Princeton University Press, 2015), 318.
11. Jihad is both unavoidable in contemporary media and little defined in mass
usage. Journalistic and entertainment media alike deal with the topics of
religious violence and terrorism, especially as it relates to the actions of
Muslims. These actions are often labeled jihad by Euro-American media,
sometimes before the perpetrators (and their motives) are known, or before
such a claim is made or verified by Muslim perpetrators. These violent or
terroristic acts are also often claimed as jihad by various Muslim extremist
organizations as often as they are denounced as irreligious and anti-Islamic
(and therefore, one assumes, not authentically jihad) by myriad other Muslims.
All of which suggests that the uses of jihad by Muslims and non-Muslims alike
remain complicated and contentiously defined.
12. Violent jihad is sometimes described as an “outer” or a “lesser” struggle,
contrasted with “inner” or “greater” jihad, the struggle of the individual to
conquer her religiously inappropriate urges, desires, and thoughts. As we can
see from the framing of “lesser” and “greater,” some have argued that the true
meaning of jihad is, in fact, a non-violent attempt at bettering oneself.
Shahab Ahmed notes that the idea that jihad is primarily a spiritual struggle
is based upon a famous “non-canonical Hadith.” Ahmed, What is Islam?,
318. Canonical or not, this is a well-established idea that has been written
about widely. As an example that works particularly well, see: Abdulaziz
Sachedina, “The Development of Jihad in Islamic Revelation and History,”
in Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western
and Islamic Traditions, ed. J. T. Johnson and J. Kelsay (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1990), 35 – 50.
13. Topical overviews about jihad seem to proliferate rapidly. For a concise but
comprehensive overview of the topic, see: Sohail H. Hashmi, “Jihad,”
188
NOTES TO PAGES 127–128
Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, Vol. 1., ed. Richard C. Martin (New
York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004); 377 – 9.
14. Michael David Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. Cf. Reuven Firestone,
Jiha¯d: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 13 – 18.
15. Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, 174.
16. Asma Afsaruddin nimbly traces the theological roots and eschatological uses of
jihad in her recent work: Striving in the Path of God: Jiha¯d and Martyrdom in
Islamic Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
17. Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2005), 33.
18. David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 34 – 5.
19. What had historically been a heavily debated and, at once, a specific set of
Islamic legal questions as well as a broad categorical frame of analysis has
become all the more fraught in a post-September 11, 2001 and global War
on Terror context. There is a lot at stake for various constituencies in defining
“jihad,” especially after 9/11/01. While 9/11/01 marks the date of terrorist
attacks in the United States (at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and
World Trade Towers in New York City), it is also a date that many cite as the
start of the US-led but internationally supported global War on Terror.
Other European and/or Western nations have experienced terrorist attacks
(the Madrid train bombings of March 2004; the underground bombings in
London on 7/7/05; the 2015 gunman attacks in Paris, first at Charlie Hebdo
and later at the Bataclan theater), but the 9/11 attacks mark a global shift in
military responses to Islamic terrorism. Many – including Muslims – elide
Islamic terrorism with jihad. For opposing views on whether Muslims
terrorists necessarily participate in global jihad, see: Charles B. Strozier,
“The Global War on Terror, Sliced Four Ways,” World Policy Journal 24, no. 4
(2007/2008), 90 – 8; and Parvez Ahmed, “Terror in the Name of Islam –
Unholy War, Not Jihad,” Case Western Reserve Journal Of International Law 39,
no. 3 (September 2007), 759 – 88.
20. Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, 160.
21. Ibid. Cf. Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-
Century Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 203 – 4.
22. Dar literally means “abode,” and many scholars render dar-ul-islam and dar-
ul-harb as abode of peace and war, respectively. Dar-ul-aman appears less
frequently. In the imperial context, the issues of conquest, expansion, and
control of land are primarily important to these debates, and so I prefer land,
country, or region for “dar.”
23. E.g., Taufiq Ahmad Nizami, Muslim Political Thought and Activity in India During
the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, with a foreword by Mohammad Habib
(Aligarh, India: Singh for T. M. Publications Aligarh, 1969), 3– 4, 23 – 5.
NOTES TO PAGES 129–130
189
24. Just war tends to be a term used in Western contexts, and has a rich history of
philosophical reasoning and militaristic deployment. I use both just and holy
war, here, to gesture toward the complexity of jihad traditions as well as
attempt to capture the ways in which legal, political, and religious debates
about jihad have been framed. For a concise comparison of just and holy war,
see: Khalid Yahya Blankinship, “Parity of Muslim and Western Concepts of
Just War,” Muslim World 101, no. 3 (July 2011), 412 – 26. For a longer
explication of jihad as just war, see John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
25. The Hanafi madhhab, or school of legal thought, is one of the four primary
Sunni madha¯hib. It is also the foremost madhhab in South Asia, though not the
singular legal school represented.
26. Muhammad Mushtaq Ahmad, “The Notions of Da¯r Al-harb and Da¯r Al-isla¯m
˙
in Islamic Jurisprudence with Special Reference to the Hanafı¯ School,” Islamic
˙
Studies 47, no. 1 (2008), 6.
27. Ibid., 8 – 10.
28. David Motadel, “Islam and the European Empires,” The Historical Journal 55
(2012), 841.
29. It is beyond the scope of this project to outline all of the resistances to
European imperialism in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the (so-called)
New World in which Muslims were active participants or specifically called for
jihad. As examples of Muslim resistance to colonial or imperial rule outside
South Asia, see: Edward E. Curtis, “Islamic Jihad or Just Revolt? African
Muslims in Latin America and the Caribbean,” in The Call of Bilal: Islam in the
African Diaspora. Islamic Civilization & Muslim Networks (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 111 – 34; B. G. Martin, “Muslim
Politics and Resistance to Colonial Rule: Shaykh Uways B. Muhammad Al-
Bara¯wı¯ and the Qa¯dirı¯ya Brotherhoo
d in East Africa,” The Journal of African
History 10 (1969), 471 – 86; Mallam M. Bashir Abubakar, “Muslim Responses
to British Colonialism in Northern Nigeria as Expressed in Fulfulde Poems,”
Islamic Africa 4, no. 1 (2013), 1 – 14; Douglas Northrop, “Subaltern Dialogues:
Subversion and Resistance in Soviet Uzbek Family Law,” Slavic Review 60, no. 1
(2001), 115 – 39; Spencer D. Segalla, The Moroccan Soul: French Education,
Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912– 1956, France Overseas (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Syed Muhd Aljunied, Khairudin, Radicals:
Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2015).
30. Elsewhere, Motadel notes that the idea of a sui generis Muslim community and
pan-Islamic political and religious ideologies was not feared or viewed as
suspect by European powers, but instead thought of and used as a political
tool. For example, in his short essay “Jihad 1914,” Motadel states that at the
start of World War I, Ottoman leaders pushed for pan-Islamism, and drew on
fatwas about jihad to draw support within and beyond their imperial borders;
but, he notes that Germans “pushed for the jihad declaration,” because they
190
NOTES TO PAGES 130–134
hoped Muslims, who predominately lived within British, French, or Russian
empires, would revolt. Germans deployed jihad, therefore, as a tactic by which
to make Muslims (perhaps unwitting) allies against a common enemy. David
Motadel, “Jihad 1914,” History Today 64, no. 9 (September 2014), 41 – 2.
Motadel also points out similar deployments of the notion of pan-Islamism
and jihad by Nazi Germany leading up to and during World War II in his
recent monograph, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
31. Margaret Kohn, “Afgha¯nı¯ on Empire, Islam, and Civilization,” Political Theory
37, no. 3 (2009), 399.
32. Azmi O
¨ zcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans, and Britain (1877–
1924) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997).
33. Archibald R. Colquhoun, “Pan-Islam,” The North American Review 182.595
(1906), 906.
34. Ibid., 915.
35. E.g., Tariq Hasan, Colonialism and the Call to Jihad in British India (New Delhi:
Sage Publications, 2015).
36. Wisdom Tettey and Korbla P. Puplampu, The African Diaspora in Canada:
Negotiating Identity & Belonging (Calgary: University of Calgary Press,
2005), 94.
37. Baber, “‘Race’, Religion and Riots,” 703.
38. Ibid., 712.
39. Marcia Hermansen, “Wahhabis, Fakirs and Others: Reciprocal Classifications
and the Transformation of Intellectual Categories,” in ed. Jamal Malik,
Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History 1760 – 1860 (Leiden:
Brill, 2000), 30.
40. Ibid., 31.
41. Khan, Review, 11 – 12.
42. Hermansen, “Wahhabis, Fakirs, and Others,” 32. Cf. British Library, India
Office Records, P/Sec/IND/22 July 17 1839.
43. E.g., Khan Bahadur Fazlullah Lutfallah Faridi, Gazetteer of the Bombay
Presidency, Vol ix pt. 2, Bombay, 1899, pp. 12 – 13.
44. Hermansen, “Wahhabis, Fakirs, and Others,” 32. Cf. Ahmad, “Chapter VIII:
State Trials of Wahhabi Leaders, 1863 – 5,” in The Wahhabi Movement in India,
200 – 34.
45. Hunter, Indian Musalmans, e.g., 43 – 4, 94 – 5, 106.
46. Khan, Review, 5. Chief Justice Norman (d. September 1871) was a magistrate
in the Calcutta High Court, and was stabbed on his way home from chambers.
His murder became a sensational story in many parts of the British Empire,
and many presses and journals ran stories, sometimes with salacious details,
about the murder and, later, the murder trial. As representative examples, see:
“The Assassination of Chief Justice Norman,” The Sydney Morning Herald
(NSW: 1842 – 1954), October 28, 1871: 5. Accessed September 9, 2015.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13247208. Cf. The Law Magazine and Law
NOTES TO PAGES 134–138
191
Review, Or, Quarterly Journal of Jurisprudence, March to August 1871 (London:
Butterworths, 1871).
47. Khan, Review, 8 – 9.
48. As examples: W. H. Carey, The Mahomedan Rebellion; Its Premonitory Symptoms,
the Outbreak and Suppression; with an Appendix (Roorkee: The Directory Press,
1857); John William Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857 – 58
(London: W. H. Allen, 1880); William Muir and T. H. Weir, The Life of
Moḥammad from Original Sources (London: Smith, 1878); William Muir,
Records of the Intelligence Department of the North-West Provinces of India during
the Mutiny of 1857, vols 1 and 2 (Edinburgh: 1902); William Muir, “The
Mahommedan Controversy,” Calcutta Review, IV (December 1845); William
Muir, “Biographies of Mohammed for India,” Calcutta Review 17, no. 34
(1852).
49. The Letters of Indophilus to “The Times” With additional notes (London: Longman,
Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, N.D.), 36.
50. Ibid., 6.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 6 – 7.
55. Ibid., 7, 8.
56. Ibid., 8.
57. Khan, An Account of the Loyal Mahomedans of India, Part I: 7.
58. Ibid., 4.
59. Hunter, Indian Musalmans, 214. As quoted above: “Without interfering in any
way with their religion, and in the very process of enabling them to learn
religious duties, we should render that religion perhaps less sincere, but
certainly less fanatical. The rising generation of Muhammadans would tread
the steps that have conducted the Hindus, not long ago the most bigoted
nation on earth, into their present state of easy tolerance. Such a tolerance
impress a less earnest belief than their fathers had; but it has freed them, as it
would liberate the Musalmans, from the cruelties which they inflicted, the
crimes which they perpetrated, and the miseries which they endured, in the
name of mistaken religion.”
60. One who participates in jihad is a muja¯hid (pl., mujahidı¯n). Contemporary
terrorism scholars and foreign policy makers and scholars use “jihadi” or
“jihadis.” I choose to use jihadi precisely to mark its definition in relation to
Western use, power, and interpretation; jihadi, as an Anglicized term, better
captures the ways in which jihad, as a complex legal subject, comes to be
redefined and reinterpreted in light of geopolitical realities of the nineteenth
century and beyond.
61. I focus here on the time immediately relevant to our topic. However,
precolonial as well as early colonial/late Mughal debates about jihad both
existed and, given the ways in which Islamic law at least in part relies upon
192
NOTES TO PAGES 138–142
legal precedent, influenced the later debates. However, my purpose is not to
elucidate the complexities of jihad in all of South Asian Islamic history and
writing, but rather to explore the formation of debates about jihad leading up
to, during, and following the 1857
Rebellion. Ayesha Jalal has written the
history of jihad in South Asia masterfully: Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South
Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
62. E.g., Salim al-Din Quraishi, ed. and comp., Cry for Freedom: Proclamations of
Muslim Revolutionaries of 1857 (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1997).
63. E.g., Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant
Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
64. Jalal, Partisans of Allah, 1.
65. Tariq Hasan, Colonialism and the Call to Jihad in British India (New Delhi: Sage
Publications), 27.
66. Ibid., 28.
67. Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Wahabis in the 1857 Revolt: A Brief Reappraisal of
Their Role,” Social Scientist 41, no. 5/6 (2013), 17.
68. Khan, Review on Dr Hunter, 11 – 12.
69. I am moving briskly through this movement’s history and connections.
The classic study of Indian Wahhabis/Ahl-e Hadis is: Qeyamuddin Ahmad,
The Wahabi Movement in India (Cambridge University Press, Calcutta, 1966).
70. Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Wahabis in the 1857 Revolt,” 16.
71. Ibid. Cf. Shah Ismail, Mansab-i imamat, passages translated by M. Mujeeb in
The Indian Muslims (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1985), 463.
72. Jalal, Partisans for Allah, 1.
73. Ibid., 124.
74. Abdul Aziz quoted in Taufiq Ahmad Nizami, Muslim Political Thought and
Activity in India During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, 23 – 4.
Cf. Fatawa-i-Azizi, Urdu trans. (Kanpur: n.d.).
75. Nizami, Muslim Political Thought and Activity in India During the First Half of
the Nineteenth Century, 25.
76. Khan, “The Wahhabis and the 1857 Revolt,” 16.
77. Jalal, Partisans for Allah, 114. Cf. Hasan, Colonialism and the Call to Jihad in
British India, 42 – 4; Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes, 229.
78. Khan, “The Wahhabis and the 1857 Revolt,” 18.
79. Ibid., 19. Cf. Jalal, Partisans of Allah, 115 – 16.
80. Khan, Review, 16, 23. See chapter 3 for a fuller discussion.
81. Abstract of the Proceedings of the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta at a
Meeting held at the Residence of Moulvie Abdool Luteef Khan Bahadoor on
Wednesday, the 23rd of November, 1870 (Calcutta: Erasmus Jones, Cambrian
Press, 1871), 1. See Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion.
82. E.g., John H. Hanson, “Jihad and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community:
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 30