There is other evidence that the Deoband movement had not yet become the contentious “brand” that it would soon become. Coverage of Deobandi chancellor Qari Muhammad Tayyib’s monumental visit to South Africa in 1963, just over a month after Muhammad Mia died, mentioned little about his connection with Deoband. Tayyib made his first trip to South Africa with great fanfare, visiting Johannesburg and Cape Town. He visited Johannesburg first, receiving an official reception from the city’s mayor.70 In Cape Town, he was welcomed by hundreds of Muslims at a ceremony that featured speeches by the mayor of Cape Town and Sheikh A. Najaar of the Muslim Judicial Council, who delivered a lengthy panegyric upon Tayyib’s arrival.71 Tayyib gave his first lecture at the Habibia Mosque in Athlone, which was then, and remains now, a “Barelvi” mosque.72 Tayyib praised Cape Muslims for their “steadfastness” in Islam and noted that Yusuf Karaan, then of the Muslim Judicial Council, was a graduate of Deoband. Yet astonishingly, on the very same page is coverage of a mawlud where Yusuf Karaan was billed as the main speaker (though it does not indicate whether Tayyib attended).73
But if Deoband had not acquired a public image in South Africa by Tayyib’s visit in 1963, this would all change suddenly in the middle of the decade. During Tayyib’s visit, a prominent Durban-based businessman, A.M. Moolla, asked Tayyib whether it is permissible for Muslims living in a non-Muslim state to participate in interest-bearing business transactions, known as riba, which Islamic law customarily forbids. Tayyib assured Moolla an official response in the form of a fatwa from the Deoband Dar al-Ifta’, which was finally issued in 1966. The fatwa argued that Hanafi law permitted Muslims to collect interest in an “abode of war” (dar al-harb), where the standard rules governing the taking of interest do not apply, and that South Africa was just such an “abode.”
The Deoband fatwa was, by all measures, a scandal for many South African Muslims, with Muslim newspapers in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban registering the negative sentiment. “Alas, with a reckless disregard for the preservation of pure, unadulterated Islam, the Muftees of Doeband [sic] have issued a Fatwa decreeing that South Africa is Darul-Harb,” complained one letter in Cape Town’s Muslim News. “How has the amorphous entity called public opinion reacted to this Fatwa?” asked another. “The Muslims have treated it with scorn . . . . Doeband [sic] must take note that any assault by them to thwart the holy spirit that rages within the Muslims here in South Africa will discredit them forever.”74 Even the Jamiatul Ulama Transvaal opposed the fatwa—a stunning rejection of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband by one of its satellite institutions—with Ebrahim Sanjalvi arguing that a ban on riba was unequivocally clear in the Qur’an and that this clearly took precedent over any Hanafi legal concession for riba in a so-called abode of war.75
Fatima Meer, a prominent anti-apartheid activist and author, regarded the fatwa as a “dangerous pronouncement, capable of producing serious and damaging moral, material and political consequences for South African Muslims and to the cause of Islam.”76 Meer challenged Tayyib’s use of the concept of dar al-harb, arguing that the concept has “not the least authority either in the Quran or in the Hadith.”77 As far as Meer was concerned, Tayyib defined South Africa as a dar al-harb solely because Muslims are not the “ruling majority,” and not “on the grounds of its governmental policies of inequality and racial discrimination which conflicts with the fundamental Islamic concept of universal brotherhood.”78 Meer’s critique was motivated far less by the notion of Deobandis legitimating riba as it was by their labeling South Africa an “abode of war,” which undercut the interracial and interreligious alliances that activists like Meer were forging. It was also, importantly, a critique of the ‘ulama generally, an example of modernist approaches to the Qur’an that were popular among midcentury South African Muslim intellectuals—for example, those involved in the Arabic Study Circle, discussed below. Features of this approach included criticism of the authority of ‘ulama, and the promotion of lay Muslims reading and understanding the Qur’an directly.79 This was a major trope of critiques that came to full fruition in the 1970s and ’80s.
POLEMICAL PUBLICS: DEOBANDI-BARELVI POLEMICS IN THE 1970S AND ’80S
In the 1970s and ’80s, a series of public confrontations and highly charged polemics ensued between Deobandis and Barelvis, which in turn were inextricably linked to the South African Tablighi Jama‘at and its antagonists. Ebrahim Moosa has argued that “[t]he mileage that the school of Deoband has gained out of its links with the Tablighi Jama‘at in the South African context in terms of its own spread and authority, is unmistakable. The fortunes of the Deoband School in this region will to a large extent follow that of the Tablighi Jama‘at.”80 The first of these public events took place early in the history of Deobandi–Barelvi polemics and precipitated a long public debate about bid‘a in the Cape as well as in Durban. It began in 1969 when a popular Gujarati preacher, Muhammad Palan Haqqani, embarked on an extended speaking tour of southern Africa, preaching against celebrations of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, visits to Sufi saints’ graves, and offers of salutations to the Prophet Muhammad, among other practices. Haqqani was not trained as an ‘alim but was associated with Deobandi scholars, especially Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi, who endorsed his lengthy book Shari‘at ya jahalat (Shari‘a or ignorance), published first in Gujarati in 1962 and then in Urdu in 1965.81
The Arabic Study Circle of Durban hosted Haqqani in Durban, and it is not difficult to see why his views appealed to them, at least at first. Shari‘at ya jahalat opens with an impassioned call for Muslims to study the Qur’an directly, one reminiscent in many ways of Muhammad Isma‘il’s Taqwiyyat al-iman (Strengthening the faith), discussed in chapter 2. “Today we keep the Qur’an in our homes to ward off evil spirits. We tie verses up to put them in amulets, or stir them into a liquid [to drink]. We come up with ignorant interpretations and lead guileless people astray, or recite [the Qur’an] solely to gain the spiritual rewards [sawab],” Haqqani implores. “Yet we don’t apply its guidance to our lives.”82 And, like Muhammad Isma‘il’s, his book draws almost exclusively on Qur’an and Hadith.83
But the book also denounces celebrating saints’ death anniversaries (‘urs), the Prophet’s birthday (mawlud), and other devotional practices, and accuses Barelvis directly of staging public debates (munazara) solely to rile up ignorant crowds by accusing their opponents of unbelief.84 In any case, Haqqani’s views were so scandalous, according to reports, that the Arabic Study Circle then convened a meeting of community leaders at West Street Masjid in June 1970 to publicly reject Haqqani’s views on bid‘a.85 Some years later, Durban’s Muslim Digest even reprinted what purported to be a public “repentance” by Haqqani’s family in Gujarat, disavowing his views as “those of the Deobandis and Tablighi Jamaats.”86
The Haqqani controversy is the immediate context for understanding reactions to a related incident, when in June 1970—the same month in which Haqqani’s views had come to a head in Durban—a Barelvi organization, the Sunni Razvi Society, sent its founder and patron, Ibrahim Khushtar of Mauritius, to visit Cape Town and give a series of public lectures at town halls and mosques. Khushtar (d. 2002) was a renowned Indian Barelvi scholar originally from West Bengal. After graduating from the chief Barelvi seminary of India, Miftah al-‘Ulum, Khushtar emigrated to Mauritius and established the Sunni Razvi Society in 1965.87 In the summer of 1970, Khushtar gave a series of lectures in Cape Town on topics such as standing in the presence of the Prophet.88 At the final lecture, when local Tablighis had gotten word of Khushtar’s talks, a melee erupted between Barelvis and Tablighis after an official of the Muslim Judicial Council accused Tablighis of being Wahhabis.89 Other clashes came in its wake at the end of the decade.90
Khushtar was just one of a series of international Barelvi scholars who visited South Africa in the 1970s and ’80s. Among the most prominent Barelvi scholars to visit South Africa were Muhammad Shafee Okarvi (d. 1984), who first came to South Africa in 1976 and came again from 197
9 to 1980, and his son, Kawkab Noorani Okarvi (b. 1957), who came to South Africa six times between 1987 and 1991, establishing branches of the Maulana Okarvi Academy. In December 1988, Kawkab Okarvi went to the Waterval Islamic Institute to challenge its “Deobandi-Wahaabi-Tableeghi” ‘ulama to a public debate, printing the invitation in a local newspaper. (The invitation was not accepted.)91 Okarvi’s Truth Wins, published in South Africa in 1991, was a detailed account of that challenge, very much in the style of the colonial munazaras discussed in chapter 3.92 Okarvi’s Deoband to Bareilly: The Truth, similarly, became one of the most widely read English-language Barelvi rebuttals of Deobandis.93
The Okarvis’ visits also prompted the establishment of Barelvi ‘ulama councils, madrasas, and publishing houses, which became the main partisans in their bitter rivalry with Deobandis and Tablighis. The most prominent of these organizations were founded in the 1980s: Cape Town’s Ghousia Manzil in 1980,94 Cape Town’s Ahl-e Sunnat wal Jammat in 1984,95 and the Imam Ahmed Raza Academy—which leveled by far the most attacks against Deobandi ‘ulama and the Tablighi Jama‘at—in Durban in 1986.96 The academy publishes large numbers of pamphlets on standard Barelvi theological positions. One pamphlet printed fatwas—requested by South Africans from a Barelvi scholar, Muhammad Akhtar Raza Khan Azhari (d. 1942), the great-grandson of Ahmad Raza Khan—that forbade praying behind Deobandi imams.97 The academy also publishes South African translations of works by Ahmad Raza Khan.98
The Tablighi Jama‘at, meanwhile, continued to make inroads in the very same years. The monumental visit in 1981 of Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi, whose work we have already encountered several times, was an impetus not just to the growth of new Tablighi Jama‘at branches, but also to the establishment of two new Deobandi Dar al-‘Ulums: the Dar al-‘Ulum Azaadville (also known as Madrasa Arabia Islamia), founded in 1981; and the Dar al-‘Ulum Zakariyya, founded in 1983.99 Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi was the nephew of Muhammad Ilyas, and some of his works, especially Faza’il-i a‘mal (Virtuous deeds), have constituted the unofficial textbooks of the Tablighi Jama‘at.100 In Ramadan 1981, he performed i‘tikaf (the practice of staying in a mosque for ten days during Ramadan) at a mosque in Stanger, alongside hundreds of South African Muslims. An account of the event minutely reconstructs each day of his visit—the Salat prayers, supererogatory prayers (tarawih), meetings, supplications, readings from Jami, readings from Kandhlavi’s Maut ki yad (Remembrance of death)—without so much as a hint of the political context of South Africa in 1981. The book describes the spiritual effect of his visit, highlighting the wide, mostly middle-class appeal that the Tablighi Jama‘at was said to have had:
[Kandhlavi’s] coming to this place of unbelief [kufr] and apostasy [ilhad] was a blessing, a mercy, and a proof to distinguish truth [haqq] from falsehood [batil]. His visit changed the entire country and caused a revolution [inqilab] in the hearts and actions of the people. Even those who opposed him were moved. All classes of people were astonished at the spectacle. . . . ‘Ulama, students, laborers, traders, Hadith scholars, jurists, mystics [‘arifin], and Sufis: all present were illuminated with the light of faith and knowledge.101
This period was rife with polemics and counterpolemics over mawlud and other controversies, most of which transpired via pamphlet wars. These pamphlets in turn were written almost exclusively in English (albeit with transliterated Arabic and Urdu words and phrases) and consisted mostly of cursory summaries of each side’s arguments.102 Here I will briefly examine two of these exchanges.
In 1985, the Deobandi organization Majlisul Ulama of Port Elizabeth—whose polemicist, Ahmed Sadiq Desai, is the focus of the final chapter—published a pamphlet, Meelaad Celebrations, which summarily rehearsed earlier Deobandi arguments: that mawlud is a bid‘a, that bid‘a means “to regard a mustahab [commendable] or a permissible act as compulsory,” that supporters of the mawlud regard it as even more important than Salat, that they stand up (qiyam) on behalf of the Prophet, that they believe the Prophet Muhammad to be present (hazir), that they organize qawwali (Sufi devotional music) performances during the mawlud, that they recite verses that “transgress the limits of legitimate praise, thus assigning a position of divinity to our [Prophet],” that they allow the presence of immoral people, permit singing at these functions by young boys and girls, allow intermingling of the sexes, waste resources, imitate the nonbelievers (tashabbuh bi-l kuffar), ostracize those who do not participate, and regard the distribution of sweets as essential.103
In a response to Meelaad Celebrations, Abdun Nabi Hamidi, a Barelvi scholar of Imam Ahmed Raza Masjid in Lenasia, published Yes, Meelaad Celebration Is Commendable. Hamidi provided a point-by-point refutation of the Majlisul Ulama’s pamphlet. First, he says no Muslim actually believes the mawlud to be compulsory, nor has anyone ever claimed standing for the Prophet (qiyam) to be obligatory. And of the “hundreds” of mawluds Hamidi has attended in South Africa, Hamidi says he has never observed Salat being neglected; even if one misses Salat, it does not follow that one should condemn the entire institution of mawlud: “If a person travelling by car from Johannesburg to Cape Town misses a few of his Salaah or misses the Jamaat, will one pass a Fatwa that travelling in a car from Johannesburg to Cape Town is Haraam?”104 Hamidi adds that he has never observed qawwalis in South African mawluds, and even if this were the case, it would not a reason to ban the entire celebration. He rejects the notion that any verses of praise in the mawlud assign divinity to Muhammad. He argues that one cannot ban mawlud because of the presence of immoral individuals any more than one can ban Tablighi gatherings for the same reason, nor can one ban mawlud because of the presence of “mature” (baligha) youth any more than one can ban Dar al-‘Ulums for that reason. If there is intermingling of sexes, he says, one must teach the participants the proper behavior, rather than banning mawlud outright. As for accusations of “waste” (israf), if feeding the poor at a mawlud is a waste, argues Hamidi, then surely the money spent on Tablighis’ ijtima‘ tents and organizing those events is even more so.105
Other polemical exchanges took place over claiming the mantle of “Sunni” Islam. In 1986 a Majlisul Ulama affiliate, the Young Men’s Muslim Association, published Who Are the People of Sunnah? This pamphlet implied that Barelvis (frequently called qabar pujaaris—“grave worshippers”) are opposed to the Sunna:
The sect of the Qabar Pujaaris have made the Ulama of Deoband and the Tablighi Jamaat their prime targets of attack and vituperation for the single reason that the Ulama of Deoband resolutely declare the falsehood of qabar puja [grave worship] and bid‘ah. The Deobandi ulama teach you how to perform Salaat; they do not teach you to make sajdah and ruku‘ [prostrating and bowing] to the graves. They teach you how to conduct your daily life in conformity with the detailed Sunnah practices of Rasulullah [the Messenger of God].106
The notion that Deobandis represent the essence of Sunni Islam—which, as we saw, Qari Muhammad Tayyib lays out in exquisite detail—amounts here to rejecting the very idea of Deoband as a “movement”:
The grave-worshippers seek to convey the impression that the Ulama of Deoband are a new group or a sect which has arisen recently, hence they refer to the Ulama of the Sunnah as the “Deobandi Movement.” Deoband is merely the name of a town in India where the famous Darul Uloom is located. If the Deobandi Ulama’s beliefs and teachings are unacceptable to the grave-worshippers then in actual fact their dislike is for the beliefs and teachings propagated by the Sahaabah [Companions] since the beliefs and teachings are in fact the Shariah of Islam which was handed to the Ummah by the Sahaabah [Companions] of Rasulullah [the Messenger of God].107
The Barelvi organization Sunni Jamiatul Ulama responded with Confusion or Conclusion: Answer to “Who Are the People of Sunnah?,” attempting to turn accusations of bid‘a back upon Deobandis. If celebrating the mawlud is an innovation, then surely Tablighi gatherings must be as well. Besides, it submits, Deobandi scholars such as Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri gave their qualified approval of maw
lud.108 The text also reminds the reader that Hajji Imdad Allah testified to participating in mawluds often, as we noted in the second chapter.109 After reporting that Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi himself is said to have visited the Sufi shrine of ‘Ala al-Din ‘Ali Sabir—originator of the Sabiri Chishti lineage—at Kalyar Sharif, the author asks, “One wonders how this practice of the pagans—Qabar Puja—grave worship was embraced by the very founder of Darul Uloom Deoband.”110
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