3
Remaking the Public
The previous chapter examined how Deobandis theorized what I have called the normative order by way of the forces that militate against it: bid‘a, “innovations” within revealed religion (din) that contravene or simulate it; and shirk, beliefs or practices that compromise the oneness of God’s being (tawhid). It showed how they saw certain popular devotional practices, especially the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday and the Sufi saints’ death anniversaries, as sites where both bid‘a and shirk proliferate. But their concern about these devotions was not so much that they threatened the normative order in and of themselves—though certain beliefs associated with them certainly did—as what the lay Muslim masses, the ‘awamm, tended to assume about them: for example, assumptions about the Prophet’s presence at the mawlud or the saint’s intercession at the ‘urs (which Deobandis deemed to be shirk), or the assumption that specific rules for the mawlud had to be followed or that the ‘urs could be carried out only on a certain day (which they deemed to be bid‘a). The problem was that the masses, for the most part, were simply unaware of the normative order. The question this chapter takes up is twofold: why, precisely, did Deobandis see the Muslim public as a site of normative disorder, and how did they understand the task of reforming it? The former question, we will see, hinges on a notion of the “masses” (‘awamm) that Deobandis inherited from a precolonial social and intellectual hierarchy between ‘amm (common) and khass (elite)—the latter, in this context, signifying the ‘ulama—that was itself in the process of becoming muddled, if not collapsing altogether, especially as it intersected with, but was never reducible to, ideas of the public as a collectivity of “rational” (‘aql-mand) individuals reading religious texts in private, as opposed to the irrational energies of the colonial crowd. But there were other ways in which the public was in a state of flux. For one, Deobandis encouraged Muslims to distinguish themselves from non-Muslims—in everyday habits, demeanor, clothing—through denunciations of “imitating” (tashabbuh) non-Muslims. And yet, by contrast, the difference between ‘amm and khass was becoming less distinct as lay Muslims read and studied religious texts independently of the ‘ulama or became “middling” ‘ulama with their encouragement.
As for the second part of the question—how to do reform—Deobandis grappled with an array of approaches to carrying it out. Should the ‘ulama go to the sites where those in need of reform tend to congregate, such as the Sufi shrine and the mawlud assembly, and preach to them directly, even with all the risks of abuse and slander from an unsympathetic audience? Or should one write reformist texts, which will reach far more people, but without the intimacy of the sermon and with all the attendant hermeneutical risks of print? This chapter will show how Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi shifted abruptly, at Gangohi’s instigation, from the first strategy to the second, from a tactic of mingling amid the (disorderly) masses and preaching to them directly to a tactic of harnessing the power of print to reform individuals through the written word.
THE PUBLIC AND THE CROWD
To understand how Deobandis understood the public, perhaps paradoxically, as both a source of normative disorder and the site through which to reform it, we must explore the nature of the late colonial public itself. The turn of the twentieth century was, of course, a period of sweeping social and political change in India. During this period, “new markets, new communications, and new networks linked individuals to larger arenas, and brought former strangers into new settings that stimulated new styles of social interaction.”1 Scholars such as Manu Goswami and Marian Aguiar have illustrated the effects of new technologies—in particular, the Indian railway—in producing new forms of collectivity and even the very notion of India as a geographic imaginary.2 The Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband was founded in the immediate aftermath of three major technological innovations—the postal service in 1854, rail travel in 1859, and the telegraph in 1865—that profoundly altered public life.3 The first railway station at Deoband opened in 1869, connecting Deoband to Delhi in the south and Saharanpur in the north.4 Railway travel in India “reinforced and made visible internal differentiations along class, gender, and ‘respectability’ lines” and “enabled the translation, over time, of these different perspectives into systematic and comprehensive visions of the political and social world.”5
But aside from connecting Deoband with cities and towns across North India—and eventually, by steamship, across the Indian Ocean—these new technologies also contributed to the very forms of social intercourse that Deobandis saw as a source of normative disorder, as in facilitating mass pilgrimage to Sufi shrines. The railway was critical to the celebration of the ‘urs of Shah Barkatullah of Marahra, for instance—a Sufi saint especially important for the Barelvis. Custodians of the shrine would advertise the event up and down the railway route and string lights from the station to the shrine.6 Likewise, the first railway service to Ajmer began in 1879, profoundly changing the scale of the pilgrimage to the ‘urs of Mu‘in al-Din Chishti—now one of the largest gatherings of Muslims in the world, in some years rivaling the Hajj.7 An 1892 guidebook for visiting Ajmer, Sair-i Ajmer (Traveling to Ajmer), gave detailed instructions for getting from the train station to the shrine of Mu‘in al-Din. Significantly, the author of the guidebook was a Hindu and wrote the book partially for Hindus visiting the shrine, as well as for Muslims.8 Just a few years later, in an 1898 letter, Thanvi lamented the “mixing” (ikhtilat) of crowds—Muslim and non-Muslim, men and women, youth and adult—that took place at these shrines.9 Thanvi preferred the solitude of his khanqah, as did Gangohi, whose distaste for “the public [jalvat] and crowds of people [izdiham-i khalq]” was well known to his students and disciples.10
This period, of course, was also one of grave prognoses about a then-nascent mass society. Gustave Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules (The psychology of crowds) of 1895 theorized the mimetic contagion of crowds in ways that bear a striking resemblance to Thanvi’s view, seeing in the urban crowd “a collective mind [in which] the intellectual aptitudes of individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened.”11 Similarly, for Thanvi, the customs (rusum) that proliferate in crowds and mass society “are of the sort that have spread like a tempest among otherwise intelligent [samajh-dar] and rational [‘aql-mand] people. . . . The only explanation for this is that these customs have become such common practice among the people that they have cast a veil upon their rationality [‘aql].”12
The crowd, then, was a source of normative disorder not only because of the tendencies of the masses to elevate merely permissible actions to obligatory ones—the most salient mark of bid‘a—or to misunderstand the agency of saints—a telltale mark of shirk. The crowd also harbored intrinsic forces of disorder and disruption. The disruptive affect of the crowd was one of the main reasons for which Thanvi believed that the Sufi musical assembly known as the sama‘ needed to be abandoned, despite the fact that the sama‘ was the “preeminent symbol” of India’s most prominent Sufi order, the Chishtiyya.13 In classical Sufi pedagogy, the goal of the sama‘ is ecstasy, known as wajd. Though wajd is generally considered a “state” (hal) of the Sufi path, as opposed to a “station” (maqam), meaning it was achieved not through one’s own volition but through divine favor, sama‘ was nevertheless a technique for effecting it. For Thanvi, the sama‘ occupies a liminal space between a public of reformed individuals and the crowd. Its danger was precisely in its tendency to devolve into a mere “crowd” when the visceral affect of ecstatic bodies prevailed over emotional restraint. This is the essence of Thanvi’s argument in Haqq al-sama‘ (The true Sufi musical assembly), published in 1899, in which Thanvi redeploys arguments from al-Ghazali’s Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din to argue that the sama‘ of his day was no longer a viable pedagogical option for Sufis. He draws on al-Ghazali’s three-part typology for the conditions of the sama‘: time (zaman), place (makan), and participants (ikhwan).14 Zaman means the time of the sama‘ should not confli
ct with other religious duties, such as the five daily prayers. Makan means it should not take place in a public setting “with people coming to and fro, in which some sort of tumult [hangama] may distract the heart.” Ikhwan means that all members of the assembly must be sincere in their spiritual purpose, for if even a single “ostentatious Sufi” joins and proceeds to “feign ecstasy and tear his clothes, the spiritual grace [lutf] of the gathering vanishes.”15 If this was the case in al-Ghazali’s time, says Thanvi, “now consider our times”:
The majority of participants are people for whom sama‘ is detrimental. . . . Even if there happens to be present among them a pious person who is a servant of God, then he neither possesses adequate external knowledge of the Shari‘a, nor is he an expert in the inner knowledge [of the Sufis]. He does not understand the subtle points [of sama‘], nor is he aware of the terminologies and subtleties of the mystics to enable him to interpret the verses he hears. He is unable to reconcile the Law [Shari‘a] and the Truth [haqiqa]. On account of his ignorance, he will accept any corrupt thoughts occurring to him. Whether it be an illicit innovation [bid‘a] or unbelief [kufr], he is not concerned as long as he derives pleasure. Thousands are involved in clear unbelief because they misunderstood poetry sung during a sama‘ gathering.16
Thanvi, once again, applies the principle that the sama‘, too, needs to be left behind if it corrupts the masses: “There are many actions that may be permissible [mubah] or even recommended [mandub], but they are forbidden because there is a risk of them corrupting the masses [‘awamm]. For this reason, the legal scholars have completely forbidden the sama‘, for its corruption is overpowering [ghalib].”17
In short, the sama‘ is permissible in theory, but not its “modern” forms, insofar as now “the audience comprises members of the general public [‘awamm al-nas].” “Such a thing is, in and of itself, neutral [mubah] with respect to the law,” he writes, “but is impermissible in light of the well-entrenched habits of today’s public. In the present age, sama‘ has become a pastime, a source of entertainment for the masses.”18
But sama‘ was also dangerous because the public is not equipped to understand the occasional ecstatic utterance (shath; pl., shathiyat) of a participant in an ecstatic state (hal). It is, in fact, that very state of ecstasy that absolves someone of any legal or theological infractions that the utterance might entail. Sufi devotional practices are not the only context in which the public encounters ecstatic utterances they do not understand; they often encounter them in tales of saintly miracles, which Gangohi deemed especially dangerous.19 Ideally, any discussion of ecstatic utterances would take place within the safe confines of the Sufi lodge, the only place where Thanvi was comfortable discussing difficult theological puzzles. Even there, he remained circumspect. On one occasion, he discussed what is undoubtedly the most famous ecstatic utterance in the history of Sufism, Mansur al-Hallaj’s “I am God!” (ana al-haqq). “Various people have claimed divinity [khuda’i], but Husain ibn Mansur [al-Hallaj] should not be compared to them,” he begins, absolving Hallaj of any legal ramifications for his claim. “For his claim to divinity,” Thanvi continues, “was made in an ecstatic state [hal], and otherwise he professed servanthood [‘abdiyat] because he performed his prayers.” He continues: “But someone asked [Hallaj] once, ‘When you are God, to whom do you pray?’ He answered, ‘I have two forms, one external [zahir] and the other internal [batin]. My external form prostrates to my internal form.’ This, too, is an abstruse riddle [ramz-i ghamiz].”20 Commenting on Hallajian aphorisms was something best done in the intimate setting of the khanqah.
The Sufi in ecstasy, in other words, was a moral and legal danger to those surrounding him. The Sufi might say things that ought not be repeated, and the state of ecstasy itself had a contagious energy that tended to affect others. That affect was magnified in public settings where the noninitiated gathered to gawk at sacred devotions that they regarded as mere entertainment. However—and this point cannot be overemphasized—Deobandis were by no means antipathetic toward all forms of social affect. On the contrary, the next chapter will show how the affective energy (faiz) of pious bodies—an energy that coalesces around bodies both living and dead—has a transformative salutary power, without which the disciplinary project of self-reformation would be a merely intellective one. Deobandis do not, therefore, conform neatly to the narrative of modernity by which the public is gradually divested of affect—a presumption based, in turn, on seeing rationality and affect as intrinsically at odds.21 On the contrary, the Deobandis believed that reformed publics are brought into being precisely through the affective powers of the virtuous body. Moreover, the very same technologies that were a source of normative disorder also permitted madrasa students to travel great distances to study at Deoband or Saharanpur, and permitted Sufi masters and their disciples to communicate via mail, which was especially important for Thanvi.22 We must not overemphasize this point, of course; we should avoid imputing the rise of new publics to a sort of techno-determinism. After all, Sufi masters and disciples communicated via letters in the Mughal era, too, long before the British arrived.23 These shifts were perhaps more quantitative than qualitative. The broad point is simply that, from the Deobandis’ perspective, the same technologies that enabled illicit innovations (bid‘a) to proliferate also provided new means to reform them.
PUBLICS AND POLEMICS
By Thanvi’s time, as we will see below, the “public” to which Deobandis addressed their reformist energies was primarily a discursive one: a community of like-minded readers of Urdu religious texts. In some respects, Deobandis rearticulated the distinction in classical liberalism between the public—dispersed across space, linked through texts, brought together via rational deliberation—and crowds—present in a particular space, intrinsically irrational, vulnerable to the vagaries of mass affect.24 The individual at the center of the Deobandi public was the reformed lay Muslim: emotionally restrained, disciplined in his or her sensibilities, meticulously following the Sunna in all aspects of daily life. If such an individual lay at the center of an imagined public configured through the circulation of reformist texts, that individual’s foil was the lay Muslim who attended all manner of mass gatherings, whether lavish weddings or saints’ death anniversaries, heedlessly shunning ritual obligations like the daily prayer.
In other respects, however, the Deobandi public is quite different from classical liberalism’s. As the next chapter explores further, Deobandis’ understanding of the self was not premised on a Kantian autonomy from priestly authority, relying on the “public use of one’s reason in all matters.”25 The individual at the center of the Deobandi public was not, in other words, represented by bourgeois individuals “pursuing their own self-interest, conversing, debating and deciding independently without regard to loyalties or obligation.”26 As we saw, Deobandis did believe that rationality (‘aql), with which humans are naturally endowed, played a key role in the ability to distinguish divinely revealed normativity from its multiple competitors, but this rationality was not reasoning for reason’s sake, the Kantian Räsonieren, “a use of reason in which reason has no other end but itself.”27 If, in the Kantian public, “ideas are presented on their own merits by self-reflective moral subjects rather than . . . preachers, judges, and rulers,” in the Deobandi public, reflective moral subjects re-form their sensibilities around an authoritative structure that ultimately emanates from the Sunna and is mediated by the ‘ulama.28
But there is yet another difference between the (idealized) liberal public and the Deobandi public, one relevant to the discussion here. By the early twentieth century, the Deobandi public had already been shaped by a culture of polemics—polemics that circulated textually, but were also occasionally staged in actual public fora: in other words, a culture that was simultaneously mediated by reading publics and the mass affect of crowds. This sort of staged debate, known as a munazara (“disputation,” from the Arabic root “to look at or evaluate”), was a popu
lar form of public argument and, indeed, mass entertainment.29 The munazara was typically a person-to-person debate, held at a certain time and place and before an audience, such as a noteworthy munazara that took place between ‘ulama and Christian missionaries at Agra in April 1854 over the nature of revelation.30 These are not debates that one or another of the interlocutors would “win.”31 They were, to borrow from Jesse Lander’s description of polemic generally, forms of “discursive calcification,” a “hardening of partisan identities and ideas.”32 Yet although polemics are “polarizing,” they are also “pluralizing” in the sense that they open up the space of polemic to incorporate what Michael Warner calls “onlookers”: “the agonistic interlocutor is coupled with passive interlocutors; known enemies with indifferent strangers.”33 The munazara was public in a spatial sense, then, but was also informed by the discursivity of texts. The reading publics that Deobandis addressed were already partly defined by the caustic polemics and counterpolemics that preceded them, exchanges that strain any presumptions about rational debate embedded in the liberal notion of the public. These were, in short, reading publics already enmeshed in the politics of the crowd.
Some Deobandis seemed inclined toward the view that the ‘ulama had a responsibility to proclaim the truth, in all its complexity and regardless of the public impact, and accordingly saw the munazara as an efficient means of doing so. Often the munazara was staged between Muslims and non-Muslims, as with Nanautvi’s participation in a series of famous debates in 1876 and 1877 between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians over the nature of God.34 But at other times, the munazara was staged between Deobandis and their Muslim rivals, especially the then-emerging Barelvi school led by the fiery Ahmad Raza Khan. In 1889, Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri was invited to participate in a munazara in Bhawalpur over the row that ensued after the publication of Barahin-i qati‘a (The conclusive proofs). Over the course of several days, Saharanpuri and his main opponent, Ghulam Dastagir, went back and forth over the possibility of God telling a lie (imkan-i kizb), a debate that Saharanpuri “won” so decisively that other Deobandis called him “Master of the Debaters” (Sayyid al-Munazarin).35
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