would remain a threat or become reality. Like his predecessor, Barelvi
never declared jihad against the British, and “even accepted assistance
and hospitality from persons in their service.” 76 Abdul Aziz, Shah
Ismail, and Barelvi, as noted examples of the Wahhabi movement in
South Asia, each articulated and demonstrated through their actions a
nuanced and multifaceted relationship with jihad, dar-ul-islam, and
dar-ul-harb.
The experience and ramifications of continued colonial rule marked
South Asia’s nineteenth century. The concepts of dar-ul-islam and dar-ul-
harb became, at once, inherent parts of legal terminologies about jihad
and newly meaningful in light of a loss of political, legal, and individual
sovereignties. British imperial practices in India framed the discourse
about jihad, especially during the latter half of the century. In 1857,
various Muslim populations claimed and disowned jihad. The ulama
could not and did not agree on whether to declare a jihad. 77
Yet religious elites – despite their obvious significance to both
Muslim interpretation and British knowledge – were not the only
Muslims claiming ownership of jihad. Popularly, some of the rebels
were known as jihadis or ghazis; bands of jihadis “mainly consisted of
armed volunteers from the Muslim population of the towns, and only
occasionally were Muslim sepoys opting out from the revolting
platoons.” 78 Many Wahhabi leaders were ambivalent about declaring
jihad largely because many rebels were uninterested in or ignorant
about properly establishing a holy war – that is to say, electing a pious
Muslim to serve as the imam and waging jihad with the express goal,
as articulated by Shah Abdul Aziz and Shah Ismail, of reestablishing
an authentic dar-ul-islam. 79 Other elites, especially modernists like
Syed Ahmad Khan, had also written about whether jihad was to be
142 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
declared during the Great Rebellion; while Khan was not classically
trained, his opinions carried weight among intellectual circles, Indian
and British alike.
A series of fatwas argued that as long as Muslims were able to
practice Islamic rituals without interference as protected people
(mustamı¯n) then India was an abode of peace. This includes Syed Ahmad
Khan, as we have seen. 80 It also includes both Abdool Luteef Khan, the
founder of the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta, and Maulvi
Karamat Ali – a follower of Barelvi – who issued the aforementioned
Calcutta decision that declared jihad against the British unlawful. 81
Syed Ameer Ali (d. 1928), a student of Karamat Ali, similarly
denounced the legality of jihad. While these examples questioned the
validity of a jihad against the British, other Muslim intellectuals
questioned the role of jihad and war altogether. Outstandingly, this
group includes the founder of the Ahmadi movement in Punjab
Mizra Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908), who rejected armed jihad as archaic
and whose contemporary followers, the Ahmadiyya Muslim commu-
nity, continue to interpret jihad non-violently as a core principle. 82
Historian Ayesha Jalal includes Maulana Sayyid Nazir Husain Dehalvi
(d. 1902), an influential member of the Ahl-e Hadis, among those
challenging the necessary connection between jihad and violence,
suggesting that his political quietism within an atmosphere of loyalty
to the Raj disrupts neat conceptualizations of even those groups known
for robust support of armed jihad. 83
However, not all Indian Muslims challenged either the lawfulness or
the premise of jihad, and some explicitly called for jihad during the
Rebellion of 1857. Among the main characters associated with kicking
off the revolution, both Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah Faizabadi (d. 1858)
and Fazl-i-Haqq Khairabadi (d. 1861) espoused jihad. Briton Colonel
Malleson, author of the important Indian Mutiny of 1857, described
Ahmadullah as follows:
The Maulavı´ was a very remarkable man. His name was Ahmad-
ullah, and his native place was Faiza´ba´d in Oudh. In person he was
tall, lean, and muscular, with large deep-set eyes, beetle brows, a
high aquiline nose, and lantern jaws. Sir Thomas Seaton, who
enjoyed, during the suppression of the revolt, the best means of
judging him, described him ‘as a man of great abilities, of
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
143
undaunted courage, of stern determination, and by far the best
solider among the rebels.’84
Malleson credited – or rather blamed – “the Maulavı´” for devising the
chapati conspiracy, 85 which in Malleson’s view not only spread rebellion
but also indicated the depths to which Indians (and perhaps especially
Indian Muslims like Ahmadullah) would go to revolt. Britons like
Malleson and Sir Thomas Seaton saw Ahmadullah as a prototypical
Muslim rebel.
Ahmadullah was certainly both political and savvy, as well as
religiously inspired, but he was ultimately unconcerned with theological
detail. Tipu Sultan and Barelvi inspired him and he traveled to England;
as part of his return journey, he performed hajj and began a spiritual
journey. He met a Sufi saint, Mehrab Khan Qalandar, who told him to
wage jihad. 86 In early 1857, Ahmadullah did just that: he declared
jihad against the British, who obstructed the rights of Muslims, and
pronounced that anyone who died in this war would be “venerated as a
martyr” (shahı¯d) but anyone who refused to fight “would be execrated as
an infidel and a heretic.” 87 Ahmadullah’s ideas were popularly known,
and as historian Faruqui Anjum Taban notes, his words appeared in
Urdu newspapers like Tilism at the time leading up to and during the
Great Rebellion.88 Unlike many in the ulama, however, Ahmadullah did
not sort the fine details of jihad, but rather used it as a tool through
which to inspire and incite political upheaval. His jihad, in other words,
is theologically suspect, even as its ideology is squarely rooted in a
nineteenth-century anti-imperialist framework.
Fazl-i-Haqq Khairabadi is another of the oft-cited major agitators
and jihadis of the 1857 Rebellion. While few debate Ahmadullah’s role
in political upheaval, Fazl-i-Haqq remains a controversial figure.
He died imprisoned in the Andaman Islands’ penal colony for (allegedly)
signing a fatwa on jihad. Yet many point to his family’s well-established
collaboration with the British, casting doubt on his jihadi credentials.
Similarly, others note that in 1855 Fazl-i-Haqq opposed calling for a
jihad against Hindus and argued that fighting against established
authority – even non-Muslim authority – was prohibited by Islamic
law. 89 Fazl-i-Haqq’s jihadi status is at once corroborated by his
imprisonment for that crime and spurious in light of a dearth of evidence
that he committed the crime in the first place. 90 His example
144 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
demonstrates both the lasting imagination of jihad, and its uses during
the Rebellion: scholars still debate his exact role, but his legacy remains
that of a Muslim leader of Rebellion specifically vis-à-vis religious
frameworks (i.e., jihad). 91
Additionally, two of the great thinkers of the revivalist Deobandi
school, Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi (d. 1879) and Maulana
Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (d. 1905), took up arms against the British,
wrote about jihad, and served short sentences in jail. However, as many
scholars are quick to point out, not all the Deobandis supported jihad, as
later rifts between and among Deobandis, Barelvis, and Ahl-e Hadis
intellectuals help elucidate. 92
These elite Muslims may have shaped the events of 1857 as well as the
Rebellion’s historiography, but this does not necessarily indicate a lack of
popular support for the Rebellion – or for the use of jihad with respect
to it.93 As historian Faruqui Anjum Taban notes, popular Urdu weekly
newspapers demonstrate growing unrest in the mid-1850s; he argues
that these newspapers highlight “widespread resentment among the
people of Awadh” beginning as early as 1856, which was not limited to
sepoy regimens, but rather was also “widespread among the civil
population.” 94 Like other scholars, Taban further suggests that the East
India Company’s annexation of Awadh led to a decline in the income of
the (formerly) ruling Muslim elite, but he links this economic shortfall
to decline in the Muslim elites’ support for religious institutions
through charitable donations – forcing the religious elites to leave the
city in search of livelihood. 95 Tilism, an Urdu newspaper based in
Lucknow, reported that the city had once been a shining example of
Muslim piety but in the mid-1850s the centers of Muslim religious life
– mosques, madrasas (religious schools), and imambaras (congregations of
Shi’i Muslims) – were deserted.96 Taban’s careful work with Urdu
newspapers helps elucidate popular, autochthonous, and predominately
Muslim97 conceptualizations of disillusionment and unrest.
While political and religious elites debated the appropriate course of
action, two other groups of Indians actively participated in the Rebellion
on the ground – and thus, in its construction. Sepoy regimens chose to
participate in the revolts. As Eric Stokes points out, sepoys conceptually
represented the “peasant armed.” 98 For the sepoy, this meant a dual role:
they were trained soldiers within formal colonial military structures
and yet still remained part of rural contexts of families, castes, mother
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
145
tongues, and religions. Margrit Pernau consistently points to the
ambivalence of the peasant armed as contributing to the ongoing
challenge of characterizing the Rebellion in any one particular set
of terms, be those political, religious, or economic. 99 Pernau calls
attentions to sources that suggest that sepoys often abandoned their
regimens when they had “collected enough loot.” 100 While jihad may
not preclude material gain, leaving battle because of material gain
troubles the strict interpretation of Muslim sepoys as jihadis.
In other words, if jihadis were primarily motivated by religion, then
it is inconsistent to find them abandoning the religious cause for
economic triumph.
Neither all sepoys nor all rebels were Muslim. Fatwas calling for or
denying the legality of jihad were most often written for a Muslim
community, but lesser-known fatwas were addressed to both Muslims and
Hindus. And while these fatwas were broadly concerned with religious
sentiment, many Muslims and Hindus alike remained unhampered by
“niceties of Islamic law and theology. ”101 Jalal notes that:
Fatwas were often obtained by force, forged, or attributed to
people without their knowledge, thereby provoking opposition
from Sunni and Shia ulema, who issued rulings of their own. The
contradictory fatwas on jihad illustrate how religiously informed
cultural identities were articulated in the early struggles against
colonialism. 102
The legitimacy of the official legal backing for jihad is contested and
contingent. Fatwas that were plagiarized, obtained under duress, or
addressed to non-Muslims were not accepted by Islamic orthodoxy of
various denominations. Yet, if Muslims followed these fatwas, then
regardless of their legitimacy, it would be fallacious to suggest they
were not real.
Hunter and Khan illuminate major facets of this discourse in their
textual exchange. Ultimately, nineteenth-century arguments about jihad
constitute a debate about authenticity. Jihad may have been declared and
India proclaimed dar-ul-harb by serious and authentically credentialed
Muslim elites; these categories were similarly disregarded, proved
wrong, and ignored by other similarly serious and credentialed Muslim
elites. Elite Muslims, sepoys, and the bands of ghazis acted upon fatwas
146 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
declaring jihad – and didn’t. In other words, whether jihad was real or
realized during the Rebellion has as much to do with debates about
authentic, proper, or legitimate Islam – a set of definitions at which the
contemporary scholar of religion often balks. It is not for the scholar to
determine whether declarations of jihad “count” as such, nor whether
those who followed those declarations did so under purely religious or
theological banners. What is clear in all this ambiguity is that the
location of jihad as a key identification of rebels and Muslims maintains
its place in the historiography. This very debate about the authentic
jihad during the Rebellion demonstrates jihad’s priority; its legitimacy
ceases to matter in light of the circular relationship crafted in the wake of
1857 between rebel and jihad, jihad and Islam, Muslim and jihadi.
Conclusions
I have used Hunter and Khan as a window through which to view the
discursive shifts about Muslims after the Rebellion. Hunter’s work
exemplifies a gloss of the Rebellion that renders it a natural conclusion
given its participants. He rendered the Rebellion itself as a jihad, and
one that Britons would be smart to note, since defense against such
revolts was paramount to maintenance of control of South Asia. Sir Syed,
in an attempt to denature what Hunter rendered natural, refuted Hunter’s
claim that Muslims were Wahhabis, but in doing so obliquely bolstered a
gloss of Muslims as unified in their aims, means, and methods. In other
words, both authors made a pan-Islamic identity out of the events of the
Great Rebellion – both authors replicated and redefined a Muslim
identity that was pan-Islamic, racialized, and minoritized. For Hunter,
this identity rested upon the broadest imagination of pan-Islamic identity,
one that properly had roots in Arabia; for Khan, this identity assumed an
inherent Indianness, though he also imagined Muslims as a distinctive and
identifiable whole.
For both authors, Indian Muslims maintain a unique identity, one
th
at is immutable and transferrable by birth – that is, a racialized
identity.103 Hunter used race like many of his contemporaries, who
denoted ethnicities and religions as distinctive races. 104 However,
Hunter’s participation in discourses of race are less important than his
deployment and support of racialized categories: the Muslims Hunter
renders are Muslims foreign to the British Empire, unique in their
REBELLION AS JIHAD, JIHAD AS RELIGION
147
current land (South Asia), but related essentially to all other Muslims.
Khan, too, imagines Muslims as distinctive in South Asia and part of a
global whole. For both authors, these embedded claims indicate a
distinctive Muslim identity that goes beyond religious text or creed.
Both authors denoted religious and legal responses to colonial rule as
evidence of an essential Muslim identity, despite ample contempora-
neous evidence that “Muslim” as a primary identifier was uncommon
beyond the pale of those part of the elite, ruling class to which Khan
belonged. 105 Both authors therefore made, even as they attempted
(albeit in differing ways and with radically different aims) to unmake
certain Muslim categories, which then were more deeply inscribed as
real, unreal, or primary.
In the post-Rebellion context, jihad and Wahhabism carried deeper
relevance than their literal translations. Jihad and Wahhabism served
as markers of “true” Islam for Hunter and other Britons. Sir Syed,
among other Muslims, was left to justify Islam against these “truths.”
As Ayesha Jalal frankly notes, “few concepts have been subjected to
more consistent distortion than the Arabic word jihad,” 106 and
nineteenth-century Indian texts bear this out. South Asian Muslims
both declared and exploited jihad for political and religious reasons,
though these were rarely mutually exclusive. The complex issues
surrounding jihad – namely, whether British rule in India met the
legal requirements of dar-ul-islam – spurred numerous and intense
debates among the ulama, modernist Muslims, and British observers,
as well as inspiring various sets of actions by Muslims from differing
classes, regions, and denominational alignments.
Preceding the Rebellion, a number of Muslims led and participated
in anti-imperial movements inspired by – or couched in – religious
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 23