And unlike muftis of the past, Gangohi and his generation of muftis rarely cited works of fiqh, and often gave their fatwas without any explanation of their legal reasoning at all, typically providing nothing more than a relevant quotation from the Qur’an or Hadith. Gangohi would provide legal reasoning in proportion to the learning of the one who requested the fatwa, depending on whether it was requested by a lay Muslim or one of the ‘ulama. “Gangohi’s proficiency in deriving and extracting rulings on legal issues [masa’il] was incomparable in his day,” his biographer writes, and “it was his practice to issue fatwas in accordance with the understanding of the person requesting it. Whether to commoners [‘awamm], the elite [khawass], or the ignorant [juhala’], he wrote and spoke to all according to their proficiencies and capacities.”100 One could argue that the very lack of juristic reasoning in these fatwas points to their broad audience, who would have had presumably little use for such reasoning.
“USEFUL” SECULAR KNOWLEDGE, “USELESS” RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE
In the Religious Endowments Act (Act XX) of 1863, the government formally divested itself of any control over “religious” endowments or institutions—with some initial legal ambiguity about what constituted “religion” from the vantage of the state. It mandated that the government “divest itself of the management of Religious Endowments” and relinquished any control over religious endowments’ finances or leadership, but reserved the right to continue supervision of the “secular” aspects of any endowment that was “partly of a religious and partly of a secular character.”101 The act was intended to replace the Bengal Regulation XIX of 1810 and the Madras Regulation VII of 1817, in which the Board of Revenue effectively served as patron of temples and mosques—regulations that came under fire from evangelicals who criticized the idea that the British should be actively involved in patronizing “heathen” religious institutions. Nile Green has argued that the state’s retreat from involvement in “religious” affairs created a vacuum that was filled (always tenuously) by a new religious “marketplace.”102 Thus, we can understand the period from 1780 to 1863 as one in which the British effectively replaced Mughals in patronizing Muslim law and education, and then gradually created a vacuum by withdrawing that support, culminating in the 1863 Religious Endowments Act.103
It was not only legally and discursively that Deobandis came to see the madrasa as a space impervious to state intrusion. It was also physically removed. As mentioned, while Deoband was only a train ride away from Delhi, the qasbah certainly afforded Deobandis less scrutiny than they would have had in the city that would soon become, by 1911, the imperial capital. Deoband was largely beyond the radar of colonial surveillance until the early twentieth century, insofar as it occupied a sphere of “religion” that had already been “rendered distinct from ‘politics.’”104 The colonial archive reflects the relative indifference of the state toward Deoband, until Deobandi ‘ulama became actively involved in anticolonial politics. When the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband did come under scrutiny for the political activities of several prominent Deobandi scholars—a subject to which I return in the final chapter—the institution tried to deflect such attention by reassuring British officials that the institution was purely “religious” and not at all “political.” As Deobandi scholars began to support the civil disobedience movement of Gandhi, the British pressured the Nizam of Hyderabad, who had begun contributing annually to the institution beginning in 1887, to discontinue his support.105 In response, no less a political figure than Husain Ahmad Madani, then head teacher (sadr mudarris) of Deoband, wrote:
I have to state that the Dar-ul-Ulum School, from the time it was brought into being, devoted its attention solely to imparting religious teaching and the propagation of the Muhammadan religion. It silently did its duty in this field. . . . In these days when political and other movements grew in India, the Jamiat-ul-Ulma declared the policy of the Dar-ul-Ulum on platforms and by means of articles published in various newspapers. The local Officers and the Governor of the Provinces were appraised that the Dar-ul-Ulum adhered to its old policy of keeping aloof from politics, and confined its activities only to imparting religious teaching, and so far as it could be imagined, no suspicion attached to the working of its Dar-ul-Ulum and to the policy it followed.106
This was, to be sure, a strategy on Madani’s part to deflect suspicion away from Deoband, but it points to a larger assumption about the madrasa as an “apolitical” space. By the early twentieth century, then, it seems, the mutual exclusivity of religion and politics was self-evident. Deobandis not only promoted their institution as purely “religious,” but the memory of it ever being anything but religious had become blurry. Thus, Maulvi Rahim Bakhsh of Bhawalpur concluded, after a visit to Deoband in 1908, that “the instruction in this seminary, in accordance with the older style of the East, is purely religious [khalis mazhabi]”—even though this “style” was, in fact, quite new.107
The transition of the ‘ulama from “worldly” state-employed professionals to “otherworldly” religious experts is mirrored in the transition from a madrasa education as “useful” knowledge to “useless” knowledge. That is, as a madrasa education was rebranded as “religious,” it ceased to be “useful.” The discourse on useful knowledge goes back to the origins of the British presence in the subcontinent. The very first sentence of Hamilton’s translation of the Hidaya is an encomium for empire, praising it for “the diffusion of useful knowledge.”108 But it is especially the product of utilitarians’ critiques of Indian learning generally, and their fierce opposition to supporting “Hindoo” and “Mahomedan” institutions of learning specifically. The Education Despatch of 1854 was perhaps the definitive call for supplementing, if not replacing, “Asiatic learning” with “useful” knowledge. It was nothing less than “one of our sacred duties to [confer] upon the natives of India those vast moral and material blessings which flow from the general diffusion of useful knowledge, and which India may, under Providence, derive from her connexion with England.”109 But this attitude had already borne real consequences for decisions surrounding the funding and patronage of Islamic educational institutions. Thirty years before the Despatch, James Mill lambasted the use of government funds for “native” colleges in an 1824 letter to the revenue department: “The great end should not have been to teach Hindoo learning or Mahomedan learning, but useful learning.” In establishing “[s]eminaries for the purpose of teaching mere Hindoo, or mere Mahomedan literature,” he continued, “you bound yourselves to teach a great deal of what was frivolous, not a little of what was purely mischievous, and a small remainder indeed in which utility was in any way concerned.”110 With the retreat of British patronage under way, Muslims in Calcutta pleaded in 1835 to keep the Calcutta Madrasa open, defending madrasa education as “useful” precisely because it would lead to government work. They praised the British for their support of “kazee[s],” for the use of “futwahs in trials,” and defended the Madrasa on the Anglicist’s terms: “Through the establishment of the Mudrissa, many students are annually instructed in useful knowledge, and thence proceeding into the interior obtain high appointments in the cities and zillahs [districts] of Hindoostan.”111
Despite such pleas, support for madrasas diminished and madrasa education was increasingly condemned as “useless” because it was essentially religious. Colonial authorities believed that primary-level religious education (e.g., in village maktabs) could be the basis of overcoming Muslims’ “backwardness” and forming loyal subjects, so long as it taught a mix of “religious” and “secular” subjects.112 In December 1867, a little over a year after the madrasa at Deoband was founded, the British government approved a grant of fifty rupees per month to the Mahomedan Female School in Bangalore “on condition that the ordinary branches of secular knowledge should be regarded as an essential part of the education course in that institution,” insisting on “secular reading and writing” in addition to “Alcoran.”113 Even this concession to religious s
ubjects was too much for some British administrators. In June 1858, a director of public education in the Punjab reported going through “all the old Persian books . . . prohibiting everything which is grossly indecent on one ground, and everything which pertains to religion on another ground.” The same director criticized the local policy of hiring teachers from madrasas to teach in newly established public schools, and providing funds for schools connected to mosques: “[W]hile proclaiming our principle of religious neutrality, and our desire to spread secular education, we [are] propagating Muhammadanism.” Accordingly, he ordered “all village schools to be removed from the precincts of mosques and other buildings of a religious character [and] the disuse of all books of a religious character in the schools.”114 Here, secularity is defined partly through subjects of study, partly through spaces of study.
Madrasas that taught only “religious” subjects could not qualify for government support; hence an 1872 survey of the North-Western Provinces classified such schools as “indigenous (unaided),” meaning they received no government funding. Among the “indigenous” schools surveyed were the then-new seminaries of Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and Mazahir al-‘Ulum Saharanpur.115 In the same year, a commission led by Sayyid Ahmad Khan called for Muslims to establish schools where “useful knowledge might be taught along with religion.”116 But the madrasas of the “old system,” the report averred, listing the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband as a prime example, were “altogether useless to the nation at large, and . . . no good can be expected from them.”117 The Indian Education Commission of 1882 encouraged local Muslim schools (maktabs) to add “secular” subjects, but as late as 1892 a report in Bengal lamented that the “course of instruction” in such schools “does not go beyond the mere mechanical repetition of the Koran” and does not impart “any real practical education.”118
In a searing indictment of this approach to “indigenous education,” published in 1883, the Orientalist G.W. Leitner, the principal of Government College Lahore, argued that such disrespect for religious learning forced the ‘ulama to withdraw into enclaves defined principally by their distinction from “secular” education. Due to British meddling, the cultivation of “sacred classical languages” was monopolized by a “priestly class” who “withdrew into the background.” “By the elimination of the priestly classes from our educational councils,” he concludes, the British “introduced a social bouleversement, in which neither birth nor traditional rank, nor the reputation of piety, liberality, or courage, seemed to weigh with Government . . . against the apparently more practical usefulness of the supple parvenus who began to monopolise official favor.”119
Leitner’s view was not universal among his contemporaries. An 1885 report on the North-Western Provinces and Awadh concluded that “no special measures on behalf of Muhammadans are required, as Mussalman education in these provinces is by no means in a backward state.”120 Nevertheless, Leitner’s diagnosis might illuminate why scholars like Gangohi “withdrew into the background” and saw the madrasa as just such an enclave. In a letter written in 1884, soon after becoming patron of Dar al-‘Ulum and a year after Leitner’s study was published, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi inverted the calculus of “useful knowledge,” writing that it is, in fact, philosophy—an important feature of the ma‘qulat—that is useless. “Philosophy is a useless thing. No conceivable benefit [nafa‘] can be gained from it. Three or four years are wasted on its study. It dulls the minds of men and distracts from religious matters.” “Thus,” he goes on, “this wicked art has been removed from the madrasa and has not been taught at the Deoband madrasa in the last year,” though he surmises that some teachers continued to teach it clandestinely.121 If Gangohi is correct, the shift away from the ma‘qulat at Deoband was abrupt indeed, for as Leitner himself observed, the Deoband curriculum still included numerous works on logic, astronomy, geometry, and mathematics as late as 1882.122 Other Deobandis, too, proudly defended the anti-utilitarianism of the madrasa. Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri’s relatives wanted him to learn English and get a position in the government. “God saved me from learning English and gave me the fortune of religious knowledge [‘ilm-i din],” he declared.123 In an essay written in 1912, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, likewise, concluded that the madrasa should be “a purely religious school. It should neither be influenced by, nor mixed with, worldly concerns,” for to mix “worldly and religious aims would ultimately lead to a worldly orientation.”124
The point is that Thanvi was already operating in a colonial episteme in which a religious/secular binary was hegemonic, for even attempts to describe the mutual imbrication of the “religious” and the “secular” in pre-colonial Muslim education were bound by the inevitable recourse to that binary. As a 1936 study of Islamic education before the British put it: “Education was regarded as a preparation for life and for life after death. Hence it was that religion was at the root of all study: Every maktab and madrasah had a mosque attached to it, and in every mosque there were separate classes for the instruction of students in sciences other than religious, so that secular instruction might go hand in hand with religious instruction.”125 Noting that the secular and religious go “hand in hand” still presupposes the distinction itself.
Muslims in India and elsewhere, of course, have pushed back against such a stark epistemic breach between the religious and the secular in Muslim education. In 1927, the British convert to Islam Marmaduke Pickthall castigated madrasas that shun “modern” knowledge under the pretext of calling it “secular,” for, in his view, Islam reveres all knowledge as “religious.” “Most Muslims nowadays speak of religious education as something quite apart from education as a whole, as if it meant the teaching of Fiqh [law] only,” he wrote. “From the proper Muslim standpoint, all education is alike religious. . . . In a real Muslim school, there would be no separate ‘religious’ education. . . . No terms such as ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ exist in proper Muslim phraseology.”126
From a historical perspective, Pickthall had a point. As Muhammad Qasim Zaman has shown, while the notion of “useful” (nafi‘) knowledge certainly has some precedent in medieval Islamic societies, the notion of the madrasa as “purely religious” does not. It is an “eminently modern” one with “little precedent in medieval Islamic societies.”127 It is, I would argue, an example of how the discourse of modernity produces its other. As Ebrahim Moosa argues, “The very success of the secular public square anticipates and requires the emergence of an exclusive religious sphere. Hence the madrasas fill that exclusive religious sphere with consummate ease and enable the discourse of individual religious salvation to morph into identity politics.”128 Just as the first Deobandis conceived of the madrasa as a “religious” space set against colonial secularity and considered themselves as “religious” experts, whose signature distinction was the mastery of knowledge for which colonial authorities had no use, they also looked beyond the madrasa to emergent publics of lay Muslims whose salvation they took it upon themselves to safeguard. That is the subject of the next two chapters.
2
The Normative Order
The previous chapter examined how the ‘ulama of the Deoband movement conceptualized the madrasa as an enclave of religious knowledge and the ‘ulama as custodians of Muslim public life, tasked with filling the political and legal void left by the decline of Muslim power in India and reviving Indian Islam by revitalizing the religious lives of individuals. In this sense, the “inward turn” that Barbara Metcalf and Francis Robinson have described is only half of the story.1 The other half, the story of the next two chapters, is a simultaneous outward turn toward emergent Muslim publics. Deobandi scholars sought to harness new lay Muslim readers of Urdu to their project of reforming Muslim subjectivities. But this new public of readers was also situated within, and partly intersected with, a simultaneously emerging public of the colonial crowd. Before we examine these new publics in the following chapter, we will look in this chapter at why Deobandi scholars were compelled to turn outwa
rd in the first place.
This outward turn was fixated on maintaining what I call the normative order and vigorously critiquing perceived threats to it: innovation in religious matters (bid‘a), and beliefs or practices that compromise the integrity of God’s oneness (shirk). This chapter begins with a brief overview of the sources on which early Deobandis based their theorization of bid‘a and shirk. It then shows how and why they saw two major devotional practices—the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, and various devotions that surrounded the tombs of Sufi saints—as the predominant sources of normative disorder.
THEORIZING THE NORMATIVE ORDER: BID‘A AND SHIRK
For the Deobandis, there were two fundamental threats to the normative order revealed by God in the Qur’an and elaborated by the Prophet Muhammad in his words and deeds, the Sunna: illicit innovation in religion (bid‘a), and associating God’s divine qualities with other entities (shirk). They recognized two primary sites in Muslim public life where these dual theological dangers proliferated: devotions in praise of the Prophet Muhammad, and devotions on behalf of the Sufi saints.
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