Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

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Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 23

by Ilyse R Morgenstein Fuerst


  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

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  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

 

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