyib developed the concept of the maslak as a means of lending ideological and affective coherence to a rapidly expanding global network. Tayyib theorized the maslak as a “middle path” between ideological extremes—as, for instance, between those who indulge in “excessive” Sufi devotions and those who dispense with Sufism altogether—and as an embodied discourse one learns to inhabit through the companionship (suhbat) of those who already do. The second part of the chapter, shifting from “theory” to “practice,” traces the rise of the Tablighi Jama‘at, a Deobandi revivalist movement that sought to make ind
ividual Muslims mobile “embodiments” (mujassam) of the seminary (madrasa) and the Sufi lodge (khanqah), effectively translating Thanvi’s project of public reform into an actual program—one explicitly based on internalizing the teachings of Thanvi’s Urdu primers for lay Muslims, on shunning public debate of controversial legal issues (masa’il), and on the replication of a set of reformed affects in others; hence the Tablighi Jama‘at’s role, by midcentury, in propelling Deobandi tradition across the globe. As Tayyib theorized a global reformist movement, the Tablighis were busy shaping and expanding it.
Accordingly, the sixth chapter—“How a Tradition Travels”—reconstructs how Deoband became a global phenomenon, highlighting the reciprocal relation between the rise of the Tablighi Jama‘at in South Africa and the expansion of South African Deobandi scholarly networks. Scholars and students traveled between Deobandi seminaries in India and South Africa as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, but this chapter shows how the Deobandi “brand,” as it were, did not emerge in South Africa until the 1960s—a direct outcome, I argue, of the growth of the Tablighi Jama‘at in that decade. One of the ironies of the South African context is that the Tablighi Jama‘at, which officially is supposed to avoid controversies, became embroiled in internecine polemics and counterpolemics over local Sufi devotions, principally the mawlud. The chapter concludes with a brief survey of these polemics.
The seventh chapter—“A Tradition Contested”—shows how this “branding” of Deoband intersected with the volatile context of an emergent Muslim anti-apartheid politics and how public debate about Deobandi critiques of Sufi devotions became inseparable from public debate about the very authority of the Deobandi ‘ulama. The chapter begins with an overview of Islamic resurgence and activism in South Africa in the 1970s and ’80s, much of which was animated by the belief that the ‘ulama generally, and the Deobandi ‘ulama specifically, were incapable of challenging, or unwilling to challenge, the state. South Africans, we will see, roundly dismissed Deobandi critiques as theological quibbles that were, at best, irrelevant to the task of liberating South Africa and, at worst, a dangerous capitulation to tyranny. The chapter focuses on the bitter invectives of the South African Deobandi scholar Ahmed Sadiq Desai—a disciple of Thanvi’s own closest disciple, Masihullah Khan (d. 1992)—who rearticulated Thanvi’s politics in South Africa. With a flashback to 1920s India, we will see how Thanvi felt a deep, affective aversion to Muslim participation in anticolonial politics—one in which Islamic law and Sufi ethics constrained the very conditions of the political. We then see how Desai, in turn, deployed Thanvi’s critiques toward Muslim participation in the anti-apartheid movement. For their critics, Deobandi contestations of local Sufi devotions in the midst of this period’s social and political upheaval made them seem all the more retrogressive. As Deobandi scholars criticized Muslim activists for mobilizing against apartheid alongside activists of other faiths, and justified that position through Sufi vocabularies, a growing number of Muslims lambasted Deobandis for their alleged collaborationist stance toward the apartheid regime, and articulated their politics through devotional practices like the mawlud. Many of these local activists, moreover, defended their activism precisely through transnational politics that Deobandis mostly abhorred, drawing variously on the Shi‘i Islamist vocabularies of revolutionary Iran and the nascent transnational discourse of progressive Islam.
1
A Modern Madrasa
In the aftermath of the failed Indian uprising of 1857, the Government of India Act of 2 August 1858 disbanded the East India Company and transferred sovereignty over India to the queen. On 1 November 1858, Queen Victoria issued the following proclamation to her new subjects:
Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity, and acknowledging with gratitude the solace of religion, we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects. We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in anywise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.1
While at first glance this may strike some as a policy of benign noninterference, Karuna Mantena argues that it was, far more, a concession to “native inscrutability.”2 Simply put, the British concluded that the events of 1857 had primarily “religious”—rather than social, political, or economic—causes. From 1857 onward, as Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst demonstrates, “religion” became the primarily lens through which the British understood their Muslim subjects, and any subsequent resistance to British rule was, necessarily, born of purely “religious” motivations.3
Demarcating a religious space ostensibly free from interference was a strategy of rule the British had adopted elsewhere. Throughout their colonies, from Ireland to India, the British advanced policies of disestablishment—a rule to which the Church of England at home was an exception—facilitating the emergence of “religion” as a private domain of conscience that Muslims and Hindus alike became keen to protect against state encroachment.4 Some of the British, accordingly, saw the Victorian proclamation not so much as constraining British interference in native religious affairs as consigning religion to a “private” domain that facilitated, rather than restricted, Christian missions. The barrister P.F. O’Malley saw the proclamation as authorizing Christian missionary efforts even by an official of the empire, who is “still left to follow in his private capacity the dictates of religious duty, and to assist as he has hitherto done in the great Missionary work.”5
The proclamation also pointed to a new, albeit tenuous, notion of the “secular” in colonial India. Scholars have long dismissed earlier notions of the secular as the decline of religion. They have also challenged more recent notions of the secular as religion’s privatization. Scholars have, most recently, understood the secular as a form of power that distinguishes “religion” from its various others—whether “superstition,” “culture,” “politics,” or something else.6 Following Robert Cover’s dictum that “Every denial of jurisdiction . . . is an assertion of the power to determine jurisdiction and thus to constitute a norm,” Iza Hussin sees the Victorian proclamation as a performative act (“juris-diction”), declaring which spaces would be marked by “religion” and which would remain under the purview of the state.7 Post-1857 discourses of official neutrality toward natives’ “religion” were in large part discourses that named a range of phenomena—institutions, traditions, forms of knowledge—as “religious.” Indeed, as I explore below, the British were willing to support madrasas only if their curricula included “secular,” and not only “religious,” subjects.
In 1866, just a few years after Victoria’s proclamation, the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband was founded, and it soon began to fill this new space marked off as “religious.” It was precisely within an emergent colonial modernity that the madrasa as a “religious” space and the ‘ulama as a class of “religious” scholars became entrenched in the very identity of the Deoband movement. This chapter explores a number of questions at the origin of Deoband: Why did a movement that claimed to seamlessly revive Islamic tradition emerge precisely at the height of colonial modernity, with all of its political, epistemic, and psychic ruptures? To what extent is the movement’s valorization of “tradition” an outcome of that very modernity? This chapter suggests that it is too simple to view Deoband as “traditional” in some respects (for instance, in terms of accentuating Hadith and Islamic law) and “modern” in others (institutionally and administratively resembling a British college more than a classical madrasa, for example). It proposes, rather, that tradition and modernity are so co-constitutive that Deoband’s traditionalism is what makes Deoband modern. Deobandi valorization of “tradition”—seen, for instance, in its privileg
ing of “transmitted” knowledge (manqulat) above its “rational” counterpart (ma‘qulat), discussed below—is hard to conceive before colonial modernity and attendant discourses of the Indian secular gave new meaning to tradition itself. Moreover, while the texts that Deobandi scholars study are not modern, the idiom through which they communicate that learning to the public is, in part because “the public” itself is largely (though not exclusively) modern—a subject the second and third chapters explore further.8
To be clear, I am not arguing that Deoband is solely the product of colonial modernity. For one, such an argument would grossly overstate the extent to which colonialism shaped the lives of the colonized. Much recent literature on colonialism has, in fact, stressed the limits of colonial power and imperial reach.9 More importantly, it would understate the extent to which the Deoband movement is anchored in texts and discourses that long predate colonialism. I see modernity, therefore, not as something that “happened” to the Deoband movement. It is not a reified “thing” that travels from Europe to India, a “virus that spreads from one place to another,” in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s words. It is, rather, a “global and conjunctural phenomenon.”10
In highlighting Deoband’s modernity, I seek to complicate standard narratives about Deoband specifically, and madrasas generally, both within and beyond the study of Islam. Even a cursory glance at literature on Islam and modernity reveals that the Deoband movement is typically regarded as, at best, a premodern vestige of medieval learning or, at worst, a stridently antimodern force holding back Muslim progress. Fazlur Rahman, among the most influential internal critics of the Islamic intellectual tradition, saw Deoband as “medieval,” which meant, for him, that it perpetuated stagnant disciplines of learning that shrouded the “élan of the Qur’an” beneath a culture of commentaries and supracommentaries.11 While Rahman’s approach to Muslim modernity has been formative for rethinking Qur’anic hermeneutics,12 approaching phenomena like the Deoband movement through this lens obscures the extent to which the movement has been shaped by modernity.
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