One more source will suffice to demonstrate the range of texts that Deobandis invoked in their thinking about sainthood. Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi—among the most important Deobandis of the mid–twentieth century, and one who will loom large in subsequent chapters—drew on Ibn Taymiyya’s (d. 1328) discussion of sainthood. Like Kalabadhi and Dimashqi, Ibn Taymiyya, too, defines walaya as the opposite of enmity (‘adawa), insofar as, he notes, walaya connotes proximity to God and enmity connotes distance from God.78 He divides all people into three groups: those who are dominated by their ego (zalim li-nafsihi) and ignore God’s commands completely; those who shun what is forbidden and carry out what is commanded (muqtasid; literally, “one who adopts a middle course”); and finally, those who “excel in goodness” (sabiq al-khayrat), who not only shun what is forbidden and carry out what is commanded but also shun what is abominable (makruh) and embrace what is lawful (masnun). The latter two groups are among the “saints” (awliya’) referred to in Qur’an 10:62: “Surely the awliya’ of God shall not fear, nor shall they grieve.” Thus, he says, “the awliya’ of God are the pious believers [al-mu’minun al-muttaqun], but these are divided into the general [‘amm], who take the middle course [muqtasidun], and the special [khass], who excel in goodness [sabiqun].”79
Ibn Taymiyya’s notion that prayer and piety are the primary criteria for identifying the saint is one that Deobandis embrace and expand. We see this, above all, in Thanvi. Thanvi, too, references this distinction between a “common” and “special” walaya. Commenting, like Ibn Taymiyya, on Qur’an 10:62–63—“Truly the awliya’ of God shall not fear, nor shall they grieve. Those who have faith (amanu) and remain pious (yattaquna), for them are glad tidings, in this life and in the afterlife”—Thanvi says:
Two pillars of walayat are noted [in this verse]: faith [iman] and piety [taqwa]. Those who have attained degrees of faith and piety have also attained the rank of walayat. If the lowest stage of faith and piety has been attained, by means of correct beliefs and deeds, the lowest stage of walayat is also attained, which all believers have acquired. This is called general sainthood [walayat-i ‘amma]. And if the highest degree of faith and piety has been attained, then the highest degree of walayat has also been attained. This is called special sainthood [walayat-i khassa]. And—technically speaking [istilahan]—this is who we call a saint [wali].80
The only difference between the first kind of wali and the second, he then adds, is that the latter possesses “complete faith” (iman-i kamil) and “complete piety” (taqwa-yi kamil).
There is a cognizance here, on Thanvi’s part, in a text that would have been read mostly by fellow Sufis and Sufi disciples, that the latter is what Sufis typically mean when they speak of the wali. This is, “technically speaking,” Sufi sainthood. But it was important, for Thanvi, that average Muslims could aspire to a saintly life. Thus, in Bihishti zewar, a book written explicitly for lay Muslim women, as noted above, Thanvi writes:
When a Muslim worships faithfully, avoids sin, maintains no love for this world [dunya], and obeys the Messenger in every way, then he is a friend of God [Allah ka dost] and God’s beloved. Such a person is called a wali. Sometimes they achieve deeds that others are unable to achieve. These deeds are called miracles [karamat]. However high a rank he may achieve, a wali is never able to equal a prophet. However beloved by God he may become, a wali is duty-bound to the Shari‘a as long as he remains within his senses. He is not excused from prayer, fasting, or any other obligatory form of worship. It is not correct for him to commit any sin. Anyone who acts contrary to the Shari‘a is unable to be a friend of God [Allah ka dost].81
Here Thanvi lays out a starkly minimalist definition of the wali, the contours of which we have seen in the texts discussed above. To be sure, many earlier theorists of sainthood also believed that the wali was constrained by the Shari‘a, but noting this so explicitly here is, I submit, part of Thanvi’s broader project of public reform. For him, it is essential that readers of Bihishti zewar understand that although the saints are “special,” they are so only to the degree that they excel in embodying Muslim legal and ethical norms.
We encounter this “flattened” conception of Sufi sainthood in numerous other Deobandi works. Muhammad Kifayat Allah defined the saint simply as “a Muslim who obeys the commands of God and His Messenger, worships abundantly and refrains from sins, loves God and His Messenger more than everything in the world, and is close to God and His Messenger.”82 Muhammad Manzur Nu‘mani’s Islam kya hai (What is Islam?) makes this even more explicit: “This little book contains the essence of the whole of Islam. All the lessons of the Qur’an and Hadith have been collected in its twenty chapters, such that a common man [‘amm admi] can not only be a good Muslim, but can also become a perfect believer [mu’min-i kamil] and a saint of God [wali Allah] also.”83
It is no coincidence, I suggest, that these sentiments appear in texts that Deobandis wrote for a lay Muslim audience. In later Deobandi works, the notion that anyone can be a saint merges with a notion that everyone must be a saint, for if Sufism is defined as ethics, and ethics are obligatory, sainthood itself—at least the “common” variety—becomes obligatory. A contemporary Pakistani disciple of Thanvi’s, Hakim Muhammad Akhtar (d. 2013), makes this point explicitly:
[Becoming] a friend of God [Allah ka dost] is an individual duty [farz-i ‘ayn], binding upon every Muslim. To be a scholar [‘alim] of the religion, or to memorize the Qur’an, or be a mufti, is a general duty [farz-i kifaya] [incumbent on the Muslim community as a whole]. In any given town, some will memorize the Qur’an or become a religious scholar, and so that general duty will be fulfilled. But becoming . . . God-fearing and abstaining from sin is a duty for every Muslim. One who recites supererogatory prayers [tahajjud] by night, who performs the required acts of worship by day, but does not save himself from sin is not a wali of God. But one who does not recite the supererogatory prayers or perform supererogatory acts of worship, and only fulfills those duties emphasized in the Sunna, yet is free of sin—he is a wali Allah.84
Akhtar states that being pious and free of sin is obligatory for all Muslims. He then says freedom from sin is what defines the wali. Therefore, it follows that all Muslims qua Muslims are awliya’.
Kelly Pemberton has argued that Deobandis undercut the intercessory roles of Sufi masters and Sufi saints alike by making “fundamental texts, teachings, and tenets of Islam available to all, and simultaneously encouraging the idea that on the basis of such knowledge each individual must develop the ability to make informed decisions about what constituted ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ matters of faith, rather than relying solely upon the dictates of spiritual guides.”85 I would argue that this is half correct. There is no doubt that Deobandis emphasized “correct” belief and practice, nor is there any doubt that they made strategic use of print to convey these reforms. But I believe it is clear that the Sufi master, as conduit of Prophetic faiz and human interpreter of the normative order, is never replaced by the text. In the next chapter, however, we will begin to explore how this delicate balance between books and bodies begins to wear thin as the Deoband movement becomes a global one. We will see how mid- and late-twentieth-century Deobandis like Muhammad Taqi ‘Usmani begin to see the text as the defining feature of an expanding Deobandi tradition—one that, however, also conjures a tradition that still resonates on the level of an affective allegiance to its masters: a tradition that, for ‘Usmani, is “felt” (mahsus) in the body as much as it is apprehended by the mind.
5
What Does a Tradition Feel Like?
Up to this point, we have explored how the Deoband movement mobilized a newly found urgency toward public reform among a closely knit community of ‘ulama in colonial north India, one that sought to draw lay Muslims away from the enticements of devotional practices whose multiple forms of bid‘a and shirk threatened Muslims’ salvation, and toward a renewed engagement with religious knowledge (‘ilm-i din) and a Sufi ethic
s of self-formation nurtured through the master–disciple relationship and communities of like-minded persons. We saw how these ‘ulama, most notably Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, composed simple primers on “correct” belief and practice for Urdu readers to attain these objectives, at the same time that he sought to constrain readers’ sense of interpretive independence by urging them not to delve into complicated legal issues (masa’il) and to consult the ‘ulama whenever they were doubtful about something they had read. For Thanvi and others, books were increasingly necessary, but never sufficient, as a mean of acquiring religious knowledge. Knowledge was never meaningful in and of itself, but only insofar as it was applied to self-reform (islah-i nafs) and implemented in practical life (a‘mal).
This chapter delineates how this delicate balance became strained, and how Deobandis sought to mitigate those fissures as Deoband itself became a global movement. From this point forward, the book shifts its focus away from the major themes and architects of Deobandi thought and toward the growth of Deoband as a movement and a network. In particular, this chapter queries the notion of “tradition” discussed in the introduction—namely, how tradition is configured in a global network bound together by the circulation of books and bodies, and what makes that tradition cohere—or fail to cohere. To that end, the chapter examines two pivotal sites for understanding how Deoband became global. The first is the career and writings of Qari Muhammad Tayyib (1867–1983), who presided over the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband as chancellor (muhtamim) from 1928 to 1980—the decades in which Deobandi madrasas were founded in countries as far-flung as the United Kingdom, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. In the work of Tayyib, I argue, the concept of the maslak (“path” or “way”) becomes a central category for theorizing the coherence of Deobandi tradition, and its centrality increased precisely as Deoband became global. In other words, as the network expanded across borders, its scholars increasingly reflected on exactly what linked the network together and how.
The second site for understanding Deoband as a global phenomenon is the rise of the Tablighi Jama‘at—of which, not coincidentally, Tayyib became a staunch advocate. Now the world’s largest Muslim revivalist movement, the Tablighi Jama‘at (“Preaching Party”) promotes tabligh—derived from the Arabic root “to convey,” but here meaning “preaching” or “proselytization”—between Muslims, as opposed to proselytization of non-Muslims. A core argument of this chapter and the following one is that the Tablighi Jama‘at is an extension of the very logic of Deoband’s program of public reform—emphasizing correct belief, personal piety, and the virtues of companionship (suhbat) while striving to avoid contentious issues (masa’il)—and an engine of Deoband’s presence in public life, one energized by Deoband’s network of seminaries but functioning independently of it. Like its relationship with the reading public itself, Deoband’s relationship with the Tablighi Jama‘at has been an ambivalent one. As we will see, the founder of the Jama‘at, Muhammad Ilyas, sought to strike the very balance between lay Muslim knowledge and deference to the ‘ulama that Thanvi advocated—‘ulama who, importantly, had serious qualms about the very notion of an organized movement of lay religious revival. If this chapter demonstrates how the Tablighi Jama‘at was an agent of Deobandi mobility in theory, the following one demonstrates that point in practice, showing how public consciousness of “Deoband” in South Africa was inextricably linked to Tablighi missions in the 1960s, even though Deobandi scholars had lived and taught there largely under the radar as early as the 1920s, simply as ‘ulama rather than as “Deobandi” ‘ulama. It is no accident, additionally, that some of the most adamant defenders of the Tablighi Jama‘at were Deobandis who were based in South Africa or spent time lecturing, teaching, and training Sufi disciples there.
We will also see here how both Tayyib and Ilyas understood the seminary (madrasa) and Sufi lodge (khanqah) as dual, complementary spaces of moral discipline and formation. They understood them, as did Deobandis before them, as “sacred” spaces imbued with affective power by and through which the normative order could be inculcated in the hearts and bodies of students. In this sense, they approached the seminary and Sufi lodge as zones of spatial normativity—in essence, as nomoi. Carl Schmitt argued that the concept of nomos cannot be reduced either to “law” or “norm”—the latter probably its closest cognate in English.1 Rather, the word has a spatial quality, meaning “both ‘to divide’ and ‘to pasture,’” a meaning ultimately derived from the jurisdiction that comes from cultivating land.2 For Schmitt, “Nomos is the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the form of political, social and religious order determined by this process. . . . In particular, nomos can be described as a wall, because, like a wall, it, too, is based on sacred orientations. The nomos can grow and multiply like land and property: all human nomoi are ‘nourished’ by a single divine nomos.”3 Nomos, then, is inextricably bound up with space and place. In a broader sense, this makes it useful for understanding the spatiality of the maslak, as well as limitations of the word “law” for understanding Deobandis’ juro-ethical discourse as a set of normative dispositions.
As we saw in the first chapter, this is in no small way the outcome of the demise of Islamic law as it was exercised before colonialism, and the concomitant impulse to cultivate the space of the seminary as a “religious” refuge—one in which learning was an act of devotion, free from the utilitarian calculus of “useful knowledge.” But this moral order could itself be rendered mobile in the bodies of the teachers, students, and wandering preachers (tablighis) who, quite literally, embodied that order. The space of the Sufi lodge, too, complemented the seminary by cultivating in practice the legal norms that seminary students came to understand discursively. And just as the space of the seminary was a refuge, we have seen how Deobandis understood the spaces of the market, the railway station, the shrine—all places where crowds congregate—as spaces bereft of the nomoi that governed the seminary and Sufi lodge, which made the embodiment of those nomoi in one’s demeanor, speech, clothing—in short, in the entire complex of social relationships—all the more essential. There was something, in short, that inhered in the very space of the seminary and Sufi lodge, such that it defined the character of those who dwelled in them. Thanvi captured this sensibility in telling the story of a police officer assigned to a case of theft at a seminary in Kanpur. The officer told the shocked students and teachers, “I’m sorry, but madrasa students steal things, too.” Thanvi responded to the event differently, with a sardonic retort: “A madrasa student is never a thief . . . though a thief may be a madrasa student.”4
THEORIZING A GLOBAL MASLAK: QARI MUHAMMAD TAYYIB (D. 1982)
In Arabic, the word maslak means “way” or “path,” but in South Asia, the term has come to denote the features that define a given school, sect, or movement. Thus, Deobandis have their maslak, Barelvis have theirs, as do the Ahl-i Hadith, and so forth. Scholars have, therefore, understood the concept almost entirely through the prism of sectarian distinction.5 By contrast, I argue that, for the Deobandis, the maslak is as important for defining internal coherence as it is for defining external difference. For the Deobandi ‘ulama, the maslak is more than a set of beliefs; it is best understood as a comprehensive juro-ethical discourse, a discipline oriented around the cultivation of specific affects. It is a normative world that one comes to inhabit through proximity to the bodies of those who already do. Moreover, this chapter will show how these two processes of boundary making cannot be separated: one defines and constitutes the other.
Qari Muhammad Tayyib (d. 1982) was the seminal theorist of the Deobandi maslak. The grandson of Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, he was chancellor of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband for over half a century, from 1929 to 1982. He was the Sufi disciple of both Husain Ahmad Madani and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, who designated him as a khalifa, giving him the authority to initiate others.6 Tayyib promoted the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and the Deoband movement not only i
n his written work but in numerous lectures across the Middle East and Africa in the 1960s.7 Like the other Deobandis we have seen, he believed that knowing the law could not be understood outside of a carefully cultivated ethical sensibility, the paragons of which were the founding jurists (mujtahidin), who were endowed with a direct intuition (‘ilm-i ladunni) of divine norms—a subtle critique of Salafis and others for whom, Tayyib suggests, the return to independent reasoning (ijtihad) was not only a false panacea but a mechanical process devoid of the law’s ethical underpinnings.8
The central text in Tayyib’s oeuvre is Maslak-i ‘ulama-yi Deoband (The way of the Deobandi scholars), written in 1975. This was not the first time that a Deobandi scholar attempted to summarize what Deobandis believe. The earliest effort to do so was Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri’s Al-Muhannad ‘ala al-mufannad (Sword upon the disproved), composed in Arabic in 1907 in response to queries from Arab ‘ulama on what Deobandi scholars believed, in the wake of Ahmad Raza Khan’s declaration of unbelief (takfir) against the Deobandis in 1906.9 Significantly, however, Saharanpuri does not describe Deobandis as having a “maslak.”10 The maslak, again, becomes for Tayyib a means of making sense of a tradition rapidly becoming global.
Maslak-i ‘ulama-yi Deoband puts forth two basic, complementary arguments: that the Deoband movement is comprehensive, unifying all aspects of traditional Islamic law, theology, and Sufism; and that it avoids any “extremes,” tracing a middle path between, for example, those who indulge in excesses of Sufi piety and those who reject Sufism as a whole. It is what he calls a “middle” (mutawassit) way that privileges following past legal precedent (taqlid) over independent reasoning (ijtihad), and a “sober” Sufism over excessive Sufi devotions. While Tayyib does not explicitly make such a connection, he invokes a symbolism of the “middle” that has been animated by numerous currents in Islamic theology, as for example in Sunni theologians’ claims to avoid the “extremes” (ghuluw; lit., “exaggeration”) of those who took Qur’anic descriptions of God’s “face” and “hand” literally, and those who “stripped God of all attributes” altogether.11 For Tayyib, this middle path strives to avoid any form of “excess” (tafrit) or “extremism” (ghuluw) and is consistently “balanced” (mu‘tadil). Part of this balance is what Tayyib calls Deoband’s “comprehensiveness” (jami‘iyyat), the idea that the movement is grounded fundamentally in the Sunna and the moral rectitude of the Prophet’s Companions, which are in turn channeled simultaneously through the transmission of discursive knowledge and through Sufism’s chain of initiatic relationships that originated with the Prophet himself. “The People of the Sunna and Community [Ahl-i Sunna wa-l Jama‘a] adopted the very same path of comprehensiveness [as the Companions],” Tayyib asserts. “This comprehensiveness was transmitted, link by link, until . . . it passed on to the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, which in turn transmitted it to the Deobandi ‘ulama. This comprehensiveness became their distinctive trait.”12
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