44. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 94.
45. However, it did in time court the support of wealthy patrons, most notably the Nizam of Hyderabad, who became an annual contributor to the institution. See Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 197. Interestingly, while the end of Hyderabad’s princely state in 1948 naturally meant the end of the Nizam’s patronage, Nehru intervened personally to continue monthly support for the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband from the central government, insofar as “Deoband has provided quite a good number of nationalist Muslim workers.” Deoband was not unique in this regard. Nehru did the same for Aligarh Muslim University, Benares Hindu University, and a number of other institutions that the Nizam had supported. See Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 80.
46. Qari Muhammad Tayyib, Azadi-yi Hindustan ka khamosh rahnuma (Deoband: Daftar-i Ihtimam-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1957), 9–11.
47. Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi, Tarikh-i mazahir (Saharanpur: Kutub Khana-yi Isha‘at al-‘Ulum, 1972), 1:5; and Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 22.
48. Sana Haroon, “Contextualizing the Deobandi Approach to Congregation and Management of Mosques in Colonial North India,” Journal of Islamic Studies 28, no. 1 (2017): 68–93, at 84–7.
49. Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 273.
50. Margrit Pernau, “From a ‘Private’ Public to a ‘Public’ Private Sphere: Old Delhi and the North Indian Muslims in Comparative Perspective,” in The Public and the Private: Issues of Democratic Citizenship, ed. Gurpreet Mahajan (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), 110.
51. Aziz Ahmad, “The Role of Ulema in Indo-Muslim History,” Studia Islamica 31 (1970): 1–13, at 6.
52. Ali Riaz, “Madrassah Education in Pre-Colonial and Colonial South Asia,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 46, no. 1 (2010): 69–86, at 71.
53. Francis Robinson, The Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 44–46, 53. The ma‘qulat began to flourish in Mughal India with the arrival of Iranian scholars at Akbar’s court, especially the polymath Fath Allah Shirazi (d. 1589). On Shirazi and the adaptation of his ideas in Mughal political ideology, see Ali Anooshahr, “Shirazi Scholars and the Political Culture of the Sixteenth-Century Indo-Persian World,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, no. 3 (2014): 331–52.
54. S.M. Ikram, Rud-i kausar: Islami Hind aur Pakistan ki mazhabi aur ruhani tarikh: ‘ahd-i mughaliya (Lahore: Idara-yi Siqafat-i Islamiya, 1975), 606.
55. Zafar al-Islam Islahi makes this point especially well in Ta‘lim ‘ahd-i Islami ke Hindustan men (Azamgarh, India: Shibli Academy, 2007), 29–30. For Sikand’s discussion, see Yoginder Sikand, Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2005), 34.
56. Jamal Malik, “Introduction,” Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror? ed. Jamal Malik (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 5–6.
57. Moosa, What Is a Madrasa? 110. Moosa argues that the excision of logic and philosophy from these curricula is at least partly responsible for what he sees as an inability of contemporary madrasa students to understand many of the theological texts they read.
58. Islahi, Ta‘lim ‘ahd-i Islam ke Hindustan men, 82.
59. Muhammad Raza Ansari, Bani-yi dars-i nizami: Ustaz al-Hind Mulla Nizamuddin Muhammad Farangi Mahall (Aligarh, India: Aligarh Muslim University Publication Division, 1973), 260.
60. Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1:171.
61. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:40–62, 88–96. The Chishti order has two branches: the Nizami branch and the Sabiri branch. The Nizami branch stems from Nizam al-Din Awliya’ and the Sabiri branch stems from ‘Ala al-Din ‘Ali Sabir; both founders were disciples of Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakkar. The historical record on the Nizami Chishtis is far more profuse than that of the Sabiris. The most important Sabiri Chishti prior to the nineteenth century was ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, ancestor of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi. In the nineteenth century, Hajji Imdad Allah al-Makki, the latter Gangohi’s master, became the single most influential Sabiri master since ‘Abd al-Quddus. See Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 118–19.
62. See also Brannon D. Ingram, “Sufis, Scholars and Scapegoats: Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (d. 1905) and the Deobandi Critique of Sufism,” Muslim World 99, no. 3 (2009): 478–501.
63. It is important to note that Deoband was not the first institution to emphasize manqulat over ma‘qulat. The Madrasa Rahimiyya, founded by Wali Allah’s father Shah ‘Abd al-Rahim (d. 1719), was perhaps the first, and certainly impacted the Deobandis through the Wali Allahian lineages discussed above. See Harlan O. Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth Century India: The Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008), 9.
64. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 61–63.
65. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:94.
66. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 53–55.
67. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69–78. On the culture of the Mughal munshi, see Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
68. Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10.
69. Rosane Rocher, “The creation of Anglo-Hindu law,” in Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis, and Jayanth K. Krishnan, eds. Hinduism and Law: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 79.
70. Quoted in “A Letter to the Chairman of the East India Company on the Danger of interfering in the Religious Opinions of the Natives of India,” Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 13 (London: J. Mawwan, 1808), 405 (emphasis in original).
71. C.S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25–29.
72. On this debate, see Lynn Zastoupli and Martin Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Surrey, UK: Curzon, 1999).
73. Charles Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1838), 152–53.
74. Carl W. Ernst, “Reconfiguring South Asian Islam: From the 18th to the 19th Century,” Comparative Islamic Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 247–72, at 250.
75. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 2:290.
76. Kristen Stilt, Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38–42, 73–76.
77. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175.
78. To resolve legal issues (e.g., marriage disputes) that required a qazi (an Islamic judge), muftis would sometimes advise individuals to go to princely states such as Bhopal that still had them, or later on, to engage in creative borrowing from other legal schools if they provided solutions that the Hanafi school could not provide for a specific issue. See Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 27–31. Indeed, with few exceptions (e.g., Bihar’s Imarat-i Shari‘a, formed in 1921), the absence of qazis was a void that would not be mitigated until after Independence. A Dar al-Qaza would be finally established at Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, e.g., only in 1974. See Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1:412. On the Bihar case, see Papiya Ghosh, “Muttahidah qaumiyat in aqalliat Bihar: The Imarat i Shariah, 1921–1947,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 34, no. 1 (1997): 1–20.
Qazis were crucial in Mughal administration and in
deciding cases of civil and criminal law. There was a supreme qazi (qazi al-qudat), as well as provincial qazis posted to towns throughout the empire. See Zameeruddin Siddiqi, “The Institution of the Qazi under the Mughals,” in Medieval India: A Miscellany, comp. Aligarh Muslim University (London: Asia Publishing House, 1969); and Jadunath Sarkar, Mughal Administration (Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons, 1952), 91–101. Not all administration relied on qazis’ decisions; under Aurangzeb, many imperial decisions were made on the basis of his imperial edicts (zawabit-i Alamgiri) or customary practice (qanun-i ‘urfi). See M.L. Bhatia, Administrative History of Medieval India (New Delhi: Radha Publications, 1992).
79. Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 294–96.
80. Jones quoted in Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the father of modern linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 286. See also Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Apostasy and Judicial Separation in British India,” in Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas, ed. Muhammad Khalid Masud, Brinkley Messick, and David S. Powers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 197. On the Fatawa-yi Alamgiri, see Alan M. Guenther, “Hanafi Fiqh in Mughal India: The Fatawa-i Alamgiri,” in India’s Islamic Traditions: 711–1150, ed. Richard M. Eaton (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
81. Wael Hallaq, Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 374–75.
82. Burhan al-Din Abu’l Hasan Marghinani, Hedaya, a Commentary on the Mussulman Laws, trans. Charles Hamilton (London: T. Bensley, 1791), xxxi. On Marghinani, see Y. Meron, “Marghinani, His Method and His Legacy,” Islamic Law and Society 9, no. 3 (2002): 410–16.
83. Scott Alan Kugle, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 257–313. In a rejoinder to Kugle, John Strawson argues that processes of codification and bureaucratization had already shaped Islamic law long before the colonial period, and that the most critical reshaping of Islamic law took place not in Hamilton’s era but in the mid to late nineteenth century, with the “pulling of Islamic law on to the terrain of English law,” by which Strawson refers to the development of the full apparatus of English courts, judges, and barristers for adjudicating Islamic law. See John Strawson, “Translating the Hedaya: Colonial Foundations of Islamic Law,” in Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements, and Legacies, ed. Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014), 157–70, at 168.
84. Marghinani, Hedaya, iv–v.
85. Jorg Fisch, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law, 1769–1817 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), 34, 47.
86. Singha, A Despotism of Law, 52–53.
87. Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112–16.
88. Hallaq, Shari‘a, 178.
89. William H. Morley, The Administration of Justice in British India: its Past History and Present State (London: Williams and Norgate, 1858), 331.
90. Peters, Crime and Punishment, 109–10.
91. Michael R. Anderson, “Classifications and Codifications: Themes in South Asian Legal Studies in the 1980s,” South Asia Research 10, no. 2 (1990): 158–77, at 166–67.
92. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 29.
93. Hallaq, Shari‘a, 381.
94. Government of India Legislative Department, The Unrepealed General Acts of the Governor General in Council, vol. 3 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1898), 330–31, 331n1.
95. Fareeha Khan, “Tafwid al-Talaq: Transferring the Right to Divorce to the Wife,” Muslim World 99, no. 3 (2009): 502–20, at 503.
96. Masud, “Apostasy and Judicial Separation in British India,” 195.
97. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 25. It should be noted that this never completely eclipsed the prestige of individual muftis. Fatwa collections by Gangohi, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Muhammad Kifayat Allah, Mahmud Hasan Gangohi, and other Deobandis drew from their association with Deoband and from their own authority as jurists in equal measure.
98. Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1:202.
99. Hussein Ali Agrama, “Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Toward an Anthropology of the Fatwa,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (2010): 2–18, at 4.
100. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:112.
101. William Fischer Agnew, The Law of Trusts in British India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1882), 396–407.
102. Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11–12.
103. That being said, some prominent British officials continued to argue that the government should have a role in patronizing institutions such as the Calcutta Madrasa, since the scholars trained there “did not show any hostility to the Government during the period of the mutinies,” in the words of the Viscount Canning (d. 1862), governor-general during the 1857 uprising. Jamal Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Tendenzen am Beispiel von Lucknow (Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1997), 206.
104. Green, Bombay Islam, 7.
105. Rizvi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1:200.
106. “Letter to Assistant Secretary to the Political Department of Nizam’s Government,” 14 March 1931, British Library IOR 1/1/2006 (emphasis added).
107. Rivzi, Tarikh-i Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, 1:219 (emphasis added).
108. Marghinani, Hedaya, ii.
109. “Copy of a Despatch to the Government of India, on the Subject of General Education in India,” House of Commons Sessional Papers 47 (1854): 155–73.
110. Zastoupli and Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate, 116.
111. “Petition of the Muslim Inhabitants of Calcutta to the Government,” Asiatic Journal 18 (1835): 95–96, reprinted in Zastoupli and Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate, 189–93. Citations are on pp. 190 and 192.
112. See Parna Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), esp. chap. 6.
113. India Political Department, Mysore, “Monthly Grant-in-Aid of Rs 50 to the Mahomedan Female School in Bangalore,” British Library, IOR/L/PS/6/555, coll. 54.
114. Quoted in G.W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Panjab since Annexation and in 1882 (New Delhi: Languages Department Punjab, 1971), app. 6, 19–20. See also Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 63.
115. Edwin Atkinson, Statistical, Descriptive and Historical Account of the North-Western Provinces of India (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces Government Press, 1875), 2:192–93.
116. Sayyid Ahmad Khan Bahadur et al., Translation of the Report of the Members of the Select Committee for the Better Diffusion and Advancement of Learning among the Muhammadans of India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1872), 8.
117. Ibid., 55 (emphasis added).
118. Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion, 137.
119. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education, ii–iii (emphasis in original).
120. Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, 209.
121. Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, Makatib-i Rashidiyya, ed. Mahmud Ashraf ‘Usmani (Lahore: Idara-yi Islamiyya, 1996), 52.
122. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education, 76.
123. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 23.
124. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, “The Raison d’Être of Madrasah,” trans. Muhammad al-Ghazali, Islamic Studies 43, no. 4 (2004): 653–75, at 667.
125. S.M. Jaffar, Education in Muslim India, Being an Inquiry into the State of Education during the Muslim Period of Indian History, 1000–1800 (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delhi, 1936), 28 (emphasis added).
126. Marmaduke Pickthall, “Muslim Education,” Islamic Culture: The Hyderabad Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (1927): 100–108, at 101.
127. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 64.
128. Moosa, What Is a Madrasa?, 200.
2. THE NORMATIVE ORDER
1. Robinson uses the phrase to denote new forms of interiority and subjectivity in Indian Muslim thought in the modern period, whereas Metcalf refers mostly to a post-1857 retreat from direct contestations of British rule. See Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9, 117–17; and Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 86, 254.
2. See Bearman et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. “Din.”
3. It is thus too simple to define it, as the entry on bid‘a in the Encyclopaedia of Islam does, as “a belief or practice for which there is no precedent in the time of the Prophet.” See Bearman et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. “Bid‘a.”
4. Jonathan Berkey, “Tradition, Innovation, and the Social Construction of Knowledge in the Medieval Islamic Near East,” Past and Present 146 (1995): 38–65, at 56.
5. See p. 75–76.
6. Muhammad Khalid Masud long ago noted that the mere existence of entire chapters of Deobandi fatwa collections devoted to bid‘a was a relative novelty. See Masud, “Trends in the Interpretation of Islamic Law as Reflected in the Fatawa Literature of the Deoband School” (MA thesis, McGill University, 1969), 17. One might assume that Wahhabism is an obvious example of one such movement similarly focused on bid‘a, but perusing Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s work suggests that shirk is overwhelmingly a far greater concern than bid‘a.
7. Muhammad Khalid Masud discusses the extent of Shatibi’s influence on Deobandi conceptions of bid‘a in “The Definition of Bid‘a in the South Asian Fatawa Literature,” Annales Islamologiques 27 (1993): 55–71, at 61–62.
8. Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Musa al-Shatibi, Al-I‘tisam (Cairo: Matba‘ al-Manar, 1913), 30–31. For a fuller analysis of Shatibi’s concept of bid‘a, see Muhammad Khalid Masud, Shatibi’s Philosophy of Islamic Law, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 2009), 218–25. On Shatibi’s legal theory more broadly, see Wael Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni Usul al-Fiqh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 5.
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