Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  116. Thanvi, Islah al-rusum, 134–35. Cf. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 115–16, 132.

  117. In some cases, jurists invoked this principle even to override norms established in the Prophet Muhammad’s era—e.g., the presence of women in mosques. See Marion Holmes Katz, “The Corruption of the Times and the Mutability of the Shari‘a,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 1 (2006): 171–86. On this idea in Hanafi law, see Haim Gerber, Islamic Law and Culture: 1600–1840 (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1999), 124–27.

  118. Thanvi, Islah al-rusum, 134. For a discussion of maslaha within discourses of the ‘ulama, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “The ‘Ulama of Contemporary Islam and Their Conceptions of the Common Good,” in Public Islam and the Common Good, ed. Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004). For a more general assessment, with attention to contemporary debates, see Felicitas Opwis, Maslaha and the Purpose of the Law: Islamic Discourse on Legal Change from the 4th/10th to 8th/14th Century (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2010).

  119. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 116, 1:130.

  120. Thanvi, Islah al-rusum, 136–37.

  121. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Al-Surur bi-zuhur al-nur wa mulaqqab bih irshad al-‘ibad fi ‘eid al-milad (Sadhaura, India: Bilali Steam Press, 1915), 3.

  122. Ibid., 4–6.

  123. Ibid., 27–28.

  124. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 98.

  125. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 25.

  126. Nile Green, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44, 48.

  127. Ibid., 33, 35.

  128. Green, Sufism: A Global History, 102.

  129. Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2002), 446.

  130. P.M. Currie, The Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-Din Chishti of Ajmer (New York and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 99–100.

  131. Jahanara, Mu’nis al-arvah (Karachi: S.M. Hamid Ali, 1991), 120. A passage of this text is translated in Carl W. Ernst, Teachings of Sufism (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1999), 196–99.

  132. Muhammad Chishti, Adab al-talibin ma‘ rafiq al-tulab wa albab thalatha (Lahore: Progressive Books, 1984), 61. See also the discussion of Muhammad Chishti in Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, 92–93.

  133. Carl W. Ernst, “An Indo-Persian Guide to Sufi Shrine Pilgrimage,” in Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam, ed. Grace Martin Smith and Carl W. Ernst (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), 55–56.

  134. Ernst, “An Indo-Persian Guide,” 60.

  135. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa-yi Dihli: Farsi matan aur Urdu tarjamah, trans. Khalid Anjum (Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-yi Urdu, 1993), 120.

  136. Imdad Allah, Kulliyat-i Imdadiyya, 82.

  137. Ibid.

  138. Ibid., 82–83.

  139. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 392–95.

  140. Mahmud Hasan Gangohi, Malfoozat: Statements and Anecdotes of Faqeeh-ul-Ummat, ed. Mufti Farooq Meeruti (Durban: Madrasah Taleemuddeen, 2010), 279–80.

  141. Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi, Maut ki yad (Karachi: Idara al-Ma‘arif, 2005). Sufi reflections on the spiritual rewards of visiting graves did not begin, of course, with the Deobandis. Al-Ghazali, too, devoted a section of Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din to the subject. See Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife: Kitab dhikr al-mawt wa-ma ba‘dahu (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2015), 111–20.

  142. On ‘Abd al-Quddus, see Simon Digby, “‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (1456–1537): The Personality and Attitudes of a Medieval Indian Sufi,” Medieval India: A Miscellany 3 (1975): 1–66; and Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 3.

  143. Quoted in Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 2:176.

  144. Gangohi, Hudud-i ikhtilaf, 119.

  145. Ibid., 120. This story is also recounted in Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 4, 1:19–20.

  146. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 2:9. The same story is related in Kandhlavi, Tarikh-i mashaikh-i Chisht, 289.

  147. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 166.

  148. In his response, Gangohi (or Mirathi) accidentally substituted al-‘akifin (“those who stay there”) for al-qa’imin (“those who stand there”). The correct phrase in Qur’an 22:26 is: “purify My House for those who walk around it, for those who stand there and those who bow and prostrate.” It seems he may have been confused by a similar phrase in Qur’an 2:125: “purify My House for those who walk around it, for those who stay there and those who bow and prostrate.”

  149. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:144–46.

  150. In a fatwa of December 1903, Thanvi made the same argument in response to a scholar requesting clarification on the Hadith: “If I were to order anyone to prostrate to another, I would have ordered the wife to prostrate to her husband.” Thanvi has some doubts about the reliability of the Hadith, but concludes in any case that the Qur’an and Sunna overwhelmingly forbid any form of prostration from one human to another, and abrogate examples of such prostration before Islam, including even examples of such prostration in the Qur’an, as when others bow before the prophet Joseph in Qur’an 12:4 and 12:100. See Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Bavadir al-navadir (Lahore: Idara al-Islamiyya, 1985), 134–38; cf. also 400–404.

  151. Underscoring how bleakly Thanvi viewed the state of Islam in his day, elsewhere he speculates: “If Muslims were asked the same question today, most would respond, ‘Yes, we would prostrate before your grave.’” Thanvi, Khutbat-i Hakim al-Ummat, 2:253.

  152. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Hifz al-iman, ma‘ basat al-banan wa taghayyur al-‘unwan (Deoband: Maktaba-yi Nu‘maniyya, 1962), 4–7. See also Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf, 5:66, in which he reiterates the distinction between prostration as worship and prostration as reverence, seeing the former as clear kufr and shirk and the latter as “a grave sin and very close to kufr.” It is worth noting that this view was not limited to the Deobandis. Ahmad Raza Khan, founder of the Barelvi movement, also condemned “reverential circumambulation” (tawaf-i ta‘zimi) of anything other than the Ka‘aba, as well as “prostrating before anything other than God.” Misbahi, Imam Ahmad Raza, 521.

  153. Thanvi, Hifz al-iman, 7–8.

  154. Thanvi, Islah al-rusum, 140.

  155. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 61.

  156. Thanvi, Islah al-rusum, 139.

  157. Ibid., 139–40.

  158. Ibid., 141–42.

  159. Ibid., 143.

  160. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 142.

  161. Thanvi, Islah al-rusum, 144–45.

  162. Ibid., 145.

  163. Mufti Muhammad Shafi‘, Ma‘arif al-Qur’an (Karachi: Idara al-Ma‘arif, 1969), 1:40, 1:43–44.

  164. For his education and relation to Thanvi, see Muhammad Sa‘d Siddiqi’s introduction to Muhammad Idris Kandhlavi, Ma‘arif al-Qur’an (Shahdapur, Pakistan: Maktaba al-Ma‘arif, n.d.), 1:3–4.

  165. Ibid., 1:22. Thanvi makes a similar argument in Bavadir al-navadir, 82–83.

  166. Arthur Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 12.

  167. For more on this history, see Joseph Kostiner, The Making of Saudi Arabia, 1916–1936: From Chieftaincy to Monarchical State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 100–117.

  168. M. Naeem Qureshi, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), 400–401. For a general overview of both the Cairo and Mecca conferences, see Martin Kramer, Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 86–122.

  169. Muhammad Anwar al-Hasan Anwar Qasimi, Kamalat-i ‘Usmani (Multan, Pakistan: Idara-yi Ta’lifat-i Ashrafiyy
a, 2006), 349–50.

  170. Shabbir Ahmad ‘Usmani, Anvar-i ‘Usmani (Karachi: Maktaba al-Islamiyya, n.d.), 69.

  171. Qasimi, Kamalat-i ‘Usmani, 355.

  172. Quoted in ibid., 354.

  173. Zaman makes this point with respect to ‘Usmani’s visit in Islam in Pakistan, 211. On the use of “Wahhabi” in polemical discourses, see Martha K. Hermansen, “Fakirs, Wahhabis and Others: Reciprocal Classifications and the Transformation of Intellectual Categories,” in Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History 1760–1860, ed. Jamal Malik (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000); and Alexander Knysh, “A Clear and Present Danger: ‘Wahhabism’ as a Rhetorical Foil,” Die Welt des Islams 44, no. 1 (2004): 3–26.

  174. Saharanpuri, ‘Aqa’id-i ‘ulama-yi Deoband, 7–9.

  175. The most prominent example of the latter, written in 1978—a very different historical and political context—is Muhammad Manzur Nu‘mani, Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab ke khilaf propaganda aur Hindustan ke ‘ulama-yi haqq par us ke asarat (Lucknow: Kutub Khana al-Furqan, 1978).

  3. REMAKING THE PUBLIC

  1. Thomas R. Metcalf and Barbara D. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138.

  2. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

  3. Metcalf and Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 95–97.

  4. Atkinson, Statistical, Descriptive and Historical Account, 2:153.

  5. Goswami, Producing India, 126. See also Ritika Prasad, “‘Time-Sense’: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (2013): 1252–82.

  6. Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India, 113–16.

  7. Currie, Shrine and Cult, 118n7.

  8. Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 188–89.

  9. ‘Aziz al-Hasan, Ashraf al-savanih, 4:355–56.

  10. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 2:202.

  11. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), 6. See also William Mazzarella, “Myth of the Multitude, or Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 697–727, at 701–7. Le Bon’s La civilisation des Arabes (1884) was translated into Urdu in 1896 and published as Tamaddun-i ‘Arab, trans. Sayyid ‘Ali Bilgrami (Sargodha: Zafar Traders, 1975), a work that both reflected and reinforced tropes of Islamic civilizational decline. It does not appear that any of Le Bon’s other works were translated into Urdu. La psychologie des foules was translated into Arabic, however, as Ruh al-ijtima‘, trans. Ahmad Fatih Zaghlul (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Sha‘b, 1909).

  12. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 454.

  13. Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, 36.

  14. Al-Ghazali, in turn, adapted this typology from Junayd.

  15. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Haqq al-sama‘ (Karachi: Idara-yi Ashraf al-‘Ulum, 1950), 13.

  16. Ibid., 15.

  17. Thanvi, Al-Kalam al-hasan, 22.

  18. Thanvi, Haqq al-sama‘, 23.

  19. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 107.

  20. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 379, 1:344–45. For Gangohi, too, Hallaj was excused of any wrongdoing, but his words are not meant for public consumption or debate. See Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 107–8. Although for Gangohi and Thanvi the theological and legal dangers of ecstatic utterances were front and center, Carl Ernst showed how the political context of Hallaj’s trial and execution in 922 is more important for understanding reactions to his shathiyat than the legal-theological implications. Anxieties about Shi‘i resistance to ‘Abbasid rule were especially salient; Hallaj was accused of sympathy toward, if not collusion with, the Qarmati sect—a Nizari Isma‘ili offshoot that revolted against the ‘Abbasids in 899. See Carl W. Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 102–10, esp. 107–8.

  21. William Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?,” in Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, ed. Saurabh Dube (London, New York, and New Delhi: Routledge, 2009), 294–95.

  22. Redacted versions of such communications were collected, partly under Thanvi’s own supervision, and published in Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Tarbiyat al-salik (Karachi: Dar al-Isha‘at, 1982). Chapter 4 draws on this collection to illustrate points about Deobandi Sufi pedagogy.

  23. The collection of Sirhindi’s (d. 1624) letters, the Maktubat-i mujaddid alf-i sani (Delhi: Matba‘-yi Murtazavi, 1873), is probably the best known of many such collections.

  24. A seminal source for this dichotomy is Gabriel Tarde’s 1898 essay “The Public and the Crowd,” in Gabriel Tarde, On Communication and Social Influence, ed. Terry N. Clark. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 277–94.

  25. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 59.

  26. Richard Butsch, The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2008), 15.

  27. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 36.

  28. Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, “Muslim Publics,” in Public Islam and the Common Good, ed. Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2006), 6.

  29. On the colonial munazara, see Barbara Daly Metcalf, “Imagining Community: Polemical Debates in Colonial India,” in Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, ed. Kenneth W. Jones (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Hermansen, “Fakirs, Wahhabis and Others”; and Jamal Malik, “Encounter and Appropriation in the Context of Modern South Asian History,” in Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History 1760–1860, ed. Jamal Malik (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000).

  30. Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 1993), 226–62.

  31. Indeed, sometimes “winning” was hardly the goal; rather, mobilizing one’s own supporters was more important than debating a point with an opponent. Metcalf discusses an occasion when the Arya Samaj insisted on carrying out a “debate” with Deobandis in Sanskrit. The fact that the Deobandi ‘ulama could not speak Sanskrit was immaterial, as the Arya Samaj were interested only in firing up their own supporters in the audience. See Metcalf, “Imagining Community,” 236.

  32. Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11–12.

  33. Lander, Inventing Polemic, 34. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 90–91.

  34. See Tareen, “The Polemic at Shahjahanpur.”

  35. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 116–17. To be precise, Saharanpuri never said God did lie, or would lie, but only that he could lie, for to deny that possibility, in his view, was to constrain divine sovereignty, as we saw with Muhammad Isma‘il.

  36. Ibid., 143.

  37. See, e.g., Usha Sanyal, Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi: In the Path of the Prophet (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 102–9.

  38. Ahmad Raza Khan, Husam al-haramayn ‘ala manhar al-kufr wa al-mayn (Lahore: Maktaba-yi Nabaviyya, 1975), 20–22, 28.

  39. Ibid., 32.

  40. Ibid., 10.

  41. Imdad Allah, Kulliyat-i Imdadiyya, 77.

  42. Ibid., 85.

  43. Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf ‘an muhimmat al-tasawwuf, 5:43.

  44. Quoted in ‘Aziz al-Hasan, Ashraf al-savanih, 4:355–56.

  45. Quoted in Muhammad ibn al-Husain al-Sulami, Haqa’iq al-tafsir: Tafsir al-Qur’an al-‘aziz (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2001), 1:22. See al
so Farhana Mayer, trans., Spiritual Gems: The Mystical Qur’an Commentary Ascribed to Ja‘far al-Sadiq (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2011), 1. I have adjusted Mayer’s translation very slightly.

  46. Pernau, “From a ‘Private’ Public,” 105–6.

  47. See Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes.

  48. Gangohi, Hudud-i ikhtilaf, 118.

  49. See Youshaa Patel, “Muslim Distinction: Imitation and the Anxiety of Jewish, Christian, and Other Influences” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2012). For South Asia specifically, see Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Cosmopolitanism and Authenticity: The Doctrine of Tashabbuh Bi’l-Kuffar (‘Imitating the Infidel’) in Modern South Asian Fatwas,” in Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past, ed. Derryl N. Maclean and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

  50. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 115.

  51. Ibid., 82 (emphasis added).

  52. Ibid., 142–43.

  53. Ibid., 69.

  54. Saharanpuri, Barahin-i qati‘a, 152. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 115.

  55. ‘Abd al-Shakur Mirzapuri, Tarikh-i milad (Karachi: Dar al-Isha‘at, 1978), 60–64. On Krishna’s birth festival, see Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson, and Michael York, eds., Encyclopedia of Hinduism (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), s.v. “Janmastami,” 386–87.

  56. Saharanpuri was asked to clarify this point in Al-Muhannad ‘ala al-mufannad. See Saharanpuri, ‘Aqa’id-i ‘ulama-yi Deoband, 25–26.

  57. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:185.

  58. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 70.

  59. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:134.

  60. Mirzapuri, Tarikh-i milad, 61–62.

  61. Thanvi, Anfas-i ‘Isa, 325.

  62. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Hayat al-Muslimin (Karachi: Idara al-Ma‘arif, 2005), 186–87. Cited in Ingram, “Crises of the Public in Muslim India,” 416.

  63. Thanvi, Imdad al-fatawa, 4:268.

  64. Thanvi, Bavadir al-navadir, 306.