it did, and argues that Sir Syed’s attempts to rehabilitate Muslims in the
wake of the Great Rebellion and Hunter’s treatise, and to disentangle
“Wahhabi” from “Muslim,” fell short. 141
However, assessments that focus on winners and losers do not fully
capture the conversation or nuance especially in Sir Syed’s work. Nor do
these assessments provide insight to the ways in which Khan and
Hunter’s arguments align. Despite thoughtful and substantial critique,
Khan agreed with Hunter’s underlying assumptions. Shortly after a
particularly harsh set of paragraphs in his critique, Sir Syed remarked:
“the purification of our faith and our loyalty to the Government under
whom we live and serve are perfectly compatible.” 142 Thus, while he
criticized Hunter’s conclusions, Khan also engaged Hunter’s primary
concern, that is, the intersections of Muslim loyalty and the possibility
of reforming Islam.
Sir Syed both refuted Hunter’s assumptions and participated in their
proliferation. By reproducing Hunter’s concerns, Khan gave them a
forum and authority. He certainly took issue with the elisions of
Wahhabism with Islam and of Islam with rebelliousness that
122 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
characterizes Indian Musalmans. But, in his criticism, he engaged – and
even replicated – the alacrity with which Hunter moved between and
among terms like “Wahhabi,” “rebel,” “Mohamedan,” and “Islam.” In
fact, Sir Syed’s Review rather ambivalently took up the language of
Hunter, criticizing not its use per se, but its interpretation. As Padamsee
similarly suggests, Khan implicitly supported Hunter’s ultimate claim
that British India was a foreign land for Indian Muslims, one that needed
to be sorted legally – in terms of both civil and religious law – with
great consequence. 143
Throughout Review, Sir Syed referred to Hunter as a friend. And, with
friends so ready to disparage and allege grotesque atrocities, both real
and imagined, no wonder Khan lamented that this was a friendship from
which he – and, one assumes, his fellow Muslims – needed saving.144
For Khan’s part, his Review aimed to dismantle the troubling assertions,
elisions, and accusations that defined Hunter’s Indian Musalmans. In
many ways, he was successful: his writing in Review (and elsewhere)
shaped responses to British rule that were, at once, supportive of the
Crown and solemnly opposed to some of its disdainful qualities and
policies. Khan’s Review gestured toward ideas that he would later pick up
and develop far more fully, including issues of religious and educational
reform and a purposeful Indian Muslim identity rooted in modern
interpretations of texts, traditions, and the empire. 145 Yet, Sir Syed’s
implicit affirmation of Hunter’s contentions, especially vis-à-vis jihad
and the idea of a distinctive Muslim identity, served to reify and sustain a
minoritized and racialized Muslim. As I explore in the following
chapter, Khan’s Review helped to solidify the association of jihad with the
Great Rebellion.
CHAPTER 4
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD
AS RELIGION
Few concepts have been subjected to more consistent distortion
than the Arabic word jihad – whose literal meaning is “striving
for a worthy and ennobling cause” but which is commonly thought
today to mean “holy war” against non-Muslims.
– Ayesha Jalal1
The Great Rebellion crystalized, catalyzed, and mobilized depictions of
Muslims as decidedly militant, especially against foreign – that is,
British – rule. Sir William Wilson Hunter and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
established which Muslim declarations ought to factor into official (and,
in Hunter’s case, demi-official) policies and laws. The former adamantly
suggested that “puritanical” 2 ideologies represented an authentic Islam,
and the latter dismissed this accusation with evidence of modernist,
moderate Muslims and their glosses on texts, events, and law. Both
engage the concept of jihad – rendered as holy war – as a primary issue.
For Hunter, jihad branded Muslims as distinctively rebellious and
treasonous, and so was an issue of security; for Khan, jihad was a specific
legal designation that was merited neither during the Great Rebellion
nor against the British more broadly (even if, as he puts it, some who
were “styled as Mouvlies” but who were actually “ignorant and besotted
scoundrels” declared jihad legally sanctioned). 3 In the aftermath of
the 1857 Rebellion, as Britons searched for explanation and sought
procedures to prevent such widespread revolts remain in the future, jihad
124 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
emerges as both a primary fixation and an obvious culprit. Muslims like
Sir Syed were left to defend Islam, argue specific legal points, and
discredit other Muslims in order to prove their loyalty – if not
individually, then as part of a minoritized, racialized, and unified group.
In the context of the Great Rebellion and in its repercussions,
jihad was both a conceptual metric by which to measure the loyalty of
Muslims, and, perhaps more importantly, how Muslims came to be
known and understood post-1857. It is a key component of the process
by which Britons minoritized Muslims, who were then bound by
particular legalisms, literalisms, and allegiances necessarily beyond the
pale of the British Empire. We have seen how the Rebellion has been
cited as a watershed for British colonial history in India, and now we
will examine the role of the 1857 Rebellion in both solidifying and
manufacturing a particular distrust of Muslim subjects amongst British
agents and scholars. After 1857, an imperial understanding of jihad
linked – and reduced – Muslim actors and Muslim organizations to
rebellion and violence.
Both Hunter and Khan deployed jihad to define the post-rebellion
South Asian landscape – most relevantly, to define Muslims and Islam.
As such, both participated in a discourse that produced Muslims as
minoritized and racialized, even as they disagreed. In fact, Khan refuted
Hunter’s assumption that Islam sanctioned jihad for all Muslims, while
still engaging within his legal landscapes. In this chapter, I return to
Hunter and Khan as demonstrations of how jihad became a fulcrum
around which the identity of Muslims was written, understood, and
solidified as part of processes of minoritization and racialization.
Race is a social construct, not a biological essential. In the nineteenth
century, race was a primary way in which communities were imagined. 4
European and American imperialists often grouped – and reduced –
disparate people(s) by physical appearance, phenotype, and cultural
practices, creating singular and subordinate “races.” Sociologist Zaheer
Baber argues that in India “religious markers have been deployed
historically not just to demarcate ethnic boundaries but also in the long
run to initiate a process of ‘racialization’ of
such differences.” 5 Race in
India encompasses religious and ethnic markers – among others –
because of racialization.
Racialization refers, like minoritization, to the process by which one
group becomes signified based upon embodied characteristics thought
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
125
to be inherent, immutable, and hereditary. A number of scholars have
defined racialization as a dynamic process that relies on ascribed
differences that are vital to social structures, with these differences often
imagined in terms of biological difference (i.e., phenotypical traits). 6
Baber helpfully synthesizes leading scholarship on the process of
racialization. He writes that:
most social scientists would agree that race is a social construct
that is sustained, reproduced and transformed through its
intersection with institutional arrangements, ideologies and
discursive formations,
and that therefore:
the work of essentializing entire groups of people with immutable,
inheritable and quasi-biological behavioral attributes contributes
to the process of constituting and simultaneously ‘racializing’
what might indeed be nothing more than cultural differences. 7
I contend that for Muslims in India, minoritization was concurrent with
racialization: as Britons seized control of South Asia, British imperialism
reduced Muslims from a diverse range of ethnicities, classes, and castes –
including those occupying the cultural elite – under the Mughals to a
singular group endowed with “immutable, inheritable and quasi-
biological behavioral attributes.” Despite vast evidence of a range of
Muslim opinions and actions about the complicated legal matter of holy
war, jihad became the metric through which Muslims were understood
discursively and regulated legally. In short, the production of jihad as the
preeminent identifier of Islam is possible because of the minoritization
and racialization of Muslims.
For example, after the revolts and siege of Delhi, Indians were
expelled from the city. Hindus were allowed to return approximately
eight months later in January 1858, while Muslims were banished for
an additional year, only gaining permission to reenter Delhi in January
1859. This differentiation in treatment reflects the finalization of the
transfer of power from the former Mughal Empire, based in Delhi (albeit
in a limited capacity8), to the British Empire, but it also signals a
fundamental differentiation in the assumed loyalties and culpabilities of
126 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
Muslims and Hindus with respect to the events of the Rebellion, in and
beyond the city’s walls. These disparities rely, in part, on notions of
Muslims that collapsed multiple denominational, ethnic, class,
linguistic, and casted identities into a singular suspicious minority
whose defining characteristics were legalism, fanaticism, and violence.
In this chapter, I trace the ways in which British imperial forces
deployed jihad as a defining characteristic of Islam and an immutable
quality of Muslims. First, I offer a brief overview of jihad. Then I discuss
the ways in which Muslims understood and deployed jihad in South Asia
during the nineteenth century. Finally, I suggest that as the Great
Rebellion came to be seen primarily in terms of religion, Muslims’
religion came to be seen primarily in terms of jihad – a material product
of Muslims’ minoritization and racialization.
Defining Jihad
“Few concepts have been subjected to more consistent distortion than the
Arabic word jihad,” noted historian of South Asia Ayesha Jalal insists.9
Similarly, Islamic studies scholar Shahab Ahmed remarks that jihad “is a
word that has acquired a certain centrality in the contemporary Western
conceptualizations of and preoccupations with Islam. ”10 Use of the word
jihad by Muslims and non-Muslims has, in recent years, grown so much
that its presence is ubiquitous in contemporary global media, but its
history, like any complex and centuries-old concept, does not make its
definition as simple as its prominence might imply. Although thus far the
majority of primary sources I have discussed have addressed jihad, I have
yet to delve into its definitions. This lacuna is purposeful and highlights
jihad’s contextualized – and fluctuating – definitions in previous chapters
as well as across the long nineteenth century. Jihad’s imbrication with the
Great Rebellion became more evident in the years that followed.
Hunter and other British observers rendered jihad most often as “holy
war;” and we still see jihad rendered this way in current media.11 But
this is not literally accurate: linguists, Arabists, and legalists will readily
and adamantly insist that jihad translates to “striving.” When followed
by the phrase fı¯ sabı¯l Alla¯h, in the path of God, jihad conveys a sense of
struggle in the name of God – but this “struggle” has included such
disparate incarnations as war and spiritual purification of the self.12
Literal or figurative definitions of jihad alone cannot adequately portray
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
127
its meaning, and even if we could render a simple definition, what we
would define is an overly simplistic aspect of a complex concept. What
counts as jihad is as challenging an issue as any other: it is historical,
legal, and changing.
For nineteenth-century British imperial agents and South Asian
Muslims alike, jihad was a religious legal concept as well as a potential
outcome. Like any legal concept in Islam, it is addressed by trained
scholars through relevant pronouncements (i.e., fatwas) that
incorporate germane Qur’anic passages, sunna and hadith (examples
and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), and, in later texts, a
discussion of previous legal rulings. 13 Classical Islamic law manuals
and compendia often contain a section that deals with jihad. However,
these sections were not standardized in any regard. We cannot
categorically assert that classical jurists either approached the term
uniformly or agreed upon its use, merit, and deployment. As historian
Michael Bonner notes, these sections within legal corpora were
sometimes referred to as Book of Jihad, other times Book of Siyar (law of
war) or Book of Jizya (poll tax), even as their content was similar;
sometimes, alternatively, legal scholars wrote freestanding books on
jihad.14 Legal scholars did not necessarily agree with one another, and
when they disagreed they did so for numerous reasons: on principle, on
interpretation, and on logical grounds, as well as along the so-called
sectarian alignments (e.g., Shi’i, Sunni, and others) or classical legal
schools (Ar., madha¯hib; Ur., maza¯heb) that were typically Sunni.
Simply put, Islamic legal scholars have debated jihad in terms of its
uses, definitions, and deployments, and these jurisprudential conversa-
tions have been neither simple nor simplistic across epoch and region.
As
Bonner succinctly states, “jihad is a complex doctrine and set
of practices.” 15 Muslims have used jihad as part of state-building,
in response to external threats and European colonial expansion and
oppression, as a tool of destruction, and as a conceptual framework
for self-betterment. 16 Each of these broad groupings, however, has
entailed lengthy debates about apposite deployment of jihad and its
appropriation. 17 Muslims have debated whether jihad prescribes
violence, what sorts of acts count as jihad, and who may partake in it.
David Cook, a scholar of Muslim martyrdom and apocalyptic literature,
rightly highlights multiple uses of the so-called “greater” and “lesser”
varieties, helpfully tracing definitional claims in which jihad was
128 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
interpreted militantly, non-violently, and in ways that were “not
exclusively violent.” 18 Cook also demonstrates that jihad is predomi-
nately and primarily a militant issue, even as some historical and many
Muslims today argue otherwise. Contemporaneously, conversations
about definitions of jihad overemphasize a black-and-white conceptu-
alization, where “war” is posited against “peace.”19
Nineteenth-century Muslims, too, discussed jihad and the attendant
possibilities and obligations signified by that “struggle.” They debated
whether struggle was violent, personal, or collective; they queried the
nature of British rule and asked whether Muslims – in India and
elsewhere – ought or were sanctioned to wage an armed struggle; they
declared jihad’s utility and then shied away from waging war entirely;
and some still insisted that striving to perfect one’s own soul was the
“real” jihad. Historian Michael Bonner notes that the nineteenth century
marked a shift in interpretations about jihad as “a body of juridical (and
in some cases, apologetic) work emerged which defined the jihad as
defensive warfare.”20 Bonner is quick to note that modernist Muslims’
pronouncement that jihad is defensive war elides the ways in which
classical texts discuss both offensive and defensive warfare, and that
modern jurists would tend to be undermined in this point by classical
jurists. Of course, interpretation and application rely on contexts, and
nineteenth-century Muslims – living overwhelmingly in colonial and
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 20