Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  Is this not a direct contradiction with what we just saw above? To be fair, nowhere in this text does Thanvi say that he is offering the reader legal rationales (‘illat) for what the Shari‘a mandates; he is offering “rational,” one might even say quasi-sociological, explanations for what is already clear and incontrovertible. In other words, one must abide by the Qur’anic prohibition on adultery, but if explaining to an inquisitive reader that prohibiting adultery has the added benefit of avoiding confusion in patriliny and the social discord that accompanies it, then so be it. And these are the very readers for whom he says he writes this book in its preface. “In our era,” Thanvi writes, “the effect of modern education [ta‘lim-i jadid] is that many people have developed a desire and a taste for looking into the benefits [masalih] [of legal rulings], and although the real cure for this would be to halt such investigations, given the harms that arise from them, experience shows most people will reject such advice, with the exception of certain sincere students among the common people.” And to ensure no reader takes the book to have any legal import whatsoever, “these benefits are not indicated [within the textual sources], nor are they the basis for the rulings themselves.” He then clarifies that the basis for writing such a book at all was partially that Shah Wali Allah’s Hujjat Allah al-baligha (The conclusive argument from God), a book that also explored the “benefits” (masalih) of God’s revelation, had been translated into Urdu—a worrisome development for Thanvi, since it was never intended for a mass readership.101 In a sense, then, Thanvi is trying to get ahead of a problem that had already started to fester.

  Thanvi fully understood that he was walking a hermeneutic tightrope. He was trying to attract certain “educated” readers—skeptical of the ‘ulama, perhaps even disaffected toward religion in general—with “commonsense” (afham-i ‘amma) explanations for what religion commands of them, yet attempting to undercut their attraction to such explanations at the very same time. Once again, we see Thanvi simultaneously struggling to bring certain readers into his orbit through the power of print, while insisting that relying on print alone is harmful. The mediation of the ‘ulama is vital.

  Islamic law was by no means the only subject on which Deobandis fought to curtail public misunderstanding, nor was Thanvi the only Deobandi to undertake this effort. The same ambivalence about public knowledge informs their Hadith commentaries as well, as Joel Blecher shows. In his commentary on Hadiths related to discretionary punishments (ta‘zir) in the application of criminal law, Anwar Shah Kashmiri (d. 1933) accepted that Hanafi traditions permitted enormous latitude in interpreting such punishments. Nevertheless, to obviate the possibility that “the general public would deliver severe punishments without proper training,” Kashmiri was clear that only a “traditionally trained expert” could interpret the law. As Blecher notes, Kashmiri’s concern was about, for instance, “an overzealous husband or father taking the law into his own hands, beating his spouse or his child abusively.”102 As we have seen time and again, whether with respect to basic belief and practice or to the interpretation of the Shari‘a, Deobandis believe that the public is adrift without the ‘ulama.

  Most Deobandis situated their approach to what the public can know and should know between the rarefied interpretive hierarchies of most premodern scholars and the hermeneutic populism of figures like Muhammad Isma‘il. This always unstable balance ended up conjuring specific Muslim publics as much as it shaped preexisting ones, for if the likes of Imdad Allah were hesitant to involve the masses in controversial matters, later Deobandis bring these very same publics into being by virtue of calling them toward their normative ideals. We have seen how Deobandis—above all, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi—became invested in the task of educating Muslim publics just enough to know the spiritual dangers of mawlud, ‘urs, and other practices, but not so much that the public arrogated to itself the wherewithal to arrive at its own conclusions about these practices without the input of the ‘ulama—a delicate balancing act indeed. Thanvi and others sought to achieve this task by educating Muslim publics on a mass scale in the basics of Islamic belief and ritual practice. In the next two chapters, we will see the tension between these opposing forces—the impetus toward lay Muslim revival through endowing individual Muslims with religious knowledge, and the countervailing impetus toward constraining their interpretation of the very same knowledge—play out in two complementary ways.

  First, we will explore in the following chapter how Deobandis’ Sufi pedagogy, at the nexus of the law (shari‘at) and the Sufi path (tariqat), included a similar ambivalence about “studying” Sufism through books. Just as one should “study” the Qur’an only under the supervision of a scholar, one should embark on the Sufi path only under the tutelage of a Sufi master. And just as lay Muslims have no business discussing Islamic legal issues (masa’il), they also have no business discussing ecstatic utterances (shathiyat) of the Sufis or reading Sufi poetry, replete as these works are with abstruse metaphysical concepts, like the “unity of being” (wahdat al-wujud), that can lead to the very speculation that, in turn, leads to shirk. Then, in chapter 5, we will examine yet another iteration of this ambivalence as it emerged in the origins of the Tablighi Jama‘at, a revivalist movement that grew out of Deobandi reform. We will see how the movement’s founder, Muhammad Ilyas, built an organized program that essentially translated Thanvi’s teachings into practice, combining Sufi ethics (shorn, to some extent, of actual Sufi orders) with a modicum of religious knowledge—one that encouraged lay Muslims to reform themselves and then seek out others to reform, under the (at least partial) supervision of the ‘ulama, while discouraging discussion of legal issues and other controversial matters.

  4

  Remaking the Self

  The previous two chapters detailed how Deobandi scholars theorized the normative order and how Muslim publics were, at once, the source of normative disorder and a site where that disorder could be remedied. That remedy entailed endowing “common” Muslims with the religious knowledge necessary to correct erroneous beliefs, perform core ritual duties, and recognize risks to salvation: illicit innovations in religion (bid‘a), and associating God’s attributes with entities that are not God (shirk). The previous chapter described this process as remaking the public. The current chapter builds on that argument by homing in on the self at the center of that public, and the ethical fashioning in which that self was called to engage. Deobandis conceived this self-fashioning almost exclusively through the vocabularies of Sufism. And just as Deobandis believed one could not fully embrace religious knowledge without the aid of religious scholars (‘ulama), so, too, they believed that one could not fully embody Sufi ethics without the companionship (suhbat) of Sufi masters. The need for living, in-the-flesh ‘ulama and for living, in-the-flesh Sufi masters were two sides of the same coin. It was the centripetal, anthropocentric force that counterbalanced the centrifugal force of an increasingly bibliocentric economy of knowledge. For the Deobandis, the self is best cultivated by way of other selves.

  By “self,” in this context, I refer to the nafs—translated variously as “lower soul, carnal soul, appetitive soul, self, lower self, impulsive self, instinctual self, [or] ego”—the transformation of which Sara Sviri described as the “sine qua non [of] Sufism.”1 In many ways the nafs is analogous to the Freudian id, and in fact mid-twentieth-century Arab psychoanalysts made that comparison explicit, drawing on classical Sufism to better understand Freud.2 Remaking the public was a call for the individual to take the nafs both as an object of introspection (muhasaba) and purification (tazkiya), and as a quasi-autonomous subject doing the inspecting and purifying. I describe this as a quasi autonomy because the self called to interrogation is not directed toward the telos of vanquishing authority but, paradoxically, toward reaffirming it. The subjected self is reoriented around the authoritative structure of the Sunna, as mediated through and interpreted by Sufi scholars, at the very same time that it is liberated from competing modes of subject
ivation, whether false customs (rusum) or illicit innovations (bid‘at).

  This notion of self and selfhood is, then, arguably quite different from what Immanuel Kant famously called for in the opening lines of “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”: “Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”3 The Deobandi self is one that comes to fruition precisely through deference to the authority of the ‘ulama for the acquisition of religious knowledge and deference to the Sufi master for turning that knowledge into action. The autonomy that the Deobandi self seeks to achieve is autonomy from the constraints that customs and illicit beliefs place on one’s agency. As the authority of these diminishes through the work of self-reformation, the authority of the Sunna replaces it at the very same time, instantiated in the bodies of other reformed selves. These are not two separate processes. Autonomy as auto-nomos—arrogating to oneself (auto) one’s own law (nomos)—was never the goal of Deobandi disciplines of the self. To relinquish oneself from the clutches of faux normativities was always already to give oneself over to the formative power of the Sunna. It is not, then, an “autonomy” in the conventional sense of (mere) self-determination.4 It may be useful, rather, to situate Deobandis’ notion of autonomy within the broader genealogies of the self-governing individual that J. Barton Scott explores in his study of reformist Hinduism. On one hand, the Deobandi notion of autonomy bears more than a passing resemblance to the liberal ideal of the self-governing individual, with its critiques of the constraints that “customs” place on individual agency. On the other hand, it stands in stark contrast to this liberal ideal as an “exit from priestcraft”—that is, a self liberated from religious authority. As Scott demonstrates, this liberal ideal was always something of a fiction. It was, to borrow Charles Taylor’s phrase, a “subtraction story,” premised on the false (but still powerful) idea that once you “subtract the priest . . . you find ‘modern man’ just waiting to be free.” This story ignores, of course, the extent to which liberal selfhood is “the contingent product of the modern social imaginary rather than its antecedent source.”5 But more importantly for our purposes, the liberal ideal of selfhood overlooks the extent to which the self is formed through relations with other selves. Against this Kantian “fantasy” of the autonomous self, Scott sees in Gandhi’s writings a “model of ascetic self-rule [that] entails obedience, asking that the subject inhabit a norm or rule that by definition precedes him,” a model that “implies relationality . . . that entwines the subject with others.”6

  Foucault famously described Stoic philosophies of self-care as an “intensification of the relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as the subject of one’s acts.”7 While Deobandis certainly took the self as an object of intense introspection and discipline, it is important not to imagine the Deobandi self as solipsistic, or one conjured entirely through the act of introspection itself. In his study of Stoic spiritual exercises, Pierre Hadot recognized that self-mastery is a process that transpires through dialogue, and dialogue is always embedded in a community.8 Sajjad Rizvi’s application of Hadot to Islamic philosophy could just as well describe ethical self-formation in Deobandi Sufism. Rizvi describes the insufficiency of the written word without a human mediation or an interpretive community: “The written word is an aide-mémoire for the spoken word,” which is in turn predicated on “the revealed word, encoded in a sacred book, requiring a spiritual master to initiate and explicate.”9 We will see below how the pursuit of self-mastery, then, takes shape through the tutelage of a Sufi master, and comes to full fruition, ideally, in a community of other reformed selves within the disciplined sensoria of the Sufi lodge (khanqah). This sort of self-fashioning is premised on the notion that it is not “belief, discussion or persuasion . . . [that] transforms a person, but practice—action, repetitive behavior, and physical habits. It also points to a process, an on-going practice, the fulfillment of which in this life is impossible.”10 The self, then, is a project. The goal of fashioning the self, which always takes the Sunna as the ultimate reference point, is never complete; rather, one approaches that goal asymptotically, the way a curve approaches a line.

  This is, then, an ethical discourse that one accesses through the study of the Qur’an and the Sunna and by observing and imitating the pious exemplars of the Sufi tradition, who were its living embodiments. This understanding of ethics, it should be noted, is different from ethics as the deduction of universally normative laws through the rational faculties, associated most notably with Kantian philosophy. Deobandis believe their values to be universally normative, of course, but they derive those values from participating in a tradition. It is an ethics based not just on assenting to metaphysical claims about truth, but equally on embodying pious dispositions in accord with the Prophetic model—or, more precisely, how that Prophetic model has been filtered through centuries of commentary. It is an “imitatio Muhammadi,” as Annemarie Schimmel put it, yet never mere passive imitation, since these pious dispositions must be actively internalized.11 Such subjectivation is “the production of a morally and socially bounded individual self through a process of inward reflexivity,”12 yet for the Deobandis such mastery is never in the abstract: mastery of the self is not an end in itself, but a means of freeing one from the constraints of this world, constraints that distract human beings from the sole reason they were placed on this earth—namely, to worship God and express gratitude (shukr) for his beneficence. In the case of Deobandis’ Sufi ethics, the cumulative power of their own “tradition” exerts itself upon this discourse of self-transformation.

  SUFI ETHICS OF LIFE

  Deobandis use two terms that connote “ethics:” akhlaq and adab. Akhlaq derives from the semantic root that connotes “creation” and sees the ethical as an attunement to the highest ideals for which God created human beings, especially worship. The word is translated variously as “ethics,” but also “disposition” and “character.” Similarly, with its semantic connotations of “disciplining,” adab connotes “civility,” “etiquette,” and “character.” Deobandis have called adab the essence of Sufism. Zafar Ahmad ‘Usmani declared that “[t]he entirety of Sufism is adab,”13 while Rashid Ahmad Gangohi deemed adab its “most fundamental” aspect.14 He elaborated on this idea elsewhere, in what is a veritable summary of the entire Deobandi approach to Sufism:

  The Sufi’s knowledge is knowledge of the inner [batin] and outer [zahir] aspects of the religion [din] and of the power of certainty [yaqin]. This is the highest form of knowledge. The reality of the Sufi is the adornment of character [akhlaq] and remaining perpetually turned toward God. Sufism is the adornment of the self with God’s ethics, the eradication of one’s will, and absorption in seeking the satisfaction of God. The Sufi’s ethics are identical to those of the Prophet Muhammad, in accordance with what God has said: “Truly [Prophet] you are of great character [khulq]” [Qur’an 68:4].

  Gangohi goes on, in this statement, to describe the Sufi’s character in detail:

  The Sufi’s character is as follows. The Sufi regards himself as the lowliest, which is the opposite of pride. The Sufi is kind in dealing with God’s creation and patient with people, is gentle with others, shuns wrath and anger, sympathizes with others and lets them take precedence. With abundant compassion, the Sufi respects what is due to others above what is due to himself, is generous, forgiving of faults and mistakes. . . . The entirety of Sufism is, in fact, character [adab].15

  Numerous Deobandi works on Sufism describe the self as an ethical work in process that entails the divestment of harmful traits (akhlaq-i razila)—among them love of the world (hubb-i dunya), love of fame (hubb-i jah), greed (hirs), pride (takabbur), hypocrisy (riya), lust (shahvat), and envy (hasad)—and the adoption of virtuous ones (akhlaq-i hamida)—God-consciousness (taqwa), gratitude (shukr), patience (sabr), love (muhabbat), asceticism (zuhd), humility (khushu‘), and others.
This discourse long predates the Deoband movement. Sufis have understood these as stages (maqamat) on the Sufi path for centuries. For al-Qushayri (d. 1072), “Sufism means to take on every sublime moral characteristic from the life of the Prophet and to leave behind every lowly one.”16

  Ethics is, therefore, the space where law and Sufism converge. This mutual imbrication of inward and outward is the basis for the assertion that law (Shari‘a) and the Sufi path (tariqa) are interconnected and, indeed, mutually constitutive. Even Shahab Ahmed’s description of Sufism as “para-nomian”—“beside, beyond and above law,” as opposed to against it—does not do justice to the mutually imbricated nature of Sufism and law in Deobandi understandings of them.17 This ethical work is achieved, inwardly, when one becomes conscientious of God at every waking moment, which is reflected, outwardly, by performing the core ritual obligations of a Muslim naturally and reflexively. For Gangohi, this is the internalization of law and the process of removing any dissonance between the legal injunctions and their performance: