If Deoband’s influence fans out into an array of ancillary organizations and movements—the “edges” of Deobandi tradition, as it were—this book focuses on the center of that tradition and how it has engaged with and impacted three major aspects of modern Islam: the place of Sufism in the modern world, the position of the ‘ulama in Muslim public life, and the very notion of Islamic tradition.
THE PLACE OF SUFISM IN THE MODERN WORLD
In a foreword to one of many books on Sufism written by his father, Mufti Muhammad Shafi‘ (d. 1976), Muhammad Taqi ‘Usmani, a prominent Deobandi scholar of contemporary Pakistan, succinctly posed the “problem” of Sufism in the modern world as many Deobandis see it: “Some believe [Sufism] to be an innovation [bid‘a], something apart from the teachings of the Qur’an and the Sunna. Others believe Sufism to be a source of salvation in its own right, a rival to the Shari‘a itself.”24 The Deobandis have positioned themselves as treading a middle way between those who would unmoor Sufism from its grounding in Islamic law and those who would reject Sufism altogether. Although this positioning has roots in early Deobandi thought, it has become especially salient in recent history, and above all in Pakistan, where Deobandis have been on the defensive because of their perceived antipathy to Sufism.
Indeed, one can argue that contemporary Deobandis’ engagement with Sufism is not as robust as it once was. I return to this idea in the final chapter and conclusion. But for now, I stress only that the politics of Sufism have become so vexed that, in some circles, what Deobandis advocate scarcely registers as “Sufism” at all, insofar as the Sufi saints, which some of their critics believe Deobandis have maligned, have become a metonym for Sufism as a whole. Several factors aligned to create this defensive posture. For one, Deobandis’ subcontinental rivalry with the Barelvi school has made the celebration of the saints’ death anniversaries (‘urs) and the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (mawlud, but also spelled mawlid or milad) litmus tests for Sufi authenticity. Another is that the War on Terror has repeatedly valorized certain forms of Sufism as truer or more authentic than others, especially representations of Sufism as inherently peaceful, as the quintessence of “moderate” Islam.25 Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Gregory Starrett memorably summarized this attitude as one that assumes that “if fundamentalism is the heroin of the Muslim street, Sufism is to be its methadone,” even though there is no evidence that Sufis are less violent than non-Sufis or non-Sufis more violent.26 The politics of who is a “good” Sufi is closely related to, and partly overlaps with, the politics of who is a “good” Muslim. Western governments and policy makers have a long history of shaping and intervening in these debates.27
This book contends that debates about which is the “real” Sufism tell us more about the politics of defining Sufism than they do about actual Sufis, let alone Deobandis’ relationship to Sufism. Much of what is vaunted as true Sufism is highly “visible”: the pomp of the ‘urs, the infectious energy of the qawwali performance, saintly relics that exude spiritual power (baraka). Conversely, Deobandi Sufism is largely “invisible,” subsiding in the disciplinary training that a Sufi undertakes with his or her master, or in commentaries on classical Sufi texts that few read outside of highly elite scholarly circles. It may surprise some readers, therefore, that Deobandis have penned lengthy commentaries on the likes of Jalal al-Din Rumi, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, and Ibn ‘Arabi. But the fact is that the reputations of the Deobandi ‘ulama were forged through the circulation of widely read and highly public polemics. Their detractors have largely ignored what is contained in the biographies and treatises Deobandis have written for their Sufi disciples. In other words, there is a correlation between Deoband’s public face and its widespread reputation for extremism.
So how do we know who is a Sufi? The scholar of Sufism Arthur Buehler recently argued that “if persons call themselves sufis, academics have no other choice but to take their word for it,” even as he proposed a “litmus test” for recognizing Sufis: “the existence of a transformative practice that facilitates ethical development and/or furthers taming of the ego.”28 It is worth noting that, by this account at least, almost all Deobandis would qualify as Sufis. But there is another, more important, point to be made here. Buehler hints at an arguably irresolvable tension in the study of Sufism (or for that matter, Islam): scholars can attempt to avoid making normative interventions in the politics of defining Sufism, but to some degree, any attempt to conceptualize Sufism inevitably does so. That being said, this book conceptualizes Sufism as a tripartite entity, consisting of three intersecting, mutually constitutive dimensions: literary, interpersonal/institutional, and ritual/devotional. The literary dimension is familiar to most, encompassing the great Sufi poets, but equally, the innumerable treatises on traversing the Sufi path. The interpersonal and institutional dimension concerns relations between Sufi masters and disciples, initiations into Sufi orders, and the inculcation of Sufi ethical virtues through study with, and sitting in the presence of, Sufi masters. Finally, the ritual and devotional dimension concerns the multiple forms of devotional piety that have formed around the veneration of Sufi saints, especially but not exclusively at their tombs. What will become clear is that Deobandis embraced the first two dimensions of Sufism but maintained a complicated, ambivalent relationship with the third. To say that Deobandis are not Sufis is, quite literally, to define Sufism only in terms of ritual and devotion. Their interrogation of Sufism was, in other words, an internal critique of Sufism by Sufis.
This “sober” Sufism has an ancient pedigree.29 A few brief examples will suffice to suggest the scope of Deobandis’ premodern Sufi antecedents—Sufis whom, we will see, the Deobandis themselves read and cite. Deobandi vocabularies of spiritual purification, especially techniques of disciplining the ego-self (tazkiyat al-nafs), go back to the very origins of Sufism in ninth-century Baghdad with the writings of Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 857) and others.30 Deobandis’ view that Sufism emerged from, and is contained within, Qur’anic ethics recalls Abu Nasr al-Sarraj (d. 988), who was among the first to ground Sufism firmly in the Qur’an; who regarded Sufis, alongside Hadith scholars and legal scholars (fuqaha’), as among the ‘ulama; and who argued that Sufis distinguished themselves from mere jurists through their rigorous self-interrogation—a theme we will see again and again among the Deobandis.31 When Sufis began to narrate their history, many looked back to Junayd Baghdadi (d. 910) as a founding figure.32 Junayd’s “sobriety” (sahw) would become perhaps the unifying feature of Deobandi Sufism centuries later, as it was for a cofounder of the Deoband movement, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi.33 The biographer Abu Nu‘aym al-Isfahani (d. 1038) wrote Sufi history from the vantage of a legal traditionalist, including two of the eponymous founders of Sunni Islam’s legal schools, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi‘i, among the Sufi saints.34 Isfahani was not so much a Sufi who wanted to make Sufism palatable to Islamic legal scholars as he was a legal scholar who simply saw no contradiction between Sufism and Islamic law. The work of Abul Qasim al-Qushayri (d. 1072) and ‘Ali al-Hujwiri (d. 1073), whom the Deobandis read and cite widely, reinforced the ethical and legal credentials of Sufism.35 One final example may be the most important of all: many Deobandis looked to Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) as the preeminent theorist of Islam at the intersection of law, ethics, and Sufi piety. For Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (d. 1943)—the most influential Deobandi scholar in the history of the movement, and to a great extent the central personality of this book—no self-respecting Islamic scholar (‘alim) was worthy of the name without having studied al-Ghazali’s Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din, while he also urges lay Muslims to study the Urdu translation of the condensed version of the Ihya’, which he personally commissioned.36
At the same time that discourses articulating Sufism in Islamic legal language began to emerge, popular Sufi devotions were also emerging—practices that Deobandis would critique in British India centuries later—such as the first organized mass pilgrimages (ziyarat) to Sufi saints’ tombs in th
e early thirteenth century.37 Just as Deobandis were by no means the first Sufis to align Sufism with Islamic legal discourses, nor the first to cast Sufism in the language of Islamic ethics, they were also not the first to critique certain Sufi devotional practices. It is important not to portray these simply as critiques of “Sufism.” While Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1200) was long considered among the first all-out critics of Sufism, George Makdisi long ago noted that, for al-Jawzi and other Hanbalis, “Sufism itself was not being brought into question.”38 If al-Jawzi was primarily concerned with “licentious” Sufi practices, his Hanbali acolyte Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328)—still considered the ultimate bête noire of the Sufis—was primarily concerned with the Sufi metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabi and certain saintly devotions, and not “Sufism” as a whole.39
Yet, beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one can discern a crescendo in both the scope and number of accusations against Sufi practices across the Muslim world, as well as the distinctly modern phenomenon of opposing Sufism tout court.40 Up to this point, as Nile Green has put it, “Sufism was inseparable from many aspects of Islam as such,” to the extent that “an immediate and wholesale rejection of everything said and done by the Sufis was hardly possible.”41 Until the colonial period Sufism was largely taken for granted as part of the fabric of daily life across Muslim societies from the Maghrib to Java.
Not only is the very notion of critiquing Sufism as a whole a modern idea, but in the modern era, anti-Sufi polemics and Sufi counterpolemics became both more frequent and more intense. Technologies of print and mass media aided Sufis’ detractors, who have cast Sufis as partly responsible for the loss of Muslim political power and prestige. In the wake of colonialism, Sufism was criticized from three angles, which we may call, broadly speaking, modernist, Islamist, and Salafi.42 Modernist critics, like Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), often celebrated early Sufi mystics but saw “modern” Sufism as partly responsible for the decline of Islamic civilization. For Iqbal, Sufism had become mired in a world-denying pantheism that sapped the collective élan of Muslim societies. He called for reconstructing a revitalized Sufism around the affirmation, rather than the denial, of selfhood (khudi), as he expressed in a poem titled “Sufism”:
This angelic wisdom, this celestial knowledge
Are useless in curing the Haram’s pain.
This midnight litany [zikr], these meditations, this intoxication:
They will not protect the Self [khudi].
They, too, are of no avail.43
Islamist critics, too, blamed Sufism for a host of ills, often seeing Sufis as standing in the way of the Islamization of the state. One of the twentieth century’s most influential Islamists, Sayyid Abul A‘la Maududi (d. 1979), the Pakistani founder of Jama‘at-i Islami, once wrote that “if someone wishes and plans to revive Islam, he must shun the language and the terminology of the Sufis, their mystic allusions and metaphoric references, their dress and etiquette, the saint–disciple institution and all other things associated with it.” He called for Muslims to abstain from “these abuses as a diabetic is warned to abstain from sugar.”44 Salafis, who claim to adhere only to the belief and practice of the first three generations of Muslims—al-salaf al-salih (“the pious predecessors”)—have also been major critics of Sufism and Sufis.45 The wide-ranging career of the Salafi activist Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (d. 1987) began with a 1921 “conversion” from Sufism to Salafism after he asked the Prophet Muhammad in a dream whether he should study “exoteric or esoteric knowledge.” The Prophet replied: “exoteric knowledge.”46
It must be noted, however, that these tropes, while influential, typically obscure a far more complex engagement with, and ambivalence toward, Sufism than they suggest at first glance. Maududi tempered his opposition to Sufism over the course of his career, taking up a newfound interest in his family’s own Chishti background in the 1970s.47 Meanwhile, scholars have tracked how Islamist political parties have aligned themselves with Sufi orders in particular contexts, such as contemporary Sudan, and how Islamist icons ranging from Ayatollah Khomeini to Sayyid Qutb adopted and adapted Sufi vocabularies.48 Even Salafis have not been uniform critics of Sufism. The Syrian Salafi Jamal al-Din Qasimi (d. 1914) leapt to the defense of Ibn ‘Arabi, the bane of many Salafis, against the proto-Salafi hero and icon Ibn Taymiyya.49 Nevertheless, this outline of dominant tropes in the critique of Sufism helps illuminate how Deobandis differed from these trends in their own critiques. Like Islamists, for example, they believed that Sufism had become burdened with centuries of cultural accretions; unlike them, they believed that the solution was a bottom-up revivification of Muslim subjectivities rather than the top-down reform of a Muslim state.50 Like the Salafis, they, too, regarded the era of the Prophet’s Companions as the paragon of a proper Muslim society, but unlike the Salafis, they saw that era as the very fount of Sufism, rather than its antithesis.
THE ‘ULAMA IN MUSLIM PUBLIC LIFE
The scholars of the Deoband movement are ‘ulama, traditionally educated Muslim scholars. The contested status of Sufism in the modern world closely parallels, and intersects with, the contested status of the ‘ulama in Muslim public life—the second major theme of modern Islam that this book explores. Like the Sufis, the ‘ulama have been the object of scorn and ridicule in the last two centuries, indeed often from some of the same quarters. Modernists, Islamists, and Salafis blamed the ‘ulama, too, for a plethora of intellectual and social ills (even as many ‘ulama populated their ranks). Jamal al-Din al-Afghani famously castigated the Indian ‘ulama for their alleged failure to solve “worldly” problems, asking, “Why do you not raise your eyes from those defective books and . . . cast your glance on this wide world?”51 This was in part an indictment of the ‘ulama for allegedly failing to adapt to modernity, and in part a conscientious effort to appropriate the spaces of authority that ‘ulama had traditionally claimed.
As a range of scholars have noted, modernists and Islamists challenged the so-called monopoly that ‘ulama are said to have claimed over the interpretation of the Qur’an, Hadith, and the Islamic legal tradition. Two immediate qualifications of this claim are in order. First, it is essential to note that many modernist and Islamist critics of the ‘ulama were also ‘ulama; there was never a neat demarcation between these groups. Second, scholars have challenged the presumption that the ‘ulama ever had such a monopoly on interpreting the normative textual tradition.52 Notwithstanding these caveats, it is generally true that before the modern era, the ‘ulama did play a central role not only in interpreting that tradition but also in advising rulers on the basis of those interpretations—a mutually interdependent and often vexed relationship. In the process, they variously legitimated and undermined political powers, sometimes coopting them, sometimes coopted by them.53
As Muslim political hegemony declined globally under the yoke of colonialism, the ‘ulama were increasingly cast as medieval relics holed up in fortress-like madrasas, writing commentaries on obsolete tomes of pre-Copernican astronomy. For their critics, the Deobandis are doubly medieval: as Sufis and as ‘ulama. As Fuad Naeem expressed, “A preference for originality over ‘tradition’ led to an overemphasis on modernist figures on the one hand, and Islamist or ‘fundamentalist’ figures and movements on the other, often combined with a tacit supposition that the ‘ulama and Sufis represented ‘medieval’ discourses that would not long survive the triumph of modernity.”54 Deobandis felt this shift acutely. Lay Muslims’ cavalier dismissal of the ‘ulama is a motif throughout Deobandi texts. As Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri (d. 1927) lamented: “In the past, the masses were in need, and the Deputies of the Message [the ‘ulama] were the ones needed. No matter how severe they were, they had an effect. The masses would become worried, repent, and turn back. But nowadays, the ‘ulama have to go begging to the masses to do the work of reform.”55 Still, they held on closely to the idea that they remained vital. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi put it more bluntly: “It is absurd to think Muslims can dispense with the �
��ulama.”56
One of the central discourses through which the Deobandi ‘ulama have sought to articulate and maintain that vitality is reform (islah), a concept crucial for understanding their role in shaping Muslim public life. The semantics of islah (from the Arabic root s-l-h) resonate with the most positive and cherished values in the Qur’an, connoting peace and reconciliation (sulh), what is right and proper (salah), and what is sound, virtuous, or devout (salih). The Qur’an aligns islah closely with prophets’ missions through history. The Prophet Shuayb, for instance, tells those to whom he was sent that he has come to implement islah on behalf of God.57 It is best understood not in the colloquial English sense of “reform,” but in the sense of re-form. In many contexts, reform is understood in opposition to “tradition.” For the Deobandis, the point of islah was not to vanquish tradition, but to reaffirm it.
The irony of the ‘ulama doing reform is simple: most self-styled reformers took the ‘ulama as an object of reform, rather than its agent. Yet islah is a ubiquitous term in Deobandi texts. A collection of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi’s reformist treatises is titled Islahi nisab (The reformist program).58 The contemporary Deobandi scholar Mufti Taqi ‘Usmani has published a sixteen-volume collection titled Islahi khutbat (Reformist sermons).59 The scope of reform includes not just the social, as in Thanvi’s call to reform customs, but subjectivities, as in frequent calls to reform the heart (islah-i qalb) and reform the self (islah-i nafs). Indeed, Deobandis believed that the moral health of the individual is inseparable from the social health of the body politic, a connection that chapters 3 and 4 explore in depth.
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