58. The Claremont Main Road Mosque dates to 1854 and holds an immense, if often controversial, stature among Muslims at the Cape. It became especially noteworthy when, in August 1994, the female African-American Qur’an scholar Amina Wadud gave a pre-khutbah talk on women’s rights in this mosque before a mixed-gender audience. See Abdulkader Tayob, Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams, and Sermons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 56–58.
59. Claremont Main Road Mosque, “Mawlud an-Nabi: Poetry in Honor of the Prophet’s Birth” (n.p., n.d.), Islamic ephemera collection, African Studies Library, University of Cape Town.
60. This is especially true in the Indian Sufi context. For a discussion of the halqa-i zikr among Sabiri Chishtis, see Robert Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 194–96.
61. “Call for Dhikr to Show Solidarity,” Muslim Views, March 1988, 3. For Moosa’s biography, see his What Is a Madrasa?, 15–30.
62. Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa, From Where Shall We Begin? (Durban: Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa, n.d.), 13.
63. Call of Islam, The Struggle (Cape Town: Call of Islam, 1988), 14.
64. Farid Esack, “Review of Faith” (n.p., 1984), 23. I thank Matthew Palombo for sharing this document with me.
65. E.g., Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 188, 5:186–91.
66. On the Khilafat Movement, see esp. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Qureshi, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics.
67. The first monograph on this subject was in fact the first in English on any aspect of Deobandi history: Zia ul-Hasan Faruqi, The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963). More recently, Metcalf’s Husain Ahmad Madani, Zaman’s Ashraf Ali Thanawi (esp. pp. 35–56), and Qureshi’s Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics (esp. pp. 233–316) have all explored Deobandi politics, with attention to the disagreement between Thanvi and Madani.
68. Qureshi, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics, 249.
69. Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 296–301.
70. Metcalf, Husain Ahmad Madani, 78–79.
71. Husain Ahmad Madani, Muttahida qawmiyyat aur Islam, ed. Amjad ‘Ali Shakir (Lahore: Jami‘at Publications, 2006), 136–37, 147–48.
72. E.g., Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi, Al-I‘tidal fi maratib al-rijal, ya‘ni Islami siyasat (Deoband: Ittihad Book Depot, n.d.); and Gangohi, Hudud-i ikhtilaf.
73. Husain Ahmad Madani, Al-Shihab al-saqib ‘ala al-mustariq al-kazib (Lahore, 1979).
74. Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 106–10.
75. Ahmad Sa‘id, Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Sahib Thanvi aur tahrik-i azadi (Rawalpindi, Pakistan: Khalid Nadim Publications, 1972), 69–71. For the text of Azad’s fatwa, see Qureshi, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics, 188–89.
76. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 34, 1:60–61; statement no. 12, 5:22.
77. See pp. 103–4 above and the discussion in Zaman, Ashraf Ali Thanawi, 39–44.
78. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 10, 1:35–36.
79. Sa‘id, Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Sahib Thanvi, 52–57, esp. 53.
80. Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211.
81. Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000), 356; David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), 96–99.
82. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 116, 1:120.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., 1:122, 1:127.
85. Ibid., 1:120.
86. Ibid., 1:121.
87. Interestingly, Yusuf al-Qaradawi disagrees. Citing the same point about the Persian origins of the practice of digging trenches in warfare, Qaradawi argues that “[t]here is no Islamic legal impediment to acquiring an idea or a practical solution from non-Muslims.” Zaman and Euben, Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought, 237.
88. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, 1:124, 1:122.
89. Ibid., 1:130.
90. Ibid., 1:133.
91. Thanvi, Ashraf al-tariqat, 85–90.
92. Muhammad Taqi ‘Usmani, Hakim al-Ummat ke siyasi afkar (Karachi: Idara al-Ma‘arif, 2000), 44.
93. Ibid., 44–45.
94. Megan Eaton Robb, “Advising the Army of Allah: Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s Critique of the Muslim League,” in Muslims against the Muslim League: Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan, ed. Ali Usman Qasmi and Megan Eaton Robb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 152–55.
95. Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina, 21.
96. Ibid., 110–14.
97. Its original members consisted of Ismail Moosagie, who acted as president; Muhammad Hanif Ismail Moosagie; and Ahmed Sadiq Desai, who became the public face and principal writer of the group’s literature. All three studied at Miftah al-‘Ulum in Jalalabad, India, with Masihullah Khan. “Port Elizabeth gets second Ulema body,” Muslim News, 27 February 1970.
98. Miftahi, Hayat-i Masih al-Ummat, 56.
99. Muhammad Faruq, Zikr-i Masih al-Ummat (Brixton, South Africa: Maktaba Noor, 1998), 8.
100. Ibid., 67. These works include Bayan al-Qur’an, Imdad al-fatawa, Bihishti zewar, Tarbiyat al-salik, Islahi nisab, and Ashraf al-sawanih.
101. Faruq, Zikr-i Masih al-Ummat, 54–55.
102. Ibid., 17.
103. Ibid., 47–48. His khalifas in South Africa numbered at least ten out of approximately sixty in total. They include Maulana Munshi Moosa Yaqub of Verulam, Maulana Ismail Kathrada of Natal, Maulana Ahmed Sadiq Desai of Port Elizabeth, Dr. Abdul Qadir Hansa of Ladysmith, Maulana Abdul Haq Omarjee of Durban, Dr. Ismail Mangera of Johannesburg, Haji Yusuf Kathrada of Verulam, Mufti Rashid Mia of Waterval, Maulana Muhammad Hashim Boda of Lenasia, Maulana Qasim Dawood of Parlock, and Yusuf Navlakhi of Lenasia.
104. Puja is of course a Hindu ritual term, one chosen deliberately.
105. “The Curse of Grave Worship,” The Majlis 7, no. 9, p. 1. Issues of The Majlis are undated; they do not provide the month or year of publication. They provide only the volume and issue number. Some of the articles are titled, and some are not. Page numbers are usually provided, but some of the Majlis citations below are from issues without page numbers. The citations below provide all the information available for a given issue.
106. Young Men’s Muslim Association, Moulood and the Shariah (Benoni, South Africa: Young Men’s Muslim Association, n.d.), 11–21.
107. Ibid., 34.
108. The Majlis 4, no. 12, p. 7.
109. Ibid.
110. “Tasawwuf Misunderstood,” The Majlis 14, no. 6, p. 6.
111. “What Is Tasawwuf?,” The Majlis 11, no. 6, p. 9.
112. The Majlis 6, no. 6, p. 1. Also see The Majlis 7, no. 2, p. 8.
113. The Majlis 6, no. 6, p. 1; The Majlis 7, no. 2, p. 8.
114. The Majlis 6, no. 7, p. 5.
115. Majlisul Ulama of South Africa, The Interfaith Trap of Kufr (Benoni, South Africa: Young Men’s Muslim Association, n.d.), 17.
116. Ibid., 40.
117. Ibid., 42.
118. Matthew Palombo, “The Emergence of Islamic Liberation Theology in South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 44 (2014): 28–61, at 44.
119. Muslim News, 8 August 1980, 32.
120. Cassiem, Quest for Unity, 66.
121. The Majlis 8, no. 9, p. 9.
122. Al-Qalam 10, no. 2 (1985): 8.
123. The Majlis 8, no. 5. p. 1.
124. “Maududi-ism,” The Majlis 2, no. 7, p. 4.
&nb
sp; 125. The Majlis 7, no. 3, p. 7.
126. The Majlis 8, no. 7, p. 5.
127. The Majlis 11, no. 4, p. 11.
128. In the Chishti context, this usually took the form of refusing the largesse or patronage of rulers. On this, see esp. Tanvir Anjum, Chishti Sufis in the Sultanate of Delhi, 1190–1400: From Restrained Indifference to Calculated Defiance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
129. “The Bid‘ah of Halqah Thikr in the Musaajid,” The Majlis 14, no. 3, p. 8.
130. The Majlis 6, no. 7, p. 2.
131. Esack, “Review of Faith,” 25–26, quoted in Palombo, “Islamic Liberation Theology in South Africa,” 47. Esack elaborates on his understanding of praxis in Quran, Liberation & Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective on Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997), 107–8.
132. Palombo, “Emergence of Islamic Liberation Theology,” 50.
133. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), introduction, chaps. 2 and 5. See also SherAli Tareen, “Revolutionary Hermeneutics: Translating the Qur’an as a Manifesto for Revolution,” Journal of Religious and Political Practice 3, nos. 1–2 (2017): 1–24.
134. Peter Custers, “Maulana Bhashani and the Transition to Secular Politics in East Bengal,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 47, no. 2 (2010): 231–59.
135. Yousuf Dadoo, “Maulvi Cachalia: The Contributions of a Thinker Activist in the Political Liberation of South Africa,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 16, no. 1 (1996): 129–33.
136. Yunus Patel, interview with author, Madrasa Sawlehaat, Durban, 12 November 2009. More information on Patel’s life and work is available on his website, www.yunuspatel.co.za (last accessed 23 June 2018).
137. Francis Robinson, “Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and the Islamic Revival: A Memorial Lecture for Wilfred Cantwell Smith,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, vol. 14, no. 1 (2004): 47–58.
CONCLUSION
1. Declan Walsh and Nour Youssef, “Attack on Coptic Cathedral in Cairo Kills Dozens,” New York Times, 11 December 2016.
2. “Attack on Shah Noorani Shrine in Pakistan kills dozens,” Al-Jazeera, 12 November 2016; “Blast Hits Pakistan’s Lal Shahbaz Qalandar Sufi Shrine,” Al-Jazeera, 16 February 2017.
3. On the dhamal, focusing on the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, see Jürgen Wasim Frembgen, “Dhamal and the Performing Body: Trance Dance in the Devotional Sufi Practice of Pakistan,” Journal of Sufi Studies 1, no. 1 (2012): 77–113. On the Qalandars in Islamic history, see Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Later Islamic Middle Period, 1200–1550 (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).
4. Sher Alam Shinwari, “Footprints: Rahman Baba’s Devotees in Grip of Fear,” Dawn, 5 April 2015. On the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, see Hassan Abbas, The Taliban Revival: Violence and Extremism on the Pakistan–Afghanistan Border (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 141–67.
5. Declan Walsh, “Suicide Bombers Kill Dozens at Pakistan Shrine,” The Guardian, 2 July 2010.
6. Huma Imtiaz, “Sufi Shrine in Pakistan Is Hit by a Lethal Double Bombing,” New York Times, 7 October 2010.
7. Ashraf Buzdar, “Suicide Hits at Sakhi Sarwar Shrine Kill 41,” The Nation (Pakistan), 4 April 2011.
8. Rania Abouzeid, “Taliban Targets, Pakistan’s Sufis Fight Back,” Time, 10 November 2010. The author interviews Sayyid Safdar Shah Gilani, head of a Barelvi organization, the Sunni Ittehad Council, who has proposed among other things a ban on “incendiary Deobandi literature,” according to Abouzeid.
9. Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 261.
10. Sami‘ al-Haq, Afghan Taliban: War of Ideology, Struggle for Peace (Islamabad: Emel Publications, 2015), xvii.
11. M.A. Haqqani et al., Fatawa-yi Haqqaniyya, 2:261.
12. Ibid., 2:245–47.
13. Ibid., 2:249. The manual is Nizam al-Din Awrangabadi’s Nizam al-qulub. On Nizam al-qulub and its centrality for the Chishti-Sabiri lineage, see Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies, 232. Hajji Imdad Allah outlines the zikr haddadi in his manual on zikr, “Ziya al-Qulub,” in Imdad Allah, Kulliyat-i Imdadiyya, 21–22.
14. M.A. Haqqani et al., Fatawa-yi Haqqaniyya, 2:254. On the role of the chilla in Chishti piety, see Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, 96. Ernst and Lawrence also note (on p. 122) that Thanvi likewise supported the chilla as long as it was done “to cure some moral defect” (their words, not Thanvi’s).
15. M.A. Haqqani et al., Fatawa-yi Haqqaniyya, 2:267.
16. Ibid., 2:256–57.
17. Ibid., 1:189.
18. Ibid., 1:182–86.
19. Zaman, Islam in Pakistan, 343n174.
20. One of Sami‘ al-Haq’s works, a detailed treatise on Qur’anic ethics, draws on much of the standard language of Deobandi works on Sufism, including ethical reform (islah-i ahklaq) of the self (nafs), and targeting love of wealth (hubb-i mal) and lust (shavat) as particularly harmful “negative ethical traits” (raza’il-i akhlaq). These are the negative attributes that nearly all Deobandi Sufi texts also single out. But there is no mention of Sufism in the entire text; indeed, the Qur’an alone, along with the core ritual commandments of Islam, are single-handedly equipped to effect this ethical reform of the self. The Hajj, for instance, is a “system [nisab] for purifying the self [tahzib-i akhlaq] and ethical training.” See Sami‘ al-Haq, Qur’an aur ta‘mir-i akhlaq (Akora Khattak, Pakistan: Maktaba al-Haq, 1984), 46.
21. Ron Geaves, “The Contested Milieu of Deoband: ‘Salafis’ or ‘Sufis’?,” in Sufis and Salafis in the Contemporary Age, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 191–216.
22. Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound, 36.
23. Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, 11–13.
24. Muhammad Rafi‘ ‘Usmani, Fiqh aur tasawwuf: Ek ta‘arruf (Karachi: Idara al-Ma‘arif, 2004), 37.
25. The collection I have in mind is Jawad Syed, Edwina Pio, Tahir Kamran, and Abbas Zaidi, eds. Faith-Based Violence and Deobandi Militancy in Pakistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). To be clear, the collection is not entirely without merit. A few of the essays are well argued and well sourced, though the collection relies predominantly on news reports and policy papers rather than primary source materials. But on the whole, the essays do exactly what the title suggests: argue that “Deobandi militancy” is (exclusively) “faith-based.” I submit that this may be one among many approaches to understanding militancy, but the meaning of “faith-based” must be clarified (the collection assumes throughout that the meaning is self-evident), and it cannot be the only approach.
26. See Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom, and William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Freedom: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
27. See Finbarr Barry Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 641–59; and Jamal Elias, “Un/Making Idolatry: From Mecca to Bamiyan,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation 4, no. 2 (2007): 2–29.
28. A. Afzar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 271n121.
29. Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound, 14.
30. Usha Sanyal, “Tourists, Pilgrims and Saints: The Shrine of Mu‘in al-Din Chisti of Ajmer,” in Raj Rhapsodies: Tourism, Heritage and the Seduction of History, ed. Carol E. Henderson and Maxine Weisgrau (Hampshire, UK: Ashland, 2007), 183.
31. Michael T. Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43, 54.
32. Katherine Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Sainthood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 93–127.
33. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 95.
34. Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando, “Rediscovering the ‘Everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Divide,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5, no. 2 (2015): 59–88, at 74. See also the responses to Fadil and Fernando from Lara Deeb and Samuli Schielke in the same issue.
35. I am thinking especially of Salomon, For Love of the Prophet, and Irfan Ahmad, Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
36. Ebrahim Moosa, “Introduction,” Muslim World 99, no. 3 (2009): 427–34, at 429–30.
37. It is essential not to oversimplify Salafi thought here; in recent years, numerous scholars have complicated the common perception of Salafis as uniformly anti-Sufi and/or anti-madhhab, and have stressed local iterations of regional or transnational Salafi currents. Much of this pioneering work has been carried about by Africanists. See, for instance, Terje Østebø, Localising Salafism: Religious Change among Oromo Muslims in Bale, Ethiopia (Leiden: Brill, 2012); and Alexander Thurston, Salafism in Nigeria: Islam, Preaching, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
38. Jonathan A.C. Brown, “Is Islam Easy to Understand or Not? Salafis, the Democratization of Interpretation and the Need for the Ulema,” Journal of Islamic Studies 26, no. 2 (2015): 117–44.
39. Humeira Iqtidar, “Redefining ‘Tradition’ in Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 15, no. 4 (2016): 424–44, at 425.
40. See p. 120.
41. Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), xii–xiii.
42. M.T. ‘Usmani, Hakim al-Ummat ke siyasi afkar, 22.
43. Barbara Daly Metcalf, “New Medinas: The Tablighi Jama‘at in America and Europe,” in Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 119.
44. Ibid., 123 (emphasis added).
45. Nile Green, “Urdu as an African Language: A Survey of a Source Literature,” Islamic Africa 3, no. 2 (2012): 173–99, at 190–91.
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