Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  But ironically, the crux of Deobandis’ relationship to time, history, and temporality is borne out by their movements across space. As Barbara Metcalf has argued, the Tablighi Jama‘at is defined not by the places where its members go but by the “typological” and “non-linear” view of history they adopt when they get there—one configured through “patterns of moral significance.”43 It is the mobility of the Tablighi or the madrasa student through space that makes this temporal imaginary all the more salient, for it is “not space, the new place where they have chosen to live, but time, in which the past and future converge in the present . . . . Far from being on the periphery, they can make any place a center.”44 We see this typological view of time and history in Tablighis’ accounts of their travels. The narrative of Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi’s 1981 visit to South Africa, discussed in chapter 6, “contained almost no details of the journey’s African locations and instead provided a narrative of praying, blessings, signs of respect, deferential meetings, and moral discussions,” Nile Green comments. “Even specific places were presented not as cities but as social networks: Durban, for example, featured in the text solely as a circle of mosques and pious Muslims. In this travelogue, at least, Africa was not so much meaningful in itself but as a crucible of Deobandi piety.”45 While perhaps they can make any place a center, as Metcalf notes, the vociferous opposition to the Tablighi Jama‘at in South Africa during apartheid suggests that their “spaceless” imaginary intersects, sometimes violently, with other highly localized and spatially grounded ones. Farish Noor makes this point elegantly in arguing that the Tablighi Jama‘at is high on “bonding capital” but low on “bridging capital.”46 That is, it offers appealing “patterns of moral significance” that purport to transcend history, but do not easily “bridge” with local contexts because of that very rhetoric of transcendence. This surely informs why the Deobandi critique of Sufism met such fierce resistance in South Africa. South African Muslims contested it not just as a “foreign” matter, a theological rivalry imported from the Indian subcontinent, but, more important, one that never quite planted “roots,” that refused to grow organically in the local environment.

  But if the Tablighis and the critiques that traveled with them never did plant roots in South Africa, this does not mean the Deoband movement as a whole failed to do so. This, finally, brings us full circle to where we started in this book: to the question of the Deoband movement’s dynamism and internal complexity. Whether in the case of local madrasas teaching Shafi‘i law or South African Deobandi scholars siding against the verdicts of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband’s muftis in the midcentury debate about riba, we have seen instances in which the movement did, in fact, adapt to local exigencies. This book, at the very least, has strived to acquaint the reader with some of the major debates that this movement has initiated globally and how those debates were contested locally, in ways that tell us something about global Islam itself: the constantly shifting nexus of people, ideas, texts, and institutions contained within it, and the multiple, sometimes conflicting publics that animate it.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 295.

  2. As Dietrich Reetz has observed, “The longest interaction between the Deoband school and foreign Deobandi networks exists perhaps with its branches in South Africa.” See Reetz, “The Deoband Universe: What Makes a Transcultural and Transnational Movement of Islam?,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 1 (2007): 139–59, at 153. South Africa boasts at least ten Deobandi Dar al-‘Ulums, but this number does not include numerous smaller madrasas that are affiliated with the Dar al-‘Ulums or staffed by their graduates. Deobandi scholars have also brought their critiques of Sufism to Mozambique as well as Réunion. See Liazzat J.K. Bonnate, “Muslim Religious Leadership in Post-Colonial Mozambique,” South African Historical Journal 60, no. 4 (2008): 637–54, esp. 640–41; and Marie-France Mourrégot, L’islam à l’île de la Réunion (Paris: Harmattan, 2010). Beyond southern Africa, Malaysia and the United Kingdom have comparatively large numbers of Deobandi madrasas. The first Deobandi institution in the United Kingdom was the Dar al-‘Ulum Bury, established in 1975 by Yusuf Motala, a disciple of Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi—an important Deobandi discussed in subsequent chapters. See Jonathan Birt and Philip Lewis, “The Pattern of Islamic Reform in Britain: The Deobandis between intra-Muslim Sectarianism and Engagement with Wider Society,” in Producing Islamic Knowledge: Transmission and Dissemination in Western Europe, ed. Martin van Bruinessen and Stefano Allievi (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 97.

  3. One source states that 199 South Africans graduated from the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband between its founding in 1866 and 1976; this figure represents the largest number of graduates of any country outside of South Asia besides Malaysia, with 445 students. And the number would be far higher if we were to include South Africans who graduated from Deobandi seminaries in South Asia other than the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband. See Muhammad Faruq, Afriqah aur khidmat-i Faqih al-Ummat (Deoband: Maktaba-yi Nashr al-Mahmud, 1990), 144.

  4. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 50n1, cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 7.

  5. I refer primarily to Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). But both scholars have done other important work on Deoband, to which the book will refer throughout.

  6. See, most recently, Arshad Alam, Inside a Madrasa: Knowledge, Power and Islamic Identity in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011).

  7. For the history and politics of this assumption, see Alix Philippon, Soufisme et politique au Pakistan: Le mouvement barelwi à l’heure de “la guerre contre le terrorisme” (Paris: Éditions Karthala et Sciences Po Aix, 2011).

  8. Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870–1920 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 82.

  9. A notable example would be Izhar al-Hasan Mahmud, ‘Ishq-i rasul aur ‘ulama-yi Deoband (Lahore: Maktaba al-Hasan, n.d.). This book consists largely of stories of the passionate love (‘ishq) of the Deobandi ‘ulama for the Prophet. Rashid Ahmad Gangohi’s “extreme passion and love” (intihai ‘ishq o mahabbat) for the Prophet was such that he owned a tiny piece of the green cloak the Prophet wore during the Hijra from Mecca to Medina and would occasionally display it to his disciples, which they would kiss and place upon their eyes in reverence (111).

  10. See, e.g., Yasin Akhtar Misbahi, Imam Ahmad Raza aur radd-i bid‘at wa munkarat (Karachi: Idara-yi Tahqiqat-i Imam Ahmad Raza, 1985).

  11. Marc Gaborieau, Le Mahdi incompris: Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (1786–1831) et le millénarisme en Inde (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010), 18–19.

  12. Ahmad Raza Khan, Maqal ‘urafa’ bi-i‘zaz shar‘ ‘ulama, al-ma‘ruf shari‘at o tariqat (Karachi: Idara-yi Tasnifat-i Imam Ahmad Raza, 1983), 20–35.

  13. On misunderstandings of the madrasa in the context of the global “War on Terror,” see Ebrahim Moosa, What Is a Madrasa? (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

  14. Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey, “The Madrassa Scapegoat,” Washington Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2006): 117–25.

  15. I do not mean to suggest that cosmopolitanism and militancy are mutually exclusive. I refer to arguments like that of Farish Noor and others, who have argued that new restrictions on the transnational movement of madrasa students have threatened a much older “cosmopolitan” flow of people and ideas. See Farish A. Noor, Yoginder Sikand, and Martin van Bruinessen, “Behind the Walls: Re-Appraising the Role and Importance of Mad
rasas in the World Today,” in The Madrasa in Asia: Political Activism and Transnational Linkages, ed. Farish A. Noor, Yoginder Sikand and Martin van Bruinessen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 21.

  16. Declan Walsh, “Suicide Bombers Kill Dozens at Pakistan Shrine,” The Guardian, 2 July 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/02/suicide-bombers-kill-dozens-pakistan-shrine. Since its original publication date, the text of this article has been altered and the quote in question has been removed. The original version of the article, including this quote, can be seen here: http://www.wluml.org/node/6476 (last accessed 6 February 2018).

  17. ‘Abd al-Haq et al., Fatawa-yi Haqqaniyya, ed. Mukhtar Allah Haqqani (Akora Khattak: Jami‘a Dar al-‘Ulum Haqqaniyya, 2002), 1:143.

  18. See esp. Carl W. Ernst, Sufism: An Introduction to the Mystical Tradition of Islam (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), chap. 1.

  19. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 10.

  20. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 235. For the most part, the “link” between Deoband and affiliated institutions is informal and unofficial, rendering it difficult even to estimate the number of “Deobandi” madrasas, though in recent decades Deobandi madrasas in India, at least, have attempted to organize into an official body to standardize curricula: Rabita Madaris Arabiyya (Association of Arabic Schools), founded at the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband in 1994. See Dietrich Reetz, “Change and Stagnation in Islamic Education: The Dar ul-‘Ulum Deoband after the Split in 1982,” in The Madrasa in Asia, ed. Farish A. Noor, Yoginder Sikand, and Martin van Bruinessen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 82.

  21. Ismail Alie, interview with the author, Qasimul Uloom, Cape Town, September 22, 2009.

  22. Sayyid Mahbub Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband (Deoband: Idarah-yi Ihtimam-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1977), 1:24. On the development of the concept of Ahl al-Sunna wa-l Jama‘a, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early Abbasids (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1997), 49–61.

  23. Thus, a widely circulated anti-Deobandi pamphlet from South Africa is titled Exposing the Tableeghi-Deobandi-Wahabi Sect (Durban: Sunni World, n.d.).

  24. Muhammad Taqi ‘Usmani, foreword to Mufti Muhammad Shafi‘, Dil ki dunya (Karachi: Idara al-Ma‘arif, 2013), 7. On ‘Usmani, see Kelly Pemberton, “An Islamic Discursive Tradition of Reform as Seen in the Writing of Deoband’s Mufti Muhammad Taqi ‘Usmani,” Muslim World 99, no. 3 (2009): 452–77.

  25. See Rosemary R. Corbett, Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the “Ground Zero” Mosque Controversy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), as well as G.A. Lipton, “Secular Sufism: Neoliberalism, Ethno-Racism, and the Reformation of the Muslim Other,” Muslim World 101, no. 3 (2011): 427–40.

  26. Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Gregory Starrett, “Textbook Islam, Nation Building, and the Question of Violence,” in Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East, ed. Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Gregory Starrett (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007), 6.

  27. See Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

  28. Arthur F. Buehler, Recognizing Sufism: Contemplation in the Islamic Tradition (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 18–20.

  29. Jawid Mojaddedi, “Getting Drunk with Abu Yazid or Staying Sober with Junayd: The Creation of a Popular Typology of Sufism,” Bulletin of SOAS 66, no. 1 (2003): 1–13.

  30. On Muhasibi, see Gavin Picken, Spiritual Purification in Islam: The life and Works of al-Muhasibi (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). On the Qur’anic roots of tazkiyat al-nafs, see the same author’s “Tazkiyat al-Nafs: The Qur’anic Paradigm,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 7, no. 2 (2005): 101–27.

  31. Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, Kitab al-luma‘ fi al-tasawwuf, ed. Reynold Nicholson (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1914), esp. 4–7, 13–15 (Arabic text pagination). See also Ahmet Karamustafa, Sufism: The Formative Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 67–69.

  32. Jawid Mojaddedi, The Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The Ṭabaqāt Genre from al-Sulamī to Jāmī (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 2001), 9–40.

  33. See, e.g., Qutb al-Din Dimashqi, Imdad al-suluk, ed. Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (Lahore: Idara-yi Islamiyyat, 1984), 155–56. I discuss Dimashqi in chap. 4.

  34. Mojaddedi, The Biographical Tradition in Sufism, 41–68.

  35. On Qushayri, see especially Martin Nyugen, Sufi Master and Qur’an Scholar: Abu’l-Qasim al-Qushayri and the Lata’if al-Isharat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). A single scholarly monograph on Hujwiri remains to be written, but see the discussion in Karamustafa, Sufism: The Formative Period, esp. chap. 4.

  36. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Tashil-i qasd al-sabil ma‘ panj rasa’il (Karachi: Kutub Khana-yi Mazhari, n.d.), 17. The Urdu translation of al-Ghazali’s Al-Arba‘in (his summary of the Ihya’) was commissioned by Thanvi, completed by ‘Ashiq Ilahi Mirathi (author of the definitive biography of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi), and published as Tabligh-i din. See Thanvi’s introduction to Hujjat al-Islam Imam Ghazali, Tabligh-i din (Delhi: Naz Publishing House, 1962), 3.

  37. Christopher S. Taylor, In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), 12–14.

  38. George Makdisi, “The Hanbali School and Sufism,” Biblos (Coimbra) 46 (1970): 71–84, at 83.

  39. For Ibn Taymiyya’s view of Ibn ‘Arabi, see Alexander Knysh, Ibn ‘Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 89–92. For his view on the veneration of saints, see Taylor, In the Vicinity of the Righteous, chap. 5.

  40. A substantial literature on contestations within, and over, Sufism has emerged in the last two decades. See especially Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis: The Defense, Rethinking and Rejection of Sufism in the Modern World (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon, 1999), as well as the essays collected in Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, ed. Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999).

  41. Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Malden, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 160.

  42. This typology is a heuristic one, of course, and does not mean to suggest watertight distinctions between these labels, or that all who may otherwise be classified as “modernist,” “Islamist,” or “Salafi” have opposed Sufism, in part or in full.

  43. Muhammad Iqbal, Kulliyat-i Iqbal Urdu (Aligarh: Educational Book House, 2003), 496–97. For a brief discussion of Iqbal’s approach to Sufism, see Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis, 124–37. On modernist critiques of Sufism, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 196–98.

  44. Quoted in Marc Gaborieau, “Criticizing the Sufis: The Debate in Early Nineteenth-Century India,” in Islamic Mysticism Contested, ed. Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), 453. On Maududi and Sufism, see Maulana Shaykh Ahmad, Maulana Maududi aur tasawwuf (Deoband: Maktaba-yi Tajalli, 1966).

  45. For an overview, see Bernard Haykel, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, ed. Roel Meijer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 33–51.

  46. Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 53. Lauzière suggests that the story, recounted in 1971, may have been embellished by al-Hilali and may reflect the anti-Sufi politics of Salafism in the 1970s more than the 1920s.

  47. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Maududi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 128.

  48. Rüdiger Seesemann, “Between Sufism and Islamism: The Tijaniyya and Islamist Rule in the Sudan,” in Sufism and Politics, ed. Paul Heck (Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner, 2007), 23–57; and Roxanne E. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, introduction to Princeton
Readings in Islamist Thought, ed. Roxanne E. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 23–27.

  49. Mun‘im Sirry, “Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi and the Salafi Approach to Sufism,” Die Welt des Islams 51 (2011): 75–108.

  50. I do not intend to suggest, of course, that Islamists are not interested in individual Muslim subjectivities.

  51. Nikki Keddie, trans. An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 120.

  52. This presumption was most recently called into question by Shahab Ahmed in What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 528. The presumption itself comes from a variety of sources, most notably Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 131–35, in which Eickelman and Piscatori put forth their widely debated argument that the authority of the ‘ulama has been challenged by “new religious intellectuals.” James Hoesterey accepts Eickelman and Piscatori’s basic premise but usefully challenges the notion that there is a zero-sum competition between the ‘ulama and such “new religious intellectuals,” showing how the Indonesian self-help guru Aa Gym meshes Islamic vocabularies with pop psychology while remaining broadly deferential to the legal authority of the ‘ulama. James B. Hoesterey, Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 9–15.

  53. See Zaman, Religion and Politics; and Felicitas Opwis, “Shifting Legal Authority from the Ruler to the ‘Ulama: Rationalizing the Punishment for Drinking Wine during the Saljuq Period,” Der Islam 86 (2011): 65–92.