Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  Scholars during this period did not see the manqulat and ma‘qulat as rival discourses of knowledge—let alone seeing the one as “religious” and the other as “secular,” as Yoginder Sikand has noted—but as complementary parts of the same whole.55 This complementarity has roots that stretch back long before the colonial period, as Jamal Malik observes. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), for one, distinguished between “traditional” (naqliyya) sciences (studies of the Qur’an and Sunna) and “philosophical” (‘aqliyya) sciences. While emphasizing the manqulat, Shah Wali Allah, too, believed the ma‘qulat allowed scholars to “strengthen faith through rational proofs,” in Malik’s words.56 While the two are conceptually distinct, Ebrahim Moosa has rightly noted their deep interdependence. Architects of the Nizami curriculum understood the ma‘qulat to provide the intellectual resources for comprehending the manqulat.57 The ma‘qulat were regarded to be useful for training individuals for careers in administration because they developed critical intellectual skills. One historian of Islamic education in India argues that the whole point of the ma‘qulat was “exercising the mind” (zehni mashq).58 Philosophy and logic were not studied as ends in themselves, but were understood by the ‘ulama as “tools” for “mental exercise” (zehni varzish).59

  In Deoband’s early years, Nanautvi seems to give this complementarity at least partial credence. In 1873, he wrote that a student at the Dar al-‘Ulum would “attain proficiency in all the rational and transmitted sciences [‘ulum-i ‘aqliyya o naqliyya]. God willing, they will have the capacities to acquire all the ancient and modern sciences [‘ulum-i qadima aur jadida]. The reason for this is that in these madrasas . . . religious knowledge alone is insufficient. Rather, we also deal with subjects that hone the intellect, just as in previous times.”60 This is not a view shared by Nanautvi’s principal co-collaborator in the founding of Deoband, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi. For Gangohi, the manqulat was not only properly “religious” knowledge but the only knowledge worth knowing. He dismissed the ma‘qulat as useless, if not dangerous. When he became sarparast (“patron,” in a spiritual rather than financial sense) of the Dar al-‘Ulum in 1879, following Nanautvi’s death, Gangohi began to shape the Deobandi curriculum according to his vision.

  Born in 1829 in the northern Indian village of Gangoh, Gangohi went to Delhi in his youth to study Hadith with the prominent Hadith scholar Shah ‘Abd al-Ghani (d. 1878). He was also a Sufi master of the Chishti and Naqshbandi orders.61 The next two chapters examine Gangohi’s work in detail.62 For now, I wish to underscore how Gangohi left his mark on the Deoband movement in his insistence that the manqulat take precedence over the ma‘qulat, to the near complete exclusion of the latter.63 Gangohi’s distaste for the rational sciences was famous. Gangohi once tried to convince his Sufi disciple Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri to leave his post at a madrasa after it introduced philosophy and astronomy, but relented when he learned that Saharanpuri would not have to teach it.64 Gangohi himself completed the entire Nizami curriculum as a student in Delhi, including all the subjects that were customary at the time: logic, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy. But when he began teaching, he abandoned the rational sciences, seeing them as sources of “unbelief and associating God with others” (kufr o shirk). Gangohi once explained to a student that the ma‘qulat was rife with statements that would invoke God’s anger when uttered, even by those who did not believe a word of them. The student protested, however: “But sir, what can we do? We are compelled [to study them], for without them we will not get jobs.” Gangohi replied, “If someone offered you a hundred rupees a month to carry a basket of outhouse waste back and forth across the bazaar, would your dignity permit you to take this job?” The student was evidently silenced.65 This was not merely a matter of dignity, however. The possibility that a student might inadvertently utter a statement of infidelity (kufr) was a matter of salvation or damnation. It was for similar reasons that he discouraged Muslim parents in Saharanpur from sending their children to schools run by Christian ministers because the students were expected to read Christian books and sing hymns. In an 1883 fatwa, drawing on Hanafi scholar Ibn ‘Abidin, Gangohi argued that deliberately expressing a statement of unbelief (kalimat-i kufr), even in jest, rendered one an unbeliever (kafir). Even parents who allowed children to attend such schools were toying recklessly with unbelief, he said, reasoning from a principle in Mulla ‘Ali al-Qari’s (d. 1606) commentary on the Hanafi Fiqh al-akbar: “Approving of kufr is itself kufr” (al-rida bi-l kufr kufrun). His point is simply that words have ontological consequences—whether they are proclaimed in a missionary school or a madrasa—and thus Muslims needed to approach the rational sciences with the utmost circumspection.66

  Changing British policies toward the patronage of Muslim scholars was yet another context for this new validation of “religious” knowledge over “rational” knowledge. Initially, the British took over the patronage that had begun to wane with the decline of Mughal power. They relied extensively on native munshis (scribes) literate in Persian, the administrative and literary language of the Mughal empire.67 When Muslims in Calcutta petitioned Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, to establish the Calcutta Madrasa in 1780, they did so by reminding him that the nawabs of Bengal, who preceded the British, had patronized Islamic learning. Hastings was motivated in supporting Muslim learning by both the expediency of rule and an admiration for “Oriental” learning and culture. As Thomas Metcalf put it, it was a “mixture of scholarly curiosity and administrative convenience.”68

  But as numerous scholars have shown, Hastings’s patronage was also bound up with his belief that Muslims and Hindus needed to be governed by their own texts, for which the ‘ulama and Hindu pandits would serve as intermediaries and interpreters. Hastings’s vision was first articulated in the Judicial Plan of 1772, which stipulated that “the laws of the Koran with respect to Mahometans and those of the Shaster with respect to Gentoos [Hindus] shall be invariably adhered to,” even though they did not yet understand the extent to which Islamic law was based on more than the Qur’an, nor, as Rosane Rocher points out, did they “know the extent of the content of the shastra (canonical literature), nor were they familiar with Sanskrit.”69 Still, this reflected the idea that India’s people were intrinsically religious and were therefore to be governed by their scriptures. As East India Company merchant Thomas Twining put it, “[T]he people of India are not a political, but a religious people. . . . They think as much of their religion as we of our Constitution. They venerate their Shastah and Koran with as much enthusiasm as we our Magna Charta.”70

  The belief that Indians are inherently religious implied, for many, that the East India Company ought to support religious institutions as a key mechanism of governance.71 This “Orientalist” position, insisting that the British should actively promote Islamic learning and the Persian language as a means of creating imperial functionaries, prevailed until it was eclipsed by the “Anglicist” position in the 1830s, which saw Islamic (and Hindu) learning as utterly inferior to European learning.72 Drawing on support from evangelicals and utilitarians, this position was exemplified most famously by the oft-cited Minute of Macaulay in 1835. The most vocal critic of the Orientalist position was Charles Trevelyan, who inveighed against government support for Arabic and Persian, calling for the swift replacement of instruction in these languages with English:

  Buried under the obscurity of Sanskrit and Arabic erudition, mixed up with the dogmas of religion, and belonging to two concurrent systems made up of the dicta of sages of different ages and schools, the laws are at present in the highest degree uncertain, redundant, and contradictory. . . . The expositors of the law are the muftis and pundits; men, who deeply imbued with the spirit of the ancient learning to which they are devoted, live only in past ages, and are engaged in a perpetual struggle to maintain the connection between the barbarism of antiquity and the manners and opinions of the present time. Their oracular responses are too often the result of ignorance, pedantry, or corruption.73<
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  The Deoband movement responded to the destruction of patronage networks with a new discourse of authenticity, centered on reconstituting “severed” links to medieval disciplines of learning and the moral life of the individual Muslim. Carl Ernst describes this process as a shift “from a local inflection of universalist Islamicate learning under aristocratic patronage to a defensive posture of authenticity articulated by a new class of religious scholars under the pressure of foreign colonial rule.”74 The transition was not immediate, and never uniform. Gangohi’s biography is full of stories about Sufi disciples of his who studied at Deoband and then went on to work in civil administration. At one point he mused, “When we were students, anyone who studied Arabic would be highly valued for the top administrative posts.” Gangohi’s uncle pressured him to take a government post, but relented when he “realized I would never agree to work for the British.”75

  The shift away from employing the ‘ulama as scribes and administrative personnel is essential for understanding the concomitant shift toward the new, self-appointed role of the ‘ulama as stewards of public morality, exemplified by the Deobandis but evident among their rivals as well. However, I do not wish to suggest that precolonial ‘ulama were unconcerned with public morality, in India or elsewhere. The role of the inspector of markets (muhtasib) would be one such example. Kristen Stilt demonstrates how the Mamluk-era muhtasib was essentially the public face of the law, “as much a part of the legal landscape as the judge or mufti,” tasked not only with ensuring fair and equitable trade but also with making sure market patrons attended congregational prayer and maintained the fast during Ramadan.76 In India, the muhtasib under Aurangzeb policed public behavior such as wine drinking and gambling.77 The difference between these efforts and those of the Deobandis was that the latter were mediated by a new print culture, as will see in chapter 3.

  THE SHIFTING TERRAIN OF ISLAMIC LAW

  But the other major impact of the end of British patronage was that it left a vacuum in the administration of Islamic law. In the decades before the founding of Deoband, the British ceased to patronize Islamic learning and began to regard a madrasa education as “useless” knowledge, precisely as Deobandis began to defend the madrasa as a purely “religious” institution and Islamic learning as valuable precisely because it did not serve the utilitarian calculus of the state; indeed, they said, learning was an act of worship that led to one’s salvation in the next world. At the same time, a parallel process emerged: as the Orientalist argument for governing Muslims according to their (ostensibly) sacred texts gave way to the Anglicist argument of governing according to British laws and norms, so, too, did that shift create a space in which the Islamic law itself was reimagined—never completely, I note below—as a moral discourse of reform rather than a juridical process located in the courts of qazis (judges), which had effectively ceased to exist.78

  We can further understand how the British sought to govern “natives” through their respective texts by detailing how that philosophy of rule affected Islamic law. As noted above, the British aimed to rely principally on what they deemed “canonical” texts, which they regarded as more reliable than actual “native” experts on those texts. The East India Company regarded the traditionally fluid and context-specific nature of Islamic law to be fickle and unreliable (even though fatwas would be solicited by, and used in, British criminal courts until 1832, when their use was abolished).79 Thus, in 1778, East India Company judge and famed Orientalist scholar William Jones (d. 1794) called for a “complete Digest of Hindu and Mohammedan laws, after the model of Justinian’s inestimable Pandects,” one that would make the “Pandits and Maulavis” superfluous. At first, Jones proposed relying on the Fatawa-yi Alamgiri, a primer on Hanafi law compiled under the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707).80 But ultimately the Hidaya (“Guidance”), an abbreviated manual on Hanafi law by the twelfth-century Transoxianan jurist Marghinani (d. 1197), became the basis of what the British called “Anglo-Muhammadan law.” Marghinani never purported to summarize Hanafi law in toto, but only to provide a convenient primer for Hanafi law in his time and place.81

  But the text’s concision and brevity were precisely the qualities that attracted the architects of Anglo-Muhammadan law. In Charles Hamilton’s introduction to his 1791 translation of the Hidaya, he posited, at once, the immutability of Islamic law’s textual sources and the fickle caprice of the Muslim jurists who interpret them:

  [I]t is impossible, in the infinite variety of human affairs, that the text of the KORAN, or the traditionary precepts of the Prophet, would extend to every particular case, or strictly suit all possible emergencies. Hence the necessity of Mooftees, whose particular office it is to compound the law and apply it to cases. The uncertainty of this science, in its judicial operation, is unhappily proverbial in all countries. In some, which enjoy the advantage of an established legislature, competent at all times to alter or amend, to make or revoke laws, as the change of manners may require, or incidental occurrences render necessary, this uncertainty arises pretty much from the unavoidable mutability in the principles of decision. Of the Mussulman code, on the contrary, the principles are fixed; and being intimately and inseparably blended with the religion of the people, must remain so, as long as they shall endure.82

  Thus the British saw Islamic law as at once too rigid (a “code”) and too loose, fixed by “ancient” texts but haphazardly applied by its specialists.83 Hamilton concludes that the “Mussulman code” is so “intimately blended with their religion that any attempts to change the former would be felt by them as a violation of the latter.”84

  The British quest for uniformity and universalism undermined the context-specific nuance and flexibility of Islamic law in part by introducing “the state” as a legal entity in Islamic legal proceedings. Governor Hastings was appalled that Hanafi law permitted relatives of a murder victim to pardon the perpetrator or to claim blood money. It was “a law of barbarous construction, and contrary to the first principle of civil society, by which the state acquires an interest in every member which composes it, and a right in his security.”85 In this manner, the British reformulated Islamic criminal law from a conflict between two parties to a conflict between a defendant and the state.86 There were yet other ways they changed Islamic criminal law. British jurists found Islamic evidentiary standards too strict, they rejected the requirement that witnesses be of “upright” (‘adl) reputation, and they strongly favored incarceration over corporal punishment.87 But above all, they sought to reorient Islamic law around the principle of relying on the precedent of prior legal decisions (stare decisis), utterly foreign to Islamic legal reasoning.88 We see this especially in post-1857 efforts to isolate and remove “native lawyers” (i.e. muftis) and rely instead on the decision of courts. The English barrister William Morley argued, in 1858, that India’s laws needed to be restructured around this principle: “In no instance is the maxim ‘stare decisis’ so imperative . . . as when applied to the laws administered in India.”89 In 1860—just six years before the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband would be founded—the Indian Penal Code abolished the last vestige of Islamic criminal law.90 By 1864, even “native lawyers” were no longer consulted; for the time being, English judges would consult the texts directly without the help of Muslim jurists.91 (Deobandi fatwas, meanwhile, show that the Dar al-‘Ulum’s muftis could tolerate the idea of a non-Muslim appointing a Muslim judge, but the judge himself had to be a Muslim; a British judge would not do.)92 What Hallaq has called “the rigidification of Islamic law,” an “attempt to remold Islamic law in the image of the concision, clarity, and accessibility” of English law, was more or less complete.93 This does not mean, of course, that such a system functioned well. Realizing that “the presence of Kazis . . . is required at the celebration of marriages and the performance of certain other rites and ceremonies,” the government passed the Kazis Act of 1880, once again permitting the government to appoint qazis, first in Madras and later, by 1894, in the North
-Western Provinces, the heartland of the Deoband movement.94 There is little evidence, however, that many qazis were actually appointed. The fact that, as late as 1933, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi petitioned the government to appoint qazis in every district to adjudicate divorces for women trapped in unhappy marriages but without recourse to a judge suggests a persistent dearth of qazis.95

  For all intents and purposes, nevertheless, the absence of a full-fledged legal apparatus created a vacuum that Deobandis sought to fill by giving legal advice directly to individual Muslims through fatwas.96 By the mid to late nineteenth century, muftis began to issue legal opinions on the authority of a particular madrasa.97 They also issued fatwas in substantially larger numbers than previously through the widespread use of print. The Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband established a Dar al-Ifta’ in 1892, whose “main goal was religious education of the masses so that common Muslims could understand legal issues [masa’il-i shar‘iyya],” even though, as we will see in chapter 3, Deobandis also debated how much the masses should know.98 But famous muftis issued their own collected volumes of fatwas, which, like all texts at this time, benefited from the availability of mass printing. Rashid Ahmad Gangohi’s collection, in particular, was critical in establishing the juro-ethical stance of the Deobandis on a variety of issues. Fatwas were traditionally solicited by qazis; now they were solicited primarily by individual Muslims, as well as some fellow ‘ulama, who sent renowned ‘ulama like Gangohi their questions about proper belief and practice. The fatwa became a tool of mass moral reform, “a form of the care of the self,” linking “selves to the broader practices, virtues, and aims” of Islamic tradition.99