Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  I speak of “modernity” here in two distinct but intersecting registers. The first comprises the sum total of new ideas, practices, institutions, and socialities that scholars often call “colonial modernity.” In the following, I seek to delineate how Deoband emerged within and against colonial modernity while heeding Frederick Cooper’s warnings against reifying “colonial modernity” as an agent in its own right.13 The second is modernity as a reflexive attitude, a self-conscious distanciation between past and present, especially insofar as it values the present over the past.14 Broadly, I show here how Deobandi scholars were profoundly shaped by the first modality of the modern—institutionally, discursively, and in what they regarded as properly “religious”—even as they consciously rejected “modernity” in the second sense. That is, Deobandis did not understand their movement as a “modern” one, let alone modernist.15 Most Deobandis, and certainly the main characters of this book, understood themselves as anti-modern.16 But in making this claim, we must also be attentive to the ways in which Deobandis understood the very category of the “modern” (jadid). Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, for example, conceived modernity in epistemic terms. For him, it was an attempt by certain Muslims to adapt “Islamic” knowledge to Western science. Typified by Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), this “modern theology” (‘ilm al-kalam al-jadid) was anathema to Thanvi, an intellectual capitulation to the modern against which he believed the madrasa should serve as a bulwark.17 In short, the Deoband movement is ambivalently modern, thoroughly shaped by, and inseparable from, the contexts of its origin at the height of British imperial domination and the changes—social, institutional, technological, political, economic—that it ushered in, even as many Deobandi scholars resolutely rejected “modernity” as they construed it.

  This chapter makes three main arguments: First, the Victorian discourse on religion and religious institutions after 1857 intersected with, and amplified, Muslim scholars’ reimagining of the madrasa as a “religious” space and of the knowledge they had mastered as “religious” knowledge, in contrast to the “useful” secular knowledge promoted by the British. Second, in the wake of Mughal decline and the near evaporation of the traditional patronage networks they had supported, the ‘ulama rebranded themselves as custodians of public morality rather than professionals in the service of the state—a state, of course, that had ceased to exist—that is, a simultaneous de-professionalization and privatization of the ‘ulama through which they took on a more active role in shaping individual subjectivities and public sensibilities. Third, as the British attempted to co-opt the judicial administration of Indian Muslims through the British-Islamic legal hybrid known as “Anglo-Muhammadan law,” they created a legal and ethical vacuum that early Deobandi scholars sought to fill with a highly personalized, individuated notion of Islamic legal norms, pressed into the service of critiquing Sufi devotions and reformulating Sufism itself as a regime of ethical self-fashioning, for which the fatwa and the short primer on Islamic belief and practice became key instruments. This chapter, then, sets up a framework for understanding how the Deobandi ‘ulama conceived of, and engaged with, nascent Muslim publics—a development described in the subsequent two chapters.

  DECLINE AND REVIVAL: FOUNDING THE DAR AL-‘ULUM DEOBAND

  The Deoband movement emerged in the context of widespread notions that Indian Islam was in a state of abject decline in the nineteenth century. Deobandis were not alone in this view. Narratives of decline, in fact, shaped a wide swath of Muslim intellectual and cultural life in the nineteenth century. The poet Altaf Hussain Hali (d. 1914) mourned the “decay” (tanazzul) of India’s Muslims in his famous Musaddas. The institutions of Muslim greatness had broken down in the face of the West’s rise. “The Ummah has no refuge,” he mourned, “no qazi [judge], no mufti [jurist], no Sufi, no mullah [scholar].”18 For Hali’s close associate Sayyid Ahmad Khan, India’s Muslims had reached a veritable nadir, “the furthest limit of decline, disgrace and baseness.”19

  The opening pages of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi’s biography are a veritable litany of decline. His biographer vividly describes the year Gangohi was born, 1828, as one in which Muslims were in the throes of un-Islamic customs and mired in ignorance and superstition: “Over here, drums and sitars crash and clang. Over there, bazaar women dance while someone goes into ‘ecstasy’ [wajd o hal]. Over here, there is grave worship and ta‘ziya worship;20 over there God’s saints are abused and cursed.” The masses had little interest in Islam itself: “The prevailing view was that Islam consisted only of prayer, fasting, and a few beliefs about the afterlife—maidens in paradise, snakes in hell, and worms of the grave.” Non-Islamic laws and practices had insinuated themselves into the Shari‘a. Fake mystics performed feats of trickery and called them “miracles” (karamat). But nothing signified this decline quite like contempt for the ‘ulama and the ignorance of the ‘ulama themselves. “The masses considered themselves self-sufficient and to have no need for the ‘ulama,” he writes, “while pseudo ‘ulama, deprived of self-reform [tahzib-i nafs], became their servants and paid employees.”21

  These narratives colored the world in which a number of young Muslim scholars converged in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857 to revive Indian Islam from within via a new educational movement. They hailed from a cluster of closely knit qasbahs north of Delhi—Nanauta, Gangoh, Thana Bhawan, Ambetha, Kandhla—situated in the fertile plains between the Yamuna and Ganges Rivers, often separated by only a few miles. Their families were interconnected by scholarship, marriage, and Sufi discipleship. Foremost among these men was Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (1833–1880), upon whose vision the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband was principally founded. “His central goal,” as his biographer Sayyid Manazir Ahsan Gilani put it, “was an educational movement through which rays of divine knowledge would shine across India and beyond.”22 This was surely self-evident from the vantage of 1954, when Gilani wrote Nanautvi’s biography, long after the Deoband movement had become a global phenomenon. From Nanautvi’s vantage, however, it is hard to imagine he could have known how prominent this movement would become.

  Nanautvi was born in Nanauta in 1833. In 1843, he went to Delhi to study with Mamluk ‘Ali, a scholar who also hailed from Nanauta and who had cultivated close ties to the family of Shah Wali Allah, had been teaching at Delhi College since 1825, and had achieved renown within Muslim scholarly circles of north India.23 In Delhi, Nanautvi met Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, who had also come to study with Mamluk ‘Ali and who would go on to leave a profoundly deep imprint on the Deoband movement. Nanautvi and Gangohi became immensely close. Mamluk ‘Ali was not the only mentor they shared. Both became disciples of the Sufi master Hajji Imdad Allah al-Makki. Born in 1817 to a scholarly family in Nanauta, Hajji Imdad Allah also traveled to Delhi in 1833 to study with Mamluk ‘Ali and Muhammad Ishaq, a disciple of Wali Allah’s son Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.24

  The events of 1857 profoundly affected Nanautvi, Gangohi, and Imdad Allah, as they did all Muslims. After the local chief (ra’is) of Thana Bhawan was arrested and hanged for allegedly smuggling elephants into Delhi to help the rebels, the town’s residents asked Imdad Allah to act as “commander of the faithful” (amir al-mu’minin) during the uprising, a role for which the British sought his arrest. Gangohi was implicated, too: Imdad Allah needed someone to carry out Shari‘a-based legal judgments in the town and turned to Gangohi. As the uprising was squashed, Gangohi was arrested and served six months in a British jail. Imdad Allah, for his part, had to flee to Mecca to avoid imprisonment.25 From Mecca he maintained a prolific correspondence with his Sufi disciples back home and frequently received them in Mecca during the Hajj.

  Nanautvi was known as an erudite, incisive thinker with a penchant for theology and philosophy—which, as we will see below, distinguished him sharply from his friend and associate Gangohi. One can glimpse the sort of texts a young man involved in Indo-Persian intellectual life would have studied in this period. Before entering Delhi College, he studied works of logic (mantiq
) and dialectical theology (kalam), such as Mir zahid, a commentary on a work of logic by Iranian philosopher al-Taftazani (d. 1390), as well as Mulla Mahmud Jaunpuri’s (d. 1651) Shams-i bazigha, an Indian work on astronomy.26 He also placed himself at the center of inter- and intrareligious polemics of the day, and knew the power of print in carrying out these debates; in 1850 he began working at the influential printing house Matba‘ Ahmadi, which was devoted to publishing works by Wali Allah and scholars of his circle.27 He carried out high-profile debates with Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Hindu revivalist movement Arya Samaj, on the nature of God’s omnipotence,28 and refuted Saraswati’s provocative assertion that Muslims’ facing the Ka‘aba during prayer was a form of idolatry.29 He critiqued the modernist theology of Sayyid Ahmad Khan,30 and was also a vocal critic of the Shi‘a in India and elsewhere.31

  Nanautvi used to visit Deoband because his father-in-law lived there. During his visits, he stayed in Deoband’s Chatta Masjid, where he frequently had long conversations with local notables, including Muhammad ‘Abid Husain (d. 1912), who would later play an important role in raising money for the new madrasa.32 The town of Deoband was well placed for locating a new madrasa, situated close to the qasbahs from which its early supporters and teachers came. The Madrasa Islamiyya at Deoband, as it was called at first, was formally inaugurated in the Chatta Masjid on 15 Muharram 1283, corresponding to 30 May 1866.33 (In 1879, the name was changed to Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband.)34 Some of the innovations that Nanautvi proposed were fiercely opposed at first: ‘Abid Husain came out against the idea of the madrasa having its own separate building and wanted to continue at Chatta Masjid, but Nanautvi convinced him otherwise—a strikingly novel innovation, since madrasas were traditionally located in mosques or in family homes.35 In 1874, Nanautvi moved forward with plans to purchase land near the Chatta Masjid for a new campus.36 Muhammad Ya‘qub was the first head teacher (sadr mudarris) of Deoband, serving in that role from 1866 to 1886. Like Gangohi and Nanautvi, he too studied at Delhi College with Mamluk ‘Ali, his father, and was known for his mastery of Hadith studies. Like them, he also became a Sufi disciple of Hajji Imdad Allah. And like many other graduates of Delhi College, he went first to a government position, teaching at Government College in Ajmer.37 The familiarity of Deoband’s founding figures with British educational and governmental institutions was evident in the array of “modern” features in this madrasa.

  A “MODERN” MADRASA

  The Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband is a particularly renowned madrasa in a long history of Islamic educational institutions, going back at least to the tenth century, when the first madrasa originated in Khurasan. The madrasa subsequently spread to Baghdad by the mid–eleventh century, to Cairo in the late twelfth century, and eventually to India by the early thirteenth century.38 In time the madrasa became, along with the Sufi lodge (khanqah), the most recognizable and near ubiquitous institution of medieval Islamic society.

  Traditionally, madrasas’ principally oral mode of learning centered around the memorization of texts. This does not mean that these texts were somehow frozen; instead, as Michael Chamberlain elegantly expressed it, they were “enacted fortuitously in time,” and could thus be invoked to serve various needs in various contexts.39 In the medieval madrasa there was no set curriculum, no slate of exams; students who mastered a given text would get an ijaza, a certificate permitting them to transmit those texts in turn. Indeed, during this period it was less important “where an individual studied” than “with whom one had studied,” a system that “remained throughout the medieval period fundamentally personal and informal, and consequently, in many ways, flexible and inclusive.”40 And since they did not charge tuition, madrasas typically depended on charitable endowments (awqaf) to sustain themselves.

  The Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband changed all of this, even as Deobandi scholars sought to retain key features of the oral economy of the transmission of Islamic learning, as chapter 3 elaborates in more detail. Over the course of several years after 1866, Deoband’s founders implemented a number of novel innovations: a fixed program of study (based on the Nizami curriculum, discussed below), a slate of exams to gauge students’ progress, formal graduation ceremonies, a central library, a salaried faculty, and purpose-built structures for study and instruction, as opposed to mosques or homes. Students would come to Deoband, in theory, not to study with a specific person—though the renown of specific scholars did attract students from far and wide—but to study at Deoband as an institution. In these respects, it bore more resemblance to British colleges in India than the classical madrasa. Indeed, Barbara Metcalf argued that it was at Delhi College that Nanautvi witnessed the advantages of the British administrative approach to educational institutions—ironic given the lengths to which early Deobandis sought to avoid British influence in virtually all other spheres of Muslim public life.41

  But it was the founders’ conscientious decision to rely on individual donations, rather than political or courtly patronage, that most distinguished it as a “modern” madrasa. In the older system of patronage, a donor (waqif) was typically rooted in a specific neighborhood or town, was affiliated with a specific family, and knew the beneficiaries of his or her donation.42 By contrast, Deoband began with a handful of tiny donations from local Muslims. In one narrative told of Deoband’s origins, after dawn prayers at the Chatta Masjid, Muhammad ‘Abid Husain, who would later become Deoband’s first chancellor (muhtamim), made a pouch from a handkerchief and went around the neighborhood collecting donations: two rupees here, five rupees there. As a historian of the Dar al-‘Ulum observed, “It was strange and novel indeed to establish an educational institution with public donations [‘awammi chande] that would be free from the influence of the government.”43 Metcalf rightly saw the “participation of people with no kin ties and the system of popular financing” as the twin pillars of the Deobandi approach.44

  The Dar al-‘Ulum was, notably, not a charitable endowment (waqf).45 Nanautvi himself made this a centerpiece of his vision for the institution. In his founding principles for the Dar al-‘Ulum, Nanautvi stipulated, first and foremost, that “as much as possible, the workers of the madrasa should always seek to increase donations,” and to seek them from the “commoners” (‘awamm), who would receive divine blessing (baraka) for their donations. He urged future leaders of the institution to avoid “assured income,” noting the “harms of patronage from the government and the affluent.”46 This model, dependent on individual donors, was easily replicable. The second seminary based on the Deobandi model, Mazahir al-‘Ulum, in Saharanpur, was founded a mere six months after the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband.47 Muhammad ‘Abid, meanwhile, remained active in soliciting funds for a new congregational (jami‘) mosque, begun in 1870, that would accommodate the seminary’s growing number of students. This was significant both because the mosque was built with individual donations, and because it broke with the precedent of having only one congregational mosque per city: Deoband already had one, built in the early sixteenth century—a mosque whose Friday khatib was appointed by the ruler, a political context that no longer applied after 1857.48

  It is for all these reasons that Margrit Pernau calls Deoband a “project of the emerging middle class,” in which the ongoing importance of birth and lineage was complemented by “piety, asceticism and a willingness to work hard.”49 What Pernau also calls the “privatization of the ulama” was premised, in part, on breaking those relationships of patronage and reconstituting the madrasa as a “private” space—but “private” only insofar as it was independent of the state.50 As the third chapter shows, these “private” ‘ulama were intimately involved in the constitution of new publics. I argue, however, that this valorization of lay Muslim patronage and rejection of government and courtly support are twin manifestations of a broader trend in how the Deobandi ‘ulama began to understand themselves as custodians of lay Muslim sensibilities rather than professionals in the service of the state. This, in turn, depended on etching out
a purely “religious” space for the madrasa itself.

  CONCEPTUALIZING “RELIGIOUS” KNOWLEDGE, MAKING “RELIGIOUS” EXPERTS

  There were other dimensions of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband that were deeply entangled with colonial modernity. The very idea of the ‘ulama as exclusively (or near exclusively) “religious” professionals was fairly novel. There are antecedents for this notion in the premodern period, of course. As early as the Delhi Sultanate, Zia al-Din Barani (d. 1357) distinguished between the “otherworldly” ‘ulama (‘ulama-yi akhirat) and those who opted for a “worldly” career (‘ulama-yi duniya).51 But under the Delhi sultans, the principal function of madrasas was educating scholars for state employment.52 The Mughals, too, patronized Islamic educational institutions, which trained the ‘ulama to become civic officials. The most well known example of this mutually dependent relationship between Mughal administration and the ‘ulama was Farangi Mahall, a family of scholars named after the residence (mahall) in Lucknow, given to the family by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707), that had been previously occupied by a wealthy European (farang). A member of this family, Mulla Nizam al-Din (d. 1748), created the Dars-i Nizamiyya (the Nizami curriculum) in the early eighteenth century, stressing the rational sciences (ma‘qulat) to prepare young ‘ulama for work in the civil administration of new princely states that emerged in the wake of the post-Aurangzeb fragmentation of Mughal power.53 The ma‘qulat included subjects such as logic (mantiq), philosophy (hikmat), dialectical theology (kalam), rhetoric, and astronomy, distinguishing them from the “transmitted” sciences (manqulat)—Hadith studies, Qur’an exegesis (tafsir), and Islamic law (fiqh). As Mulla Nizam al-Din designed it, the Nizami curriculum contained only one work on Hadith: the Mishkat al-masabih.54