Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  Later on in the letter, he submits: “If participation is truly against the pleasure of God and His Prophet, then Hazrat Imdad Allah’s approval of it needs explanation. The masses are having doubts about their respect for and connection to the ‘ulama. To remedy this, I feel confident that there is room in the Shari‘a [for participation in these assemblies].”70 But he offers to quit his employment at the madrasa in Kanpur if Gangohi urges him to do so.

  In his response, Gangohi excuses Imdad Allah for his lack of knowledge of legal niceties, and concedes that Thanvi followed him out of the love and respect he has for the master. But he says that Thanvi’s participation in the mawlud, even for the purposes of reforming it, demonstrates an incomplete knowledge of bid‘a, for which he chastises Thanvi and urges him to read Saharanpuri’s Barahin-i qati‘a.71 He ends the letter with a gentle admonition, giving his disciple the space to arrive at the conclusions he had made abundantly clear: “I will not interfere with the methods you wrote about. Do whatever you deem appropriate and prudent. I approve of any method for freeing God’s creatures [khalq-i khuda] from an innovator [mubtadi‘], so long as you avoid any severity that could be cause of disorder [fasad].”72

  But Thanvi seems to have taken Gangohi’s advice to heart. The fact is that he did quit teaching in Kanpur soon after this exchange with Gangohi, taking up residence at Imdad Allah’s khanqah in Thana Bhawan, where he would spend most of the rest of his life.73 And indeed, these years coincided with the publication of a number of short primers on Islam and succinct critiques of popular devotions and customs, including Islah al-khayal (The reformation of thought) in 1901, and Bihishti zewar in 1905. Thanvi did not stop writing for the rest of his career. I do not want to suggest that this exchange with Gangohi was the sole reason for his shift to writing, or that his writing began only afterward. In fact, Thanvi began writing reformist literature while still in Kanpur. Islah al-rusum (The reformation of customs), though not a “primer” per se, was composed as early as 1893. His first true primer on Islamic belief and practice was likely Ta‘lim al-din (Instruction in the religion), published in Kanpur in July of 1897—a mere two months after these letters were written.74 Unless Thanvi wrote Ta‘lim al-din in a matter of weeks (not altogether impossible for a writer as prolific as he), he likely began it beforehand. Regardless, the letters and the subsequent relocation to Thana Bhawan heralded a shift to print as his preferred medium of reform.

  Though Thanvi came to see the task of reforming Muslim practices like mawlud and ‘urs as one that could be best accomplished through religious texts written for lay Muslim readers of Urdu, the aim was never only about reforming these practices. The salvation of the masses, under the strain of colonial modernity, depended on endowing them with a certain degree of religious knowledge, empowering them to reform themselves and then others. This attitude toward knowledge and salvation was not new to Thanvi. It has roots in the Qur’an itself, of course. As Franz Rosenthal put it, “Right from the start, the student of the Qur’an finds himself confronted with the thought presented forcefully and inescapably that all human knowledge that has any real value and truly deserves to be called ‘knowledge’ is religious knowledge.”75 Thanvi called on Muslims not only to acquire essential religious knowledge, but to ponder the very notion of reform (islah) and how it related to their everyday choices.76 This core knowledge was so critical, in fact, that Thanvi regarded its pursuit as a “binding duty” (farz-i ‘ayn) upon all Muslims individually. This was not a new idea either; al-Ghazali, too, as Thanvi would have known, had argued that a certain degree of religious knowledge was a binding duty—especially what is necessitated by Islamic belief, worship, and social conduct (mu‘amalat).77 The difference between al-Ghazali and Thanvi, here, is not the content of their views, but the context.

  To this end, Thanvi composed numerous short primers that sought to convey just enough knowledge to prepare Muslims to navigate the fluid public life of colonial modernity and, most importantly, attain salvation. One of these primers, Hayat al-Muslimin (The life of Muslims), begins with a Hadith of Ibn Majah—“Seeking religious knowledge is compulsory upon every Muslim”—and explains: “This Hadith establishes that every Muslim—whether male or female, city dweller or villager, rich or poor—must acquire religious knowledge. And ‘knowledge’ does not only mean reading Arabic. In fact, it means learning about the faith, whether through reading Arabic books or reading Urdu books, whether inquiring among reliable ‘ulama or listening to reliable lecturers.”78

  As numerous scholars have documented, the rise of large-scale lithographic printing in nineteenth-century India introduced a world of print across multiple vernaculars.79 This included the rapid expansion of Urdu-language presses and Urdu book markets, which was in part due to British privileging of Urdu as an administrative lingua franca over more “regional” languages like Punjabi.80 In the rise of Urdu print, we can also see the concomitant emergence of Urdu reading “publics”—in the dual, overlapping senses of an ‘awamm that had a voracious appetite for books, and a “public” that had begun to refer to itself using that very term. Thus, in the 1880s, journalist and novelist Abdul Halim Sharar began to speak of a nascent “Islami pablik” in Urdu.81 Soon thereafter, the Urdu novelist Ratan Nath Sarshar began to use the word “public” (pablik) in Urdu to signal a new category of reader that, he believed, the category of ‘awamm did not adequately capture.82

  However, Thanvi and other Deobandis use the terms ‘amm (“common,” “mass”) and ‘awamm (“commoners,” “masses”) predominantly to refer to these readers. Within the Deoband movement at least, it was Thanvi, primarily but not exclusively, who tapped into these new markets in the first two decades of the twentieth century with short, introductory texts on Islam.83 These texts would typically cover worship (‘ibadat), belief (‘aqida), ways of life (mu‘asharat), social relations (mu‘amalat), Sufism (tasawwuf), and the rights (huquq) due to different members of a properly ordered Muslim society—one’s spouse, one’s children, one’s parents, one’s friends. They also typically included sections on Sufism and the importance of resisting bid‘a, the latter typically with minimal commentary, as in Bihishti zewar: “God and his Messenger have laid out for their servants all aspects of religion [din] in the Qur’an and Hadith. It is improper to introduce anything new into religion. Such a thing is called bid‘a.”84

  This minimalist approach to explaining bid‘a is found throughout other Deobandi texts written for lay audiences. Mufti Muhammad Kifayat Allah’s Ta‘lim al-Islam (Instruction in Islam), to take a prominent example, combined core principles of belief and practice alongside Deobandi reformist perspectives in a deliberately simple question-and-answer format:

  Question:After unbelief [kufr] and associating others with God [shirk], what is the greatest sin?

  Answer:After kufr and shirk, innovating in religion [bid‘a] is the greatest sin. A bid‘a is anything that does not have a foundation in the Shari‘a [asl-i Shari‘at]—that is, has no basis in the Holy Qur’an or Noble Hadith, did not exist in the time of the Messenger of God, his righteous Companions, the Followers, or the Followers of the Followers,85 and for which adhering or abstaining is understood as a religious deed. Bid‘a is a very bad thing. The Messenger rejected bid‘a and called those who commit it destroyers of religion. He said that all bid‘a is sin and all sin leads to hell.

  Question:What are some of the acts that are bid‘a?

  Answer:People have devised thousands of bid‘as. Here are a few: constructing permanent [pukhta] graves; constructing domes over graves; holding the ‘urs or lighting lamps at graves; putting sheets of cloth over graves; assembling to eat at the home of the deceased; including the sehra [a floral garland attached to a groom’s headgear] or the baddhi [a floral garland worn around the waist] in marriage ceremonies; adding conditions and qualifications to any otherwise permissible and desirable acts that have no basis in Islam.86

  It is important not to overstate the distinction between reformist text
s for fellow ‘ulama and for lay Muslims. There was surely some overlap between the two. By and large, Thanvi’s texts on law and Sufism were written for ‘ulama and Sufi disciples, respectively (though these were often one and the same). His texts for lay Muslims concerned Islamic belief and practice, and while they might hint at more technical legal issues, they deliberately avoided delving into them. But we can partly identify which texts he intended for lay Muslims by the fact that he identifies them as such. Thus, he marketed Hayat al-Muslimin—a primer published in 1928, covering the importance of religious knowledge, reciting the Qur’an, the life of the Prophet, the rights (huquq) due to others, how to pray, how to fast, Muslim marriage, and other topics—as a primer for lay readers, a “treasure house sufficient for the well-being and success of Muslims in this world and the next.”87

  But print, of course, came with certain hermeneutic risks. To mitigate them, Thanvi urged lay readers of these texts to consult the ‘ulama at every turn:

  Those who are able to read Urdu, or able to learn to read Urdu easily, should consult reliable Urdu religious books. . . . To the extent it is possible, these books should be studied lesson by lesson with a properly knowledgeable person, and if such a person is unavailable, you may study the books on your own, but whenever you do not understand something or there is some doubt, make a mark with your pencil. Then when a properly knowledgeable person is available, inquire [about what you do not understand] and then impart that knowledge to others, whether in the mosque or in an assembly room. Then at home, share the knowledge with your wife and children. . . . Those who cannot read Urdu should have a literate man read to them so they can hear these books and inquire about religious issues. . . . Whenever you are about to do some deed, whether religious or worldly in nature, and do not know whether it is good or bad in terms of the Shari‘a, then it is necessary to ask a pious ‘alim and to bear in mind what he says, and to tell it to other men and women. If you don’t have the time to go directly to such an ‘alim, send him a letter, along with a self-addressed envelope so that he can respond to you easily and quickly.88

  As Francis Robinson observed, for the Indian ‘ulama, “[t]he printed book was designed to reinforce learning systems that already existed, to improve them, not to transform them. No one was to read a book without the help of a scholar.”89

  Thanvi applied the same principle to reading the Qur’an: it should be done only under the supervision of a qualified scholar. The very idea of studying the Qur’an, as opposed to knowing by heart a number of key suras for recitation in the five daily prayers, was still relatively novel in Thanvi’s era, at least from the standpoint of the ‘ulama. In the previous chapter, we saw how Muhammad Isma‘il advanced the notion of the Qur’an as easy to understand and accessible to all. While Deobandis benefited from the revivalist impulse behind Isma‘il’s call for individual Muslims to engage with their scripture more directly, a Qur’an that needs no human mediation marginalizes the ‘ulama, who are trained in its proper interpretation. The abundance of mass-printed Qur’an translations magnified these hermeneutic risks. We see Thanvi grappling with this dilemma as he advises individuals to read the Qur’an, even in translation, but to do so, again, alongside a trained scholar. “Instruction in the Holy Qur’an is desirable, and in fact commanded, for all Muslims, young and old, commoners [‘awamm] and the elites [khawass] alike. This includes instruction from translations for non-Arabic-speaking commoners.” There are a few principles that must be adhered to, however: “The instructor should be a full-fledged scholar [‘alim-i kamil] and a wise sage [hakim-i ‘aqil] who discusses the translation and selects topics to interpret in accordance with the understanding of the learner. The instructor should be easy to understand, soft in tone, and not conceited about himself or his knowledge, so that he does not make mistakes in interpretation [tafsir] or have the audacity to interpret the Qur’an from his own opinion [tafsir bi’l ra’e].”90

  This effort to police the boundaries of interpretation was at least partly an effort to preserve the place of the ‘ulama as custodians of Islamic tradition. But it was also born of a real fear of the untrained masses engaging in wild speculation about matters beyond their comprehension—whether concerning the Qur’an, Islamic legal issues (masa’il), or ecstatic utterances (shathiyat) of the Sufis—and thereby imperiling their very salvation. This is nowhere more evident than in Thanvi’s discussion of the Islamic legal concept of the ratio legis, known as ‘illa (Arabic, “reason”). In the principles of Sunni jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh), there are two substantive sources of the law (Qur’an and Sunna) and two methodological sources: analogy (qiyas), and consensus (ijma‘) of the ‘ulama. Qiyas allows the derivation of a new legal verdict (hukm) by analogy with an existing one in the Qur’an, Sunna, or consensus. A paradigmatic case illustrating this process is Islamic law’s prohibition of intoxicants. The Qur’an explicitly forbids wine (Qur’an 5:90) but not other intoxicants—for example, liquor. In jurists’ prohibition of other intoxicants, wine consumption is the original case (asl), other intoxicants are the new case (far‘), and preventing intoxication is the “reason” or “rationale” (‘illa) that links the original case and the new case, yielding the legal verdict (hukm) of prohibition. But actual cases were rarely so clean-cut. Sometimes cases presented multiple possible ‘illas. Even the very process of determining what constituted an ‘illa in a particular case had its own name—ta‘lil (“ratiocination”)—derived from the same Arabic root.91 Deriving a legal verdict in a situation for which the Qur’an and Sunna do not offer clear proofs was a delicate matter indeed. “While standing at the core of shar‘i epistemology,” writes Kevin Reinhart, “the ‘illa is the most problematic link in the epistemological chain because there is no objective procedure for its determination.”92 Getting it wrong is to tamper with God’s will.

  Therefore, Thanvi asserts, only a mujtahid—one qualified to engage in independent legal reasoning (ijtihad) from the scriptural sources—was permitted to derive new laws by way of analogy. As far as he was concerned, neither he nor anyone else alive in his day, moreover, was a mujtahid.93 He saw the derivation of the law as an epistemically sensitive process that could go horribly wrong in the hands of someone ill qualified. What if, he speculates, someone were to decide that the ‘illa for the Qur’anic prohibition of adultery (zina) is to avoid confusion about bloodlines? Would it, then, become permissible to fornicate with a woman who is barren? The very idea, of course, is an abomination.94 If even the ‘ulama were susceptible to this sort of wayward legal reasoning, what of the masses? “There is an illness these days in that the masses search for the rationales [‘illat] behind rulings [ahkam],” which was in turn part of a broader “mass illness, in which everyone wants to be . . . a mujtahid.”95 This is why “the rationales [‘illat] for legal rulings [akham-i shar‘iyya] should never be discussed in front of lay Muslims.”96 For Thanvi, discussing the ‘illa before the public was a veritable invitation for lay Muslims to form their own legal “verdicts” on contentious issues, something only the mujtahid is qualified to do—not average ‘ulama, not even Thanvi himself, let alone the masses. Thus, he urged lay Muslims not to inquire about the reasons behind legal rulings, and urged the ‘ulama not to discuss the reasons behind legal rulings publicly.

  Two clarifications about Thanvi’s stance are important here. First, as Fareeha Khan has convincingly shown, despite Thanvi’s rhetoric about the utter absence of ijtihad in his time, he was a mujtahid in every way but in name. Thanvi’s ijtihad ranged from rulings on contracts to rulings on parental rights (huquq al-walidayn) that diverged markedly from Hanafi precedent. Khan argues that Thanvi fits the classic ranking of the jurist qualified to do ijtihad within the legal issues pertaining to a given school (a mujtahid fi’l masa’il), if not the higher rank, one qualified to make decisions on new issues not covered by the school’s founder (a mujtahid fi’l madhhab)—the founder, in this case, being Abu Hanifa. Calling his decisions “ijtihad” would have run afoul of
the Deobandis’ carefully crafted image as staunch defenders of traditional legal conservatism (taqlid).97

  Second, and more germane to our purposes here, Thanvi was also stretched between his impulse to curtail public debate about knotty legal and theological issues and his awareness that the public was already debating such things and that he should therefore at least intervene to mitigate the damage. He did not always manage that tension well. A case in point is the rather odd book Al-Masalih al-‘aqliyya li-l ahkam al-naqliyya (The rational benefits of transmitted rulings), published in 1916, in which Thanvi systematically offers “rational” explanations for a whole array of Islamic beliefs and practices, from prayer and fasting to dietary restrictions and criminal penalties. (To take one example, pork, he says, is forbidden because pigs naturally tend to consume impurities [najasat], which are then transmitted to the one consuming it. While Thanvi does not offer such commentary, one can imagine him fielding a question about whether pork would then become permissible for a Muslim if a pig were raised in such a way as to ensure that the animal consumed no impurities. This is precisely the risk of offering “rational” explanations for legal rulings.)98 Zaman persuasively argues that Thanvi was under great pressure to appeal to the “rational” sensibilities of an English-educated readership, and that this text stands in tension, if not outright contradiction, with what he says elsewhere.99 Let me return momentarily to the adultery example I just discussed. In Al-Masalih al-‘aqliyya li-l ahkam al-naqliyya, Thanvi provides a rational reason for forbidding adultery, the very thing we just saw him caution against. He provides two reasons, in fact: First, adultery has a deleterious effect on the social order (intizam-i tamaddun); it is liable to provoke anger and retaliation on the part of the families involved. Second—and notably, given the discussion above—adultery mixes bloodlines (khalt-i nasab).100