Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  For a range of reasons, these social and subjective iterations of islah have been largely ignored by scholars. Geographically, islah has been associated with trends in the Middle East, and thematically, with political Islam, independent reasoning (ijtihad) in Islamic law, and the Salafi movement.60 Deobandis, by contrast, have advanced a revival from below, a bottom-up reform largely invisible relative to the top-down reform of Islamist political projects. Above all, the Deobandi effort to remake individual subjectivities has been part of a broader effort to carve out a role for the ‘ulama in Muslim public life.

  A term closely linked to, even “used interchangeably” with islah,61 is tajdid, “renewal.” Tajdid is in turn bound up with the concept of the mujaddid, the “renewer,” who would arrive, according to an oft-cited Hadith, at the beginning of every Islamic century to renew the global community of Muslims.62 The idea was an important feature of Indian Islamic history. Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624) presented himself as the mujaddid of the second Islamic millennium, while Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) was deemed the renewer of the twelfth Islamic century.63

  Deobandis’ invocation of “renewal” (tajdid) must be distinguished from Islamists’ use of the term. Sayyid Abu A‘la Maududi mobilized the language of tajdid toward the view that, in his words, “the Islamic system of law . . . needs for its enforcement in all its details the coercive power and authority of the state.”64 As Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr elaborated, “In Maududi’s formula, although individual piety featured prominently, in the final analysis, it was the society and the political order that guaranteed the piety of the individual.”65 Deobandis inverted this approach: one had to reform the individual to reform society. And in Deobandi discussions of reform and renewal, the individual and the social are often intertwined. For the founding Deobandi scholar Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (d. 1905), the centennial renewer (mujaddid) may not be just one individual at all. While there is no doubt that the imperative of renewal is clear—“repelling illicit innovations [bid‘at], propagating the Sunna, and reviving long-forgotten prophetic traditions [sunan]”—he added that “the reviver of the century may not be a single scholar [‘alim], but may be, at any time, two, four, ten, twenty, fifty, a group of a hundred, or just one. In every century, there will be a different group of scholars who will exert themselves in the reformation [islah] of religion. All of them have a share in renewal [tajdid] according to their knowledge [‘ilm] and rank.”66 This is a remarkable passage. Gangohi decenters the process of renewal, making it dependent not on a single person but a collection of scholars, who are distinguished by their knowledge, and for whom the act of tajdid is, in fact, islah. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, too, believed that centennial renewal was a process by which the various illicit innovations that emerge each century would be vanquished; but he, too, believed the ‘ulama were instrumental, individually and collectively, in carrying the task of renewal.67 That being said, there were some who certainly believed that Thanvi himself deserved to be called one of the great “renewers” of the age. ‘Abd al-Bari Nadvi (d. 1976)—a Sufi disciple of Thanvi’s as well as a prolific writer and translator and a professor at Osmania University in Hyderabad—believed that Thanvi had undoubtedly “reached the highest level of the station of renewal [mansab-i tajdid].”68

  The role of the ‘ulama in reform (islah) and renewal (tajdid) encapsulates Deobandis’ view of the centrality of the ‘ulama in Muslim public life. But their ultimate aim was not simply reasserting the importance of the ‘ulama. Their ultimate aim was saving souls. The epigraph of this introduction is a line from one of the sermons of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, delivered in Kanpur in March 1923: “O Faithful, save yourself and your family from the torments of hell.”69 This is his translation, he tells his Urdu-speaking audience, of a phrase from Qur’an 66:6: “O believers, protect yourselves and your families from the fire.”70 In the sermon, and in his more extensive comments on this verse in his Qur’an commentary, Bayan al-Qur’an, Thanvi draws on the Sunna to amplify the verse: when even the Prophet was compelled by God to advise his family in belief and practice, “it is all the more obligatory for you to reform [islah] your family and household.”71 In this deceptively simple declaration, multiple facets of Deoband’s reformist project are embedded. Saving souls from eternal punishment is the most important, but two others are noteworthy: “protect yourselves” is a call to the individual, an interpellation of a subject in need of reform; “and your family” is a call to the social, to replicate the act of self-reform in others. We will see this complementary, indeed reciprocal, relationship between self and society again and again throughout this book.

  As we will see in chapter 4, Deobandis believed that an essential corpus of religious knowledge was the prerequisite for guiding others to guide themselves, and that Sufism provided the ethical resources to turn that knowledge into practice. And embodied knowledge, they would add, is more easily transmitted than merely discursive knowledge, because of its affective power. All of this was intended to bring Muslims closer to God and, thereby, save them from perdition. It is a sentiment shared by Muhammad Shafi‘, perhaps Thanvi’s most prominent disciple in postpartition Pakistan. Shafi‘ followed al-Ghazali in making an explicit connection between Sufi ethics and salvation. “What the Sufis call ‘virtues’ [faza’il], Imam Ghazali called ‘munjiat,’ meaning ‘that which grants salvation’ [najat],” said Shafi‘. “Opposite to these, those things that are forbidden and impermissible the Sufis call ‘vices’ [raza’il], which Imam Ghazali calls ‘muhlikat,’ meaning ‘that which destroys.’”72

  DEBATING ISLAMIC “TRADITION”

  The third major debate within modern Islam that this book explores is how to define and conceptualize tradition. “Tradition” has been a watchword in Islamic studies in the last three decades. The word has become so ubiquitous, in fact, that one may wonder whether its analytical purchase has exhausted itself. Why revisit it here? Simply put, it is impossible to understand the Deoband movement—and, I would argue, modern Islam—without it.

  There is no single word in the main languages of the Deoband movement—above all Urdu, followed by Arabic and Persian—that neatly conforms to the English word “tradition,” though a constellation of words falls within its semantic range.73 For the Deobandis, there are multiple, overlapping phenomena that the word connotes. There is, first and foremost, Islam itself, configured through divine revelation and the transmission of the prophetic Sunna. Sufism, too, is a tradition in its own right—so much so that Nile Green has argued persuasively that Sufism is best understood through the lens of “tradition” rather “mysticism.”74 And, finally, there is the tradition of Deoband itself.

  Perhaps the most influential definition of tradition in Islamic studies comes from philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre famously defined tradition as “an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of fundamental agreements comes to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.”75 Although MacIntyre may help us understand how traditions defend themselves from external challenges and constitute themselves through the pursuit of internal coherence, I find his definition too cerebral, too centered on ideas and not enough on people—in a word, too discursive. As I argue in chapters 4 and 5, most discussions of tradition in Islamic studies have focused too much on discursivity and not enough on affect. I approach affect in terms of ways that emotional valences work in, through, and between bodies—a core theme of affect theory in the last two decades.76 For my purposes, I am interested in ways that bodily presences authorize particular forms of knowledge. I do not see “knowledge,” in the contexts I explore below, as some sort of discrete, cognitive datum—mere information—that is passed from one person to the next. For one, Deobandis believe that the reliability of knowledge itself is inseparable from the embodied ethics of the
persons who transmit it. (Would you learn Sufi asceticism from someone who isn’t an ascetic? Would you study Hadith with a scholar who doesn’t live by them?) But in addition, Deobandis—and they are by no means unique in this respect as Sufis, as scholars, or even as Muslims—believe that pious bodies themselves resonate with an energy (faiz) that transcends discursive knowledge (‘ilm) even as it validates it.

  While the study of Islam is certainly moving toward a more nuanced understanding of the embodied transmission of knowledge,77 scholars of Islam have long been predisposed to see tradition transmitted primarily through texts, both in the modalities of that transmission and in the content transmitted. This explains, in my view, the resilience of the Asadian formation of Islam as “discursive tradition”—so resilient, in fact, that even Asad’s subsequent qualifications of that idea have arguably had less traction than the original essay of 1986 in which he first put it forth.78 In that essay, Asad argued that “a tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice. . . . A practice is Islamic because it is authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam.”79 This theorization of tradition, indebted to MacIntyre, has been inadequate for developing a language to understand how traditions are transmitted not just through texts but also through bodies.80 And Asad, to his credit, has attempted to correct the text-centeredness of his earlier formulation, seeing tradition as both discursive and embodied in various, sometimes conflicting, ways.81 Not only do traditions transmit knowledge; equally, they transmit affective sensibilities, styles of comportment, and demeanors—not just knowledge, in other words, but also how to embody knowledge. Asad has also recently explored ways in which traditions are not simply fixated on reproducing the past, but are oriented toward unfolding futures. Traditions are, in a word, “aspirational.”82

  This book poses the question of tradition, for the Deobandis, as part of a host of questions in the study of Islam broadly. Is tradition transmitted through bodies or books? Does tradition convey its own authority? To what degree should individual Muslims have the latitude to engage with tradition directly, and to what extent must that engagement be mediated? Corporeality is embedded in the very etymology of tradition—from the Latin tradere, “to hand down.” In Adorno’s words, tradere “expresses physical proximity, immediacy—one hand should receive from another.”83 Books and bodies are, of course, not mutually exclusive; they are mutually constitutive. Books circulate via the bodies that carry them, on the one hand, while corporeal authority is configured through embodiment of scripture and law, on the other. And as Asad suggests, the vitality of a tradition is measured not just by its ability to absorb ruptures but, perhaps even more, by its ability to let internal contradictions subsist. “Tradition accommodates mistakes as well as betrayal; it is not by accident,” he observes (to return again to tradere), “that tradition and treason have a common etymology.”84

  As I argue in the fifth chapter, Deobandi tradition falls somewhere between two concepts: Sunna and maslak. In Deobandi thought, the maslak (literally “way,” “path”) captures this affective register. This concept connotes the world of shared sensibilities that Deobandi scholars cultivate and pass down through the interplay of books and bodies. I will show how they adapt the Sufi concept of “companionship” (suhbat) between master and disciple to argue that books alone are inadequate on their own to transmit tradition. If the transmission of knowledge in premodern Islam—the classic image is one of students sitting in a circle around a scholar, in a mosque or even under a tree, memorizing texts and receiving an ijaza (permission) to transmit those texts to others—is the very paragon of an anthropocentric knowledge economy, in which the books are secondary to the people who teach them, the “modern” madrasa may be seen as a triumph of bibliocentrism, with its fixed curriculum, salaried faculty, central library, and slate of exams.85 But it is of course never quite that simple. I argue that Deobandis have attempted to recuperate anthropocentrism in an ever more bibliocentric world in a number of ways: insisting that knowledge cannot come from books alone but requires the guidance of an expert, accentuating the Sufi concept of suhbat (companionship) as the sine qua non of moral self-formation, and reasserting the indispensability of the ‘ulama as the learned individuals who can help the less learned make sense of difficult and often theologically perilous issues.

  The maslak is, in a sense, larger and more capacious than what is transmitted through the madrasa. A “common” (‘amm) Muslim, perhaps someone with a middle-class occupation who reads religious texts in his or her spare time, may participate in the maslak without having set foot in a madrasa. In this way, the maslak could be usefully compared with what the philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a thought collective (Denkkollektiv): a “community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction.”86 Every thought collective consists of a dynamic interplay between elites and commoners, the esoteric and the exoteric. Barbara Herrnstein Smith described Fleck’s thought collective as “a set of nested, mutually interacting circles. . . . At the centre is a small inner (‘esoteric’) circle of the elite—experts and elders, master builders and laboratory directors. At the periphery is a large (‘exoteric’) circle—fans, audiences, lay people and the general public. In between is a graduated hierarchy of initiates: students, amateurs, assistants and apprentices.”87 For Fleck, at the center of an esoteric circle is what he called “journal science”—scientists who conduct experiments and publish the results in journals—and at the exoteric edge of that set of concentric circles is what he called “textbook science”—the first stage of initiation into the esoteric circle.88

  As I show in chapter 3, the Deobandi scholars at the center of their thought collective were clear that lay Muslims (‘awamm) are no more equipped to opine on legal-theological issues (masa’il) than someone who has read a physics textbook is equipped to run a laboratory. This is critical to understanding both the transmission of knowledge across Deobandi tradition and the maintenance of authority within it. This is, of course, an idealized epistemic relationship between center and periphery that, we will see, is never quite as neat and orderly as the scholars at the center imagine it to be. In the final two chapters, we will witness lay Muslims who willfully and conscientiously locate themselves outside these circles altogether and, indeed, reject the authority of the Deobandis and the authoritative structure they have fashioned.

  In sum, then, Deobandi tradition arises out of a tension—sometimes productive, sometimes strained—between the anthropocentric and the bibliocentric, between the centrifugal force of a global movement and the centripetal force of intimate encounters, between the dispersal of books and the proximity of bodies, between esoteric centers and exoteric peripheries, and above all, between the “little” tradition of the maslak, to which they adhere as Deobandis, and the “great” tradition of the Sunna, to which they adhere as Muslims.

  MAIN CHARACTERS AND STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

  A number of main characters associated with the Deoband movement appear again and again in this book. In the first two chapters, we will see how multiple currents of nineteenth-century Islam converge in the founding of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband, emanating from an array of influential figures: Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831), the jihadi rebel and charismatic leader of a fledgling frontier state; Muhammad Isma‘il (1779–1831), Sayyid Ahmad’s close associate, whose radical critique of everyday piety electrified Indian Muslims in the early nineteenth century and whose mantle early Deobandis adopted, if not without certain reservations; Hajji Imdad Allah al-Makki (1817–1899), arguably the most important Sufi of late colonial India, who mentored a generation of Deobandis but whose ambivalence about the very devotions the Deobandis critiqued and whose lack of legal training made his legacy a deeply contested one; and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1828–1905), patron (sarparast) of the Deoband madrasa, whose sober Sufism and law-centered piety shaped the Deoband movement’s ethos f
rom its origins to the present day.

  But it is Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (1863–1943), the endlessly prolific visionary of late colonial Deoband, who is by far the central character in this book. It is Thanvi who synthesized law and Sufism in a body of work that is largely responsible for making Deoband a global phenomenon. Thus, while this book is about the Deoband movement, it is also in no small way a book about Thanvi, the pivotal figure around whom the movement formed in the seminally important first three decades of the twentieth century, as well as the teacher and mentor of the generation that began to take the Deoband movement beyond South Asia in the 1940s and ’50s. Nevertheless, we must stress that Thanvi does not therefore stand in for the Deoband movement as a whole. On the contrary, his perspectives on some aspects of the movement, especially concerning politics, were sharply rebuked by other Deobandis. But he was arguably the most influential, and undoubtedly the most prolific, Deobandi scholar. In his voluminous work, he simultaneously inherited and processed the legal and mystical influences of his forebears Imdad Allah and Gangohi and popularized those ideas through texts meant for a mass readership in Urdu.

  In the process of centering Thanvi, the book inevitably gives less attention to Husain Ahmad Madani (1879–1957), the only figure whose position could legitimately rival Thanvi’s as the most important Deobandi of the twentieth century. This is not deliberate. It is the result, rather, of the book’s focus on Sufism and Sufi devotions on the one hand, and on Deobandis in South Africa on the other. Thanvi’s presence looms over both. By contrast, Madani’s stature derives largely from his role in anticolonial politics. The book does discuss Madani in the context of Thanvi’s political views in the final chapter.