Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  54. Fuad Naeem, “Sufism and Revivalism in South Asia: Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi of Deoband and Mawlana Ahmad Raza Khan of Bareilly and Their Paradigms of Islamic Revivalism,” Muslim World 99, no. 3 (2009): 435–51, at 436.

  55. Quoted in ‘Ashiq Ilahi Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil (Saharanpur: Kutub Khana-yi Isha‘at al-‘Ulum, n.d.), 336.

  56. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Bihishti zewar: Mudallal o mukammal bihishti zewar ma‘ bihishti gauhar (Karachi: Altaf and Sons, 2001), 24.

  57. Qur’an 11:88.

  58. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Islahi nisab: Tashih-i ‘aqa’id o a‘mal, tahzib o tamaddun-i Islami (Lahore: Maktaba-yi Rashidiyya, 1977).

  59. Mufti Taqi ‘Usmani, Islahi khutbat, 16 vols. (Karachi: Meman Islamic Publishers, 1993).

  60. A typical example of this tendency would be John O. Voll, “Renewal and Reform in Islamic History: Tajdid and Islah,” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Voll’s notion of islah completely ignores the widespread usage of that term among the ‘ulama, especially in equating islah with ijtihad. When islah in South Asia is discussed, it is likewise discussed in relationship to Islamist and modernist trends. Thus, in the “India/Pakistan” subsection of the Encyclopaedia of Islam’s entry on islah, Aziz Ahmad mentions none of the traditionalist ‘ulama, concentrating instead on the subcontinent’s counterparts to the Middle East’s reformist intellectuals—namely, Karamat Ali Jaunpuri, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, and similar figures. One senses that the traditionalist ‘ulama, whether of Deobandi or Barelvi inclinations, are simply off the radar because their version of islah does not conform to the standard one. P.J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E.J. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs, eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2005), s.v. “Islah.”

  61. Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 35.

  62. The Hadith in question is found in the Sunan of Abu Dawud: “Truly, God will send to this umma at the turn of every century one who will renew religion.” Ella Landau-Tasserson, “The ‘Cyclical Reform’: A Study of the Mujaddid Tradition,” Studia Islamica 70 (1989): 79–117, at 79. For a brief overview of this Hadith and variant interpretations of it, see Hamid Algar, “The Centennial Renewer: Bediüzzaman Said Nursi and the Tradition of Tajdid,” Journal of Islamic Studies 12, no. 3 (2001): 291–311.

  63. Sajjida Sultana Alvi, Perspectives on Mughal India: Rulers, Historians, ‘Ulamā’ and Sufis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 89–115.

  64. Nasr, Maududi, 57.

  65. Ibid., 56–57.

  66. Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya (Karachi: Educational Press Pakistan, 1985), 176 (emphasis added).

  67. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Imdad al-fatawa, ed. Muhammad Shafi‘ (Karachi: Maktaba-yi Dar al-‘Ulum Karachi, 2010), 6:168–85. For a fuller discussion of this fatwa, see Altaf Ali Mian, “Surviving Modernity: Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (1863–1943) and the Making of Muslim Orthodoxy in Colonial India” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2015), 98–100.

  68. ‘Abd al-Bari Nadvi, Tajdid-i mu‘ashirat, ya‘ni tajdid-i din-i kamil (Lucknow: Majlis-i Tahqiqat o Nashiryat-i Islam, 2010), 45.

  69. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Khutbat-i Hakim al-Ummat (Multan: Idara-yi Talifat-i Ashrafiyya, 2006), 13:48.

  70. The full verse is: “O believers, protect yourselves and your families from the fire whose fuel is people and stones, over which are angels stern and severe who do not disobey God in what he commands of them, but they do what they are commanded.”

  71. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Tafsir-i bayan al-Qur’an, mukammal (Karachi: Dar al-Isha‘at, 2015), 2:602.

  72. Mufti Muhammad Shafi‘, Dil ki dunya (Karachi: Idara al-Ma‘arif, 2013), 49. Shafi‘ refers to the titles (and themes) of the third and fourth volumes of the Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din, respectively: the Quarter on That Which Destroys (Rub‘ al-Muhlikat), and the Quarter on That Which Provides Salvation (Rub‘ al-Munjiat).

  73. One could note any number of closely related concepts. In no particular order: rasm (“custom”), ‘adat (“habit,” “established practice”), ‘urf (also “custom,” in Islamic legal terminology), turath (“heritage”), taqlid (“following past legal precedents”).

  74. Green, Sufism: A Global History, xi.

  75. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 12. Scholars such as Talal Asad, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, and Samira Haj, among others, have drawn on MacIntyre for theorizing Islamic tradition in a variety of contexts.

  76. See, e.g., Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39.

  77. Three recent monographs that take up this theme explicitly are Scott Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); and Rudolph T. Ware, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

  78. I refer to Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (2009): 1–30.

  79. Ibid., 20–21.

  80. Ware makes a similar point in suggesting that Islam be understood “not only as ‘discursive tradition’ . . . but also a dense web of fully embodied encounters.’” See Ware, The Walking Qur’an, 76.

  81. Talal Asad, “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 166–214.

  82. Basit Iqbal, “Thinking about Method: A Conversation with Talal Asad,” Qui Parle 26, no. 1 (2017): 195–218, at 199–200.

  83. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Tradition,” Telos 94 (1993/94): 75–82, at 75.

  84. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 169.

  85. I am borrowing and adapting the terms “anthropocentric” and “bibliocentric” from Nile Green, “The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge between Person and Paper,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (2010): 241–65.

  86. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979). I thank Ebrahim Moosa for introducing me to Fleck.

  87. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 67–68.

  88. Fleck, Genesis and Development, 161.

  89. He is variously referred to as Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri, based on his lifelong affiliation with Mazahir al-‘Ulum in Saharanpur, and Khalil Ahmad Ambetwi, based on his place of birth, Ambehta. This book refers to him throughout as Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri, the more common appellation.

  90. The reader may have noted that the main characters are all men. The Deoband movement is an undeniably male-centered tradition, and this book relies overwhelmingly on the texts of its principal architects, all of whom are men. Women are, of course, frequent objects of Deobandi reformist discourse; most famously, Thanvi’s Bihishti zewar was composed specifically for female readers. This does not mean that women have not had important roles in disseminating (and sometimes contesting) Deobandi tradition. Most of the work on the Deoband movement and women has revolved around the Tablighi Jama‘at. See, notably, Barbara Daly Metcalf, “Tablighi Jama‘at and Women,” in Muhammad Khalid Masud, ed. Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama‘at as a Transnational Movement for Faith Renewal (Leiden: E.J., Brill, 2000), 44–58.

  1. A MODERN MADRASA

  1. Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, 1 November 1858, in The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947: Select Documents, ed. C.H. Philips and B.N. Pandey (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 11.

  2. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4. See also Bernard S. Coh
n, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 164–65.

  3. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

  4. Nandini Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1960 (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11.

  5. P.F. O’Malley, Religious Liberty and the Indian Proclamation (London: W.H. Dalton, 1859), 6 (emphasis added).

  6. See, among others, Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Benjamin Berger, Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Claims of Constitutionalism (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2016).

  7. Iza Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 63–64.

  8. J. Barton Scott and Brannon D. Ingram, “What Is a Public? Notes from South Asia,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2015): 357–70.

  9. E.g., Ashwini Tambe and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds. The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

  10. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104, at 99–100 (emphasis in original).

  11. The passage in question is one in which Rahman contrasts “medieval” Deoband with “modern” Aligarh. See Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 115. The reference to Qur’anic élan appears on p. 19.

  12. I refer to Rahman’s influence on contemporary Qur’an scholars such as Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Aysha Hidayatullah, among others.

  13. See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 117, 142–43. On colonial modernity and Hindu reform movements, see Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

  14. Numerous scholars have discussed this aspect of modernity. See, among others, Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

  15. And in this respect, they recall Bruce B. Lawrence’s definition of the “fundamentalist”: “moderns . . . but not modernists.” See his Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1990), 1.

  16. This is an ambivalence comparable to the one that Humeira Iqtidar examines in contemporary Pakistan, where, she argues, Islamist groups like Jama‘at-i Islami and Jama‘at ad-Da‘wa simultaneously reject “secularism” while facilitating discourses of the secular. See Humeira Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa in Urban Pakistan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 38–54.

  17. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Al-Intibahat al-mufida ‘an al-ishtibahat al-jadida (Delhi: Jayyid Barqi Press, 1926). Thanvi indicates that he was inspired, in part, by the Ottoman jurist Husain al-Jisr al-Tarablusi’s (d. 1909) influential critique of scientific materialism, al-Risala al-Hamidiyya (1888), which had been translated into Urdu in 1897, as Husayn ibn Muhammad Tarabulusi, Jadid ‘ilm-i kalam, ya‘ni sains aur Islam (Delhi: Azad Barqi Press, 1928/29). See Thanvi, Al-Intibahat al-mufida, 4. On Husayn al-Jisr, see Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 131–59, and, for the date of the Urdu translation, 356n34. Sayyid Ahmad, too, saw modernity “as an intellectual and epistemological, rather than a political, challenge.” Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Islam and Modernity in South Asia,” in Being Muslim in South Asia, ed. Robin Jeffrey and Ronojoy Sen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.

  18. Christopher Shackle and Javed Majeed, trans., Hali’s Musaddas: The Ebb and Flow of Islam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 142, 166. On the theme of decay, see the translators’ introduction, 49–52.

  19. See Brannon D. Ingram, “Crises of the Public in Muslim India: Critiquing ‘Custom’ at Aligarh and Deoband,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2015): 403–18, at 411.

  20. A ta‘ziya is a miniature replica of Imam Husayn’s mausoleum, used by Indian Shi‘a Muslims in public processions during the month of Muharram to commemorate Husayn’s martyrdom in 680.

  21. ‘Ashiq Ilahi Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid (Saharanpur: Kutub Khana-yi Isha‘at al-‘Ulum, 1977), 1:9–10.

  22. Sayyid Manazir Ahsan Gilani, Savanih Qasimi, ya‘ni Sirat-i Shams al-Islam (Lahore: Maktaba-yi Rahmaniyya, n.d.), 1:3.

  23. Anvarul Hasan Sherkoti, Sirat-i Ya‘qub o Mamluk (Karachi: Maktaba-yi Dar al-‘Ulum Karachi, 1974), 27–35; M. Ikram Chaghatai, “Dr. Aloys Sprenger and the Delhi College,” in Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107.

  24. Sayyid Nazar Zaidi, Hajji Imdad Allah Muhajir Makki: Sirat o savanih (Gujarat: Maktaba-yi Zafar, 1978), 38–42. This was not Hajji Imdad Allah’s only Wali Allahian connection. He was also the Sufi disciple of Nasir al-Din Dihlawi, grandson of Rafi‘ al-Din Dihlawi, who was a son of Shah Wali Allah. Nasir al-Din, a Sufi successor (khalifa) of Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi’s, initiated Imdad Allah into the Naqshbandi order. Another khalifa of Sayyid Ahmad’s, Mianji Nur Muhammad Jhanjhanawi (d. 1845), initiated Imdad Allah into the Chishti Sabiri order.

  25. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:73–74. Some have argued that Imdad Allah had a more active, direct role in waging jihad against the British. Ishtiaq Qureshi, among others, described Imdad Allah as the leader of a jihad campaign against the British in Shamli, which was promptly put down by the British, after which Imdad Allah hastily fled to escape arrest. See Ishtiaq Qureshi, Ulema in Politics: A Study Relating to the Political Activities of the Ulema in the South-Asian Subcontinent from 1556 to 1947 (Karachi: Ma‘aref Ltd., 1972), 200–202. Metcalf cast doubt on these narratives, calling them “nationalist accounts” that appear “only in secondary sources written after about 1920.” Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 82–83.

  26. Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum, 1:104.

  27. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 77–78.

  28. Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Intisar-i Islam ma‘ tashrih o tahsil (Deoband: Majlis-i Ma‘arif al-Qur’an, 1967), and Nanautvi, Guftagu-yi mazhabi (Karachi: Dar al-Isha‘at, 1977). On his debates with Saraswati, see SherAli Tareen, “The Polemic at Shahjahanpur: Religion, Miracles and History,” Islamic Studies 51, no. 1 (2012): 49–67. The role of Deoband’s founder in interreligious debates is recounted in Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Mubahasah-yi Shahjahanpur (Karachi: Dar al-Isha‘at, 1977).

  29. Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Qiblah numa ma‘ tashrih o tehsil (Deoband: Majlis-i Ma‘arif al-Qur’an, 1969).

  30. Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Tasfiyat al-‘aqa’id (Delhi: Matba‘-yi Mujtabai, 1934).

  31. Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, Hadiya al-Shi‘a (Lahore: Nu‘mani Kutub Khana, 1977).

  32. Gilani, Savanih Qasimi, 2:231–32.

  33. Ibid., 2:257–59; Sarfraz Khan, Bani-yi Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband (Gujranwala: Maktaba-yi Safdariyya, 2
001), 41. There has been a good deal of confusion about whether the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband was founded in 1866 or 1867. Metcalf’s Islamic Revival in British India gives 1867 as the year of its founding, but there is some confusion even in Urdu sources: Sarfraz Khan’s Bani-yi Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband provides 15 Muharram 1283 as the hijri date but then provides 1867 as the Gregorian date. This is, however, incorrect. All the evidence points to 1866 as the correct date. It seems that most academics have used 1867 based on Islamic Revival in British India, but tellingly, Metcalf corrected the date in her Husain Ahmad Madani: The Jihad for Islam and India’s Freedom (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 17.

  34. Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum, 1:187–88.

  35. Sayyid Muhammad Miyan, ‘Ulama-yi Haqq aur un ke mujahidana karname (Lahore: Jam‘iyat Publications, 2005), 89–90. See also the discussion in Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 111–16.

  36. Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum, 1:174–75.

  37. Sherkoti, Sirat-i Ya‘qub o Mamluk, 22–25, 46.

  38. Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 8–9.

  39. Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 143, quoted in Jonathan P. Berkey, “Madrasas Medieval and Modern: Politics, Education, and the Problem of Muslim Identity,” in Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, ed. Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 47.

  40. Berkey, “Madrasas Medieval and Modern,” 43.

  41. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 94.

  42. Gregory C. Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 60–78.

  43. Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1:150–51.