imperial regions – read classical texts through these lenses. In other
words, while Europeans (as we saw in Hunter, Muir, and others) often
viewed jihad as proof of violence and fanaticism, Muslims in the same
period not only made defensive and apologetic responses to these
charges, but also seriously considered the notion of jihad as part of
resistance to imperial rule. 21
The major issues of interpretation centered on India’s status – namely,
what sort of region India became under British rule and whether that
rule impeded upon practicing Islam. The legal concepts of dar-ul-islam
(a land of peace or Islam) or dar-ul-aman (a land of protection or peace)
and dar-ul-harb (a land of war)22 began to reign supreme in debates
about the application of jihad beginning in the mid-eighteenth century
and gained even more prominence in the early nineteenth century. 23 A
region in which Islam had ascendancy was deemed by clerics dar-ul-
islam, a notion that was tied classically to early Islamic history and
expansion, but which retained legal importance well after the classical
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
129
and medieval periods of Muslim political conquests. Dar-ul-harb, by
contrast, referred to regions in which Islam had not yet spread or taken a
position of primacy; in this way, dar-ul-harb marked territories that
might merit just or holy wars. 24
These terms effectively split the world in two, appearing to describe
a rather stark dichotomy. In reality, though, most Muslim empires
and, indeed, many jurists – especially Hanafi jurists25 – resist such
simplistic definitions.26 To assume that dar-ul-islam and dar-ul-harb
remained static from the earliest Islamic interpretations ignores legal
developments in the intervening centuries. Similarly, overreliance on
these concepts – as well as an insistence that they necessitate jihad –
ignores other overarching legal principles.27
Historian David Motadel remarks that:
Throughout the imperial age, European authorities were confronted
with religious insurgency and Islamic anti-colonialism. Across
Africa and Asia, religious leaders called for holy war against non-
Muslim rule over the dar-ul-islam. At times, this call was combined
with the appeal for emigration from the colonized territories,
drawing on the concept of hijra.28
Many Muslim leaders deployed dar-ul-islam during their experience of
imperialism. While it is folly to suggest that all experienced or reacted
to imperialism in the same way, in general, dar-ul-islam became a mode
through which to think about the conquest of Africa and Asia by
Europeans. As Motadel notes, these Muslim leaders traded on the idea
that their lands were properly dar-ul-islam, but under current rule by
interloping non-Muslims, their land was threatened to turn or had
already become dar-ul-harb, thereby interfering with practicing Islam.
As Motadel also suggests, one solution to European imperialism was to
fight – jihad – and the other was to flee – hijra (emigration). Both
Hunter and Khan pick up on the debate about whether India was truly
dar-ul-islam or dar-ul-harb, and both weigh in on whether these statuses
then necessitated a religiously articulated fight or flight response.
Muslims reinterpreted and recast the notions of dar-ul-islam and dar-
ul-harb, issues that gained urgency in the context of land-grabs and
European expansion. Jihad, as a possible outcome of these designations,
emerged as a concern across colonial contexts, certainly within the
130 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
British Empire but also for French, Russian, Dutch, and other European
imperial powers. This is to say that British imperial officials expressed
concern about anti-imperial movements led by Muslim religious leaders
and based on Islamic doctrine; these concerns were not limited to South
Asia, but instead applied across the multiple spaces in which Muslims
lived under British control (including the Middle East, Africa, parts of
the Caribbean, as well as South Asia). It is also to highlight a discursive
similarity among European empires (primarily French, Russian, Dutch,
and British), all of which experienced Muslim-led and religiously
articulated insurgency. 29 Thus, there are two related issues here: first, the
threat of anti-imperial movements, specifically those rooted in Islamic
discourse; and second, a conceptualization of Islam and a Muslim
identity as necessarily sui generis, or, put differently, a suspicion and fear
of an intrinsic pan-Islamic identity.30
Pan-Islamism is a notion of unity that isolates Muslimness from
culture and ethnicity – a notion that defies contemporary under-
standings of how “religion,” “culture,” and “ethnicity” as categories
operate, to be sure. However problematic such a conceptualization
may seem, pan-Islamism is nevertheless a conceptualization of
Muslims, at once authored and expressed by Muslims and used against
them by others, which ideologically asserts a Muslim identity that can
be divorced from all other identifiers. Most scholars cite the famed
modernist Jamal al-Dı¯n al-Afgha¯nı¯ (d. 1897) for first articulating a
specific Muslim unity with respect to – and as oppositional to –
European colonial and imperial rule. Political scientist Margaret Kohn
observes that, for Afgha¯nı¯, “Islam is a necessary source of unity, identity,
and mobilization against imperialism.”31 Other scholars note the
relationship between pan-Islamism and the Ottoman Empire. Azmi
O
¨ zcan, Ottoman historian, argues that the Ottomans used pan-Islamism
as an important tool for state relations with European powers as well as
internally to soothe ethnist and nationalist movements (e.g., Arab or
Albanian) by uniting Muslims under one ideology. 32
Non-Muslims, too, engaged in notions of pan-Islamism, often
drawing upon deep-seated fears of Muslim legalism along with those of
geopolitical movements. In the early twentieth century, American
Archibald R. Colquhoun summarized the history, as he saw it, of pan-
Islamism as well as its aims. First he expressed – as Hunter did – an
understanding of Islam as rooted in law: “Islam is not only religion but
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
131
law, and law is as essential to the religion as the religion to the law.” 33
Then, Colquhoun insisted that pan-Islamism was a diffuse movement,
unlikely to provide “revivication” of Islam, and that the “best exponents
of Pan-Islam [. . .] desire to raise the general level of their co-religionists
rather to place them in antagonism to their environments.” But, he
added, “the anti-foreign propaganda is the most tangible and most
intelligible of the whole programme.” 34 For Colquhoun, who positioned
himself as a representative Western observer, pan-Islamism was a tactic
to unify disparate Muslims globally, especially against foreign rule.
For Muslims like Afgha¯nı¯ or Ottoman state agents, this unification
was imagined for differing purposes, but it was still ultimately related
to the imposition of European expansion and control. Pan-Islamism
relies on the premise that Muslims can and ought to be unified per
their religious identification. For many imperialists, pan-Islamism
recentered the idea of Muslims as threat: in this ideology, long-
standing and historical differences among Muslims ceased to matter,
leaving intact the notion that Islam was religion and law, and as such,
binding to Muslims above all other authority. Pan-Islamism is related
to jihad because each term recursively reinforces the other. Jihad is a
legal category that British imperialists feared because it insinuated
widespread and mandatory warfare of Muslims. Muslims, as we have
seen above, were imagined as a unified collective, with all differences
superseded by Islam’s legalism and literalism. Pan-Islamism serves to
prove both the idea of a sui generis Muslim identity as well as produce it
anew. Circularity does not disprove these claims, but rather reinforces
their logic and truth.
A sui generis Muslim identity – one that could and would stand in
opposition to British imperial power – is all the more dangerous
when joined by the religiously sanctioned, well-studied, and widely feared
legal category of jihad. Like others, I locate the nineteenth century as
the beginning of the discourse about jihad as a concern of empire and
as a fixation of British rule in South Asia. 35 I suggest that these
imperial concerns reference the Great Rebellion of 1857, and therefore
demonstrate not only the relationship of jihad to revolt but the particular
imbrication of conceptualizations of jihad and the Great Rebellion.
In short, the definitions of jihad are secondary to the production by
imperial actors of a situation in which jihad became primary both for
particular imperial concerns and more generally (even Muslims in
132
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
colonized spaces increasingly debated jihad). Jihad’s “authentic”
definition is – like claims of authenticity about religion broadly or Islam
specifically – both unavailable and beside the point. However, how
jihad is deployed – and it comes to overdetermine Muslim identification
in colonial and imperial India – is of great consequence.
Making Muslims Jihadis
Muslims and Britons characterized and refuted characterization of the
Great Rebellion as jihad. The process by which Muslims were made
jihadis was complicated and messy, and involved Britons and Indian
Muslims alike. While Muslim subjects of British rule defined
their own textual, theological, and political deployment of jihad,
their British rulers glossed the textual, theological, and political
deployments of jihad. Though parallel, these definitional processes
occurred in parallel were nonetheless related to one another; neither
was an internal discourse for only Muslims or Britons. As both Muslims
and Britons interpreted the Rebellion, differences between rebels, and
fatwas declaring the Rebellion jihad, they collectively crafted a
discourse in which Muslims were a unit, and that unit was jihadi. If the
Great Rebellion was a jihad, then the Muslims participating in it were
jihadis. The minoritization of Muslims informed this supposition: the
ruling elite perceived Muslims as a unified collective and a distinctive
problem. 36 A vast array of Muslim praxis and doxa came to be read
through the lens of literalism, most often labeled Wahhabism by
British observers. The minoritization of Muslims relied on simplistic
conceptualizations that reduced the broad spectrum of Muslim
practice, experience, and opinion to one identifiable unit.
The minoritization of Muslims in India is imbricated with their
racialization. Religious markers delineated both ethnic and racialized
boundaries in India. 37 After 1857, the diversity among Muslim-
identified groups was formally gone, replaced by a narrow and rigid
definition of Muslims as possessing “immutable, inheritable and quasi-
biological behavioral attributes”38 – namely, an inescapable penchant
for violence and fanaticism, usually represented by Wahhabi literalism.
Hunter’s work precisely illuminates this process of racialization,
which links literalism to Wahhabism and authentic Islam, and finally to
rebelliousness as a predicable, immutable trait. He pronounced Muslims
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
133
inherently disloyal, and his claim centered on a read of Islam that
imagined a standard set of obligations that each Muslim must uphold –
and that each Muslim would uphold because of her very Muslimness.
Of course, Hunter’s primary concern was religiously sanctioned
resistance against non-Muslim rule, and he cited Wahhabism as
evidence of an immutable literalism amongst Muslims. As discussed in
the previous chapter, he simultaneously lauded Wahhabi puritanism and
railed against its risks to the British Empire in South Asia.
While Hunter used the term prodigiously and it was an operative
category for Britons and Muslims in South Asia, it should be noted that
the term “Wahhabi” and the movements it signifies have long been cited
as problematic in the context of India.39 As noted Islamic studies scholar
Marcia Hermansen argues, Britons and Muslims used the categorical term
rather differently. Britons used it to denote a pan-Islamic movement of
varying levels of threat, and Muslims engaged it to denote particularity:
The term [Wahhabi] was then later applied by both the British
and the Indian Muslims in an oscillating series of moves to refer to
groups with differing religious and political agendas. In the case of
the successive British applications, the valence was negative due to
a perceived threat of a Pan-Islamic political impulse to reject alien
rule by armed resistance. Indian Muslims might acquiesce to,
appropriate, use as a derogatory epithet, or resist the category.40
Even if used differently by Indian Muslims and Britons, and despite
serious debate about the mercurial definition of “Wahhabi” itself, the
category it represented became closely aligned with Muslims, a pan-
Islamic identity, and the obligation of armed resistance.
“Wahhabi” thus became polemically applied to Muslims, especially,
at the start of the Ahl-e Hadith movement in South Asia (as Syed Ahmad
Khan both confirmed in his own usage and described historically in
his Review41). As Hermansen notes, in the 1830s and 1840s, the term
appears in official British dispatches.42 “Wahhabi” was recognized by
officials, identified with a particular movement and set of individuals,
and was listed as a unique sect of Muslims in late nineteenth-century
gazetteers. 43 Leading up to the Great Rebellion, the category of
“Wahhabi” came to signify an especially literalist sect of Muslims who
were committed to armed resistance (i.e., jihad).
134 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
In 1857 and afterward, the so-called Wahhabi movemen
t in India
came under even more heavy scrutiny. Wahhabism was directly
implicated in the uprisings, and in the period following the Rebellion,
the British launched a series of state-based trials against a number of
individuals and leaders of the movement. Popularly known as the
Wahhabi Trials, they “prosecuted those believed to be planning a new
conspiracy against the British.”44 Hunter, for his part, conflated
Wahhabis not only with a particular set of Muslims but with the bulk of
Indian Muslims, whom he called “fanatic masses” in a number of places
in Indian Musalmans.45 Khan mentioned the trials as one factor in
negative views of Muslims in India, in addition to the murder of Chief
Justice Norman and, unsurprisingly perhaps, Hunter’s book itself.46
Khan also noted that Hunter’s gloss on Wahhabis was simplistic, his
views were superficial, and he drew imprecise conclusions.47
Whether British elites utilized the category of jihad accurately is
irrelevant. The existence of the category itself and its varied but
overwhelmingly incriminating uses by Britons – as well as Muslim
authors’ attempts to distance themselves and their communities from
the category – illustrate the elisions among “Wahhabi,” “Muslim,” and
violent rebel. Hunter made this connection explicitly, but other scholars,
East India Company officers, and agents of the British Empire similarly
contributed to the production of a category that had movement around
the time of the Rebellion. 48
As one poignant example, Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan (d. 1886),
a British civil servant and officer in Bengal, penned a number of letters
to The Times under the pseudonym “Indophilus.” Some of these letters
responded to “Philindus,” pseudonym of famed philologist F. Max
Mu¨ller (d. 1900), and others addressed various particularities in
colonial India. Each of the collected letters appeared in The Times
either in or after 1857, and nearly all address the problems of the
Rebellion, British rule in India, and civic unrest in the subcontinent
with specific attention to Islam and Muslims. Trevelyan was fairly
critical of British actions in South Asia, citing variously the brutishness
with which Britons acted as well as their inability to understand the
locals – for racialized and minoritized reasons. He surmised that the
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