Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  For one, Thanvi was deeply disturbed by reports that the Arya Samaj was pressuring Meos to apostatize, and Thanvi saw apostasy (irtidad) as a far greater fitna than organized tabligh itself.65 But even if he had qualms about organized lay preaching, he was adamant that the masses should, or must, work to reform others: that is, they must do tabligh. At its core, for Thanvi, tabligh simply means actively striving to reform oneself and others, starting with one’s own family. In this sense, as he elaborated in a sermon at Thana Bhawan in May 1923, tabligh must not be solely the prerogative of the ‘ulama; it is the responsibility of all Muslims.66 He states in jest that if one thinks of tabligh as something only the ‘ulama should do, then one might as well ask the ‘ulama to fast and pray on one’s behalf as well, for tabligh is no less obligatory than fasting and praying.67 But Muslims must consult with the ‘ulama in the process of doing tabligh. Here, too, Thanvi seeks to keep the ‘ulama at the center of the reformist nexus. “Reading books on medicine does not make one a physician. Possessing the means to heal is what makes one a physician. Likewise, reading books on Qur’an, Hadith, and law alone does not give one true knowledge. This is merely the recollection of words. To possess true knowledge, something above and beyond books is necessary,” he explained. “This is the companionship [suhbat] of the people of God [ahl-i Allah], who are, nowadays, usually the ‘ulama.”68

  Thanvi notes that the act of tabligh is rooted in the Qur’an itself, though the term does not appear there. “Commanding the good and forbidding the evil” (amr bi’l ma‘ruf wa nahy ‘an al-munkar) is Thanvi’s point of departure, citing Qur’an 3:110: “You are the best of nations who has been raised for mankind. You enjoin the good and forbid the evil.”69 But the Qur’an also provides the model for how lay Muslims should engage in reforming others. From the verse “Call [others] to the way of your Lord with good wisdom and instruction, and debate with them in a better way” (16:125), he argues that Muslims should offer “gentle advice [narm nasihat] . . . in a manner without blame or reproach.” Likewise, as Qur’an 25:63 proclaims, “When the ignorant address them, they reply peacefully.”70

  In seeking to delegate responsibilities for doing tabligh between lay Muslims and scholars, Thanvi carefully differentiated between four types of tabligh: that which is addressed to individuals, that which is addressed to the masses, that which gives “general” advice on religion, and that which gives “detailed” advice. Tabligh to individuals—for example, parents giving children instruction on the proper performance of prayer or the Hajj—is obligatory upon all Muslims, whereas tabligh toward the masses is permissible only by the ‘ulama. Likewise, discussing major issues of the religion—prayer, fasting, and so on—is the responsibility of all. Preaching to the masses and discussing legal issues (masa’il) is permissible only by the ‘ulama.71 Accordingly, Thanvi lists several conditions for non-‘ulama doing tabligh. In brief, first, one must begin with absolute sincerity (ikhlas); doing tabligh for any purpose other than conveying religious knowledge—for example, fame or compensation—is strictly forbidden. Second, one must show compassion (shafaqat) and gentleness (narmi). Third, one must simply do tabligh; one should not lecture on the rules of tabligh. Fourth, he says, one should be modest and give specific forms of religious advice. One should not lecture about matters outside of one’s expertise, or lecture to crowds.72

  As with nearly everything in the Deoband movement, of course, these concerns had precedents in the premodern period. Jonathan Berkey has explored similar concerns among medieval ‘ulama about popular preachers who resorted to stories (qisas) of dubious authenticity to convey religious knowledge, often to the chagrin of the ‘ulama. These ‘ulama voiced concerns about the masses’ capacity to understand theological matters invoked in these stories, as when Ibn al-Jawzi insisted that popular preachers avoid discussion of God’s attributes, for if even the ‘ulama could not agree on such issues, “the ignorant common person” (al-‘ammi al-jahil) stood no chance of understanding them. Another expressed concern about popular preachers’ references to anthropomorphic language, such as a Hadith pointing to God creating Adam “in his own image” (‘ala suratihi).73

  Similarly, even as Ilyas sought to channel ‘ulama authority as a salutary force in Islamic public life, he did so with minimal recourse to the Islamic legal tradition, preferring instead to reach individuals through the Qur’an, Hadith, and edifying stories of the Companions—a rhetorical stratagem of the movement generally. Thanvi, as we have seen, was deeply wary of public discourse becoming unfettered from legal norms. He wanted to reach the masses, but was apprehensive about mass affect. These dual concerns remained an undercurrent in Tablighi works well into midcentury. Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi, for example, enjoined the ‘ulama to engage the masses publicly, yet confessed:

  The masses have made it their business to form opinions of their own on religious controversies [masa’il]. Why do they find it necessary to arbitrate over differences among the men of knowledge [ahl-i ‘ilm], over intellectual issues and reasoning, when they lack the capacities to do so? In such arbitrations and decisions, they ought to follow the true ‘ulama, whose sound beliefs and piety are born of experience and whose credentials as men of God are established. But this is not their intention. Their intention is to engage in disputes. In such assemblies, in such public discourses, the masses find no gratification unless others are reviled, unless others are criticized, unless others are publicly disgraced. The masses find assemblies in which religious topics are explained in a straightforward manner to be dull [phika] and insipid [be maza].74

  That is, the masses want disputation (munazara), not religious lectures. They want entertainment, not edification.

  But in weighing the risks of popular preaching with the need for mass reform, Deobandis mostly gave a preference to the latter. Sometime in the late 1960s, no less a figure than Qari Muhammad Tayyib gave an impassioned speech in defense of the Tablighis.75 In Tayyib’s view, the Tablighis are a direct extension of the entire Deobandi philosophy of companionship (suhbat) with the pious. Like Gangohi and others, he referenced the Prophet’s ability to turn an idolater into a Muslim instantaneously through the affective power of his mere presence. The history of Islam is, for Tayyib, the nostalgic attempt to re-create that affect and apply it to the task of self-reform (islah-i nafs).76 As other Deobandis note again and again, Tayyib, too, comments that the best means of self-reform is through finding a Sufi master to be one’s guide. But what if a master is unavailable? The Tablighi Jama‘at, he suggests, offers the most elegant solution to that problem. To illustrate this idea, Tayyib drew on al-Ghazali, who proposed four means for doing self-reform when one cannot find a master. The four-part typology moves inward from society to complete solitude: first, one should seek companionship with other “men of God” (suhbat-i ahl Allah) to aid in self-reform; second, if such companionship is not possible, one should find pious friends (intikhab-i dost); third, if one cannot find such friends, one should let the fault-finding of one’s enemies guide one toward awareness of what needs to be reformed; finally, one should engage in self-reform through rigorous self-interrogation (muhasaba). “Suppose one says, ‘I am on a mountaintop. I have neither the companionship of a master, nor friends, nor enemies. How am I to reform myself’?” Tayyib asks rhetorically. Paraphrasing al-Ghazali, he replies that such a person can still spend time every day in introspection and gratitude (shukr).77 But Tayyib brings his argument back around to the Tablighi Jama‘at: they exemplify all four forms of self-reform. “So when one goes out for tabligh, he is in the company of holy men, and he is amid good friends who prevent one another from doing evil.”78 Even the accusations of “Wahhabi” and “innovator” (bid‘ati) that Tablighis receive, he adds, are opportunities for introspection. “You will ponder: what are my weaknesses and faults, and how can I mitigate them?”79 Lastly, the Tablighis engage in daily self-interrogation (muhasaba). At the end of each day, they ask, “How much good did I do, and how much evil?”80

/>   There is no reason to doubt Tayyib’s sincerity here. But grafting al-Ghazali’s rhetorical device onto the Tablighi Jama‘at feels artificial, a call to an ideal rather than a description of actual realities on the ground. From the vantage of many Muslims whom we will discuss in the final two chapters, Tayyib’s third point—about the Tablighis’ enemies—was the most germane to their experience. In 1970, only a year or so after this speech, the first major Tablighi–Barelvi clash in South Africa would take place. Whether those involved took Tayyib to heart and saw these events as opportunities for introspection is impossible to know. Regardless, that story—one involving a bitter, internecine conflict between subcontinental rivals in a very different context—is the one to which we now turn.

  6

  How a Tradition Travels

  That Islam is a global religion is obvious. What is less obvious is precisely how. In the previous chapter, we saw Qari Muhammad Tayyib, chancellor of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and the preeminent theorist of Deobandi tradition, attempt to grapple with what made Deoband cohere as a movement across time and space, precisely as the movement began to expand beyond the Indian subcontinent. Tayyib deployed the concept of the maslak to lend coherence to Deobandi tradition, so long as the individuals in its ambit were involved in one of the three key modalities of the movement: teaching, writing, and preaching. We have also seen how Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi sought a balance between the anthropocentrism of teaching (whether by the ‘alim or the Sufi master) and the bibliocentrism of writing—always regarding the latter as subservient to the former. And we saw how he, Tayyib, and others came around to accepting the Tablighi Jama‘at as a mass mobilization of the seminary (madrasa) and the Sufi lodge (khanqah).

  This chapter details how the Deoband movement expanded to the locale outside of South Asia where it has established a presence greater than in any other place: South Africa. It will show how Deoband’s mobility was configured partly through the migration of individual Sufi-scholars from India to South Africa (and, eventually, from South Africa to India), and partly through the global rise of the Tablighi Jama‘at. It will argue, moreover, that the Tablighi Jama‘at, more than the movement of individual scholars, became the principal engine behind the global migration of Deobandi contestations over the Sufi devotional practices we saw in chapter 2. These roving contestations were, in turn, inseparable from both the global rise and the highly local iterations of the Deobandi–Barelvi rivalry, which took on an especially bitter hue in the South African context.

  This chapter begins with a brief overview of Islam in South Africa in order to set a scene for the gradual rise of the Deoband movement, beginning with Deobandi ‘ulama councils in the 1920s, the first branches of the Tablighi Jama‘at in 1960, and the first Deobandi Dar al-‘Ulum in South Africa in 1973. One of the reasons that a Dar al-‘Ulum was not established in South Africa until 1973 is that local ‘ulama born in South Africa still tended to travel to Indian seminaries well into the latter half of the twentieth century. This chapter and the next explain how several prominent Deobandi scholars—Masihullah Khan, Mahmud Hasan Gangohi, Qari Muhammad Tayyib, and Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi, all of whom were students and/or disciples of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi or Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi—were instrumental in establishing a Deobandi presence in South Africa through their repeated visits to the country and their initiations of scores of South Africans into their Sufi orders, many of whom went on to establish or teach in Deobandi madrasas there.

  Finally, the chapter details the emergence of Deobandi–Barelvi polemics in the 1970s. Transpiring in mosques, at lectures, and in assembly halls, and through the circulation of short pamphlets and broadsides, these polemics rehashed points of contention—over mawlud, ‘urs, bid‘a, whether God can lie (imkan-i kizb), whether God can create additional Prophets after Muhammad (imkan-i nazir), and others. They rehashed these arguments mostly in English and with little of the texture or hermeneutical complexity of the texts we examined previously and, for the most part, did not adapt or apply these polemics to local South African contexts.

  In this and the next chapter, I will suggest ways that these polemical circulations constitute the very forms of public debate over theological issues that scholars like Thanvi hoped to curtail. Moreover, the fact that the Tablighi Jama‘at was central in instigating these polemics suggests a certain compromising of its initial commitment to avoid these issues and perhaps a straying from Thanvi’s exhortation for Tablighis to offer “gentle advice [narm nasihat] . . . in a manner without blame or reproach.”1 As the final chapter will argue, Tablighis’ quarrels with Barelvis brought both movements under critical scrutiny from South African Muslims who were not ideologically or politically invested in either group, and who regarded them as politically retrogressive squabbles with no bearing on local exigencies. In the broadest sense, the fate of Deobandi thought in South Africa shows how a tradition interpellates multiple publics as it travels, some of which function as counterpublics militating against not just the debates themselves but the very terms of debate. It also shows how the careful control that Thanvi sought to maintain over the circulation of the Deobandi public was unhinged in at least two ways—first, by the movement of those publics into new locales, where they met new forms of resistance, and second, by elements intrinsic in the circulation of the public itself, especially via texts. In this sense, centripetal forces of Deobandi “tradition”—articulated through the maslak, emphasizing bodies as the mediators of books—gave way to the centrifugal, even chaotic, forces of a global movement.

  ISLAM(S) IN SOUTH AFRICA

  The three-and-a-half-century-old story of Islam in South Africa is less well known to most readers than the story of Islam in South Asia. A brief overview will familiarize readers with this history, as well as provide context for the clashes we will see later in this chapter and the next, both within Muslim communities of Indian descent and between Muslims of Indian and “Malay” descent, as Cape Muslims have traditionally been called.

  In 1652 the Dutch colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck established Cape Town as a waystation for ships traveling between the Netherlands and Dutch trading posts in the East Indies. Situated along a natural harbor at the tip of southern Africa, Cape Town was settled by Dutch farmers and merchants who relied on slave labor. From the outset, the Dutch imported slaves from other parts of its empire to work in the Cape, many of whom were Muslim.2 The Dutch severely curtailed the practice of Islam in the Cape colony; Muslims were unable to build mosques, madrasas, or cemeteries, or engage in any Sufi practices.3 The arrival of Shaykh Yusuf in 1694 marks the emergence of the first major figure in Cape Muslim history, though even in the era of Shaykh Yusuf there was no substantial Muslim community in the Cape. Exiled by the Dutch for fomenting unrest and fighting against the Dutch in Indonesia, Shaykh Yusuf was forcibly settled at Zandvliet, outside of Cape Town, where he wrote treatises on Sufism in Malay, Bughanese, and Arabic.4 It was another political prisoner, Imam Abdullah ibn Kadi—popularly known as Tuan Guru—who worked to institutionalize Islam in the Cape. After the British took over control of the colony and liberalized some restrictions on Muslims, a free black slave established the first mosque in South Africa in 1795, known as Auwal Masjid. Tuan Guru served as the first imam.5

  In 1795 the British took Cape Town as part of a larger campaign to secure global trade routes during their war with revolutionary France. The Dutch reclaimed Cape Town in 1803 and granted religious freedoms to Cape Muslims the following year. The British once again seized the Cape in 1806 and ceased the import of slaves in the following year, effectively ending the import of Muslim slaves.6 With their new freedom to practice Islam openly (albeit with some restrictions), Cape Muslims built a cemetery and a number of small madrasas.7 The period from 1770 to 1840 saw a sharp growth in the Muslim population of the Cape, and by 1840, Muslims were one-third of a Cape population of roughly twenty thousand.8 Historians have argued that Sufi orders provided a sense of communitas for freed slaves, who were genera
lly barred from Christian congregations, thereby swelling the ranks of the Cape’s Muslims.9

  Two forms of devotional practice—celebrating the mawlud, and visiting local saints’ tombs known as kramats (from the Arabic karamat, meaning “miracles”)—were and remain especially central to Islam in the Cape. The mawlud has been practiced in the Cape since as early as 1772.10 The Cape has long had numerous mawlud clubs (“moulood jamaahs”), each with its own name.11 Cape mawluds have distinctive features that exist perhaps nowhere else, such as the practice called rampie-sny, the “cutting of the orange leaves,” in which women and girls cut the leaves of orange plants into small strips, which are scented with rose and lemon oils and then wrapped into small bundles using colorful kite paper.12 These sachets are then distributed among the participants. The kramats comprise a circle of tombs that dot the hills and mountains surrounding Cape Town. A 1938 survey of the kramats described them as a “Holy Circle” surrounding the Cape.13 Among the most important is the kramat of Sheikh Yusuf, whose annual festival routinely attracts over forty thousand pilgrims.14 In 1982, on the occasion of the ‘urs of ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani (d. 1166), founder of the Qadiri Sufi order, the Cape Mazaar Society was founded to preserve these tombs.15

  The history of Cape Muslims—or Cape “Malays,” as some would later call them16—would eventually intersect in numerous ways with the history of Muslims from India who began to arrive on the shores of Natal, then a British colony on the east coast of South Africa, in 1860.

  MUSLIM MIGRATIONS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN

  In the nineteenth century, millions of Indians migrated to work in far-flung parts of the British empire, the engine of the modern South Asian diaspora.17 While there were centuries-old networks that linked coastal cities along the Indian Ocean rim, the advent of the steamship and the regularization of British shipping lines in the mid–nineteenth century facilitated new movement of vast numbers of people between India and Africa.18 India became a “nodal point from which peoples, ideas, goods, and institutions—everything that enables an empire to exist—radiated outward.”19