But what about the Sufi saints? Here, too, the responses are standard, almost boilerplate, Deobandi views. The Haqqani muftis believe that saints can and do perform miracles (karamat) while alive, and continue to do so after death.15 It is even possible to form a spiritual connection (nisbat) with a deceased saint.16 It is only in believing that saints have the power to intercede on behalf of their followers independently of God that one begins to tread dangerously close to unbelief (kufr).17 A number of fatwas state clearly that bowing to, or circumambulating, a saint’s shrine is impermissible.18
Nowhere in these fatwas do the muftis of Dar al-‘Ulum Haqqaniyya call for Sufi shrines to be destroyed or for Sufis themselves to be killed. In fact, one of the Dar al-‘Ulum Haqqaniyya’s muftis was asked whether “un-Islamic” practices at a shrine justified killing the shrine’s custodian; he averred that they did not.19 At the same time, across numerous works by ‘Abd al-Haq and Sami‘ al-Haq, one finds little more than passing references to Sufism. They did not author any works of their own on Sufism, nor are there references to either figure taking on Sufi disciples under their tutelage.20 Whether, and to what extent, Deobandis’ relationship with Sufism has changed in recent years is an open question. Beyond the Haqqani scholars I have just discussed, there is evidence to suggest that Sufism is no longer as central to Deobandi thought as it was for Deobandi scholars from Gangohi to Thanvi and beyond, and even that Deobandi Sufism has become preoccupied with its own “discourse of decline.”21 Sabiri Chishtis in twenty-first century Pakistan, Robert Rozehnal shows, have been critical of contemporary Deobandis for abandoning, in their view, the legacies of Sabiri Chishti masters associated with the Deoband movement, such as Imdad Allah and Gangohi.22 Yet, narratives of decline have been a fixture of Sufism itself for centuries. This is nothing new.23 And there is other evidence that contemporary Deobandis, even in Pakistan, remain devoted to Sufism. To take just one example, Muhammad Rafi‘ ‘Usmani, president of the Dar al-‘Ulum Karachi and among the most prominent Deobandis in Pakistan today, has recently reasserted the importance of Sufism generally. Like Thanvi and many others, ‘Usmani argues that embodying Sufi ethics is incumbent on all Muslims individually (farz-i ‘ayn), and that mastery of Sufism is a duty of Muslims collectively (farz-i kifaya).24
It is for all these reasons that reducing the cause of the recent violence to an allegedly primordial hatred of Sufism rooted in the Deoband movement itself, as one recent collection of essays does, is inadequate and deeply misleading.25 For one, this approach ignores the complexity of attitudes toward Sufism even within the Taliban, let alone within the Deoband movement as a whole. But another reason this approach is flawed is that it ignores politics and assumes that “religion” is the sole motivator behind such violence, as scholars such as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, William Cavanaugh, and others have persuasively argued with respect to the discourse on “religious” violence generally.26 After the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan, scholars called for resisting the easy explanation—that it was simply the expression of a deeply seated, innate iconoclasm within Islam—and urged us to consider a more nuanced one: that it was a context-specific power struggle with precedents throughout the medieval and early modern periods.27 We should approach the destruction of Sufi shrines in the same light, as A. Afzar Moin has argued.28 I suggest, then, that we resist the temptation to regard attacks on Sufis and their shrines as simply a “weaponized” version of the Deobandi critique of Sufism. That critique, surely, informs the hostility toward these shrines, but that hostility cannot be reduced to it.
This book has called for renewed attention to Sufism as an ongoing site of contestation in contemporary Islam. Part of this call is taking seriously Deobandis’ claims to represent Sufism. By this I do not mean that scholars of Islam must ratify theirs as the “true” Sufism, to the exclusion of other practices and forms of piety (nor should they ratify as “true” the forms of Sufism that align more readily with popular attitudes of what Sufism should be). What I mean is that Deobandis have made a powerful claim on how to define it. Accordingly, this book has called for scholars of Islam to reflect critically on “Sufism” as a category, in all its entanglements—be they “mystical,” experiential, ethical, political, institutional, or otherwise. “Sufism” is a diverse, internally contested, constantly debated entity. Rozehnal puts it well when he says Sufism is best approached as “a verb rather than a noun . . . not a static, homogenous ‘thing’ that can be studied in isolation. Rather, it is a discursive tradition and an embodied practice that is experienced in discrete temporal and cultural locations.”29 And in locating Sufism, we must be attuned to subtle shifts in how Muslims debate it, from within and without, in multiple settings, whether in the confines of a khanqah or in a political manifesto in Cape Town.
Despite, or perhaps because of, attacks on Sufis and Sufi shrines, mass support for Sufi devotional practices continues unabated. The ‘urs of Mu‘in al-Din Chishti regularly attracts numbers of Muslims comparable to the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.30 In Pakistan, devotees of ‘Ali Hujwiri and Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakkar will continue to gather in massive numbers at their shrines, among many others, despite the real, existential risks of doing so. In South Africa, too, support for Sufi devotional practices is unrelenting. If anything, the persistence of rhetorical and physical attacks on Sufis, Sufi shrines, and those who visit them has substantially amplified their power. “In the very act of critique,” Michael Taussig observed, the critic “adds to the power of the thing critiqued.” The destruction of an object amplifies its sacredness, “magnifying, not destroying, value.”31
The Deobandi critique originated in texts, but it has since become one debated well beyond texts—in mosques, at Sufi festivals, in lecture halls, on the radio, on the Internet, and elsewhere. And the terms of these debates continue to shift. In Katherine Ewing’s view, this means attending to the “everyday arguments” surrounding these debates as much as we attend to the arguments of the ‘ulama.32 While ‘ulama continue to claim the authority to adjudicate on legal issues, we must also consider extralegal forms of public argumentation. It is important, however, not to see these extralegal perspectives as antinormative. Rather, these perspectives represent an alternative form of normativity, perhaps akin to what Shahab Ahmed called “non-legal values as norms.”33 If understanding how Deobandis articulate and defend themselves as Sufis is essential, then, so too is understanding how individual Muslims talk back to their critiques. Many of these conversations are located well outside the ambit of ‘ulama-centric discourse. What the ‘ulama argue about a given issue is important; what students, activists, teachers, mothers, and workers say is equally so.
Equally, not more. I submit that we should avoid valorizing the “everyday” Islam of lay Muslims as more (or less) authentic, valuable, or legitimate than the Islam of the ‘ulama. In their analysis of the “everyday” as a trope in the anthropology of Muslim societies, Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando provocatively argue that “[t]he everyday Muslim . . . emerges as a familiar figure,” defined by an “ambivalent, critical, and even contestatory relationship to Islamic norms.” The everyday, in their view, is “not only an analytical frame but also a normative one.”34 Is the contestation of norms the sole criterion by which we deem a practice “everyday?” Are those who critique legal norms not grounded in other forms of normativity? And are the ‘ulama, too, not part of “everyday” Islam? Furthermore, valorizations of everyday Islam risk reinscribing outmoded notions of the “public sphere” or “civil society” onto debates among contemporary Muslims. These notions, especially in their Habermasian vein, see the public as, intrinsically, a venue for challenging religious authority. Throughout this book, but especially in chapter 3, I have pointed to ways in which the Habermasian model of the public, with its free, rational actors deliberating upon ideas without respect to prior affective commitments, fails to grasp the extent to which colonial publics were already predicated on polemics. I’ve also pointed to the
particular forms of affect that undergird Deobandi ideas of the public and that, in turn, form the very basis for politics, broadly defined. Following in the footsteps of Talal Asad, many scholars of Islam and Religious Studies have made similar interventions in recent years.35
To be sure, the Muslim activists we met in chapters 6 and 7 challenged the authority of the Deobandi ‘ulama. Is this not a vindication of the “Muslim public sphere” against “traditional authority?” I think this is a simplistic read, for several reasons. First, many of those engaging in these public critiques were themselves products of seminaries, i.e. ‘ulama. Second, South Africans’ critiques of the ‘ulama were by and large not critiques of ‘ulama as such, but of their politics. Third, even those who did critique the ‘ulama as such typically did so by way of modes of argumentation grounded in Islam itself. It is also worth noting, finally, that to the extent these publics were engaged in critiques of authority, the object of their critiques was the apartheid regime; critiques of the ‘ulama were ancillary to this far more fundamental one.
Deobandi critiques and countercritiques are grounded in the exigencies of local politics, as we saw in South Africa, but we must also be attuned to the complex, global peregrinations of these critiques as they travel in and out of specific contexts. We see this in the ways that the Deobandi critique itself morphed over time and across space—as, for instance, in the way that Ahmed Sadiq Desai appropriated Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi’s arguments about Sufism and politics even as he reduced Thanvi’s textured hermeneutics to a series of shibboleths. In another respect, and with important exceptions, this loss of texture is due to a broad shift across late-twentieth-century Deobandi texts away from invoking the Hanafi legal tradition and toward the sole invocation of Qur’an and Hadith. Ebrahim Moosa argued that this tendency runs deep in the history of the Deoband movement, insofar as Deobandis have had to compete on a discursive terrain with groups like the Ahl-i Hadith, who were already operating on that terrain in their near exclusive use of Qur’an and Hadith.36 This mode of argument is now common—not just among Salafis, of course, but among Muslims of all views; and not just in books, but on Muslim websites, blogs, chat forums, and the like. In this sense, Deobandi discourse in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first has dovetailed with what we might call a Salafization of public argument. By this I do not mean Deobandis are now Salafis; they are not. Rather, I mean that, broadly speaking, Deobandi argument now overlaps (partly, never completely) with modes of rhetoric associated with (but not limited to) Salafis. These arguments mobilize citations of the Qur’an and Hadith toward a sort of new sola scriptura that is more or less foreign to premodern and even most modern ways in which Muslims have engaged with their traditions.37 As Jonathan A.C. Brown has argued, the rhetoric of Salafism has been premised, in part, on the notion that Islam is “easy” to understand.38 The Salafization of public argument is enticing: why cite Ibn ‘Abidin or Shatibi when you can cite God and his Prophet?
And yet, most Deobandis would regard this as a false choice: even when directed at lay Muslims in public fora, their arguments can, and often do, interweave Hanafi legal authorities with relevant passages from the Qur’an and Hadith. Deobandis have rightly cast themselves as arbiters of a “complex” Islam. As I have argued throughout this book, the perennial challenge for the Deobandis has been how to communicate the complexity of the legal tradition to lay Muslims without diluting it or undermining their authority in the process. In the Indian context, we saw incipient forms of the notion that Islam is easy and accessible in Muhammad Isma‘il and his contemporaries, who argued almost solely with reference to Qur’an and Hadith—a scriptural impulse that Deobandis like Thanvi sometimes awkwardly incorporated into their own attempts to render Islam “easy.” I would like to suggest, though, that Thanvi succeeded in this endeavor in part by treating Islam’s outward simplicity as a mere gateway into its internal complexities. And his work was an invitation to delve into that complexity.
This surely distinguishes him sharply from his acolyte Desai, who not only did not continue in Thanvi’s footsteps by producing new scholarship in the tradition, but reduced Deobandi thought to a handful of broadsides—whatever could fit in a newsletter or a pamphlet, but little more. In this respect, he was merely following his own teacher (and Thanvi’s student) Masihullah Khan, who saw his own work as in essence a commentary on Thanvi’s. But if Masihullah Khan’s career reminds us that this attitude is not new, it also makes it all the more apparent that there is no Deobandi like Thanvi alive today. Many living Deobandis maintain such deferential awe for Thanvi that the notion that one of them may aspire to be his equal is almost unthinkable—but Thanvi, too, felt this way toward the great Sufis and jurists that came before him.
As we have seen, the rhetoric of decline is built both into the Deoband movement, and even, in a larger sense, into Sufism itself. Perhaps this points to a loss of a certain sensibility at the heart of Deoband, one in which the core aspirations that Deobandis articulated in the first half of the twentieth century—a tradition handed down through the carefully cultivated dynamic between books and bodies, grounded in the intricately theorized interplay between madrasa and khanqah, hopeful about the power of print to implement reform but wary of its implications—gave way to a text-driven, superficial, ossified tradition, one whose most salient public articulations now take place in chat rooms rather than in the khanqah. I do not mean to suggest that complex, nuanced debates about Islam cannot take place on the Internet; they do. What I mean is that the shift of the locus of debate away from spaces defined by human presence and intimacy, and toward spaces defined by distance and disembodiment, has had a palpable effect on the terms and articulations of debate. Along these lines, Humeira Iqtidar has recently theorized Islamic tradition at the nexus of “knowledge production and consumption” and a certain “sensibility” about that same knowledge. When the two become uncoupled, when “method is separated markedly from . . . sensibility,” she argues, “we can expect a reduction of debate and hence vibrancy within the tradition.”39
Desai would seem to corroborate this. In some ways, Desai’s vituperations represent the very opposite of the “gentleness” (narmi) that Thanvi counseled for the ‘ulama, and that Gangohi described as an essential part of a Sufi’s temperament: “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 . . . is generous, forgiving of faults and mistakes.”40 Perhaps, on occasion, the Sufi’s shunning of pride meshes awkwardly with the scholar’s sense of certainty.
Despite—or because of—the currents of colonial modernity that merged to make the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband possible, the branch of the Deoband movement emanating from Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi is one we may describe as “modern antimodern”—represented by men whose engagement with tradition, whose very notion of tradition, is a by-product of modernity, yet who never felt at home in modernity. In this way they are akin to the modern reactionaries recently described by Mark Lilla. “Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes. He is time’s exile,” Lilla writes. Unlike the revolutionary, the reactionary is “the guardian of what actually happened, not the prophet of what might be.” His “nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one.” The reactionary is the mirror image of the revolutionary: both are products of modernity’s self-referentiality, for modernity’s “nature is to perpetually modernize itself.” Thanvi lived in history but never dwelled in it. He was never at home in the passage of time. Whereas the revolutionary places human agency squarely at the center of historical change, the reactionary, says Lilla, sees history “develop slowly and unconsciously . . . with results no one can predict.”41 To be precise, here Lilla is describing the philosophy of Edmund Burke,
an icon of European conservative thought. Is it any wonder that Muhammad Taqi ‘Usmani compares Thanvi admiringly with Burke?42
Accordingly, it is arguably time, more than place, that is the dominant modality through which Deobandis experience and conceptualize tradition. Deobandis’ theorization of the normative order is seminally bound up in the experience of time. The near constant recollection of the era of the Prophet and his Companions is part and parcel of the temporal dimension of the normative order. Deobandis have not purported to re-create the era of the Prophet in the modern age; rather, they have seen that era embodied in the very mien of those who are connected to it through their spiritual lineages, through whom they could get a mere glimpse—but a glimpse nonetheless—of the Prophet’s own demeanor.
But time informs Deobandi tradition in other ways. Bid‘a is characterized, in many instances, by a misunderstanding of temporal normativity. Thus, where a Sufi devotee goes is arguably less important than when, how often, and for what purpose. Conversely, the shrine-based Sufism that Deobandis have found unsettling is grounded far more in a sense of place than time. The lifeworlds that coalesce around reverence toward the dead are defined by the places where the dead are interred. Saints’ bodies, usually, stay put. It is important not to press this argument beyond its usefulness. Shrines, too, are connected to time and the past in complex ways. Saints are saints in part through their sacred genealogies. Conversely, the madrasa is a place, first and foremost. But crucially, its spatiality is not anchored by the body of a saint. Madrasas, like shrines, are nodes in complex spatial itineraries, but these itineraries are markedly different from the networks of pilgrimage that form around shrines.
Revival From Below Page 30
