Revival From Below
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65. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 24.
66. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Tuhfat al-‘ulama (Multan: Idara-yi Ta’lifat-i Ashrafiyya, 1995), 1:480. See also Zaman, Ashraf Ali Thanawi, 20.
67. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 833–34. Quoted in Brannon D. Ingram, “The Portable Madrasa: Print, Publics and the Authority of the Deobandi ‘Ulama,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 845–71, at 859.
68. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 23. See also Barbara Daly Metcalf, trans., Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi’s “Bihishti Zewar”: A Partial Translation with Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 48.
69. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 1:117–18.
70. Ibid., 1:118.
71. Ibid., 1:120–24.
72. Ibid., 1:124.
73. Zaman suggests Thanvi may have had multiple reasons for the move from Kanpur to Thana Bhawan. In addition to noting the exchange with Gangohi, Zaman points out that Thanvi chafed at pressure from the administration of Faiz-i ‘Amm to solicit donations directly, believing it beneath the dignity of the ‘ulama to do so. Zaman, Ashraf Ali Thanawi, 18–25.
74. Thanvi, Ta‘lim al-din, 102, in Islahi nisab.
75. Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2007), 30.
76. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 113, 6:120–1.
77. Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Kitab al-‘Ilm: The Book of Knowledge, trans. Kenneth Honnerkamp (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2015), 30–35.
78. Thanvi, Hayat al-Muslimin, 18. Quoted in Ingram, “The Portable Madrasa,” 860.
79. On print culture in nineteenth-century India generally, see Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia, eds., India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty, eds., Print Areas: Book History in India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Francesca Orsini, ed., The History of the Book in South Asia (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013); and Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).
80. Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 27–32.
81. C. Ryan Perkins, “From the Mehfil to the Printed Word: Public Debate and Discourse in Late Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 50, no. 1 (2013): 47–76, at 52.
82. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43–44.
83. Another widely read summary of belief and practice is Mufti Muhammad Kifayat Allah’s Ta‘lim al-Islam (Delhi: Kutub Khana-yi Aziziyya, n.d.). This is used in primary school–level madrasas. Marieke Winkelmann, From Behind the Curtain: A Study of a Girls’ Madrasa in India (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 141.
84. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 54.
85. Classical sources define the Followers (ta‘biun) as anyone who saw a Companion (sahabi), was a Sunni Muslim, and died a Sunni. The Followers of the Followers (tabi‘ al-ta‘biyin), similarly, include anyone who saw one of the Followers, was a Sunni, and died a Sunni. See Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. “Tabi‘un.”
86. Kifayat Allah, Ta‘lim al-Islam, 4:22–23.
87. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 71, 8:79–81; statement no. 426, 8:311.
88. Thanvi, Hayat al-Muslimin, 20–22. Quoted in Ingram, “The Portable Madrasa,” 860–61.
89. Robinson, Islam and Muslim History, 77.
90. Thanvi, Bavadir al-navadir, 333–34.
91. See Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2003), 46–51.
92. A. Kevin Reinhart, “When Women Went to Mosques: Al-Aydini on the Duration of Assessments,” in Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas, ed. Brinkley Messick, David S. Powers, and Muhammad Khalid Masud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 120.
93. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Fiqh-i Hanafi ke usul o zavabit, ed. Muhammad Zaid Mazahir Nadvi (Karachi: Zam Zam Publishers, 2003), 43–44. We now know, of course, the extent to which ijtihad continued in practice long after it was deemed to have ended in theory, most notably through Wael B. Hallaq, “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 16 (1984): 3–41.
94. Thanvi, Fiqh-i Hanafi, 44–45.
95. Ibid., 46, and Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 113, 6:120.
96. Thanvi, Fiqh-i Hanafi, 45.
97. Fareeha Khan, “Traditionalist Approaches to Shari‘at Reform: Mawlana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Fatwa on Women’s Right to Divorce” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 69–73.
98. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Al-Masalih al-‘aqliyya li-l ahkam al-naqliyya (Lahore: Kutub Khana-yi Jamili, 1964), 3:14–15.
99. Zaman, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi, 41–42.
100. Thanvi, Al-Masalih al-‘aqliyya, 3:78.
101. Ibid., 3:18, 3:20.
102. Joel Blecher, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 156.
4. REMAKING THE SELF
1. Sara Sviri, “The Self and Its Transformation in Sufism with Special Reference to Early Literature,” in Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, ed. David Shulman and Guy G. Stromsa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 196.
2. Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 46–48.
3. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 58.
4. Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12–13.
5. J. Barton Scott, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11–12.
6. Ibid., 16, 20.
7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 41.
8. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 82–89.
9. Sajjad H. Rizvi, “Philosophy as a Way of Life in the World of Islam: Applying Hadot to the Study of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1635),” Bulletin of SOAS 75, no. 1 (2012): 33–45, at 39.
10. Barbara Daly Metcalf, “‘Remaking Ourselves’: Islamic Self-Fashioning in a Global Movement of Spiritual Renewal,” in Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 710–11.
11. Annemarie Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 90.
12. Paulo G. Pinto, “The Limits of the Public: Sufism and the Religious Debate in Syria,” in Public Islam and the Common Good, ed. Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004), 186.
13. Zafar Ahmad ‘Usmani, I‘la al-sunan (Dar al-Fikr, 2001), 8827.
14. Dimashqi, Imdad al-suluk, 155.
15. This statement is found in multiple texts, including Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 2:11–12; Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi’s introduction to Dimashqi, Imdad al-Suluk, 47; and Kandhlavi, Tarikh-i mashaikh-i Chisht, 292–93 (emphasis added).
16. Abul Qasim al-Qushayri, Sufi Book of Spiritual Ascent, trans. Rabia Harris (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1997), 280.
17. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 454.
18. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 216.
19. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 54 (emphasis added).
20. An excellent translation of this text is Ashraf Ali Thanawi, A Sufi Study of Hadith, trans. Yusuf Talal Delorenzo (London: Turath Publishing, 2010). Delorenzo notes on p. 19 that the selection of Hadiths follows the order of Hadiths in an earlier compilation, Muhammad al-Shaybani’s Taysir al-wusul ila jami‘ al-usul.
; 21. Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf, 5:1–2 (emphasis added).
22. Ghazali, Tabligh-i din, 165.
23. Margrit Pernau, “Male Anger and Female Malice: Emotions in Indo-Muslim Advice Literature,” History Compass 10, no. 2 (2012): 119–28, at 123.
24. Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Ashraf al-tariqat fi-l shari‘at wa-l haqiqat, al-ma‘ruf bih shari‘at aur tariqat, ed. Muhammad Hasan (Delhi: New Taj Office, 1964), 25.
25. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 274, 6:247–48.
26. Thanvi, Ashraf al-tariqat, 25–26.
27. Thanvi, Bid‘a ki haqiqat, 38.
28. Dimashqi, Imdad al-suluk, 56.
29. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 2:84–85.
30. He made a special exception for Masihullah Khan Sherwani, granting him bai‘at through written correspondence in 1931 while he was still at student at the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband. Masihullah Khan would frequently visit Thana Bhawan to sit with Thanvi during his breaks at the madrasa. Thanvi later considered Masihullah Khan among his closest disciples. See Rashid Ahmad Mewati Miftahi, Hayat-i Masih al-Ummat (Faridabad: Idara-yi Ta’lifat-i Masih al-Ummat, 1995), 82–85. Khan was instrumental in the spread of the Deoband movement to South Africa, as we will see in subsequent chapters.
31. Nu‘mani, Din o shari‘at, 226 (emphasis added).
32. Kandhlavi, Shari‘at o tariqat ka talazum, 101.
33. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 72.
34. George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 128–29.
35. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophets, 16–17, 84–85.
36. Gangohi, Makatib-i Rashidiyya, 108–9. The letter is undated.
37. Zuhur al-Hasan, introduction to Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi, Arvah-i salasa al-ma‘ruf bih hikayat-i awliya’ (Karachi: Dar al-Isha‘at, 1976), 9–11.
38. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet, 117–18.
39. Rüdiger Seesemann, The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42–43. See also Seesemann’s excellent discussion of the role of Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815) as a conduit of fayd for the Tijaniyya (pp. 42–47).
40. Gangohi, Fatawa-yi Rashidiyya, 104.
41. Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf, 5:30–31.
42. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 426, 2:285.
43. Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf, 5:1–2.
44. Thanvi, Tashil-i qasd al-sabil, 13.
45. Thanvi, Anfas-i ‘Isa, 61–62 (emphasis added).
46. ‘Aziz al-Hasan, Ashraf al-savanih, 2:245.
47. Thanvi, Tarbiyat al-salik, 38.
48. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Khalil, 368.
49. Mirathi, Tazkirat al-Rashid, 2:98.
50. Qazi Sanaullah Panipati, Tuhfat al-salikin, tarjama irshad al-talibin (Allahabad: Maktaba-yi Jami wa Ikhwanihi, 1954), 17–23.
51. Thanvi, Tarbiyat al-salik, 1:45–46.
52. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 541–53 (emphasis added).
53. Masihullah Khan, Shari‘at o tasawwuf: Fan-i tasawwuf ki mukammal o mudallal-i kitab (Multan, Pakistan: Idara-yi Ta’lifat-i Ashrafiyya, 1996), 17–18.
54. Thanvi, Tashil-i qasd al-sabil, 7–10; Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf, 5:61.
55. Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf, 5:95.
56. ‘Aziz al-Hasan, Ashraf al-savanih, 3:154–55.
57. Shafi‘, Dil ki dunya, 59.
58. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 86, 1:95–96
59. Thanvi, Tashil-i qasd al-sabil, 14.
60. Ibid., 17.
61. Ibid., 17–30.
62. Ghazali, Tabligh-i din, 75–176.
63. Ibid., 177–266. Curiously, Tabligh-i din is not quite a complete Urdu translation of al-Ghazali’s Al-Arba‘in fi usul al-din (Forty principles of the religion): it omits the first section of Al-Arba‘in, which is primarily about God’s knowledge and characteristics.
64. Thanvi, Tashil-i qasd al-sabil, 34–35. This is more than a little ironic, given that Rumi is now one of the world’s best-selling poets. One can only wonder what Thanvi would have made of his popularity.
65. Thanvi, Al-Takashshuf, 5:82.
66. Jamal J. Elias, The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ‘Alā’ ad-dawla as-Simnānī (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 104–5.
67. ‘Abd al-Haq et al., Fatawa-yi Haqqaniyya, 2:255.
68. See Bryan Turner, Weber and Islam (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1974), 56–64.
69. Vincent Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), xxix.
70. Scott Kugle, Rebel between Spirit and Law: Ahmad Zarruq, Sainthood, and Authority in Islam (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 27–41.
71. Abu Bakr Muhammad al-Kalabadhi, Al-Ta‘arruf li-madhdhab ahl al-tasawwuf (Cairo: Maktaba al-Kulliyat al-Azhariyya, 1969), 90–91 (emphasis added). For an English translation, see Abu Bakr Muhammad al-Kalabadhi, The Doctrine of the Sufis, trans. A.J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
72. ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami, Nafahat al-uns min hadrat al-quds (Cairo: Al-Azhar al-Sharif, 1989), 9.
73. Green, Making Space, 46.
74. Ahmad Sirhindi, Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani (Delhi: Matba‘-yi Murtazavi, 1873), 2:101.
75. Arthur F. Buehler, Revealed Grace: The Juristic Sufism of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1625) (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2012), 90–93. Cf. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet, 122–23.
76. Qutb al-Din Dimashqi (d. 1378) was a Sufi about whom we know very little. Gangohi translated select passages of Dimashqi’s Risala from Arabic to Persian in an unpublished manuscript he called Imdad al-suluk (Help along the Sufi path), in honor of his master Hajji Imdad Allah. His biographer, ‘Ashiq Ilahi Mirathi, then translated Gangohi’s manuscript from Persian to Urdu and published it in 1914. It seems the Risala originally made its way to South Asia by way of the Suhrawardi Sufi master Hazrat Jalaluddin Bukhari (d. 1384), popularly known as “Jahangasht” (“World Traveler”), who taught the text to his disciples and claimed to have received a copy directly from Dimashqi. See Amina Steinfels, Knowledge before Action: Islamic Learning and Sufi Practice in the Life of Sayyid Jalal al-din Bukhari Makhdum-i Jahaniyan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 48, 100.
77. Dimashqi, Imdad al-suluk, 196–97.
78. Diego R. Sarrio, “Spiritual Anti-Elitism: Ibn Taymiyya’s Doctrine of Sainthood (walaya),” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 22, no. 3 (2011): 275–91, at 278.
79. Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, Amrad al-qulub wa shifa’uha: Yaliha al-tuhfa al-‘Iraqiyya fi al-a‘mal al-qalbiyya (Cairo: Al-Matba‘at al-Salafiyya wa Maktabatuha, 1966/67), 38. Kandhlavi discusses this passage in Shari‘at o tariqat ka talazum, 110–11. Cf. a similar discussion from a different text by Ibn Taymiyya in Sarrio, “Spiritual Anti-Elitism,” 279.
80. Thanvi, Ashraf al-tariqat, 26–27 (emphasis added).
81. Thanvi, Bihishti zewar, 53–54.
82. Kifayat Allah, Ta‘lim al-Islam, 3:17–18.
83. Muhammad Manzur Nu‘mani, Islam kya hai (Lucknow: Kakori Offset Press, 2008), 11.
84. Hakim Muhammad Akhtar, Pardes men tazkirah-yi vatan, ya‘ni dunya ke pardes men akhirat ke vatan-i asli ka tazkira (Karachi: Kutub Khana-yi Mazhari, 2006), 55–56 (emphasis added).
85. Kelly Pemberton, “Islamic and Islamicizing Discourses: Ritual Performance, Didactic Texts, and the Reformist Challenge in the South Asian Sufi Milieu,” Annual of Urdu Studies 17 (2002): 55–83, at 72.
5. WHAT DOES A TRADITION FEEL LIKE?
1. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 69–71. On various interpretations and applications of this concept, see Stephen Legg, ed., Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
2. Arendt, too, recognized the relationship between the production of space and the production of normativity implicit in the etymology of nomos. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University o
f Chicago Press, 1998), 63n62.
3. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 70–71 (emphasis in original).
4. Thanvi, Al-Ifadat al-yawmiyya, statement no. 12, 5:22.
5. See, e.g., Alam, Inside a Madrasa, 191–97.
6. Ghulam Nabi Qasimi, Hayat-i Tayyib (Deoband: Hujjat al-Islam Academy, 2014), 1:81–83.
7. Ibid., 1:112–13.
8. Ebrahim Moosa, “History and Normativity in Traditional Indian Muslim Thought: Reading Shari‘a in the Hermeneutics of Qari Muhammad Tayyab (d. 1983),” in Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 290–91.
9. See chap. 3, p. 100.
10. Al-Muhannad ‘ala al-mufannad, which we have encountered already, was subsequently published in Urdu as ‘Aqa’id-i ‘ulama-yi Deoband (The beliefs of the Deobandi scholars). The text succinctly summarizes “Deobandi” perspectives on a range of controversial issues: whether the Deobandis believe it commendable to visit the Prophet Muhammad’s grave (they do, according to Saharanpuri), whether intercession (tawassul) through the Prophet or saints is permissible (it is, so long as one understands the power to intercede comes from God), whether the Prophet is living in his grave (he is), whether it is permissible to send salutations to the Prophet (it is), whether any part of creation is better than the Prophet (it is not), and whether the Prophet is the seal of the Prophets (he is), among other topics.
11. Tim Winter, introduction to Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8–9. To take another example, ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti (d. 1683) taught that the Sufis best represented the “moderation” (i‘tidal) of the Ahl-i Sunna wa Jama‘a. See Muzaffar Alam, “The Debate Within: A Sufi Critique of Religious Law, Tasawwuf, and Politics in Mughal India,” South Asian History and Culture 2, no. 2 (2011): 138–59, at 142.
12. Qari Muhammad Tayyib, Maslak-i ‘ulama-yi Deoband (Lahore: Aziz Publications, 1975), 15–16.
13. Ibid., 30.
14. Ibid., 29.
15. Ibid., 17.
16. Qari Muhammad Tayyib, ‘Ulama-yi Deoband ka dini rukh aur maslaki mizaj (Deoband: Maktaba-yi Millat, n.d.), 109.